Post Google I/O 2013 Rundown

The three biggest conferences of the year are happening this summer and they are all happening in the same place: Google I/O, Microsoft BUILD and Apple WWDC are all taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and Telerik will have been at all three!

Myself, Brandon Satrom and Todd Anglin, had the pleasure of attending Google I/O for the second year in a row. If you were trying to get tickets and you came up short, don't feel bad. Before we got an invite from Google, we tried to buy tickets as well with no success.

Fortunately for me, Google invited Kendo UI back for a second year to the Google I/O sandbox. The sandbox is a designated spot right in the middle of the main floor at I/O where Google invites certain companies to come in and demonstrate the neat things that they are doing. Kendo UI was present last year for 1 day in the sandbox and this year, we were invited for two full days which was quite exciting. We shared the sandbox with The Financial Times, JetBrains, LEAP Motion, AngularJS, Adobe and many others. You can see a full list of sandbox exhibitors from this year on the I/O site.

The Conference

Google I/O kicked off with a keynote on day 1. There were over 5 thousand attendees from all over the world. Last year they did 2 keynotes over two days, but this year there was a 3 hour keynote on the first day alone.

I summed up much of what was in the keynote in my previous post from Google I/O. There was a lot of interesting information about Android, Chrome and Google Maps. Among the announcements was a new IDE for native Android Development, a completely revamped Google Maps (sign up for the preview here), and a completely new Google Voice Search (which has landed in Chrome stable).

The keynote ended with a very informal Q/A with Google CEO and founder, Larry Paige. There were many questions about Google Glass (as you can imagine), but strangely not much of any answers on Glass. Additionally, none of the presenters during the keynote were wearing Glass. There was a Glass booth though and many of the attendees had donned the new wearable computing device.

The video on the front page of the I/O 2013 site sums it all up far better than I ever could.

The Sessions

There were sessions for three straight days covering virtually any and all areas of Google's products and technologies. From Android to Angular and Web Components to Chrome Packaged Apps, it was all there. In fact, you can watch any of the sessions for free on the I/O site. Some of my personal favorites were..

• Jank Free - Chrome Rendering Performance
• Web Components - A Tectonic Shift For Web Development
• Design Decisions In AngularJS
• Chrome Packaged Apps State Of Nation

Kendo UI made appearances in two of the sessions, including the Chrome Packaged Apps State Of The Nation (where the Camera App was featured), and Design Decisions In AngularJS. Thanks to the hard work of Pierre Asselin and Omkar Patil, Kendo UI works quite nicely with AngularJS. We are launching V .5 of the AngularJS integrations at the end of this quarter, so keep an eye out for that announcement.

The Sandbox

It was fascinating to see how prolific Kendo UI has become in the past year. Last year, we had just launched Kendo UI and had 1 Q release. Needless to say, Kendo UI was new to pretty much everyone. This year, virtually everyone had heard of Kendo UI. On top of that, we talked to quite a few people who were actively building with Kendo UI on all different types of platforms, including Rails, PHP, Node and Java.

We talked to many developers over the course of two days. It felt like we talked to virtually everyone at the conference. The Google I/O sandbox has extremely heavy traffic from 9 AM until ?. Officially it closes at 6 PM, but you find yourself there long after talking shop with developers.

This year we also tried to really let people know we were in town by having some mobile billboards outside of the Moscone center. There were three of these that were constantly on the move throughout the day during the conference.

Exciting Projects

One of the most exciting things is getting to hear about what other developers are working on. There were some really exciting projects, including Runnable - a platform similar to JSBin and JSFiddle, but allowing you to actually run server code that you write in the browser. Another one is SoundWave. This is a project that aggregates all of your listening activity across platforms like iTunes, Rdio, Pandora, SoundCloud and more so that you can share all of your online musical adventures with others.

Post I/O

We're all back now and gearing up for our fast approaching Q2 release. We have a LOT of great stuff to coming in this next keynote as we always do. The team has been very hard at work on some really fascinating projects that we just can't wait to share with you.