Google may have abandoned its rash bid to be a handset maker, with the sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, but it still wants to help drive design of other gadgets which drive new or increased usage of its web services ‘ whether new form factors such as wearables, or extensions of existing ones, such as second screens for TV and games. Many of its recent acquisitions and R&D projects support this ambition, from Nest, maker of smart thermostats, to its latest purchase, Green Throttle, which could feed into future gaming and video streaming activities. All this will see Google building an array of devices, along with a unifiying layer of protocols, APIs and sensors – a kind of fabric…