Friday, June 11, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Kicking around search trends for the World Cup

Posted: 11 Jun 2010 07:16 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Kicking around search trends for the World Cup

If you're a certain type of sports fan, you've been waiting four years to get to June 11, 2010—the kick-off of the World Cup and 30 days of football (soccer to some of us) madness, with 64 matches played by 32 teams from around the world.

As we've done before, we took a look at the search data using tools like Google Insights for Search—as well as some internal resources—to see what we could uncover about the upcoming tournament and its global audience. Search patterns can truly reflect the "pulse" of the world, and we found that the pulse of World Cup fever is beating strong as millions of fans hold tight to the hope that their team will make history as the 2010 champion.

It's often said that football is a global sport, and that's certainly true in search. Searches for [world cup 2010], [copa mundial] and [월드 컵] are all spiking, although overall World Cup buzz seems to be off to a slower start in 2010 than in the months leading up to the 2006 tournament, based on global trends for queries like [world cup] and [fifa world cup]. India is the #1 country searching for [fifa world cup schedule], [fifa 2010 schedule] and similar queries. And as the match-up between anglophone rivals England and USA approaches, searches for [england world cup] continue to far surpass interest in [usa world cup].

Most of us will be watching the matches on TV in pubs and living rooms, but a few lucky spectators will get to watch in person in South Africa. Searches for [world cup tickets] peaked in mid-April, and have since declined. But whether home or abroad, we're all searching for the best way to show support for our team. Searches for [world cup decoration] have risen, and a glimpse at the Dutch shows queries for [oranje versiering] ("orange decoration"; orange is the Netherland's national color) and [orange] have risen sharply for the last three months, as they have in 2006 and 2008 for the World Cup and European Cup.

All eyes—and hopes—are now hanging on the football stars who will be dribbling, passing and scoring for their countries. In search, the winning player is already clear: Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese team captain and talented forward.



But many others are also being closely watched, especially the handful of players who have been injured in the days leading up to the start of the tournament. Queries on the Ivory Coast's [drogba], England's [rooney], Germany's [ballack] and Italy's [pirlo] have all spiked in this fashion. And the Netherlands is apparently far more concerned about Arjen Robben's injury than their national elections. In the days leading up to the June 9 elections, between four and five times as many searches were done for [robben] than either of the two popular candidates [wilders] or [balkenende].

We'll be back throughout the next month to highlight more search trends from the World Cup. In the meantime, you can explore trends on your own using Google Trends and Google Insights for Search, or see what topics other fans are discussing with the "Updates" mode and other search tools in the left panel of your Google search results page.

Posted by Jaime Forman-Lau, Consumer Operations Strategist
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/kicking-around-search-trends-for-world.html

[G] 2010 World Cup: All eyes on South Africa

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 09:47 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: 2010 World Cup: All eyes on South Africa

Teams representing 32 nations have gathered in South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World CupTM, the quadrennial football (aka soccer) tournament celebrating the world's most popular game, which begins Friday, June 11, and concludes in a month, with the championship match on Sunday, July 11.



This World Cup has special significance as it will be the first time the event has been held in Africa, where the game has been growing by leaps and bounds – besides host nation South Africa, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon and Algeria will each be competing.



According to FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), the sport's governing body, the World Cup is the most-widely viewed sporting event in the world, with fans everywhere following their teams with rapt attention.



On YouTube, there will be many ways to feel World Cup fever. Here are some channels to subscribe to:

- ESPN will have extensive coverage of the event, including match highlights, and have put together a set of 32 videos profiling each of the national teams:









- Univision will be uploading Spanish-language video around the event, with special coverage of the Mexican national team.

- The U.S. team will face England in one of the Cup's most-anticipated matches on Saturday, June 12. Get behind-the-scenes footage of each team on their respective channels: U.S.A., England.

- Coca-Cola is celebrating the tradition of the post-goal dance, giving people a chance to submit their original moves to the "Longest Celebration." Submit here.

- Visa is creating an epic video of fans around the world screaming "GOOOAAALLL!" in the style of the iconic soccer announcer Andrés Cantor. Submit your video here.

