Google I/O 2013 Keynote Transcript

An incredibly important revolution in our lifetime.

It started around 1980. But if you take a look back, for over 25 years most people in the world used one operating system, which was Windows. And in terms of hardware form factors, it evolved from desktops to laptops over a long period of time. But fast forward to about seven years ago. With the advent of smartphone, there has been an explosion of devices, phones and tablets and increasingly newer types of devices. People are adopting these devices at an amazing pace because it has a profound impact on their day to day lives.

Nothing captures this moment as the picture behind me. These are two pictures in the same location in Saint Peter’s Basilica. The one on the left is a the funeral of Pope John Paul II. The one on the right is the announcement of the new Pope Francis recently. For sure, different moments, the one on the left is more somber. But you can see there is one person way ahead of their time with a clamshell phone trying to take a picture.

But you look at the one on the right, a sea of phones capturing that moment. The world has changed pretty dramatically just in a span of six to seven years. Increasingly people are using many, many different types of computing devices. It’s not just desktops, phones, and laptops anymore. It’s watch with displays. It’s thermostats with displays. Maybe a car console has a display and maybe something like Google Glass.

When you look at all these computing devices, it’s a multi-screen world. These are all small displays with a lot of computing power in them. In addition to that, they have sensors. They can listen. They can feel. They can hear. And the amount of computing power in these screens is incredible. And users are really adopting these computing devices.

We at Google are incredibly excited. This is why we view this as one of the most important moments in computing. And we’re working very, very hard to continue this journey forward. The reason at the heart of this journey is the impact we can have on people around the world. That’s what this journey of personal computing is about for us.

We are very, very fortunate at Google to have two platforms, two large open platforms, two fast growing platforms, two scalable platforms completely designed for developers like you to build amazing experiences, Android and Chrome.

Android started with a simple goal of bringing open standards to the mobile industry. Today it is the most popular mobile operating system in the world.

Chrome, again, started as a simple journey to make the web much better, both as a platform for developers and as an experience for users. The goal was to design a simpler, safer, and faster browser. And today it is the most popular browser used in the world.

Android and Chrome, as I said earlier, are really designed for people to build amazing experiences on top. We at Google are working hard on top of these platforms. We call this the best of Google.

We are building products like Search, Maps, YouTube, Google Now, and many more new things which you will hear about later today. So we are working hard on top of these platforms to push the journey of computing forward.

But what really excites is that developers like you can build thousands of third party applications, great applications which really make a difference on top of Android and Chrome. And that’s what a lot of this keynote is about.

What are we doing on top of these platforms so that you can continue doing the great work you do? With that, let’s get started. We’re going to talk about Android. So two years ago we announced we had over 100 million activations of Android. We were incredibly excited at the rate of growth. And a year ago, at Moscone, we celebrated the fact that we have 400 million activations of Android. The momentum has been breathtaking since then.

So let’s take a look at where we are.

[Video Presentation]

900 million. It’s an extraordinary achievement. But it’s an extraordinary ecosystem achievement. We couldn’t have gotten there without the help of a lot of you in the audience and people around the world, developers around the world. We are incredibly humbled by where we have reached. But we have to remember there are over 7 billion people on this planet. So we have a long way to go. And we think the journey is just getting started.

So if you look, we’re going to put a map of the world. And we’re going to highlight for you areas of the world where the penetration of Android is less than 10%. And as you can see, while we’re growing very, very fast, most of the world, the countries in green here represent over 4.5 billion people. And the penetration of Android is less than 10%. But it is growing very, very fast. So a lot of this journey is about bringing that next 4.5 billion people online and making a difference in their lives.

9:15So we’re going to talk a lot about what we are doing in Android both for developers and users to continue this momentum. And to get started, I’m going to invite Hugo onto the stage.

Hugo Barra: Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Sundar. How are you guys doing this morning? Great. You guys just heard about the spectacular Android ecosystem momentum all around the world. Well it’s also been an amazing year for Android developers. Here’s a pretty insane number for you.

Google Play has just crossed 48 billion app installs. That’s right. 48 billion app installs. That’s a huge number. And 2.5 billion installs in the last month alone. But even better than that, over the last four months, this year, we’ve already paid out more money to Android developers on Google Play than in all of last year. And revenue per user, which is a pretty important stat for all of us, is two and half times what it was just a year ago globally.

6So you guys, Android developers, are really the heart of this ecosystem. And I think that you know that. We’ve been in this incredible journey together for over five years now since the first Android SDK came out. And as Vic said, Google I/O is all about you. And we’re here to show that we’re listening. And we’re here because we really want you to thrive.

So let’s go. Let’s get started here.

The first thing we want to do is give you a preview of some exciting developer tools and services that we’re announcing here at I/O. And, of course, you’ll get to see these in great detail in the 52 Android sessions and code labs that we’ve put together just for you over the next three days.

All right, so first off is Google Play services.

A few months ago we launched Google Play services as a layer built and managed by Google on top on the Android platform. It includes API that we at Google use to build our own apps like Google Maps and Google Now. And we’re making these APIs available to you so that you can make your apps even better. Google Play services are distributed via the Play Store. And it’s automatically updated directly by Google independently of operating system versions. This means you have access to the latest APIs consistently on all devices.

Now, one of the first APIs that we launched as part of Google Play services was the Google Maps Android API v2. Many of you already use it in your apps. You’re looking here at the Expedia app. And you can see this is a major user experience upgrade compared to the original Android platform Maps API. It allows you to build Google Maps directly into your app, amazing vector based maps, full 3D movement and rotation, and 3D building profiles. Looks really, really great.

Now, location is a key input to so many apps. The Google Maps API is, of course, a huge part of this. But today we’re going to take it one step further by launching three new location APIs as part of Google services. A first API is called Fused Location Provider. We’ve completely rewritten our locations algorithms, taking advantage of all the sensors so that location is now faster to acquire. It’s more accurate.

