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>> I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News.com and my guest today is Stephen Shankland, Senior writer at News.com and he follows the Google and open source beat. Thanks for joining us Stephen.
>> Thank you.
>> Tomorrow we've got the Google IO Conference beginning here in San Francisco. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the promise of the show?
>> Well, the Google IO show is their first -- IO show is their first developer-focused show. They've had a couple of developer days in the past, but this is the real first serious one, it stands for Innovate in the Open and Google does a lot of stuff with the open interfaces, open source software and so they're gonna try to bring a lot of those initiatives together under one conference.
>> Are we expecting any type of big news to come out of this conference?
>> I suspect, there're gonna be lots of little things and a few highlights. Probably, one of the highlights is gonna be the second SDK Software Developer Kit for Android.
>> Wow.
>> That's their open source mobile phone software. They're trying to build a huge ecosystem of programmers building software for these mobile phones that they're gonna try to start selling later this year-- well, other companies will sell. So they're probably gonna release the second software developer kit that presumably will make for better applications when people are writing software for these phones.
>> How far along are the developers right now. I mean, what have you heard, what's been developed, like our -- is Google happy with what's going on?
>> Oh, Google was very happy with what's going on, but it's told very [inaudible] phase. We don't even have any phones yet. So people are still mostly writing on a software foundation, so it looks like -- it's emulated at this stage, but they wanna get as many people in the pipeline as possible. They had a big contest of close to 2,000 people joined that they have 50 finalists. I suspect we'll probably be hearing who the winner of that contest is at the show as well.
>> Google app engines, is that gonna be making some headlines?
>> Yeah, Google has a philosophy. Obviously, they're a big Internet company. They want applications that run on the Internet to be better. So they're gonna be working on improving the infrastructure that works on people's Web servers that host applications. And they're gonna be working on the infrastructures that runs on people's browsers, so app engine is this environment where you can run Web applications at Google and a pretty sophisticated Web applications. So I suspect we'll be hearing more about app engine there. And then at the other end of the network pipe, they're working a lot on the browser. There's a project called Google Gears, that's been out for a little while now. It tries to improve what you can do with the browser for example, working, when you're not connected to the network, then when you connect again, it will synchronize what you've been working on. I think we'll be hearing some about Google Gears too, so again, to be working on the server end of the Internet and the browser end of the Internet.
>> And what's the format of this conference, are we talking about like breakout sessions or you're just gonna be learning from different Google engineers at various points of the day?
>> Yes. Google engineers and engineers from other companies as well, so there's gonna be an opening keynote by a guy named Vic Guntodra who actually came from Microsoft last year and then it's gonna be a free-for-all sessions on all kinds of, you know developer issues for people writing a code on the Web and people dealing with browsers, the whole suite of Web 2.0 technologies.
>> Well, since this is the first conference, we'll be checking in to see what kind of news emerges.
>> Yeah, I'm sure it's gonna be a busy show. It's gonna be a blog frenzy.
>> All right, we'll check in with you. Stephen Shankland thanks for joining us. I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News.com and we will see you next time.
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