- Last but certainly not least, Portugal striker extraordinaire (and international heartthrob) Cristiano Ronaldo has joined the YouTube community, with videos like this:










Olé olé olé!

Andrew Bangs, Sports Manager, recently watched "My 2010 World Cup Predictions."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/Qf5Fwv1jU78/2010-world-cup-all-eyes-on-south-africa.html

[G] Blogger Template Designer Now Available To Everyone

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 05:23 PM PDT

Blogger Buzz: Blogger Template Designer Now Available To Everyone

When we launched the Blogger Template Designer to Blogger in Draft in March, you gave us a lot of feedback and suggestions. Our blog post received nearly 1,000 comments and many of you shared your blog's new looks on Twitter using #newbloggertemplate. Since the launch, we fixed many bugs and added even more themes and background images. But the Blogger Template Designer has only been available on Blogger in Draft, which is why we're excited to announce that the Blogger Template Designer is now available to everyone.




Highlights

How you look online is important, and everybody wants to look unique. With the Blogger Template Designer, you can create your own blog designs through:
  • Beautiful new templates. We've designed 19 brand-new templates, with more on the way. You can quickly give your blog a great new style by selecting one of the new templates.[1]
  • Separating design from layout. Designs are completely defined in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), meaning that any design can be applied to any blog layout, making templates more flexible and unique.
  • Hundreds of free, professional background images. We've paired up with iStockphoto to offer you hundreds of gorgeous background images at no cost.
  • A single control to change all your design's colors. With other platforms, users have to define every color in their blog separately, making changing the color theme of your blog a tedious task. The Blogger Template Designer lets you change all the colors in your blog at once, by changing the Main color theme.
  • Pixel-perfect layout manipulation via smooth resizing. You can define your layout down to the pixel via sliders that update the blog's preview in real time.
  • A real-time preview sits below the design control panel. Watch your blog update as you create your template design.
  • Keeping it simple. Throughout the Template Designer we use hierarchy to hide complexity from you.
  • Complete control. Under the advanced tab, you can override a design's CSS and enter your own CSS in the editor and see your blog's preview updated in real time.
  • Cross-browser support. Blogger handles cross browser support for you, so you don't have to. Want a design with rounded corners? We give it to you in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.


Try it now!

Anyone can try out the template designer here. If you like your design, you can apply it to a new blog or to an existing blog. You can also try the Template Designer on your blog (Design > Template Designer).

Feel free to spread the word with the #newbloggertemplate hashtag on Google Buzz or Twitter. If you are a template designer, you are also welcome to join the Blogger Template Design Group.  If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know on the forums.

As always, thanks for using Blogger!


[1] Note: Selecting a new template will erase all of your customizations on the existing template, so if you have customized your template be sure to first save the current template at Design > Edit HTML.
URL: http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/06/blogger-template-designer-now-available.html

[G] Long lived new windows

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 05:15 PM PDT

Official Gmail Blog: Long lived new windows

Posted by Michael Davidson, Software Engineer

I recently posted about Gmail's fast new windows and explained that the only downside of them was that they closed when the main Gmail window closed. Today, we're changing that. If you're using the latest version of Google Chrome, you can now continue to work in popped out windows after you close your main window (especially handy for those of us who always like to keep an eye on our tasks).

For the technically curious among you, our friends on the Chrome team made it possible to transfer the code that runs Gmail from one window to another as the window closes. When the window that hosts the code fires an unload event, we move the iframe with the code to a surviving window. Everything continues to run, including timers and outstanding requests.
URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/long-lived-new-windows.html

[G] Settle trivia debates anytime, anywhere

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 04:27 PM PDT

Official Google Mobile Blog: Settle trivia debates anytime, anywhere

Last month we launched a way to provide short answers to search queries, and it's now available on your iPhone, Palm WebOS or Android-powered device in English. If you're like us, you may sometimes engage in trivia matches with friends on topics as far ranging as, what continent is Turkey in?, Star Wars release date?, or Augustus' successor? Now you can settle that debate there and then by searching Google from your mobile; you can speak your question into Google Search on Android or Google Mobile App for iPhone, or you can visit google.com from your mobile browser to type your search.