And we’re also adding a new low power location mode that uses less than 1% of battery per hour.

The second new location API that we’re announcing today is Geofencing. Geofencing lets you define virtual fences around geographic areas. And those trigger when the user enters or exits these areas. You can have up to 100 geofences simultaneously active per app. This has been a big ask from you guys. There you go. That’s what I thought.

So I thought you would like that.

The third new location API that we’re announcing today is Activity Recognition. There’s been a lot of interest from the developer community for apps that help users track their physical activities. This new API, Activity Recognition, uses accelerometer data and machine learning classifiers to automatically figure out when the user is walking, cycling, or driving. And we do it in a really battery efficient way without even turning on the GPS.

So we think there’s going to be a whole new category of awesome apps that take advantage of this new capability.

So let’s keep going.

Another Google Play services API that we launched a couple months ago was Google+ Sign-in. And as many of you know, that lets people sign into your app with their existing Google credentials so that you don’t have to create a new account name space and users don’t have to remember yet another passport. Today we’re expanding that capability by introducing cross platform single sign-on. It’s really exciting. And I want to show you that right now.

So Jai is here in The Fancy Web site. He’s on his computer. He has not created a Fancy account. But he is signed into Google. And when he tries to fancy, let’s say, this margarita maker, he’s prompted to create an account. He’s going to choose Google+ as his Sign-in method here. Now here’s the interesting part. He’s getting an option to automatically install the fancy app on his Android tablet. That’s pretty cool because now he doesn’t have to remember to 2go find it and install it later. It just does it all for him. So he’s fancied his mixed drink machine here.

Now let’s switch over to his tablet and take a look. Now, Jai should have gotten the notification– there it is– that says the app was automatically installed on his tablet. This actually just happened.

And when he opens the app here, because he’s already signed in on The Fancy Web site, he’s automatically logged into the Fancy on his Android tablet. Isn’t that cool?

So he goes to the My Collection section, which shows things that he’s fancied before, there it is. That’s your margarita machine, Jai. That’s pretty cool. So that’s cross-platform single sign-on in action.

So let’s keep going with Google Play services.

Last year at I/O we announced Google Cloud Messaging, or GCM for short. GCM is a service that’s managed by Google that lets you seamlessly push data from your servers to your Android apps. GCM was super well received by the entire developer community. 60% of the top 100 apps in Play Store today are using GCM. We’re delivering 200,000 GCM push messages every second. That’s 17 billion messages a day.

And what’s even more impressive is the average server to server latency. That’s 60 milliseconds, which is actually 30% faster than when we launched this service just a year ago. So the news here today is that GCM is now part of Google Play services. And we’re announcing three major new features as part of a major upgrade.

So, first, GCM now supports persistent connections between your servers and Google. With a persistent connection you can send a large number of messages to many, many devices very quickly.

Second, we’re launching one of the GCM features that you have requested the most. And I think you’ll like this. Upstream messaging, there you go. You can now use GCM to send data in the other direction as well, so from your app to your servers just as seamlessly. GCM, of course, does all the client side connection before you. It automatically retries if the network isn’t up and so on. So it really helps to keep battery and data usage as minimal as possible.

Third, and I’m sure you’ll love this one too, we’re launching another GCM API that synchronizes notifications for you so that when you dismiss a notification on one device– there you go.

So that same notification goes away on the other device as well. And you’ll see more about this here today. All of the three new major GCM features you saw are rolling out progressively. And all you have to do is sign up. And you can do that starting today.

So to summarize, this is where we are right now. These are the Google Play services we’ve covered already, the Maps API, the new location APIs, Google+ sign-in with cross-platform single sign-on, and GCM with upstream messaging and synchronized notifications.

Now we’re going to cover one more service, a major one that we’re adding today. So let’s talk about gaming. Everybody loves gaming. And with the explosion of tablets all around the world, games are doing better than ever. And today we’re announcing a new family of APIs built specifically for game developers. We call it Google Play game services.  So let’s talk about that.

The first new Google Play game services API is Cloud Save. Cloud Save enables you to save user data across devices like player progression and game state. So if a player finishes playing level one on his phone, for example, he can then pick up his Android tablet and start playing right away from level two.

Next, are APIs for achievements and leaderboards. Achievements are virtual trophy walls that make it really easy for you to increase engagement inside your games. And leader boards use Google+ Circles to connect players and really encourage friendly competition. Let’s put it that way.

So here we are in the game called the World of Goo. And from within the game my friend Jai can launch into a leaderboard and see how he ranks against other players. So here in the public leaderboards you can see that he’s actually not very highly ranked. You can’t even find him. That’s the public leaderboard.

But that’s okay because he’s number two amongst his friends on Google+, which looks pretty cool until, of course, you see who’s number one.

Now, Cloud Save, achievements, and leaderboards are APIs that we’re launching not only on Android, but also for iOS and web so you can have cross platform gaming experiences, which I think is pretty important.

Now here’s where it gets really exciting. The next Google Play game services API that we’re announcing today is a comprehensive multiplayer service for matching players and engaging them in head to head competition. We know, obviously, because you tell us, that building low latency, real time synchronous games is pretty damn hard. So we want to help.

So the first thing we’ll do is we’re going to deal with all the hard networking problems and manage all of the device peer-to-peer connections for you. And then the second thing we’ll do via Google+ is make it easier for your players to invite friends that they want to play with or against, as well as quickly find new people that they can challenge.

What you’ll see here are some of the developers that we’ve been working on to integrate Google Play games services into their titles. There’s actually lots of games launching today with many of these capabilities that we talked about. Now, these game APIs that we just talked about are also part of Google Play services, by the way. And all the core APIs that you see here, some of the things that we talked about today, will be available via an update to Google Play services that we’re rolling out today to all Android devices, Froyo and up. And we’ll continue to add the best of Google innovation so that you can continue to build awesome apps.

