Google IO 2011 Day Two recap

Oh the perils of making predictions when there is still a conference keynote to go!

It turns out that Chrome OS and the associated hardware hasn't been read the last rites after all. Rather, v1.0 is almost ready for primetime (scheduled for release in mid-June - about a month away). You have to imagine over time though that Google will want one code base for phones, tablets and chromebooks. At the very least, they will want to make it as easy as possible for developers to write their applications once and have them "just work" on devices with radically different screen sizes and input methods, something that Android developers today are already doing. Nonetheless, a very brave play, especially in targeting the enteprise space, where significant replacement costs exist. If it pays off, it will be huge.

Moving on from Chrome, a couple of sessions I attended yesterday were really interesting, specifically two - Full Text Search and Smart App Design.

Full Text Search is Google's take on Lucene / Solr and integrated into the App Engine Datastore as well, so it will be compelling for developers who just want to start indexing and scoring documents quickly. The "fully automatic" mode of operation with the Datastore should also be a timesaver.

Smart App Design covered material of a completely different color. I had already read about the Prediction API in the blogosphere but I hadn't realised exactly what it did until this session. Essentially, Google offers the discerning developer the ability to add machine learning techniques to their application by leveraging a cloud-based service.

At first glance, I had thought that the API gave access to the same model that Google uses to predict search terms, and I guess that is one use case. But Google has done much more than that - they have effectively white-labelled their machine learning technology and made it available to non-Google developers to use with their own data, i.e. learn what's important for their application / business.

As with all machine-learning techniques, the nub of the matter remains the correct selection and efficient representation of the key attributes in the training set, and that is quite simply a problem that requires deep domain knowledge. One announcement yesterday was quite interesting however, in that Google are now allowing good model authors to sell their models to others. So if I come up with a model that predicts shopping basket behavior on leisure travel websites and a tour operator used that to bump their online conversion rate by 33%, then that model has a lot of value and it's a win-win situation for the model author and the model user.

So an API with a lot of promise. But also with two potential flies in the ointment, one commercial and one cultural:

(a) Commercial - Google are trying to charge for use of the API from day one, this will stymie adoption in the earliest stage

(b) Cultural - an endemic problem with a lot of machine learning techniques is their black box nature. As someone who spent a fair bit of time working with artificial neural networks at university, quite often a machine learning approach will yield the correct answer but the researcher can't exactly explain why! That's not a Google-specific weakness, but what is Google-specific is that the modules you access via the Prediction API (the man behind the curtain if you will) is not made open at all, so can a company really invest time in building, training and using models that they don't really understand and can never hope to do so? Only time will tell.

So to recap then, Google IO was definitely worth attending this year - and not just for the hardware gifts! The main items on my research list post the event are:

1. Google Go running on App Engine

2. The Prediction API

3. Full Text Search enhancements / module for App Engine

4. Adding my own hooks and content into Google Maps and Street View to greatly enhance what the end user sees when they access Maps from my site

5. Fusion tables + Charting - a good / cheap way to rapidly slice and dice data and provide good interactive widgets to visualize same to end users.

Google IO 2011 (#io2011) - day one recap

The official Google code site  has the lowdown on all of the announcements that came thick and fast today (some 11 major items last time I checked and plenty of API revs and upgrades) and I won't replay them all here.

Specific announcements that interested me today:

Google Go is about to become an officially supported language on App Engine, alongside Python and Java (it's currently in "Trusted Tester" mode).

Rhetorical question: what value does a complete end-to-end technology stack with no overhanging IPR issues or blockers have to Google as a potential insurance policy in case the Oracle lawsuit does not go in their favor / be settled reasonably? Two things I heard today convinced me that there is now serious engineering investment going into Go (as opposed to a small, talented team cranking things out as they work down the list):

(a) The afore-mentioned App Engine support (this won't have been trivial to implement - Go is the first compiled language to run on App Engine after all for one thing)

(b) The info that a "comprehensive" Go library for ultimately all of the Google APIs is in development and will be with us "soon".

Go is a very nice language to write in, and the App Engine support announced today addresses one of the major gaps I identified when I took a look at Go when it was first released in Nov 2009.

Three final comments on day one:

1. Press articles I read in March / April this year about the +1 button being a make or break deal for Google to compete with Facebook seem overblown. The +1 button has merited just one session so far and apart from that you wouldn't even know Google had it. Either that or the memo didn't make it to the IO organisers in time.

2. It's instructive to watch Google see the mistake that companies like Sun Microsystems made and impressive to watch how they studiously avoid it. It's not enough to develop great code / software / hardware - you have to have people **using** it. Google's continued push into content ensures that usage. Google is not just the place you go to find content on the web, it's also where you consume that content (first youtube, but now books, movies and music too). I'm glad Google don't have a social network offering in their portfolio of services - they would be simply too powerful if they did.

3. Google IO seems to be **all** about Android so far - it's absolutely everywhere you look and consumed the entire keynote this morning (Ice Cream in Q4 that unifies tablet and phone, Futures (Android @ Home), open accessories etc.). Barring some crazy and unforeseen announcement tomorrow, I'd say Chrome OS has been given the last rites internally. But then again, who knows what day two will bring?