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And we are out. To sum up. Big announcements on Search, Maps, and Music, Hangouts, Google Now, developer tools, and an amazing speech and live Q&A with Larry Page. Thanks for joining us.
“I can do most things I need to do to run the company on the phone”
— LARRY PAGE
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Next (and last) question: What’s Google’s role in bringing the world online and democratizing the Internet.
Page notes that smartphones are still too expensive in the developing world, but that’s changing. He says he tries to mostly use smartphones now, and can do most of the things he needs to do to run the company on his phone. It’s pretty amazing that can go to 3, 6, 7 billion plus in not much time, he says. “I think people are underestimating how quickly that’s going to happen.
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A question from a “Burning Man artist” who Page invited here: How can we get more women involved in technology?
Page says they’re trying to do that, and one of the keys is to get them more involved and excited about it in their youth. He says the company actively tries to recruit women.
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Tell me you don’t want to go to Burning Man with Larry now.
” We haven’t built mechanisms to allow experimentation. We don’t want our world to change too fast, but maybe we should set aside a small part of the world – I like going to Burning Man for example … - as technologists we should have some safe place where we can try out new things and find out what the impact is on society and civilization without having to deploy it to the real world.”
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How can Google improve healthcare?
Page: We’re at one percent of where we can be. They tried with google Health, but regulatory constraints got in the way. he thinks we’ll see amazing things in healthcare, but they’ll have technological levers—like DNA sequencing.
He notes how he came forward about his voice problems yesterday, and thinks maybe he should have done so sooner. Page notes that the reason people re probably most concerned about making health records public is due to concern over insurance, “and that makes no sense.”
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Here’s a good one: what can people do to help technology focus on positive and changing the world?
Page says its natural to be concerned about the pace of change in the world, but that people in technology need to go into other areas and help them understand technology. “We don’t want to our world to change too fast.” Maybe we should set aside a part of the world where people can try out new things, but that not everyone has to go. He cites Burning Man. (Yes, really.)
“We should be honest we don’t always know the impact of change and we should be humble about that.”
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A question about Oracle: How do you improve Android when one of the core technologies (Java) is outside of your control?
He notes that the relationship with Oracle is very difficult. “Money is more important to t hem than having any kind of collaboration.” (Wow.) but he’s optimistic and thinks they’ll get through it.
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Find the crazies in your world and learn from them Page advises.
“Before we do something, I try and understand it. And not just understand it, understand the crazy people in the area. Google is great for that.”
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A younger audience member asks what Page thinks is coming and how to keep the pace of change fast.
Page says he tries to see what’s coming next by finding the craziest person in an area and trying to understand them. He notes that smartphones are really expensive now, but the raw materials cost in a phone is “like a dollar.” He says he likes to ask people in industry how far they are from raw material costs and people never know. He says he tries to understand the real issues around, say, power grids or engineering. He encourages non-incremental thinking, where you can make real leaps.
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Next up: What are the largest opportunities for developing on Glass and what will the production cycle look like?
Page notes that the team is trying to build a minimal set of experiences there. But part of the answer is they don’t know. Part of what he loves is just being able to take pictures of his young kids. Communications and navigation is amazing, he says. Some of the core experiences are pretty amazing, he says. “Ultimately a lot of your experiences can move to Glass and we’re relying on you to figure that out.”
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Page is challenging other companies to take more risks to expand their business and reach. Come up with their own moonshots.
“I’d encourage more companies to do things that are a little bit outside of their comfort zone because I think it gives them more scalability in what they can get done … Almost every time we have tried do something crazy we have made progress, not all the time, but much of the time.”
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Next up: a question as to what further projects Google is getting into on real world physical objects like automated cars, and fiber.
“Google X is focused on real world atoms and not bits, and Sergey’s having a great time working on that.” He says these projects are huge and take time. He talks about how they do crazy things. But no specifics. (No surprise.) He says they’ve been emboldened by the big risks they’ve taken. “We had 100 people in the company when we did Gmail, people said we were crazy.”