Now I want to shift gears and talk about developer tools. One of the most common pieces of feedback that we get from you all the time is that you want more options for Android development. Well, today we want to show you a new Android tool that we’ve been working on. It’s called Android Studio and it’s based on the community edition of IntelliJ from JetBrains– which, obviously, you guys know very well.

Android Studio is an IDE that’s truly built for Android with the goal of making you faster and much more productive as an app developer. Now, I’d like to show you this live.

And to do that, here’s Tor Norbye from the Android Tools team for a quick demo. Take it away.

Tor Norbye: Good Morning. Today, I want to share with you a few of my favorite features in Android Studio. As Hugo said, Android studio is based on IntelliJ, so it’s a fully featured IDE right from the get-go. What I love about it is the attention to detail, which makes it a pleasure to use. The IDE has a deep semantic model of your code and it understands Android. So that makes the Code Editor smarter and more productive.

Take, for example, this code right here. This is how your write internationalised apps in Android. You don’t hard code your strings. You look them up from resource files. 3Well, this IDE can figure out what the real strings are and show them to you in place in the editor as if you had hard coded the string.

So note that the code is still there. It’s just easier to read. And we don’t just preview strings. On the next few lines you can see that I’m manipulating some icons. And those icons are previewed right here in the editor margin.

And so, likewise, here’s a color file. And you can see that we resolve the colors and preview those in editor margin as well. Now, when you’re editing your layouts, you now get a live rendering of what the layout is going to look like at runtime time. And what makes this really powerful is that we have multi-configuration editing.

So what if I want to know what this layout looks like on different screen sizes? Let’s take a look. So here it is. So here, I can see my current layout rendered on a 3.7 inch phone, 10 inch tablet, and everything in between. It’s also showing me that I have a custom tablet layout to take advantage of that extra space. This feature is also great for internationalization.

So if we jump into the settings layout for our app, I can now take a look at the languages we’re targeting. And so, here, I can see my layouts with the different message catalogs applied. So I can see Norwegian in the bottom left corner, for example.

So let’s say I want to make an edit. Let’s say I want to bump up the font size on this second label here. I can do that. And that’s obviously too big. So let me go back a little and make it 26. So now this looks Okay in English. But notice that in German right next to it right over here, this string is actually wrapping, which I don’t want.

So at this point I could either continue tweaking my layout or get a shorter translation if that’s possible. So, in short, this is a feature that makes it really easy to ensure that your layouts work well across a variety of devices and configurations. And while I focus on the Code Editor today, this also works in the full UI builder. We have big plans for Android Studio. We plan to integrate more and more services into the IDE. For example, with the simple menu item, I can add a Google Cloud Messaging back end into my app. And then I can take advantage of all those great GCM APIs that Hugo told you about earlier. And this is just scratching the surface of all the new features in Android Studio.

All right. I think I actually lost my prompter, guys. I need somebody to advance that mainly for me, if we could do that. The prompter, please?

Okay, well, then we can ad lib it. And so, of course, half of the game is about building awesome apps, developer tools, and services, and so on. The other half is about distribution and monetization.

How do you find more users? How do you monetize your app? To tell you about a bunch of new features to the Android developer console, I’d like to invite on stage Ellie Powers from the Android product team. Ellie, come on up.

Ellie Powers: All right. Hi, everybody. I’m Ellie and this is Miles. So last year at Google I/O we announced the new Google Play developer console. And since then you’ve sent us tons of feedback telling us exactly what you want to see next.

We’ve taken that feedback into account and today I’m here to tell you about five new features that we’re adding to the developer console to help you get more users and make more money on Android. So let’s get started.

The first feature I want to tell you about is optimization tips. So let’s take a look here. We can see all of my apps in the developer console. And let’s take a look at Fortune Teller, which is my most popular app. Okay, here we go. This app is doing pretty well. But I’m always wondering what can I do to make Fortune Teller a bit more successful? And that’s exactly what we had in mind with optimization tips. It analyzes your app. We look at how your app is doing in the Play Store. And we offer you insights about how you can improve it.

So what do we have today? We have two optimization tips. The first one is telling us that we should design our app for tablets by uploading tablet screenshots. Now, this is really important, and I should definitely do it because it will encourage more users on tablets to install my app.

Next, it’s telling me that I have a lot of users who speak Russian, and they’re already using my app. But my app isn’t actually translated into Russian. So that’s another opportunity for me. Okay, I don’t speak Russian, so I need to get some help. It used to be a lot of work to find a translator for your apps. You had to search the internet looking for a good company. But we want to make this easier. So that’s why today we’re now going to use our new app translation service, fantastic.

And we’re announcing this today. This service allows you to get professional translations directly in the developer console. And we’re going to try it out.

Okay, it takes just a minute to upload the strings we want translated into the Google Play developer console here. Next, we select the languages that we want to translate into. So for today, we’re, of course, going to select Russian and try to help those guys out.

Next, it’s going to show us a list of all the different translation vendors. And then I can just pick one that suits my budget. And that’s it. Google will send my strings off to the translation company. And then in about a week they come back and I can download them directly from the developer console. Super simple.

Some of you may be interested in participating in this pilot program. So please sign up in the developer console today. Okay, now I’ve gotten Fortune Teller ready for the Russian market. So I want to invest in a campaign to promote my app. But naturally I want to know which ads are the most effective. And that’s why we’re announcing referral tracking. This makes it easy to understand which ads are most effective. And we’re going to switch to Google Analytics to take a look at it.

Okay, here we’re adding a new report in the acquisition section. This is a conversion funnel report with data from Google Play. It shows us where our installs come from, like blogs or top websites and other important ads. So here we go. This will allow us to track the effectiveness of each referral channel. So in the left we have each of the channels followed by how many users view, install, and launch our app. Installations with an app are really just the first step.