If your friends challenge the answer provided in Google Search results, you can corroborate the information with a list of websites by clicking on the "Show sources" link. The source list includes the relevant text from each page so you can quickly verify whether Google interpreted the context of the answer correctly. You can also click through to the original website to get all the details.

We continue to work on providing short answers to more questions. Here are some additional examples to try:
  • Who's taller? [height of kobe bryant] or [height of paul pierce]
  • Geography trivia? [capital of massachusetts], [language in netherlands]
  • Literature trivia? [author of les miserables], [george eliot's gender]
  • Movie trivia? [release date of shrek], [director of harry potter 3]
  • Music trivia? [composer of four seasons], [birthday of lady gaga]
Posted by Nick Fey, User Experience Designer and Mike Buchanan, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team
URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/06/settle-trivia-debates-anytime-anywhere.html

[G] Google Tags rolling out nationwide

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 03:26 PM PDT

Google LatLong: Google Tags rolling out nationwide

Just a month ago we announced that Tags, our new advertising feature for local businesses, became available in 11 cities throughout the U.S. Today we're excited to announce our plans to expand the trial to the entire country. The rollout will start with states where we have already had Tags available in select cities (California, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Washington, and Colorado). We'll update this page as additional states go live.

For a flat monthly fee of $25, businesses can enhance their listings that appear on Google.com and Google Maps with a yellow tag that emphasizes specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos, or a custom message. Tags do not affect the ranking of the listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.

If you try out a query for "massage houston," you'll see that two of the businesses whose listings appear have created coupon Tags to promote their current offers:




We haven't just been working on increased availability; we've also been adding new features. Tags now appears on mobile web searches as well, helping your local customers quickly identify what's unique about your business while they're on the go.



Posts, a new kind of Tag that enables business owners to create a custom message, is also live. These messages can be changed as often as the business owner would like, making it easy to let the world know about a special discount or limited-time offer.

We hope you find Tags to be a useful and easy way to find and connect with your local customers. To learn more and try it out, please visit www.google.com/help/tags.

Posted by Shalini Agarwal, Product Manager
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/06/google-tags-rolling-out-nationwide.html

[G] AdWords brings you insight about the competitive landscape

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 02:31 PM PDT

Inside AdWords: AdWords brings you insight about the competitive landscape

As an AdWords advertiser, you know you're not alone in the auction -- any number of advertisers may be using AdWords to offer some of the same goods and services as you. You can monitor your performance and use optimization tools to improve your ROI, but you still might not know how you're performing as compared to similar advertisers. We're aiming to bring more transparency to AdWords with the launch of Analyze competition in the Opportunities tab. For now, this feature is only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but we'll expand this to more advertisers in the near future.



'Analyze competition' examines your account's activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services you're advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with your account, you'll see a bar graph, which shows your individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.

When you hover over the data in the 'Competitive Range' column, you'll be able to see more details such as the exact size of your competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers.

In the case below, you'll see that we've chosen to evaluate our performance based on how our CTR compares with that of other advertisers. In addition to CTR, you'll also be able to look at competitive data for impressions, clicks, and average position, and you can segment data by advertiser location.

As with other areas of the Opportunities tab, you'll be able to export information from 'Analyze competition' to a .csv file.

It's important to remember that data in 'Analyze competition' is anonymous, and as part of our commitment to protect your privacy, we don't reveal information about any advertiser's identity.

Now that you know what 'Analyze competition' does, here are some tips on how to make the most of this data:
  • Take action. Click the 'Explore ideas' button to see customized keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your account.
  • Consider your advertising goals and focus on the most relevant metrics. It's not always a bad thing to perform below competitors on a metric that's not important to you.
  • If you see that one campaign is performing poorly in comparison to the competition, you can get insight into changes you can make to improve that campaign.
Just like the other areas of the Opportunities tab, we hope that 'Analyze competition' will help you uncover new opportunities to improve your AdWords performance. To learn more about this feature, visit the Help Center, or watch this short video.

To read more about 'Analzye competition' and to discover other new developments in AdWords, visit the Ad Innovations page.

