Photo gallery: The Google I/O party
Curious about the lavish (at least by trade show standards) party Google threw for the 3,000 attendees at the Google I/O conference? See some of what went on.
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
OK, all you coders toiling in obscurity, are you wondering how the other half lives--the programmers who live the glam rich Internet application lifestyle, ditching Win32 and C++ for Web-based APIs and Python?
A few hundred of them were to be found at the party this week at the Google I/O conference, and I couldn't resist taking some photos. I've been to a lot of trade show parties, and although this wasn't over the top, it was certainly more lavish than the usual rubber-chicken-and-Heineken affair.
For the event, Google packed Moscone West's third-floor auditorium with games and food--I overcame my fears of Moscone-induced illness and found the sushi tasty--but the real draw clearly was a concert by the witty New Zealand duo, the Flight of the Conchords.
As usual, the concert was better if you already knew the words. I hesitate to acknowledge that I first encountered the band on YouTube (which had better audio than Moscone) but failed to notify the authorities of the possibility of copyright infringement.
About 3,000 people attended the show, said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering in charge of developer evangelism and open-source software. Gundotra seemed to be having a good time at the party--at least until he heard about the binary encoding typo that meant the conference T-shirts read "Google KO" rather than "Google IO."
The conference was alive and kicking. Many sessions were packed to overflowing. It's not clear if the draw was Google's clout or the hunger for information about building rich Web applications, but interest there was.
For those who couldn't be attend, Google plans to post videos of the sessions on the Google I/O Web site in the next week or two.
Among the presentations I joined, I found the most interesting to be Jeff Dean's on the inner workings of Google's data centers; Marissa Mayer's on Google search, and the several talks on Google Gears software to augment browser abilities.
Forthwith, some pictures.