What you want is for users to come back to your app again and again. And I want to understand how often people are using my app. I can do that with Google Analytics. But I have to go to Google Analytics. So soon we’re going to be showing these great engagement metrics from Google Analytics directly in the developer console. You’ll have all your metrics– We want to give you all your metrics together n the same place. These two analytics features are rolling out later this summer. So now we have an app that people are launching all the time. So, of course, it’s time to make money.

Like you, I just want to have simple tools to show me how much money I’m making every single day. So now we’ve added a new tab to the developer console giving us a summary of our app’s revenue. You can see your global revenue and how it varies over time. And then we can even show country specific revenue. For example, we can check how our app’s doing in Japan. Wow, it looks like we had a great day last week. It must have been our new in app products. Fantastic. So that’s it.

Revenue is at your fingertips just like the rest of your metrics.

All right, so we have a successful app. We’re making lots of money. So now I’m ready to try some new features with my app. Now it’s important. I really want to find out what do my core users think about these new features before I roll them out to everybody? And from your feedback, I think a lot of you want to do this too. So today we are launching beta testing. Yeah, a lot of you talk to me on Google+ about this one and also staged roll outs.

Let’s take a look.

Okay, we now have three tabs in the developer console, alpha testing, beta testing, and production. We want to start with a small– we’ll start with a small group of alpha testers and then roll out to a larger group of beta testers. Let’s set it up.

Okay, we select the APK for our test. Next, we’re going to use Google Groups and Google+ Communities to control access to the app. Keep in mind here feedback will be sent directly to me. And it’s not posted as public reviews. That’s very important.

So now we have our new version. We’re ready to put it into production. But rather than upgrading all my users in one go, I can now manage the roll out. So we can select a percentage here, like, let’s say, 10% and then we’d increase it over time when we’re ready.

Don’t applaud at the same time.

Let’s start with 10% on this side. So that was our five new features in the developer console. We had optimization tips, the app translation service, usage metrics with referral tracking, revenue graphs, and beta testing with staged roll outs.

Hugo Barra: Thanks, Ellie. So just checking, how’s everyone doing? How are you guys feeling? Pretty good?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty API’d out at the moment. So I guess it’s probably a good time to move on to something maybe a little bit more playful.

With that, I want to introduce a man whose name is always music to my ears. Ladies and gentlemen, our resident rock star, Chris Yerga.

Chris Yerga: Thank you, Hugo. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for staying up. All right, so we’ve just heard about some great APIs and tools to help you build the next wave of Android apps. But we’ve also been hard at work helping users discover all your great existing apps.

As we heard, we’ve been successful that way with over 48 billion applications installed from Google Play. But our aspirations are greater than that. So I’m happy to talk to you today about some improvements we’re making to Google Play.

We recently launched a redesigned version of the Google Play store. It has a simple clean design that’s designed to scale effortlessly across phones and tablets and the web. Let’s take a look at the Play store on the Nexus 10 tablet.

So here we have the store on the tablet. And it’s the same content that you would see on your phone or anywhere else. But it’s presented in a way that is much more richly presented here on the tablet. The content’s organized into collections. We have some movie suggestions there. But the new Play Store isn’t just about looks. It’s also designed to help you improve discovery of your apps. The Play Store home screen adapts to you. So here we see that I’ve got some specific recommendations for me.

I’ve got a book recommended based on a previous book. I’m being recommended the movie “Inception” because my buddy Advay +1’d it and some music and apps recommendations as well. But to give you an idea of how this adapts to different people, why don’t go out on a limb here a little bit and put Jai’s tablet up side by side so we can see the difference.

And so here with Jai’s tablet, you see he gets the same types of recommendations. He’s got movies and music, et cetera because his friends have + 1’d things or based on his previous apps that he’s purchased, et cetera. But one interesting thing that I didn’t see until now is that it turns out you’re a Metallica fan?

All right. We should hang out. I think we’ve learned enough about Jai.

So these personalization features are going to be rolling out over the coming weeks. But the point is that the new design of the Play Store gives us an excellent foundation for doing even more than what you’ve just seen. So we also know that many of you have invested a lot of energy in building awesome tablet experiences. And we want to ensure that your work pays off and that users are able to discover your great tablet apps.

So starting today, we’re going to be providing a view in our top charts that surfaces applications that are designed for tablets.

Now, this shows apps that meet our tablet app design guidelines. So they target tablet screen sizes, use the screen real estate on the tablets effectively, et cetera. And as Ellie showed you in the demo before, in the dev console you can get hints about exactly what you should be doing here if your app needs some specific tweaks to meet this criteria.

So I said that this UI scales across a variety of devices. So why don’t we show you how we’re bringing this to the rest of Play. Why don’t we pop up the laptop here. So over the coming weeks, we’re going to be bringing the same great Play experience to the web as well. You’ll notice here that it’s the same consistent design. We have the same content here along with my personalized recommendations. But it’s presented in a way that really takes great use of the laptop.

And we also have a new navigation model here on the left hand side that easily allows me to switch between apps, movies, music, and books. You know, on the run through we didn’t put a picture of a more handsome man behind me up on the screen. But I guess that’s fine. So that’s the Play Store.

But the UX isn’t just about the store. We also want to bring the same great user experience to all of the play apps themselves. So over the coming weeks it’s going to be rolling out to all the Play apps, books, movies, magazines and, of course, music.

So you guys want to hear about music? Music unites us. It’s universal. No matter who you are or where you’re from, the joy of music is a constant. And with ubiquitous mobile devices, there’s the potential to bring that music, bring that joy with us wherever we are. But when a bunch of us on the Play team got together to talk about the next generation of our music service, we all agreed that the reality was somewhat different.

