Google I/O – Wednesday May 19 – Mark Scheel of Digital Construction

This is an overview of events on Day 1 of Google I/O 2010.  I will be updating this post throughout the day with pictures and news.

Evening update

What an incredible day.  Google is crazy about HTML 5, what bums me out a bit is that their most awesome demo’s probably only work in Chrome.  We have a video war going on, Google is pushing VP8 (with some sound it is webM) as their newly open sourced darling.  Apple and Microsoft already use H264.  I feel like this is a big fight, that I am just starting to understand.

After the event today they had an after party.  Great food, all you could drink, and basically a bar mitzpah (sp?) with a 2 million dollar budget.  I rode a crazy carnival bike thing, saw people drive mechanical spiders, played video games, did puzzles, ate Google cupcakes, played with $400,000 robots, sat in a Tesla, blah, blah.  You get the idea.  Man can these guys throw a party.  Or at least set up nerdvana for a couple of hours.

Tomorrow morning is an early keynote, there will be a Flash announcement and a Google TV announcement for sure.  Will there be a gPad?  Anything else?

Thank you Google, I am having a blast.  I wish I had been more interesting when I talked to  Mr. Brin.  Next time …

Afternoon update 3 – Where I meet someone very rich and fond of celery

The guy on the right is a VP who gave most of the morning keynote.  The guy on the left?  Can you guess?

Moments before I said hi, shook his hand and he grabbed some celery snacks.

Very excited to meet Sergey Brin, what a great guy.

I am in another session now, this speaker is from Israel, I can’t imagine what it cost to fly these speakers in, I have had Googlers from Russia, Spain and somewhere Nordic too.

The surprise guests in the last talk were the founder of TweetDeck and the team from thumbplay.

Afternoon update 2

Have stumbled upon the most crowded presentation yet, and they just started with a promise of surprise guests.  There seems to be more journalists here.   “Developing with HTML5” is the generic name of the session.

These guys presenting are major geeks, I love it!

Here are some bonus pictures:

Afternoon Post

Pictures below show the scene.   Interesting that mirroring comments made yesterday in England by Google leadership MSFT is the enemy, not AAPl.  There was an iPad used in the keynote demo, etc.

This is an immersive 3d Google Earth experience with 8 quad core computer powered plasmas and a 3d joystick.  It is amazing.

The snacks are ridiculous.  Serve yourself candy stations, beverages, lunch was Thai or Creole.  It doesn’t suck, especially given the high quality of the presentations (more on that later).

Gotta show some Apple love for Greg.  Walking to Moscone this morning.

Morning Post

Here is a picture log of my activity thus far, the events that led up to today:

YouTube turned five recently so I decided to check out its birthplace at Stanford in Palo Alto, south of San francisco.  This is the William Gates Computer Science building just down the street from the Paul G. Allen building.

Surely one of these Computer Science PhD’s will make next year’s technology news.  The question is, which one?

Next I went to Redwood City.  This is the bar where the infamous iPhone 4g was lost, by an Apple engineer celebrating his birthday.  It seemed like a great place to drink German beer and make some mistakes.

Unfortunately, it was closed.

Then it was off to the Moscone center in San Francisco, where Google I/O takes place.  A huge Google Maps icon marked the entrance.

I got a nice t-shirt, a Droid phone,  and a badge.  Very well organized.  5000 people will be here Wednesday so I am glad they have things running smoothly.

Here is one of the pictures that is brought up by the t-shirt QR codes:

In case you are unaware, that is Android, the mascot for the Android phone operating system.

More to come …