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/06/adwords-brings-you-insight-about.html

[G] Sharing is caring: new ways to segment, schedule, and email reports

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 02:31 PM PDT

Inside AdWords: Sharing is caring: new ways to segment, schedule, and email reports

When we discover something great, our first impulse is to share it. How else do you explain the 66 million times people have watched a baby panda sneeze? Sharing the insights you find in your AdWords reports should be as easy as forwarding a YouTube link, so we've recently released new options for segmenting, scheduling, and emailing the data on your Campaigns tab.

By clicking the Download button in the toolbar above your data tables, you'll open a menu that shows you a number of options for sharing reports with others.



First, you'll name your report, just as you would in the Report Center. Next, you can add segments to reveal different dimensions of your performance. Add multiple segments at once to get a even deeper breakdown of your statistics. For example, you can segment your campaigns by device and day of the week to understand the days when your customers are more likely to see your ad on their mobile devices. Each new segment you add will appear as a separate column in your downloaded report.

From here, you have a few options. You can simply download your report in formats ranging from .CSV to .PDF and personally deliver it to your favorite teammate. Or, you can choose to email your data to one or all of the users with reporting access in your account.

Finally, you'll set the frequency at which you want this report to run. So if you've set up a filter for your keyword list to show, for example, only those keywords containing the term "free" that have cost you over $50 with a conversion rate under 5%, you can now get a weekly email with a report showing you their performance. All the reports you download from the Campaigns tab will appear in your Control Panel and Library, a new area used to manage the reports and custom alerts that you've created for your account.

These changes are just the latest in our ongoing efforts to simplify the ways you access your reports. We hope that with more data in the Campaigns tab and easier access to advanced statistics, looking at the different dimensions of your campaign performance becomes common practice. After all, you never know how many baby pandas could be hiding in your campaigns...

Posted by Devin Sandoz, Product Marketing Manager
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/06/sharing-is-caring-new-ways-to-segment.html

[G] Bringing Bonnaroo to you: live stream event this weekend

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 01:26 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: Bringing Bonnaroo to you: live stream event this weekend

The forecast for the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival this weekend in Manchester, Tenn., is scattered thunderstorms, but you don't have to worry a stitch about that (unless you'll actually be frolicking in the 700-acre field where it takes place). That's because starting this Friday and throughout the weekend, we'll be live streaming directly from Bonnaroo, in partnership with Superfly Productions and powered by Ford.

The exclusive webcast will include performances from folks like Jay-Z, Tenacious D, Kings of Leon, Weezer, the Dead Weather, LCD Soundsystem, Jimmy Cliff, The Avett Brothers, Spearhead and Dave Matthews Band. YouTube's own ukulele queen Julia Nunes kicks the whole thing off on Friday, June 11, at 12:15 p.m. (CDT) / 1:15 p.m. (EDT). Hear her talk about her journey to Bonnaroo:


Check the full schedule along with any last minute updates here, the very same place to tune in for the full webcast from Friday, June 11, through Sunday, June 13. Subscribe to the channel (www.youtube.com/bonnaroo) for the latest videos from the festival, stay tuned to our Tweets (http://twitter.com/youtube), and join the live chat via #bonnaroolive during the event.

Enjoy!

Michele Flannery, Music Community Manager, recently watched "Tighten Up."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/kLTfR1ks-g8/bringing-bonnaroo-to-you-live-stream.html

[G] Disturbing Concerns in Vietnam

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 12:56 PM PDT

Google Public Policy Blog: Disturbing Concerns in Vietnam

Posted by Dorothy Chou, Policy Analyst

Internet users in Hanoi will soon find that they can't reach certain sites when browsing the Web at local Internet cafés. A regulation enacted in April requires that all retail Internet locations install a server-side application by 2011. The application will likely allow the Vietnamese government to block access to websites, as well as to track user activities.

The implementation of an application like this one would choke off access to information for many in Hanoi -- given how popular Internet cafés are among Internet users in Vietnam. If the regulation spreads beyond Hanoi, it will impose these vague and non-transparent restrictions on users all over the country.