Yes, mobile devices give us more choices than ever before. But they weren’t helping us discover music we loved. It felt more like work. Like, when we were kids, figuring out what album to play in an event. It was a ritual. So why is it that managing my [queue] feels like a chore? So we set out to build a music service that didn’t just give you access to a world of music but also helped guide you through it. And we started from a great foundation.

On this very stage two years ago, we launched our locker service that allows you to upload 20,000 of your songs, stream them across all your Android devices and the web. And soon after, we launched our music store, deals from all the major labels and Indies alike. And so today, users in 13 countries globally are enjoying their music on Play music. But what if we gave you access to millions of tracks from our store in addition to your personal music library? And what if we combine the power of Google to understand what you want to hear and get you right to the music without any hassle?

A music service that’s about music, and the technology fades to the background. We built that service. And today I’m happy to announce Google Play Music All Access, a uniquely Google approach to a subscription music service.

Why don’t we show it to them, Jai. Let’s pop it up on the phone. All Access starts with explore. It’s the guided way for you to browse am entire collection of millions of tracks. And from the moment you enter explore, we provide personalized recommendations based on your listening preferences. So here’s some of my personalized recommendations. We also have a section that we can swipe over to that shows featured content, top albums, and songs as well as playlists from our staff of music experts that’s always fresh.

But if you want to guide our assistance, we can swipe over and look into specific genres. So we have 22 top level genres with more to drill into. And why don’t we pick alt Indie and go in there and show them what it looks like? So once we’re in here, you see expert powered recommendations here, playlists that are curated by our music editors as well as top albums from the genre and key albums that define the genre. But like everything in All Access, anything you see you can immediately start playing.

So Jai’s picked a track for us here.

[Music Plays]

So, so far so good. But here’s where the magic starts because anything that I’m listening to in All Access I can instantly turn into a radio station. So Jai hits start radio. The song keeps playing. But in the background, All Access has made us a never ending mix of related tracks. Now, if we’re curious about what’s coming up, we can swipe to take a little peek ahead. But more importantly, we can tap on the Playlist icon and see in detail everything that’s coming up and tailor it to our needs. So if there’s something there we don’t want to hear, swipe it away. Swipe it away.

You want to show them reordering? You can also reorder tracks in the queue. So this is radio without rules. It’s as lean back as you want to or as interactive as you want it to be.

All right, sometimes you know exactly what you want to listen to. And we’re Google. So there’s always search at the top. So right now I’m in the mood for some James Blake. Why don’t you go ahead and light that up. And so when — all right, one James Blake fan over there. That’s great.

6So why don’t we pop into the artist here? And when we do, we see a couple of things that are interesting here about how All Access blends my catalog with all the millions of tracks available to you. So you see here that there’s one album that I previously uploaded to the locker from James Blake. But if we scroll down, we see the rest of his tracks and albums that are available to me in all access blended together. And I notice his most recent album is available there. So why don’t you go ahead and tap on that and add it to my library.

So by adding it to my personal library, now it shows up here at the top. It’s easy for me to access at all times. My library contains all my personal music that I uploaded as well as anything that I’ve discovered and added from all access.

But other times I just want the music to start. I want to get to music with minimal effort. That’s where listen now comes in. Listen now brings the power of Google to surface music we know you’re going to love. There’s always a fresh set of choices in here. So in my listen now view, you see the album I just added as well as some other tracks that I’ve played recently. There’s also new releases from artists that I enjoy. And you’ll also see interspersed in here are radio stations that All Access has created for us automatically. With listen now there’s always a great selection of music available to me for my library and All Access. And every day it surprises me.

I can’t wait for you all to have your own magic moments with listen now.

So far that’s been All Access on the phone.

But, of course, it works great on tablet and web browsers as well. So why don’t we pop up the laptop? This is All Access on the web browser. As you can see, it has the same great set of features. Listen now is here with all my suggested content, get me one click to music. I’ve got my library, radio, and, of course, explore. And I can enjoy All Access whether I’m on my laptop, on my tablet, or on my phone.

So to recap, All Access allows you to explore millions of tracks effortlessly on any device. Radio without rules, it’s completely interactive if you so choose. Google powered recommendations and one click access to your music from listen now. And, of course, the best of both worlds, your personal library blended with ours. That’s All Access.

Now, there’s a lot more I could show you. But really I want you all to try it yourself. So let’s talk about how you can get it.

All Access is priced at $9.99 a month in the US. But we’re also giving everyone a 30 day free trial. Best of all, it’s launching today in the US. And we’ll be rolling out to additional countries soon. And if you start a trial by June 30, you’ll pay only $7.99 a month. That’s All Access.

It’s been my pleasure to show it to you. And now I’m going to call Hugo back to the stage. Thank you very much.

Hugo Barra: Thanks, Chris. We hope you guys liked everything you saw here today. We talked about 900 million Android, 48 billion app installs, a bunch of new tools and developer services that help you build awesome apps, find more users around the world, and, of course, monetize your hard work. You also saw the new Google Play Store as well as a taste of All Access, the brand new music experience that’s powered by Google.

One thing we haven’t talked today about yet are devices. Now, this is not a device give away. But I do have a pretty cool announcement to share with you guys.

The Android ecosystem is truly amazing, great hardware and software experiences, a range of form factors, and lots of choice for users including, by the way, Google’s own devices with the Nexus family that I’m sure you know quite well. We continue to be blown away by the great new devices that are coming out from our partners, like, for example the HTC1 or the Samsung Galaxy S4, for example. In fact, just like this one right here.

Now, there’s actually something a little bit different about this particular GS4, for this particular Galaxy S4 from Samsung, something that is not available yet but I want to show you anyways. So why don’t you take a look at my home screen? So that’s my home screen. I’ve got my Google Apps here in my Google folder. If you scroll to the left, that’s my music widget, my calendar on the other screen. Go into notifications, a pretty clean notification shade and quick settings also right at your fingertips. I’m pretty sure you guys are getting this, right?

