Gadgetory

welcome to top shelf my name is David Pierce and we're here in sunny windy San Francisco for google i/o it's Google's annual developer conference where people who work for Google people who make Google Apps and people who love Google get together and hang out it's Google's biggest event every year and it's where they announce all sorts of new products this year it started Wednesday morning with what was kind of an insane keynote it was more than 6,000 people and it took more than three and a half hours Google i/o keynote covered seemingly everything the company is even slightly involved in from big splashy products to the midea stand grittiest in his api's it started with a lot of developer love google offered new ways to build optimize and sell your apps there's multiplayer gaming notification sync cloud messaging and a whole lot more there's even a Play Store specifically for education those got big cheers from developers but they're not really part of Google's products yet then came the new products from every corner of Google there was no new version of Android or new Android hardware other than a surprise showing of a samsung galaxy s4 with stock Android but we did get a new Google Music app along with the new google music all access it's like Spotify plus your own music collection in the cloud and we really like it so far there's also hangouts Google's attempt to unify messaging across all your devices through google plus there's an app for iOS and Android plus desktop messaging that lets you chat and video call from any device we're liking that a lot too hangouts is part of a bigger change for Google Plus which reorients the service really around your photos you upload your photos to Google+ a huge resolutions and Google servers analyze them to organize them and even make them better betters may be a debatable term here though Google's best demo of the day may have just been searched you can now talk to your computer about where you should eat dinner or how old Patrick Stewart is your computer will even guess what you mean by what time is my flight and it'll show it all to on Google's redesign maps which adds some predictive functionality while stripping away all of the chrome and interface the map as they said is the UI it was a lot even for three and a half hours and even excluding the time Larry Page told us all to go to Burning Man that's not all there was a tie oh and so we sent Casey Newton to find out the rest of it when most people think of Google i/o they think of the keynote presentation and all the big announcements that get made there there's also a whole show floor it's full of Googlers who are showing off google stuff and third-party developers who are using google products and services to make cool things of their own one of the things that's cool about IO is that Google brings out some of the gear that they generally keep under wraps here on the show floor we've seen the street view trike the street view trolley and even the street view snowmobile all things that Google uses to make maps this is the leap motion controller paired with the new google map I'm feeling very much like a supervillain right now the scrolling is really smooth it's very responsive you have to move much less than you might think in order to zoom in and zoom out so I'm actually I've been zooming maybe a little bit more than i would want but i imagine that with practice you get much better at kind of controlling the environment one of my favorite things here google employees hacked together for blimps using raspberry pi socket i/o servo a logitech webcam and now the blimp is going all over the show floor it's taking pictures and it's live streaming video Google even built a special web app so that they can go in take pictures live in real time one of the big takeaways from yesterday's keynote is that Google is trying to build the computer from Star Trek that can answer any question so we're in here playing with a special preview build up some new search features that they're working on the Wi-Fi is really crowded in here but we're gonna see what it can do ok Google how old is Patrick Stewart Patrick Stewart is 72 years old ok Google show me things to do in San Jose you are popular attractions in San Jose ok Google will you marry me marriage is a huge decision these results from the web might help I'm playing map diving this is a chrome experiment built by the nice folks over at instruments they've created a chain of seven computers at each one attached to a different display and they're rendering a game using live tiles from google maps and I'm controlling it terribly with my arms right now this whole thing is running in the browser using a 3d depth sensor to control the movement it looks gorgeous and I wish I were better at it alright three out of 51 stars not bad so obviously there's a lot going on here but the big question Google hasn't really answered is how it all works together so heat dies down with the guy who knows it's Bradley Horowitz the vp of product for google plus we have questions so what I want to know that is really the the two big pillars of what happened with Google+ this week were messaging and photos why why those two things well I think there's an opportunity to do something really significant and special in both those categories for messaging is you heard Vic say there's been lots of point solutions over 50 years right and the landscape is there such that we all have devices we carry around whether that's phones in our pocket or maybe glass eventually but there's an opportunity now that you could literally reach another human on the planet with very little impediment but we've gotten in our own way protocols operating systems you know media types photos video it just doesn't work right there's little pockets of success and you've seen some of these that have just nailed a single use case have taken off dramatically it recently apps like exact yeah like there's incredible viral potential for things that actually execute on this and do well but there's no product that works across media types that's good for everything from text to photos to video to emoji people love emoji people of emoji we've got 850 in hangouts I mean anything you can think of and then some we have an opportunity to distribute this widely between you know things like android and chrome and gmail we can actually put this in the pocket or in the hand of every user on the planet and so we saw an opportunity with messaging to really get this right we've seen tremendous uptake and love for hangouts it's sort of the breakout success of Google+ we we saw that we could take what was special about that really connecting people and