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.