The Rimrocked Blog

Andrew and I just spent the last couple of days at Google I/O 2008. It’s been a fantastic 2 days, energizing us both. Here are my quick reflective impressions.

On Day 1 the keynote speaker Vic Gundotra, the VP of Engineering at Google got things going with an excellent introduction into each of the session streams in a pretty seamless cohesive manner. A good launching point was the historical look at computing from mainframes to PCs to the internet, pointing to the cloud (grid) computing future of Google’s App engine and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Over the next 90 minutes he touched on Gears, Android, Web Toolkit and Open social among dozens of other themes running through the conference.

An android demo given by Steve Horowitz, the Engineering Director for Android, was one of the morning’s highlights.  Showing an iPhone like application interface and nifty integration between google maps, mail and the killer demo of street view combined with the built in compass of the demo h/w (he rotated the handset showing the streetview which panned in synch with the compass) the demo put to rest our concerns about the platform’s maturity.

Touching on the session highlights for a minute: Android was pretty exciting with its fairly open architecture, multivendor support, Google Earth API, the ability to have an instance of Google Earth in your browser with a plugin was *amazing* and the MyMapsAPI was also really nice.  Open Social finally was a bit of an eye opener to us.  For various reasons we’ve been sitting on the fence with it and all it took was 2 days of sessions to convince us that it’s a good idea.  Watch this space.

I will be going into a bit more depth into the technology and application for rimrocked over the next few weeks, but we’re going to try to keep in touch a bit more often.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Design, Devices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.