make it ubiquitous to give it to everybody and give it for free that's another important part of this if you're really going to be successful you literally have to give it to people so it is the advantage there just the scale that you have these said you're able to bring it to everyone on the planet is that just because you just by nature of being Google you have this reach that none of these other apps I think that that's not necessarily new like we've always had an opportunity to help users get our products but what we haven't had was the product that delivered on this promise of across media types one-to-one one-to-many cross operating systems now we have that product we've got something worth sharing with the world and that's really exciting and so all of these features are designed to in some way keep me in Plus which is you know obvious that's sort of your goal um but so how does Google Plus is also it seems like it's two different things it's the spine as you've called it of all of the other Google products and it's also its own thing so where does with all this new stuff how does Google Plus sort of continue to influence the rest of Google's products well one of the things I loved about the epic three and a half plus our keynote was sitting at there's a good word for it and sort of counting the number of times that the other non google plus parts of the the keynote mentioned Google+ and Google Plus identity if you look at how tightly it's woven into the Android story you know that's one example music you know everywhere you can see Google+ as the foundational layer that the company is betting on to understand people their relationships their interests and serve them better so what about things like on one of the things we like about services like spotify and rdio is is that they have this social layer where i can say you know here's what my friends are listening to and here's playlist my friends may that i might want to listen to do you imagine google+ being the backbone of something like that as well even for you know music and there's lots of other opportunities for what Google is trying to do with offense and all yeah sorts of stuff like my friends gonna be a bigger part of my experience absolutely absolutely and that is our stated intention with Google+ is that every product that Google can be better by by dint of you using your own data in your own service and so whether it's ride-sharing for maps you're the ability to see your friends on a map and you know there's been lots of again lots of point solutions that have sort of taken off in as various domains but we really feel we have an opportunity to get this right and return a tremendous amount of value to users and music is a great example media in general is something that is very social in nature and there's huge value to be had there and so I have to ask we've had one sort of issue as we've used hangouts and I'm curious about this so we have everyone at the verge has you at least two gmail accounts and often many and we know that's a fairly common problem among people so there's now this sort of odd identity issue within Google+ where it's like how do you find me and you know if I search for Billy's on the camera over here I got i get like six different answers so how do you how do you sort of manage people's identity on google glum we're not doing this well and we feel it acutely at Google all of us has to at least two accounts right we have our personal gmail we have our Google corporate account and we need to do a better job I mean that's the short answer is it's not you it's us and we're working on it actively we feel your pain turns out to be a relatively complicated and subtle problem anytime you're dealing with issues of identity and authentication and accounts and account ownership in some cases a organizing entity the account and it gets very complicated not as simple as just meshing to the simplest gnashing things together we'd have done it you know a long time ago if it were that simple it actually turns out to be pretty subtle and nuanced but rest assured we're working on it and again I think it is a pain point we feel acutely and we're working on it as hard and fast as we can and so I guess what about Google+ as opposed to something like Twitter or Facebook where people use these they have huge numbers of users and you offer all on hand something different but on the other hand something sort of competitive with both of those how do you do see those as playing together or are you competing tangentially in a way that they can all work together like how do you are you competing with that's google i think the real opportunities are not about competitors Larry had a great line yesterday I think paraphrasing he said something like we need to build products that don't yet exist I think that's what we're doing with something like hangouts there is no product that does all that hangouts does there's point solutions that do this or that something like photos the opportunity to take advantage of the Google scale infrastructure to do something great for people is something that does not exist and is a relatively valuable feature that's hard to replicate so we're focused on bringing these things that are not me to features that clone existing products or other networks those networks may be great and they may have use cases that carry on but that's not where our focus is and it's not the kinds of things we shipped yesterday and will continue you're looking at the the bigger picture and sort of how everything plays together we really are you listen to Larry talk and I really recommend if you've only got you know 20 minutes to digest the keynote spend them all on Larry's comments at the end our products you'll see in the market and you'll get to know them that way but it's worth you know listening to Larry he's got a vision for what we can do with Google that will change the world change people's lives improve people's lives and it's a powerful vision it's a long-term vision you know it's not about a quick fix it's about what can we do that's really providing lasting durable value to people that really gives them and improve quality of life and so that's the way he thinks about it that's the way we think about it it's really much less about competition it's about these products that don't yet exist and haven't even been imagined that's where the real opportunity is Bradley thank you so much my pleasure appreciate thank you that's it for our show thanks so much for watching thanks to Casey Newton and Bradley Horowitz for being here we'll be back next week from Seattle where we're taking a look at what Microsoft has cookin with the next Xbox see you then