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>> Hey there I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News.com, joined by Stephen Shankland, Senior writer, CNET News and we are here on bouncy balls at the Google IO Conference. And we check-in with Stephen before he went to this conference here in San Francisco. We're now halfway through the second day and Stephen, what do you think? How's the event so far?
>> Well, it's been very interesting. I think this is the first official Google IO Conference they've had. They've had some other developer days, but this is the first official Google IO Conference.
>> And the biggest.
>> And it's the biggest. They have more than 3,000 people here and it's packed to the gills. Clearly, I'm not sure if everybody knows exactly what they want to get out of this conference, but it's clear a lot of people want to be here. So, it's very alive and kicking kind of a conference.
>> And we are expecting some announcements, maybe having to do with Android.
>> Well, we haven't heard anything yet about Android SDK too.
>> Okay.
>> That's a software developer kit.
>> Right.
>> Still holding out a little hope there might be some -- I know they're working on it.
>> I figure around finale.
>> Right. But they did demonstrate Android yesterday during the keynote speech and that was very interesting. We saw a lot of features that we haven't seen before. They showed it with the touch screen, so you could flick from one page to another up and down. You could double click to zoom. There's an interesting new feature that will let you get all your notifications. So, calendar items, missed calls, email that you've -- you know, new email, so there's some new features there. The one that I think caught the most attention from the audience was integration with a camera, a compass and accelerometer with Street View. So you could hold the camera -- you could hold the phone as you moved around you get a different view of Street View.
>> Wow.
>> So the Street View would pan according to which way you are pointing. That was pretty interesting I thought and so. But most of this conference is really, instead of being at the product level where most people deal with Google, this is one level down. At the infrastructure level where the developers care, so most of this isn't product news per se.
>> Right. It's all the knots and bolts behind the scene.
>> Exactly.
>> And in most of the people we see behind us are all developers here.
>> Right.
>> To tap into the Google franchise.
>> It's a lot of coders, the people who care about API's, the people who care about standards and things like that.
>> What other breakout sessions have you been to that has been really, wow, bang, amazing, this is cool.
>> Well, it's been interesting. There has been a lot of development with Gears, you know, this is technology that Google released a year ago and they're still working on updating. What it does is it gives your Web browsers some new abilities. The most obvious one that most people noticed was the ability to use Web applications when you're offline, when you're not connected to a network.
>> Right.
>> So...
>> It's cool.
>> That's been work that's underway. That's not folding in to the HTML 5 standards, so that's work that kind of began at Google and now that's making its way out. So probably everybody will be able to deal with it. One of the interesting issues though with Gears especially since it continues to be a work in progress, they're working on new features and new abilities is whether we're gonna see more fragmentation again. It's kind of a repeat of some of the browser war problems we had in the 90's where if you're writing a Website, can you write just to some standard or do you have to deal with Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer...
>> Safari.
>> Safari and then, do you have to deal with those versions of those browsers with Gears or without Gears. Complicating this, yesterday Yahoo announced a similar project called Browser Plus that adds some extra new abilities to a browser if you install it. So we're looking at a world where Web applications potentially are getting a lot more powerful, a lot richer, but also maybe the Web platform is getting a lot more fragmented again.
>> So, possibly a step back before we can really see whether this is gonna go forward.
>> Exactly.
>> Yeah.
>> But I think -- I don't think anybody wants the Web to stay fixed at what it is right now. I think there's a lot of interest in making those Web applications more powerful, so...
>> That's right.
>> It's not like there's a lot of resistance in this direction. It's a question of the practical details of how you make it happen.
>> And of course this being a Google party, we've got our bouncy seats. We've got our pool, our fuss ball...
>> The free junk food stand.
>> Free food, free junk food. Yeah, so all in all, do you think two-day inaugural event?
>> Yeah, I would say.
>> Okay. Very cool. Well, thanks for joining us.
>> Thank you.
>> Enjoy the rest of it. I'm Kara Tsuboi here with Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com. See you next time.
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