Google I/O: On the care and feeding of geeks

Google I/O can be seen metaphorically as a part of Google’s ongoing attempt to “feed” the Web and its developers. But sometimes developers need more than mental nourishment. Google has taken care of that too.

As with any such conference, there is the usual breakfast and lunch buffet, though with careful emphasis on access to vegetarian fare, recycling of waste, and biodegradable or even compostable plates and utensils. Like a good tech pit, there are coolers full of soda and other drinks, and goodies for snacks (yesterday, it was soft pretzels). But the afterhours party is where the cuisine really shone, with a wide variety of ethnic fare, about fifteen makeshift bars, and chocolate fondue fountains.

The party is where Google ready showed its understanding of its audience, and its commitment to making this an experience attendees would talk about afterwards. Recognizing that geeks don’t dance, Google deemphasized the DJ in favor of a nerdcore act that I didn’t recognize, but was clearly well-known to much of the crowd. Recognizing that geeks prefer emergent conversation coming out of activites instead of cocktail banter, Google filled the hall with pool tables, air hockey, and foosball. And knowing that geeks love video games, they set up multiple Wiis and banks of car and motorcycle racing arcade machines.

It worked.

Google I/O, morning report

I think most of us are used to a pretty dreary keynote experience at conferences.  The leading keynote - an opportunity to make the thesis statement for the conference - usually disappoints, offering an opportunity for industry leaders to issue platitudes and to state, and restate, the obvious.  Instead, Google took advantage of their keynote not only to give good demos of all the key products being explored at Google I/O, but also to make a number of exciting announcements about those products, from the addition of Java 5 support to Google WebKit, to AOLs announcement of adoption of OpenSocial within its products, to the complete opening up of Google App Engine to immediate use by any and all developers.  For once, I - and I could tell I was not the only one, walking through the hall - came away from a keynote energized, full of ideas.

One idea that keeps floating around in my head is the similarity of what Google is trying to accomplish in reaching out in myriad ways to the developer to our own goals at VoodooVox in doing the same.  Coming into this conference, one thing I hoped to do was to learn some lessons about developer outreach from Google, which largely does a very good job of the task.  You’ll hear Google executives talk often about how it is strategically worthwhile for Google to invest in the improvement of the Web, and that this is why, among other things, they put a lot of internal resources toward developing code and apps that they give away to the community for free.  Today, listening particularly to the Google App Engine product lead, this motive came into sharp focus, because it aligned so precisely to what we are trying to accomplish with MyVox.  Google wants to reduce or eliminate the barriers that keep developers from realizing their app deployment dreams - things like database handling, hardware deployment, scaling, maintenance, and so on.  APIs like the Maps API or the new image manipulation APIs then let developers add functionality without having to learn the ins and outs of these particular subjects.  Our goals with MyVox are the same:  let developers do things with voice without having to deal with deployment and learning details.  With MyVox, you can “do voice” without having to figure out how to do telephony-related programming, deploy hardware, figure out how to get phone numbers and connect them to your app, or pay for your connectivity.  The new functionality we keep launching corresponds well to the new API functions Google continues to put out there as well.

The comparison is rough, and we are, of course, in a very, very different position as a company from Google - so much so that any comparison is almost laughable.  We deal in a very different medium, one which is simultaneously much older (people have been making phone calls for a very long time, and working with voice apps for a while too) and much newer (the rise of Web-phone apps is quite new, and still in an embryonic state), necessitating perhaps a different response.  Still, it’s extremely interesting to see what an industry leader with huge resources does when it wants to push its particular medium forward.  I hope and believe there will be lessons for us to learn in the telco world from how they approach the development of the Web.

Meet us at Google I/O!

Are you attending Google I/O?  Then please look for us there!  I (Nick Branstator) will be attending, and may be bringing other folks as well.  So if you are interested in sitting down and talking about the brand new world of voice, phones, and how all this can be used in applications, please track me down.

In-Call Media Summit

Last week, VoodooVox worked with Jones Media and SoftBank to produce the first In-Call Media Summit.  The subject was the ever-expanding topic of in-call media: content, offers, applications, advertising, and so on, as applied to the world of telephony.  As the world of advertisers, content providers, and application builders draws closer together, we felt it was time for all the participants to begin the discussion about what we are doing, why we’re doing it, and how it can be done better.  You can see more in the press release.

By all accounts, it was a riproaring success.  I judge this based not only on positive comments, but on the amount of business that got done during and after the conference - and by the large percentage of people who stuck around after the conference itself to .  Or maybe they were just enjoying the view from our offices (which still blow me away)…

Photos here.

The Challenge Winners

The Developer Challenger winners have been selected. You can see them all here: http://www2.myvox.com/developers/getstarted_d.asp?ID=36

What really impresses me is the breadth of the ways developers have made use of MyVox.  You’ve got applications in each of these industries:

• Education
• Social networking
• Music
• Journalism
• General consumer

It’s not just that we hadn’t ourselves thought of these apps… but that we didn’t even previously recognize the value of voice to whole verticals.  And for most of the apps, voice is not simply a sidelight, but an integral part of the product (and, in the case of Learnit Lists, of the process by which the community content which drives the application is created).

Many of our participants are also in the process of seeking out their first rounds of VC funding.  We wish them the best in this effort, and hope their prizes not only help fund their development, but also attract that little extra attention from the VC community.

Voice is the new mobile app

One of our partners – an interactive agency – told us the other day that, in the search for exciting new mobile applications, they’ve concluded that voice is the real killer app. They like that everybody can use the voice channel, and all you need is a phone number to get somebody interacting. These are critical characteristics for a promotion; you can throw a phone number up on any surface, from a Web page to a billboard, which is a helluva lot more than you can say about downloadable applications. Even text messaging campaigns with short codes rely on educating consumers that what they are looking at is an address to be entered into the phone, and only work for demographics (read: teens) where texting is commonplace.

What was even more exciting is that the advertiser this agency is working with completely understood and agreed with the agency’s conclusions. Mobile spending is important to them, but they recognize that mobile can and should often mean voice, that voice is the most accessible channel for the vast majority of users, and that it’s time for agencies to start bringing voice-channel mobile promotions to the table.

It’s always a happy thing when you get ready to preach your gospel… and find that your audience is already preaching it back to you, before you even get there. Mobile marketing agencies need to get ready for the idea that mobile is not just SMS, WAP pages, or downloadable apps – it’s equally, if not more so, about voice applications.

The Developer Challenge, and Flash audio players

Apologies for the long time since posting… I guess travel and jury duty will do that.

Two things: The Developer Challenge entries have closed, and I think we have a very exciting batch of participants. They really show off the wide range of ways in which MyVox can be applied to solve problems and create new products. Now we have the hard problem of picking winners. Once that’s done, you’ll learn more about all the participating applications.

Secondly, it’s very common for MyVox apps to need a way to play back their audio after it’s created. While that’s technically not our business, we like to help our developers out with any reoccurring situations, and this definitely qualifies. To that end, we’ve put together a set of MyVox-branded audio player widgets, and have also put our stamp of approval on some freeware widgets that we think work well. Ours are here:

http://api.myvox.com/tools/players.jsp

And the freeware ones are here:

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

They are pretty easy to use, but if you’d like more information, check out the MyVox Reference Library, where permanent docs explaining the use of the Flash players will show up momentarily.