Visit to Googleplex and MacWorld • 01.17.08
As part of my visit to San Francisco yesterday we went down to MountainView to spend some time with Goo
gle. I was in the Googleplex several years ago and first thing you notice it how many new buildings are in the campus and how complicated is to find your way around. After reaching building 44 where our meeting was being held (no, there aren´t 44 buildings but apparently the numbering is not consecutive and does not start with one), you could see all the stereotypes that you have heard so many times about Googleplex. The lava lamps, the motor boards for employees to move around campus, the massage chairs, the free drinks, the casual and cool atmosphere, etc. The meeting was very good and insightful, I am excited about what they are doing in mobility, specially Android and their view of how the mobile Web will converge with the Web and there will be only one in the near future. We were told about the recently published statistics of huge iPhone traffic in Google properties which reinforces the notion that people with a good phone that provide a good navigation experience with a reasonable flat rate will use the Internet on the go. I am a living proof of that in spite of having a really poor EDGE connection with my 
iPhone. Another cool thing that I saw was a display with the earth rotating that was displaying in near real time all the mobile searches that Google was receiving in each part of the word, each color representing a different language and the density and high of dots representing the amount of queries being received. It was weird as the part from Spain had most of the dot columns in Madrid and somewhere in the North near Galicia…(see picture below).
Then we headed to MacWorld, it was a short visit but I had to see the MacBook Air and the booth of my former company Extensis (their new booth is really cool and they were finally showcasing the new version of their server product, codename Mystique, and I got a demo, good work!!). MacWorld looks bigger than before, the registration is now in a separate building at the Moscone Center but the booths of the companies traditionally targeting the creative professional space and exhibiting there like Adobe or Quark are getting a lot smaller than they used to, lots of consumer oriented companies there, a trend that has been happening since the iPod took off and that now has gone further with products like the iPhone or Apple TV. Talking of which, I saw the upgrade
announced at MacWorld has a gorgeous interface and if they continue improving that product is going to be a killer. At $229 (150€) I am actually thinking about taking one back to home if I have some time for shopping before leaving. The Macbook Air is also very cool, extremely thin, with a large mouse pad that does some of the multitouch tricks that the iPhone does and is very, very light. I uploaded more pictures here. Btw, is anyone having problems uploading pictures to Flickr? I am trying with both the Flickr uploader and Windows Live Picture Gallery (I am starting to really like that product) but with both products my pictures get rotated when uploaded and then I have to manually fix them in Flickr, a very painful procedure. Need some help here.
CD