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A guy from Provo Utah asks about the possibilities of Google Fiber.
Page says as a computer scientist it’s “kind of sad” to see how many computers are out there connected by tiny pipes.
(I’d love to see how many times Page has used the word “sad” today)
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A Columbian woman asks Page how Google will protect freedom of speech.
“This is part of the area where the industry gets interesting.” He says Google has a strong interest in free speech and talks to government leaders to help advance that. Eric Schmidt has been traveling the world talking to leaders. They try to be transparent about requests they get from governments.
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Page again calling out his tech peers for playing a zero-sum game.
“You need to have inter-operation, not just people milking off one company for their own benefit”
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Next up: A Mozilla employee wants to know if the Web will be the center of Google’s efforts.
Page says he’s been sad to see how companies don’t work together and that there’s so much negativity—and specifically calls out Microsoft. (So much for no negativity.) He says he’d like to see more open standards, and that developers shouldn’t have to worry about which platform they develop for “software you write should run everywhere, easily”
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Oh my. Robert Scoble is first up. (Page tells him he appreciates the shower picture.) He wants to know if Glass is going to use the sensor that watches the eye.
Page says he wants to get stuff out of the way, and that’s going to happen to all of your devices. All these different sensors are going to pick that up and make your life better. (I take that as a yes)
“Robert I really didn’t appreciate the shower picture (to Robert Scoble, self-confessed Glass-hole)”
— LARRY PAGE
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Whoa! Page is taking questions from the audience. People are lining up at some microphones. Anyone can ask. This is remarkable.
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Page is describing the pace of change, the way our world will seem as primitive to future generations as the agrarian age seems to us. Self driving cars, for example, will make our roads safer, and give us more time to
To get there, “we need more kids falling in love with science in math in school.” He jokes that this is why they got involved with the movie The Internship. But it’s because computer science “has a marketing problem. We’re the nerdy curmudgeons.”
“Today we’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible”
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“The opportunities we have before us are tremendous. We haven’t seen this rate of change in computing in a very long time, probably since the brith of personal computing…We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative is not how we create progress. Most important things are not zero-sum.”
— LARRY PAGE
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This speech from Page is amazing. Full stop.
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Page is essentially expressing awe at the world we live in. This is refreshing.
“we haven’t seen this rate of changes in computing in a long time, probably since the birth of personal computing” but we’re here because technology makes people’s lives better, he says. “We’re really only at one percent of what’s possible.” Despite the faster pace of the industry we’re still moving too slowly he says.
“Some of this is due to negativity, every story I read about Google it’s us versus some other company and I just don’t think that’s very interesting.”
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Page is talking about his childhood, and his father, who had a degree in Communications Sciences—an early version of computer science—and how much things have changed. (His voice sounds far better, by the way.) Today he notes that smartphones have almost every sensor we have in your pocket, and can talk to almost anyone in the world, from almost anywhere in the world. Hold your phone away from you, and it’s nearly the same size as your TV. A smartphone and a big display are almost the same size as your TV.
“Technology should do the hard work so that people can get on with doing the things that make them happiest in life.”
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Larry’s voice is weak. Makes sense why he released his vocal chord ailments yesterday. “First, I want to start with a story. I was very, very lucky growing up. My dad was really interested in technology…”
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Here’s Larry Page. He’s standing in front of a giant image of the spinning earth in the dark.
“It was a while ago I asked for a picture of the earth at night,” he says “I’m still waiting on one in higher resolution.”
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3D views are built into Maps too, “it’s Google Earth in the browser.” At the bottom you can see photos from users. These even work inside buildings. Users can upload photos from interiors and they are stitched together in 360 degree views. We’re looking at a just uploaded photo of ourself in Moscone right now.
We zoom out to see the entire earth “Those clouds? They’re real time.”
