The Google I/O two-day conference started Wednesay May 28th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco (I was going to say today but realized it's 2AM PST now). This developer focused conference was first branded Google Developer Day last year in San Jose but has since grown in scale and coverage. It was a packed house with over 2500 developers crowding into Moscone West. There was a brief hiccup with registration which caused everyone to go up to the keynote without their badge but by 2PM, everyone was badged and good to go.
Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering at Google delivered the keynote address around the theme of "Client, Connectivity and the Cloud". The sum of the message was that Google was making the cloud more accessible, making connectivity pervasive and making the client more powerful. To illustrate the first point, Vik had Kevin Gibbs, Google Tech Lead for AppEngine come up to talk about their new cloud services offering that they unveiled earlier at Google Campfire One. Additionally, Kevin had some pricing information available on what Google will charge for the service. To speak to cloud accessibility, Steve Horowitz from the Android team demo'd a mobile device running Android. This presentation was definitely the crowd-pleaser with everyone loving the compass-enabled Google Streetview application. Then Mark Lucovsky showed the Google Data APIs to spice up a simple celebrity fan-site. I don't know if I should make this observation or not but of the 4 main presenters at the keynote session, 3 of them were at Microsoft prior to Google (Vic, Steve and Mark).
The conference was not a stage for any large announcements but more a series of smaller incremental announcements for Gears, GWT (Google Web Toolkit), Google Earth APIs, etc. However, Google I/O is notable in that Google, in a more significant and deliberate way, is reaching out to the developer community, a community that Microsoft has long focused on.
What does the I/O stand for in Google I/O? Vic in an earlier interview with CNET said it means "Innovation in the Open." I thought it was Input/Output as in getting developer Input and having Google's latest announcements as Output but maybe that was too obvious...