What you’re seeing here is real. This is a Samsung Galaxy S4 running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean with the same software experience that was shipped on our Nexus devices. It’s Google’s take on Android. And it feels really awesome on the Galaxy S4.

In fact, this version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be available directly through Google Play in the US. We’re selling an unlocked model that works on both AT&T and T-Mobile with LTE support, 16 gigabytes of memory, expandable with a SD card, of course. And also it is bootloader unlocked.

I knew you’d like that. And it will receive system updates promptly with every Android platform update.

This version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be on sale starting on June 26 on Google Play for $649. So that’s what we have. It is a spectacular device. So I want to thank you guys for your support. I look forward to talking with many of you over the next three days and seeing you all in the sessions.

And with that, let me ask Sundar to come back to the stage. Thank you.

Sundar Pichai – SVP, Android, Chrome and Apps, Google

We’re going to switch from Android to talk about our other important platform, another open platform, Chrome. As I said earlier, Chrome started with the goal to help make the web better, both as a platform and as an experience for users. It’s been an incredible journey.

We’ve had amazing adoption from our users. And last year at Google I/O we had reached 450 million or 450 million monthly active users. We had reported weekly users before. But we are switching to monthly to be consistent with the rest of this presentation and industry metrics. Since then we’ve had amazing momentum, and we’ve added over 300 million new users just in the last 12 months alone. And so today we are at over 750 million active users of Chrome.

Chrome increasingly is being used on mobile. What excites us is a lot of this new growth is coming on phones and tablets. We launched Chrome both for Android and iOS. And we are just beginning to start pushing the mobile web forward. A lot of what you’ll hear today is about how we can push the mobile web forward. It is in its early days.

But we think we can do to the mobile web what we did for the desktop web. Chrome also serves as the foundation for Chrome OS, a computing system designed for and but entirely around the web. And we brought a lot of it together last October by launching the Samsung Chromebook, what we viewed as the perfect additional computer for everyone. At $249, it was thin, light, portable. And people are buying it as the second, third, fourth computer in their homes. It’s been over 200 days since launched. And it’s been number one on Amazon in laptops for 190 consecutive days in that time window.

It is an ecosystem play, and we have many more partners joining our journey. Acer, Lenovo, HP are all shipping Chromebooks now. And we’re expanding our presence in retail. Two months ago we also announced the Chromebook Pixel. The goal behind the Pixel was literally to design the best laptop out there possible. The screen on this laptop is gorgeous. It’s the highest resolution display that’s ever shipped on a laptop. And it has full touch enable. It’s precision engineered with the best custom components available out there. Our goal with the Pixel was to get it in the hands of developers so that they can build the next generation of web experiences.

We’re going to have a lot more to talk about Chrome OS later this year, and we are really investing a lot in this area. But I want to come back to Chrome for a minute. We talked about how in this multi-screen world people are using different types of devices, including phones and tablets. With Chrome, our goal has been to make sure it’s your web. You sign into Chrome, you get your experience consistently across all your devices, your web everywhere personalized for you.

And to do that well, we really need to take mobile web forward. So we’re going to show you an example of how the mobile web is evolving. What we are about to show you is a preview which Warner Brothers and the developers at North Kingdom have put together for the upcoming “Hobbit” movie. And Kan is going to help me with this.

We’re going to get this up on screen. This is running on a Pixel right now. And as you can see, this is what the web shines for. They want a trailer. They want a preview for their movie. You’re not going to write an app and get everyone to install an app on every one of their devices. You write a web experience and you expect people to use it independent of the device they have. So it’s on a Pixel.

Thanks to HTML 3D CSS, you can see it works great. Kan can touch and move around. The clouds look great. And it works really well. So far, not that surprising. But we’re going to switch now from a Chromebook Pixel to a tablet. And we’re going to show Chrome running on Nexus 10. And you can see there is no difference in the experience. A lot of what we’re going to talk about today is the same capabilities which you’re used to on the Chrome on desktop are all coming to Chrome on Android. So it feels exactly the same way you would see on a Pixel on a Nexus 10 as well.

Let’s dive in deeper. Kan is going to start playing a game on the Nexus 10. And I guess the goal of this game is for hobbits to avoid being eaten by the trolls. It’s a new game upcoming. It is a 3D game. And it’s based on WebGL.

Can we get the game up on screen? We can see it there. And we are running this, again, on Chrome on Nexus 10. And the reason we are able to play this game is thanks to WebGL. This wasn’t possible on the web last year. And you will hear the search team — Okay, so we have it up and running now. Kan’s goal is to avoid the trolls and not be eaten for dinner as a hobbit. I guess he lost very, very quickly there.

Look, WebGL is something new to Chrome, and it makes this experience possible. You will see Google Maps team talk later in the presentation about how they’re using WebGL. Let’s show you one more thing.

We’re going to zoom in the map in Middle Earth in a place called Rivendell. All this is happening on mobile, Chrome on mobile. Kan is going to start swiping his way through. Thanks to web audio APIs, as he gestures around on his touch screen, the music changes. And you can see how the experience is very interactive. There’s touch and web audio APIs working together on the web. I think you can really start creating powerful experiences on the web and increasingly run it on phones and tablets.

And we are making a lot of progress there. So I’m going to invite Linus Upson onto the stage to talk in detail about all the APIs we are adding to the mobile web. Linus?

Linus Upson: So just a few weeks ago the Web celebrated its 20th birthday. And the unique properties that transformed desktop computing from the web, the fact that everything is a link, everything is searchable by default, makes it possible with just a few key strokes for anyone in the world to find billions of different web pages. Applications, video content is instantly discoverable and shareable, no need to install software, no need to update software.