Zooming even farther, we see the Earth’s position in space. The stars, the sun. It’s live today for attendees, for everyone else you can sign up at maps.google.com/preview for an invite. (They start rolling out tomorrow)
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The new directions experience is also clickable. You can click to go from point a to point b, and Maps will report back with driving and public transit directions in the upper corner. Click on the public transit times, and a new schedule viewer launches. It lays out transfers and trip times. on a graph across the top of the screen.
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Maps are unique to you, with highlights and landmarks personalized for what you need. Click on one, and it gives you a new map with new, related places to explore. The map is the interface for all this.
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We’re getting a demo of the new maps now. You can do things like see the sushi restaurants your friends like, right on the map. Cards pop up in the corner with images. You click on them and it takes you to the restaurants interior, you can spin around in a 360 degree view.
The audience made a huge collective gasp at this.
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Jonah has a groovy necklace.
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Bernhard Seefeld and Jonah Jones onstage now to tell us about how Google Maps are going to be totally reinvented. There are three things missing they say: maps built just for you that adapt to what you do, immersive imagery, and making the map the user interface.
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Explore: you can hit Explore and Maps will show you suggestions for places to shop, eat, play and more. It rolls out this summer for iOS and Android, on both phones and tablets.
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Directions and Navigation: 50 billion kilometers of turn by turn directions. (That sounds like a lot but I’m not sure because America.) Live traffic conditions are integrated now too, that will suggest reroutes if there’s a snarl in your route.
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There’s a new offers experience too. Search Maps for coffee and you may get a coupon for Starbucks. You can get the details and save it for later.
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First new feature we’re getting: a new five star rating scale for points of interest. So, search for Burmese food and Maps will show you restaurants, and how they are reviewed. Zagat reviews are integrated as well.
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Graf is giving us a sneak preview of the next major version of maps for mobile, coming to Android and iOS, with a stroll through San Francisco. This is going to be all about discovery, it seems.
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Here comes Daniel Graf to tell us about Google Maps for mobile.
“Last December we launched Google Maps for the iPhone,” says Graf. “People called it sleek, simple, beautiful, and let’s not forget, accurate” Zing!
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Maps have base maps, street view, imagery, and local data (like local businesses). Thanks to the Google Maps API, it’s on some 100 million third party sites too.
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Street View now covers 50 countries. It’s also in the mountains and at the bottom of the sea—or at least on the Great Barrier Reef.
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Maps cover the entire world now with the addition of North Korea). This is based on Google mapped countries, and map maker countries where users have done the mapping, as well as third party data.
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Brian McClendon is here to tell us about Google Maps.
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Amit is back. Summing up: we got more languages, more features in the knowledge graph, new reminders and new cards in Google Now.
Search is fundamentally changing, he notes. It’s bringing answers to the entire world.
“It will change how you and I experience this beautiful journey that we call life.”
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To continue our hypothetical trip: Wright uses the conversation function to send an email to her friend Katie in New York to find out if she’s available for dinner next Thursday. It does it. Right from Now. She then sets a reminder to call Katie on Wednesday. When she lands in New York, Now gives her directions to her hotel, and shows the reminder to call Katie. Johanna says “show me my pictures from New York last year” and Now does just that.
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Johanna is (hypothetically) in Santa Cruz now. She asks Google how tall you have to be to ride the Giant Dipper, one of the roller coasters on the Boardwalk. Google knows the answer, which lets her know if her kids can ride.
When she swipes up in Google Now, she sees her restaurant reservations. When she’s ready to go there, she can get driving directions with one touch.
At the restaurant, she asks Google about an upcoming flight in a few days. She asks “when does my flight leave” and it shows the reservation.
(Okay, this is really, really cool.)
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Johanna Wright is onstage now to tell us how all this comes together. You can say something like “show me things to do in Santa Cruz.”
Google knows it’s a place, and it will give you suggestions in a card. You can also say “show me pictures of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk,” and it does that too. So you decide to go and ask “how far is it from here?” Google gives you the correct answer with driving directions—this means Google has to know that “it” means Santa Cruz and “here” means your current location.