Together with the security attacks we detected on Vietnamese human rights activists earlier this year (see our security blog post on "The chilling effects of malware") and intermittent blockages of Facebook and other social networks, this regulation is a troubling example of a government threatening free expression online and an open Internet.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/06/disturbing-concerns-in-vietnam.html

[G] Building A Business With The API

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 11:55 AM PDT

Google Analytics Blog: Building A Business With The API

Do you like web analytics data? Do you like number crunching in Excel? Get ready to drool once you click on the images below to look at them up close. But don't jump ahead just yet! A little background on a great story...

When we released the Google Analytics Data Export API, we were excited to see what developers would build - but it's even more exhilarating to see developers profiting from all their hard work. One developer, Mikael Thuneberg, has succeeded in doing just that, by starting a new business consulting around our API called AutomateAnalytics.com.

Mikael started working with the API in June 2009, developing a set of VBA functions to import data into Excel (VBA is Excel's built-in scripting language). His free solution has many benefits:

  • It does not require installing plug-ins
  • Reports are simple to share with others
  • The functions can be used just like any of Excel's built-in functions like SUM or COUNT

Check out the getting started guide to learn how to use this free tool to generate the jaw-dropping reports below - click images to enlarge:




Click images for larger versions

Because the solution is free and easy to use, Mikael quickly got requests from companies to build custom reports. As he discusses, "All of these customers have excellent skills for analyzing data, but have asked for help in automating time-consuming manual work, like data retrieval and building custom visualizations."

One of these came from Sanoma Games, the online gaming unit of Sanoma Group, one of the largest media companies in Europe. Sanoma owns dozens of popular sites, and so it was taking huge amounts of time for their analytics team to keep track of KPIs, let alone gather data for in-depth analysis.

Mikael built an Excel tool for them that fetches and processes the data they need in a matter of seconds. Now Sanoma's analysts can spend their time analyzing and taking action, instead of manually copying the data from one place to another.

Mikael eventually got many requests for customized reports from leading Internet companies, which led him to create AutomateAnalytics. As Mikael says, "I've always wanted to run a business. What I thought would be a fun project led into an amazing business opportunity. The Google Analytics API really helped me realize this goal."

We're really impressed with what Mikael has done and thrilled to share his story!


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/06/building-business-with-api.html

[G] Umit Project 2010

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 10:45 AM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Umit Project 2010


Umit Project is an international open source organization focused on network monitoring, with the goal of making life easier for network administrators and others who need to be aware of what is happening in their networks. The project developed out of Insecure.org in 2005, becoming an independent organization in 2007.

Umit Project has been a proud participant in Google Summer of Code™ since 2005. This year Umit Project participates in Google Summer of Code again with two students working on the Nmap Security Scanner.

In 2009, Umit Project received more good proposals than allocated slots, and students contacted us wishing to accomplish their projects even without funding through Google Summer of Code. To address this need, we created Umit Summer of Code (USoC) to enable those "extra" motivated students to participate in our project. Even without a stipend, the students accomplished their projects and they're still contributing in our community.

This year we have decided to operate the USoC program again, and everyone is welcome to join us! Check out more details about it at Umit's blog.

By Luis A. Bastiao Silva, Umit Project Lead Developer and former Google Summer of Code Mentor
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/06/umit-project-2010.html

[G] Goble & Associates advances customer-centric approach with Google Apps

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 09:39 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Goble & Associates advances customer-centric approach with Google Apps

Editor's Note: We launched our Google Apps community map in March 2010, and have since received thousands of Gone Google stories from organizations around the world. We'll be showcasing some of these stories in a new series of blog posts, Going Google Everywhere.

Today we welcome Mark Goble, COO of Goble & Associates, an integrated marketing agency servicing the healthcare industry. Has your company "Gone Google" and interested in sharing your story? Add your marker to the map!

Goble & Associates is a 27 year old global marketing agency with clients in the medical device, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical businesses. Our commitment to collaboration and communication has been the cornerstone of our success, with client relationships that average over eight years, which is rare in our business. As our agency has doubled in size over the past four years, our IT resources were increasingly consumed with managing our outdated systems, and we needed solutions that would enable us to continue to deliver the same levels of customer service that our clients had come to expect.

