G South Africa
Nov
Posted by: webnow
Google has arrived, again!
I recently attended Google’s G South Africa event at the Bay hotel in Camps Bay.
Google would show us some of their latest products and tools and also announce their plans for the future in Africa. As South Africa is spearheading the technological revolution here in Africa, and since I am a young eager developer boiling to be a part of the revolution of the cradle of man, I could not wait to hear what some of the superstars of Google had to say in its sixth African event in twelve months on the continent.
The theme for the occasion was centred on how Google planned to help bring Africa, quite literally, up to speed when it comes to the internet in Africa. The internet is a key factor in the growth and upliftment of the people of this poverty stricken area. Access to the internet offers the users an almost endless array of resources to educate themselves with, also making communication a reasonably quick and cheap affair. In the keynote address made by Nelson Mattos, Google’s vice president of engineering, he stated that “if you increase internet users by 1%, you increase exports by 4.3%”, an example of the incredible benefits the internet offers to society.
The problem has been that these poorer countries lack the infrastructure to provide fast, cheap and reliable internet to its citizens, leaving the continent in the dark behind the rest of the world. With the emergence of internet capable cell phones however, this picture is starting to change, and its changing fast.
Even though Google doesn’t do evil, they don’t just do things costing tons of money for the fun of it. Getting Africa online is a huge task, that requires massive amounts of time, energy and funding. Google benefits from having a stout internet and makes bigger profits when more people are online, thus their heavy interest in the last digital frontier. Getting internet access to the masses is only half the story and was something that was largely out of the hands of even Google, but now that undersea cables providing oodles of affordable bandwidth and cost effective Smartphone’s have arrived, Google is looking at the other half, relevant content.
After all the introduction stuff and the keynote by Nelson Mattos, the first real session aimed at us started. Search friendly development: Luisella Mazza, Google’s Search Quality Senior Analyst, took us through some points of how Google’s bots crawl the web, what it looks for in sites, what it likes and doesn’t like. My focus area is backend developing, but even though I have never done any kind of SEO research I recognized at least half of what she was saying so, I would think her tips were nothing new to front-end developers and designers. She had a 2 hour break away session after that for those that were very interested in how to get their page ranking up. Sounded very enticing and was tempted to go get some thorough knowledge in this department but next up was a chat about Google maps, which I could not miss.
Chewy Trewhella, who was running around taking the mic to people who had questions to ask up until this point got called to the stage to talk to us about Google maps. Many African countries would need to use map maker to draw their maps, which is a tool the public can use to draw their own maps and submit them to Google. South Africa had recognized map companies who had laid out the entire infrastructure in great detail and so we did not need this tool. He talked about the Google Maps API’s which allow anyone to use simple JavaScript to make requests to Google to return a map based on parameters passed to it. By using this API you can embed a relevant Google map in your website. He showed us many things such as customizing the way the map looks by changing the style, adding lines, markers and overlays to a map and more. This was my favourite session of the day. Chewy being as funny as he is helped a lot also.
Thiago Santos then took us through an introduction to Google’s App engine and Web toolkit. Google’s App engine is a cloud computing platform which allows developers to have their applications running on Google’s infrastructure. All you do is code your app and then deploy, no worries about up time, connectivity, hardware, operating systems and the rest. The App Engine has various tools which can be used in your development, and integrates nicely with current Google Apps such as Google Docs andGmail. Benefits include lower costs and user requests travelling over Google’s optimized network. The Google Web Toolkit or GWT is aimed at the client side, it allows programmers to code in Java or Python, then compiles the code into JavaScript which is compatible with almost any browser out there. The GWT offers support for many features such as JSON, XML, CSS, animations, JUnit, Widgets, the list goes on.
Next up was Andriod and Mobile development. This is where Google really drilled the point home, they want us to write Apps and create mobile websites that are relevant to Africa. One of the issues facing African countries is that we do not have lots of our own content. And as a direct result, we do not have content in our African languages. Google recently released Voice search for Afrikaans and isiZulu which is a huge step in the right direction.
The last session was dedicated to Google web browser, Chrome. Chrome is gaining web browser market share faster than any browser has ever managed to. For years it looked as if nobody could ever topple the browser king which is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, then after years of hard work Mozilla’s Open source browser, FireFox ruled for a short time before IE took the lead again. Chrome has been on the scene for such a short time and already has grabbed almost 15% of the browser market. No doubt that it will become a major contender in the very near future. Google Chrome offers developers the chance to write custom extensions for the browser that can do just about anything you want them to do. The session focused on the technical aspects of writing an extention.
So that was the day with Google, since I’m relatively fresh in the industry, I haven’t been on many conferences yet and don’t know what to expect really. But this is my take on how things went. I thought the location was amazing, Camps Bay at the Bay Hotel. They brought excellent people who really knew what they were talking about and they answered all questions well. I just think maybe Thiago needs to speak a bit louder because of his heavy accent, sounded like he was speaking Spanish at times.
As for the content of the presentations and what they had to say to us: Much of the content I knew already, it was sometimes a bit entry level I think, for someone like me that’s been a part of the industry for only about a year now it got boring at times, can’t imagine how some of the gurus in the crowd must have felt. The best part was the presentation on Maps, maybe only because Chewy gave so much more in what he said and how he made us dream of the scenarios he was suggesting.
I am however, definitely going to be a part of this revolution, whether it is by coding many apps for African use or even just by using Google baraza, to up the amount of African content online. The internet is a powerful tool, that will benefit many people and change lives and possibly societies forever. It can only be good news if a giant like Google dedicates itself to a mission like this adding some much needed muscle to the struggle.
Thank you Google for creating the tools to make a difference in the lives of people, and for placing those tools in the hands of the people.
Long live open source and viva le revolucion.