And on the Chrome team, our goal is to make the web better, both on desktop and on mobile, better for users and better for developers. But that doesn’t mean loading the browser up full of features. The browser’s a means, not an end. And so we’re always trying to figure out how to make the browser smaller and faster. So we focus on three things: speed, simplicity, and security. And we’re bringing that same focus to mobile.

Let’s take a look at speed to start with. When we first launched Chrome, its JavaScript engine V8 was 20 times faster than anything else out there. And in the four and a half years since, we’ve continued to make it faster still. Just in the last year you can see we’ve improved performance of V8 by almost 25% on the desktop. But the games on mobile are even bigger. In the last year we’ve seen the performance improve by more than 50% on mobile. These are the kinds of things that enable the next generation of the mobile web and of mobile web applications.

Of course, the V8 team is always looking to optimize new use cases because people are always pushing JavaScript in new directions. Recently Mozilla introduced a very clever way to compile C or C++ code down into a subset of JavaScript called ASM.js. And this has gotten a lot of attention recently because it allows you to then access all of that code that you have in C and C++ and be able to run it on the web. And this is JavaScript that’s not written by humans. It’s written by compilers. So it looks very different than the kind of JavaScript we’ve optimized for in the past.

And in the last month alone, we’ve gotten over 2.4 times speed boost running this ASM.js code in V8. And there’s tons more optimization to come. But, of course, JavaScript is only one component of speed. When you download a web page, more than 60% of the bytes that come across your internet connection are images. And it’s growing. So we’ve developed an open source royalty free compression technology called WebP. So these two images here, you see the one on the left as JPEG, the one on the right is WebP. They’re both at the same quality.

But let’s take a look at the sizes. The WebP image is 30% smaller than a JPEG image at the same quality. The benefits of this for image rich websites is compelling. It saves on bandwidth. It saves on power, particularly on mobile computing devices. And we’re seeing it adopted by properties like Google+, like Facebook, particularly on their mobile apps.

So WebP supports not only lossless compression, but also lossy compression, transparency, color profiles, metadata and, unfortunately, animated images as well. So you can use WebP to replace JPEGs, PNGs, as well as animated GIFs.

I’m sorry. Of course, videos are a big part of the web. By the end of 2012, over half of mobile internet traffic was video. We need to make videos smaller. With WebM, we’ve created an open royalty free container media file format for the web. So let’s take a look at two videos. One of these is encoded in 264, which is probably what you’re seeing today on the web. The other is encoded in WebM’s next generation codec, VP9. The bar charts show you the real time bit rate of the two videos. When we get to the end, we’ll see what the sizes of each are and how much smaller VP9 is.

For this particular video, VP9 was 63% smaller. Running across a wide range of videos and a wide range of resolutions, we see about a 50% reduction in size with VP9, which is a huge bandwidth savings. So if you’re paying money for your mobile data plan, this is enormous for you. And it’s great to see that YouTube is going to be rolling out support for VP9 later this year. Now, of course, we want all websites to take advantage of these new technologies.

But until they’re everywhere, what we’ve done is we’ve built a data compression proxy for Chrome for mobile. And you can see here it’s easy to turn on. You can go to bandwidth management to reduce data usage. And it shows you how much data you’re actually saving. So let’s take a look at the real data for one user here.

They save 46% of their data over the course of a month. And when we’ve been running this in the Android beta channel– and many of you can try it out right now– we see an average of about 50% data compression. We rewrite the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make it smaller. We transform images into WebP. And we speak the SPDY network protocol to get you fewer bits faster but get you all the bits from the web page that you’re looking for.

So beyond just making web pages faster, we want to make things faster and simpler for users. One of the hardest things you can do on your phone today is buy something. The average checkout process is about 21 steps on your phone. So it’s no surprise that the abandonment rate of shopping carts on mobile phones is around 97%. We can do much better than this.

So by building on the existing HTML5 auto complete spec, we’ve built something in Chrome, both on desktop and in mobile, that collects all of your payment information when you enter it anywhere, syncs it across all of your devices. So now when you come to check out on a website, you press check out, you see this form. Chrome already knows all of your payment information. It shows it to you in a form. You can look at it and you say, yep, that’s what I want.

And you click Submit and you’re done.

So this is going to make shopping from your phone much, much easier. And there’s a session, if you want to learn more about this, later today. It’s called — I bet it has payments in the name. I forgot what it is. But it’s on the calendar for today. Standardizing payments on the web.

Okay, so not just programs, not just users, but we also want to make developers more productive and make life simpler for them as well. So for the last couple of years we’ve been working on some new fundamental technology in the web platform called web components. For the first time you’re going to be able to build your own HTML tags. You can build your own HTML tags by taking smaller bits of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and putting them into a first class component. And that component can be reshared between applications, between phones, between tablets, between desktops so that you can be much more productive and have applications that are much more delightful for users.

We’re also working on the first toolkit to natively take advantage of web components. And in this toolkit it really captures the modern, elegant design philosophy you’ve been seeing in a lot of the recent Google applications, particularly the mobile ones. This toolkit project actually has been open source since the beginning. And some of you have stumbled upon it and found it. But it’s still very early.

But the vision for it is clear. We want this elegant UI framework that works across all form factors, all devices. And we put together a short video to give you an idea about where we’re going with the toolkit. Let’s play the video.

[Video Presentation]

So you can see our goal here really is to be able to allow developers like you create your own tags, reuse them in a way that makes sense on a phone, be able to take that same component, reuse it on a tablet, combine them in different ways for desktop applications. And it’s something that’s tremendously exciting. It’s still early, as I said. It’s not ready for consumption by regular developers. But if you’re interested in learning more about where we’re going and help us to find the vision of the future, please come to the web components in action session on Thursday.