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Anticipate: this is Google Now. “Users are loving it.” (Truth.) Starting today, you can use it to set reminders that will show up in the right place and right time.
It’s also adding cards for public transit commute times, music albums, TV shows books and video games.
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You don’t even have to use the mic button to search, you just say “okay google” and ask your question. Hot. If you like talking to computers. And really, who doesn’t?
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You’re going to be able to ask Google things like “What are my trip plans” or “photos of my trip to New Zealand” and get an answer. You can ask it this in a conversational manner. This already exists on iOS and Android, today, Google is bringing it to the desktop via Chrome.
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Amit Singhal is onstage now to talk about Search. Specifically “The end of search.” (Provocative!) Or: The End of Search as We Know it.
Singhal says that he dreamt as a child in India of building a computer that could answer all your questions. Now he’s building it.
Search is moving to a new experience: Answer, Converse, and Anticipate.
The knowledge graph allows it to answer questions it could not before like “What are the movies by J.J. Abrams.” Google has been continuously improving it. Singhal says that it’s now going to give you important statistics, and even anticipate your next question. So you search for population of India, and not only will it show that, but also how it compares to the population of the US and China, because those are the most frequently requested questions.
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Auto awesome will also create automatic panoramas, and make sure that everyone is smiling in a photo if you take a burst shot where someone’s frowning in one but not the other.
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And now: Something called Awesome. Auto-awesome “creates a new image from one that did not exist.”
Think: automatic animated gifs. The cat-obsessed Internet thanks you, Google.
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The skin softening feature will do stuff like smooth out your wrinkles. (Yes, please.) A noise reduction feature will, well, reduce noise. A structure tool can help add depth to your photos.
The demos do look pretty great. I’ll definitely use this. I am a terrible photographer with bad skin.
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Google Plus is going to make your photos better too. An Auto enhance feature will do things like reduce noise and red eye and correct exposure. There’s a skin softening feature that, well, makes your skin look nice. Google can recognize skin. Vic says photos can exaggerate flaws. We’re about to see how it works.
There is a very large photo of Vic Gundotra on screen…
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Highlight. Vic shows the 696 photos from his last vacation, says he knows there are great pictures in there, but “I don’t have time to pick them out because my vacation is over.”
So now Google Plus will pick the best ones for you. How? Glad you asked. It can do things like make sure to just find ones that are in focus, or have bad exposure. But there’s other cool stuff too. It will look for landmarks, like the Eiffel tower, if there are people in the photo, if those people in your picture are smiling (wow), if the smiling people in your photo are your family.
This is one of those Google features that’s incredibly cool but also a little unnerving.
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Photos: Google thinks it can make it easier to edit and store photos. It’s saying its datacenter is “your new darkroom.” Going beyond backup. (But of course, there’s that too. 15GB of free storage at full resolution.)
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It’s not just chat. Hangouts let you do group video, too.
This looks very, very cool.
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Conversations can be saved (or not recorded or deleted) so you can go back and see images shared across time. You can see where people have read to in a conversation.
Hangouts runs on the Web, Android and iOS and all are available today
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Here comes a new app called Hangouts. It’s a real time chat tool that lets you talk to people. “It’s a list of conversations, not contacts.” You can message or video call. The conversations can be long lasting—you can have a conversation with your family that goes on for months, for example.
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Real time communications! “You don’t think about wanting to talk to a computer, you want to talk to a person.” But we’re still stuck with gadgets that get in the way, says Vic. “Why should OSes matter? People matter.”
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These related hashtags looks incredibly useful but I hope they have a huge list of topics to be extra sensitive about.
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They think they’ve solved the “depth” problem by analyzing content of posts and adding automatically generated hashtags.
You can read a post about the Giants, flip the card over, and see hashtags with related content based on the content itself and stuff like location.
