Gary Allison's Leadership Blog

Anticipation is high for big announcements this morning. People literally we running to seats when the large garage style doors opened! Never seen anything like it at a conference…

Big announcement: “the future we don’t want” one company (apple) controlling the platform and choices. Google promoting “innovation from everyone”. Android – daily activations have passed 100k a day!

22 demos of the platform …
Announcing release of android 2.2. 2x to 5x increase in app performance from just in time compiler. Added Exchange support. New messaging API cloud to device. Example shown sending a navigation route from desktop browser to an android device. And… Teathering plus mobile hotspot support! Lots of applause here. Major browser improvements – 2-3x JavaScript improvement. Another demo showing android better than ipad. Claim the worlds fastest mobile browser. HTML5 sneak peak of things coming in the future with access to phone tilt, accelerometer.

And… Just announced flash capable browsing and Adobe Air in android. Jabs at apple for not being open and not meeting needs of users. Demo of moving apps from phone to sd card and searching data in apps. Added update all to update apps and auto update. Complete bug reporting from phone viewable in the dev view of the android marketplace.

Now demoing buying apps AND music from a browser on a pc and pushing both directly over the air to the android device! And now showing moving all music from iTunes streaming to the android device.

Adsense for mobile ads – contextually relevant ads on android – banner ads and expandable ads within an app, including rich media in the expanded ad. Also click to call ad, uses location and allows user to directly call for a special offer.

Wow – they are going to give a htc evo 4g phone to everyone here! What am I going to do with all these phones?

Announcing google TV today! full search of tv programs and seamless transition between tv and web. Includes picture in picture to allow live tx viewing while browsing at the same time. Can bookmark tv channels like web pages. “less time finding, more time watching”. can use android phone as input device to control tv, including speach recognition and pushing a video selection from phone to the TV. Built on Android, includes Chrome browser incl Flash. So will be able to run Android apps on TV and can push apps from web app store to the TV. can choose to build apps on android platform or the web app platform using Chrome.

Google has clearly painted a bullseye squarely on Apple.

Whole Google TV platform will be open source next summer, and will be available in Sony integrated TV and via Logitech accessory box thru best buy this fall.

Eric Schmidt now on stage, with the CEO of intel, Sony, Logitech, dish network, best buy, and adobe. Wow. I think only Google could pull this off.

Google VP of Prod Mgmt – HTML 5 is all about giving desktop app power to web apps – access to all local hardware. Demo of MugTug Darkroom using local storage while disconnected from Internet to edit phtoto, very impressive.

Invested $120M in buying On2 to offer an open video format. Believe this is best format for streaming as well. Google just announced they are totally open sourcing VP8 format. YouTube will be supporting. Mozilla Firefox on stage now announcing support. I think it is really great that Google has the Firefox on stage. CEO of Opera now on stage too from Norway. Tag is video 🙂

Adobe now on stage, showing dreamweaver support for html5, and previewing simultaneously for mobile, tablet, and desktop browsers. Announcing flash will play VP8 video. Hinted at a device announcement with google and flash tomorrow! My guess is a ipad competitor, ala the gpad I predicted early this year.

Demoing now the Chrome Webstore. Can add apps to your new tab page in chrome. Can buy apps for browser like iPhone apps. Demoed a star wars Lego game running in a browser based on a gaming platform that allows porting of complex games to HTML5.

Sports Illustrated Editor showing HTML5 prototype of SI. Rearrange your magazine, video and more. Very impressive preview of the future of publishing! The advertising in the magazine is very compelling and immersive.

Chrome being used by 70M users. Google Wave update: wave now open to everyone – making it part of google apps. Any apps domain can now enable Wave! Salesforce is embedding waves into Chatter. Open sourcing their in browser editor today.

Building web apps for work: announcing Google and VMWare:
Cloud Portability based on Spring framework. Bringing together Spring and GWT as an integrated backend and frontend. Power of HTML5 integrated with powerful backend of spring. Very nice demo of a bunch of auto generated spring persistence plus GWT front end generated from the java persistence classes. Eclipse plugin offered of course. Also demoed complete performance tuning with Spring Insight and SpeedTracer. Also demoing GWT 2.1 data presentation widgets working with 20million rows of data across 3 or so tables. Paging thru 5 million records is very fast, and sorting fast as well. Built very quickly an expense report application as a demo.

Mobile ready apps: gwt widgets just demoed also work on mobile apps. Very cool! Demoed on both ipad and android.

Cloud Portability: deploy same app to Google, VMWare vCloud, and VSphere. I wonder if this will work with VMForce?

Just announcing now Appengine for Business – see and manage all apps in your domain, support, SLA, SSL and SQL (bigtable or a standard SQL db). Simple pricing, $8 per user per app per month, max $1000 per month.

Sitting here on a bean bag with the laptop waiting for the keynote and I have to say this is the most excited I’ve been to attend a conference since the old days of COMDEX.   There are so many interesting sessions on Google’s Android movbile platform, cloud computing with appengine, HTML5, and more.  This is a great view of all the leading edge technologies that will be common place in a year.

I’ve activated my Andriod phone Google generously sent me ahead of the conference. It auto assigned a number, so now I have a California mobile number.  Oh well, its free for 30days.  I have to say the browser borders on sucking compared to the iPhone.  I’m forever hitting the wrong key, and my first task for it utterly failed – setting my out of office in Outlook webmail.  The Google browser on the Android phone couldn’t pick a radio button in the outlook web interface to set my out of office.  Switched over to my iphone, no problem.  The email client on the android phone is not nearly as easy to use either, and I make many more typing mistakes with the full keyboard than I do with the iphone on screen keyboard.

This is going to be an awesome 2 days, already I’ve picked out sessions on:

• Open social web
• Google cloud
• Developing with HTML5
• Data migration in appenge
• High throughput data pipelines
• Next gen queries
• And more

One more thing – on the Android phone, you unlock it buy drawing a pattern on the screen.  Cool huh?  But, then the outline of your finger motion is on the screen, so pretty much anyone could see your “password”.  The actual Google phone is probably better than the motorola version I have.  The Google I/O Android App is awesome though – full conference shcedule, maps, build your own agenda, etc.

More to come!