Our IT challenges were considerable. Our expansion to nearly 100 employees – including offices in Chicago and San Diego, plus mobile workers – had left us without a central calendaring system, and our in-house email support was costly and time consuming to maintain. When we added mobile access by rolling out iPhones to more than 20 employees, we realized our infrastructure was unable to support mobile solutions, and we knew it was time for a change.

Enter Google Apps. We migrated to Apps in early 2009, and have subsequently converted an additional organization we acquired. The results have exceeded our expectations. Six months after going Google, we saw an 80% reduction in IT issues related to email, while saving more than 23% in hardware costs. Additionally, we estimate our mobile efficiency has increased more than ten-fold.

While our initial pain points were focused on email and calendaring, we've experienced huge benefits from Docs and Sites. Docs has become the centerpiece of our daily communications regarding project status, and we're actively using Google Sites to help manage our business, including a company-wide start page with integrated calendar and Twitter feed:


We've also found ways to utilize Sites to assist in our continued focus to be the best partner to our clients. We recently developed a Site to provide a potential client insight into our immersion and research process, which was instrumental in helping us prepare to win this business. Going Google has also reinvigorated our client-centric focus, as our IT team now has the resource to assist our development team in building new client solutions.

Using cloud-based solution like Google Apps has greatly enhanced our business operations; so much so that we've extended our cloud computing initiative to include Google Apps Marketplace providers such as TripIt. We eagerly await the adoption of new technologies like Google Wave that will continue to place Goble & Associates at the forefront of the technology and communications curve.


Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Enterprise team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/06/goble-associates-advances-customer.html

[G] WWDC 2010 Journal, Day 3

Posted: 10 Jun 2010 08:24 AM PDT

Official Google Mac Blog: WWDC 2010 Journal, Day 3

By Mike Morton, Google Mac Team

Google engineer Mike Morton eschews sleep (mostly) while attending Apple's WWDC in San Francisco. Here's his account of day 3 in the life of an iDeveloper.

Things are settling into a routine. After dinner, I retreat to my hotel room and wrestle with the wifi to catch up on email and look at tomorrow's sessions. I worry about which sessions to skip so I can visit scheduled labs and pump Apple engineers for advice. Today I attended four sessions and skipped two. That ratio seemed about right.

Many labs are busy. I waited a long time to ask a couple of questions about Core Data. That's an Apple technology for storing info, not related to the phylum chordata. After an hour, I gave up. But the busiest lab is the one for User Interface consulting, where you can show your prototype application to Apple UI gurus and get advice. This takes place in private rooms, because prototypes are often secret. Unlike other labs, this one takes reservations, and by early morning they're booked for the whole day. That must be frustrating for folks who don't get a slot, but I'm glad that so many people care about the fit and finish of their apps.

Today's sessions were great…but of course the non-disclosure agreement won't let me tell you about them. During one session, I took frantic notes, emailed them off to my team on the east coast, then got questions back that I asked at a session an hour later. Technology is so useful!



The obligatory power adapter shot


I caught most of a lunchtime talk by Pixar Senior Technologist Michael Johnson about Pixar's internal software projects. His talk was fast-paced and witty, with a lot of lessons about how to make good in-house software. He mentioned one important deal that happened because of a conversation at WWDC's annual beer bash. The clear lesson was that beer bashes are an important part of the industry. Just as we always suspected.

In between sessions and labs I caught up with old friends and colleagues. I've been doing this for awhile, and sometimes I get a little behind. I asked one friend about his toddlers, and he showed me a photo of his older daughter in an evening gown. Other parents are fretting about college choices and driver's licenses. It's nice to be reminded that geeks have a life, too.

Some non-geek friends have been in touch by email, curious about what's going on. They're especially interested in FaceTime, and other possible uses for the front-facing camera. One friend suggested that it will make a handy mirror. That gives me a great idea for an app: Do I Have Spinach in My Teeth?

Thursday is my last day. I'm taking a redeye home Thursday night. Friday is supposed to be a work day. We'll see how that goes. And now it's time to start packing.
URL: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2010/06/wwdc-2010-journal-day-3.html
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)