(Well that’s not going to cause any problems…)
Content producers can tell Google not to have the related hashtags feature, and you can also “X it out” if “we ever get it wrong”
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Streams are being redesigned across all devices. They want to fix one problem with streams, they’re “flat” and it’s hard to go deeper into topics that you care about.
A new Google Plus design coming out today has a multi-column design—one two or three based on screen size. It looks Pinterest-ish. Very pretty. Menus slide in and out, cards flip and fade, so you can see details on a photo, for example.
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Google is incredibly grateful to the 100 million people who joined Google Plus (even the ones who didn’t realize they did, I bet) And so we’re going to hear about lots of new features. Notably streams, Hangouts and new photo experiences.
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Okay. Now we’re getting some details on the “best of Google,” and here comes Vic to tell us about Google Plus.
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Now we’re going to talk about Chromebooks in schools. Oh, hey, a video, (go get yourself a soda).
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Google Play for Education launches in the Fall.
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Google Play for Education lets you do things like drill down on apps designed for, say, kindergarten math. A teacher can select the app to install, and all the students will have it automatically installed on their tablets. You can push books, and educational videos to the tablets as well.
It’s already being tested in pilot programs in New Jersey and elsewhere.
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Yerga says that in education there’s a huge gap between what’s possible in education and what’s practical, and that educators say it’s Google’s job to fix this. Google should make it possible to get every child a tablet and make it easy to manage them. They’re announcing a new program to get inexpensive Android tablets into schools, running education software. They’re announcing something called Google Play for Education
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Google Apps: schools use them. Lots of schools. Now Google wants to bring Android and Chrome into schools. Chris Yerga is coming back to tell us about it. Chris has great hair. And glasses too.
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Sundar is back. He’s bearing gifts! Everyone at I/O is getting a Pixel. People are happy. People love it when you give them a computer, it turns out.
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Now we’re seeing a web-based game called Racer, played across various devices. The car moves from one screen, to another, to another, and is controlled by a different user on each. Pretty neat. Unless you’re just following along at home, in which case this may be boring?
But hey, now we’re going to see a film that shows how much has changed in the past 20 years of the Web. (Spoiler: it’s better.)
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Oh hey, a toolkit video that’s showing us how you can create new html tags that’s “not ready for regular developers.”
Glad this music is loud because otherwise I might have drifted off to sleep.
Seriously, can someone bring me a Red Bull? I don’t even drink Red Bull.
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Upson claims that the abandonment rate from shopping carts on mobile phones is about 97%. Google is reducing checkout from about 21 steps to three across all your devices:
1. Checkout button
2. Review billing and shipping
3. Submit
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Improvements to commerce too. There are 21 steps in the average checkour process. Mobile Chrome will store your payment information. You hit a checkout button, review the billing and shipping, then hit submit. Three steps. Nice.
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And now we’re on to video. He’s comparing VP9 to H.264, the former can give “about a 50 percent reduction” in file size. YouTube will roll out support for it later this year.
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Upson is talking about speed boosts, they’ve gotten 2.4 x improvements in just the past few weeks to javascript. They’ve developed a WebP image compression technology that he says can give you a 31 percent reduction in image size—it’s been adopted by Facebook among others—and it even supports animated images. (There is a laser-eye kitty, naturally.)
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Upson says Chrome’s focus on mobile is speed, simplicity and security.
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Sundar is talking about the possibilities for Chrome on mobile. He’s showing a demo of a Hobbit website with some fancy features in Chrome running on a Nexus 10 side by side with it running on the PIxel. They look pretty much identical.
Next we see a Hobbit game running on the Nexus, lots of rich features, made possible by WebGL. A Rivendell game lets you dive in and explore the world, using touch, on the Web. It’s fast, rich, and very impressive, honestly.
Here comes Linus Upson, who runs Chrome engineering, to talk about mobile Web APIs
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In the past 200 days since the Samsung Chromebook launched, it’s been the number one selling laptop on Amazon. Two months ago they announced the Pixel designed to be “the best laptop possible.” The goal behind that was, apparently, to get it in the hands of developers. No word on Pixel sales.
