Take aways from Google I/O

Itz been a while since I blogged. I had a great time in CA last week. Attended Google I/O and then had a get together with my relatives as well. Anywayz thot of quickly noting my take aways from Google I/O.

Keynotes given by Vic Gundotra and Marissa Mayer on wed and Thursday were great.
Vic was talking about how computing is moving away from pc's to the cloud. Google is taking strong steps to ensure a smooth transition from client machines to cloud. To support this, they cited few of their products like Google App Engine (a web application hosting solution from Google), Gears (a technology to make web applications work offline), Android (everyone talks about how mobile computing is going to take over the world rite ??!!). There was demo of an Android based phone which had touch screen features and the cool thing was it had a compass which was embedded in a street view. so if you invoke this compass, it'll show you as a view of the street with the compass rotating as you rotate your phone (magic of the accelerometer)

Marissa Mayer was talking about how things work at Google. She was explaining how much they experiment on the search results that gets displayed. For eg, they've tried out various background colors for the sponsored links and after an extensive analysis of the click statistics, they have settled on the yellow background that is currently being used. wat impressed me was the way brainstorming works at Google. It seems they would initially start off with watever comes to mind like "why not build a bridge from earth to moon ?" or "why not travel to north pole and establish a Google dev center ?" etc. Sometimes these thoughts have really resulted in products. For eg, one sunday afternoon few Googlers were chatting after lunch about taking pictures of their streets and add it to Google maps and that resulted in Street view feature of Google maps.

Some of the sessions were useful and some were ok types. Apart from the fireside chat - itz like a chat with the actual product development team of that Google product, all the other sessions will be made online in couple of weeks at Google I/O site. enjoy..