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Chrome has added more than 300 million new users since last update, and it’s now at more than 750 million active monthly users. Pichai says they think they can do with it for the mobile web what they did for the desktop.
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Hugo’s gone. Sundar’s coming back. And we’re moving on to Chrome.
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Hugo is back. He’s showing off his home screen on Samsung Galaxy S4 running stock Jellybean—you’ll be able to buy it from Google Play, unlocked, T-Mobile and AT&T, 16GB of memory, bootloader unlocked, and prompt system updates. It goes on sale on Google Play June 26for… $649.
Yeah. So. That’s expensive.
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Time for people to jump out of planes or ride a bike up a building. BTW, how is Sergey going to top last year’s Google Glass stunt? Will he try?
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All Access is $9.99 per month with a 30 day free trial. It launches today in the US, and if you sign up before June 30, it’s just $7.99 a month.
$7.99? Okay, I’m in.
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Yep. Streaming. It’s called All Access
All Access gives you music recommendations and anything you see, you can immediately start playing. You can turn a track into a radio station—think Pandora—that plays related music. It shows you the tracks coming up, and lets you swap the tracks up, or dismiss them altogether. It’s “radio without rules.” Your library can contain anything you own, plus everything you find on Explore. A Listen Now feature creates radio stations for you, and tries to make sure there’s always something new for you. It works on the phone, tablet, and Web. Bam.
This looks pretty cool. Can’t wait to hear how much it costs.
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Google All Access, Spotify, Rdio, Pandora — even Apple — paying very close attention right now.
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And now Yerga is talking about Music: Google Play Music All Access. It sounds like a streaming service?
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Starting today, the Play store will also highlight apps that are designed specifically for tablets.
Also I think he just called Dan Brown ugly.
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Yerga is showing us a more personalized Play Store (and touting those 48 billion app installs again). He’s talking about how recommendations for apps, music, books are personalized based on previous purchases. These will be rolling out in the coming weeks.
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Barra is back onstage and says he’s feeling pretty API’d out. (Hey, me too!) So he’s bringing Chris Yerga, who runs engineering for Android, out to entertain us. Is he going to sing? Probably not.
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Ellie Powers is showing new tools that you can use in the developer console. Things like automatic translation, revenue tracking, and a feature that lets devs do beta testing and staged rollouts. You can set up a small group of alpha testers, roll it to a larger group of beta testers, and then production. When you’re ready to hit production, you can run a staged rollout.
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Get more users and make more money on android: 5 news things google has cooked up
1. Optimization tips (suggestions to rev revenue)
2. App translation service, and referral tracking (which ads are most effective)
3. Usage metrics in developer console
4. Revenue graphs (the money you are making every day
5. Beta testing and staged rollouts
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Referral Tracking helps you see which ads are most effective.
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Ellie Powers is onstage now demoing more developer tools. The first is a translation tool that lets you send strings and have them translated directly from the developer console
There’s also something called Referral Tracking
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Barra just announced a new development tool called Android Studio and we’re getting a demo now. We’re looking at code strings. It shows lots of previews in the magins of the editor, and even a live layout of what apps will look like on different screen sizes. This gets a lot of applause from the developers in the audience.
Aren’t you excited? I can feel your excitement.
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“This is a really exciting demo” I bet! Given that it didn’t work.
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Oh and we had our first demo fail. The Multiplayer game they were trying to show just crapped out. Twice. Going for a third now.
Aaaaaaaaaannnnd… Um.
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Google Play Game Services include Cloud Save, that lets developers sync gameplay across devices. Get to level two on one device, and pick up there on another. Achievements and Leaderboards APIs are also coming, and are exactly what they sound like. They work for Android, iOS and Web, so you can go fully cross platform. A Multiplayer API coming as well. It’s going to let devs build games that let you invite friends and play each other without having to do a lot of heavy lifting.
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Oh. Boy. Gaming.
Google just announced a new family of APIs for game developers called Google Play Game Services.
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Google is launching a new Google Maps API for Android. There are also three new location APIs launching today. Fused Location API, Geofencing (think virtual fences that can trigger events as you enter or leave them—that’s pretty cool), and Activity Recognition. That last one can automatically figure out if you’re walking, cycling or driving. Wow. That’s going to be major for health and fitness apps.
Google+ Sign In API gets an update to go cross platform. This let you do things like automatically install apps to your tablet from Websites like Fancy, and then be automatically logged in when you launch it on your device. It looks like a pretty seamless experience.
Google Cloud Messaging: 17B messages a day. It’s now part of Google Play services and gets three major new features. Persistent connections between servers and Google (which lets you send lots of messages very quickly). An upstream messaging update gets audible gasps from the crowd. And third another GCM API to sync notifications. (Nice!) Dismiss a notification on your handset, and it goes away on your tablet too.
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Hugo Barra is here to tell us about the state of Android application development. Google Play has now crossed 48 billion installs. Revenue for user is double what it was. (Message: you can make money, developers.)
And now it’s time to hear about developer tools. That means most of you can probably get up and go get some more coffee.
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Aaaaand. 900 million Android activations. That’s a lot. But Sundar says the journey is just getting started—and that’s true. Huge growth is coming to the developing world. The next step, he says, is bringing the 4.5 billion people without Internet connectivity online.
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We’re starting with Android, and another video. Last year we were at 400 million activations. This video is leading us up to how many there are today. Any guesses?
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Sundar notes that we’re fortunate to have two platforms for development — Android and Chrome. He notes that Android is the most popular operating system in the world. Chrome started as a browser, and that now too is the most popular browser in the world—no note about Chrome OS market share.
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Sundar Pichai, who now runs both Android and Chrome is onstage now. He says we’re in one of the most important moments in computing. (True. But aren’t they all?) He notes that for the past 25 years we almost all used desktops, and ones running Windows at that. The past five years have seen an explosion of devices and systems. Yep.
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Vic Gundotra, who runs engineering at Google, is welcoming us (thanks Vic!). He’s thanking developers for building apps, and saying that he hopes Google will continue to build trust.
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We’re kicking things off with a video. Always a thrill when you’re following along from home, I know. Imagine loud music and fast cuts.
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An onscreen timer just counted down to zero. And here we go. You ready?
Music thumping… Time dwindling.
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Okay, now a Beastie Boys M83 mashup is playing. Feel free to parse that clue endlessly.
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It’s a real madhouse here. Incredibly chaotic. I was body checked repeatedly in the dash sprint to the seats. Thankfully, there’s soothing music playing now. Just before the doors opened a Google PR rep was telling me today will be a low key event. I can’t imagine what it would be like if it was, you know, a big deal.
We’re in!
A wired photographer and an sf chronicle photographer (not pictured) ducked under the door when it was only opened by about two feet and sprinted to the front… We’re here!
What’s the energy like here? Well, people are hooting and hollering while waiting in line if that tells you anything.
We wait… Again. Media hugging the door at Google I/O waiting for a 30 ft. wide door to open.
The pre-event conventional wisdom is that Google tried to manage expectations this year. Despite that, it’s a packed house and there’s a palpable energy. There may not be any skydivers, but we’re still pretty jazzed for the keynote.
An android for charging phones sits in the media room… iPhone users will be stuck with the payphone (left).
The media room at Google I/O!
In case the giant line for Google I/O wasn’t a big enough visual indicator.
The public line for Google I/O started at 4am!
Welcome to Wired’s liveblog of the Google I/O keynote. What should we expect today? We know itwon’t be a roll-up of Chrome and Android, no matter how much that might make sense. But we are hoping for an Android update, maybe an Android game center of sorts, unified chat, hopefully a little bit of hardware, and of course, more, more, more Glass. Stay tuned for all the action, kicking off at 8:30 am Pacific, 11:30 Eastern.