Now, we’ve been talking today a lot about Chrome across all of your different screens. So why not build a fun experience to show that off?

So Racer is a multiplayer, multi-screen experiment. And all you need to play is Chrome. Regardless of device Android or iOS, phone or tablet, you just need to click a link and get started. So we’ve got some volunteers to come help us show it off.

So while they’re coming up, why don’t we take a closer look at the devices here? We have a ring around the team. This is Arno Weber who manages the Chrome Mobile team. He’s an actual race car driver. We’ll see how he does in the electronic form. So this game is a simple little racing game. I don’t know if you remember the little slot car racing games when you were a kid? You pull the trigger, zoom around the track. But if you go too fast, the car spins out. That’s essentially what these guys are going to be trying to do.

So are we ready to switch to the overhead? Thanks.

So, Ken, take it away.

Okay, so this game is really simple. Once I start the game, all you have to do is press down to accelerate and let go to decelerate. Basically, when you go around the corners, you don’t want to be going too fast. So I’m going to start a race here and I’m going to join it from these devices.

Okay, let me click Start. You know, you guys look like professionals. So I’m going to click Ridiculous. We’re going to go ridiculous on this one guys. I predict lots of cars will fly off the track.

[Racer Demo]

Anyway, thank you all for helping with that.

Anyway, we hope you’re all excited, as we are, about where the mobile web is headed. And to celebrate the first 20 years of the web, we’ve put together this short film showing how far we’ve come.

[Video Presentation]

Sundar Pichai – SVP, Android, Chrome and Apps, Google

It’s inspiring to see the 20 year story of the web. It’s truly one of the most amazing software platforms we’ve seen in our lives.

Before we move on, let’s get a picture of the Pixel back up on the screen. I’m also going to go pick one up. As I said earlier, the goal behind the Pixel was to literally build the best laptop possible out there. You guys have any idea why we have it up on the screen and I’m holding one up in my hand?

We’re going to give each and every one of you a brand new Pixel. I’ve been asked to say it’s not ready until 2:00 PM. So please don’t leave in the middle of the Keynote. But we’re very excited.

Our goal behind the Pixel was to make sure that developers had a chance to get the web ready for the next generation experience with full touch and high resolution. So I can’t wait to see what you all to do with it. We’re incredibly excited.

A lot of us use it as our day to day computer. So we’ve talked about Android and Chrome. And our goal behind these platforms is to make sure developers can build amazing experiences on top of these platforms. We want to now give you a real life example of how this all comes together. And we’re going to do that by talking about education briefly.

A lot of us at Google are deeply passionate about education because it’s an area where we can really see the impact technology can have on people’s lives, especially the lives of children. And so we are investing a lot in education. And for us, the journey started with Google Apps.

Google Apps are incredibly popular in schools around the world. There are over 25 million users of Google Apps in over 200 countries all around the world, in schools, in universities, and so on. Just in the United States, 74 of the top 100 universities fully run on Google Apps. Seven of the eight Ivy League universities– for those of you who are from Dartmouth, you may want to start nudging your IT administrator there. But seven of the eight Ivy League schools use Google Apps.

Large public school systems like Chicago, et cetera, completely run on Google Apps. And the momentum is incredible. But we want to take it a step further. What we want to do is to bring both Android and Chrome into educational institutions around the world so that both Google and all of you can build applications to really change how computing and technology is used in schools. We are beginning to invest a lot for Android in education. And we want to give you an update.

To do that, I’m going to invite Chris Yerga back on stage.

Chris Yerga: Thanks, Sundar.

So as we’ve heard, Android is growing incredibly fast. And its momentum is changing everything. But there’s still a big part of all of our lives and the lives of our kids that mobile technology hasn’t really touched. When I go visit my kids’ classrooms, it looks pretty much exactly like it did when I went to school. So a bunch of us in Android asked educators why is there so much talk about technology in schools but so little impact? And what we heard was really interesting.

Teachers told us that in education there’s a huge gap between what’s possible with technology and what’s practical, especially with mobile technology. And then they told us it was Google’s job to fix this.

Google should make it affordable to give every student a tablet. And Google should make it so that it’s not so crazy to manage all those devices. And Google, finally, should make it way easier to find the best tools and content from a really diverse set of developers and get that content to the right students. We agreed.

So today I’m really excited to announce a new initiative, which will make it easy and affordable for schools to put Android tablets in the hands of all their kids and to load them up with powerful educational content and tools. And I want to give you a sneak peak of one of the key parts of this effort, Google Play for Education, built from the ground up to meet the unique content needs of educators. Let’s take a look.

So the first thing you’ll notice is that Google Play for Education is organized by categories educators care about, namely subject matter and grade level. For example, say I’m the K-6 math subject matter expert in my school district. And I want to find an educational app that my incoming kindergartners can use to sharpen their problem solving skills. So I click on Math, Kindergarten. And immediately I see a bunch of apps from a diverse set of partners, including NASA and PBS.

Also, each app has been recommended by a group of educators as useful for teaching kindergarten math. This is key because teachers trust other teachers. So Kids Numbers and Math from Intellijoy looks really good. I’ll start with the free version.

Remember, I’m not shopping for myself here. Because this school is using Google Apps for Education and every student has a Google account, I can just enter the name of the Google group of these students and, bam, all 500 kindergartners in my district will instantly get this app on their tablets.

Now say a few weeks have gone by and I’m really impressed with the math skills that kids are learning from Kids Numbers and Math. So I want to upgrade to the paid version so the kids can go deeper. Rather than enter a credit card, which is not how schools work, I can just charge these 500 licenses against a balance funded by a school purchase order. And one more thing, notice that the store doesn’t just have apps. You can discover books and YouTube educational videos and push them to Android tablets in exactly the same way.

Pilot sites like Kipp Bridge Charter School and Hillsborough Township Public Schools are already going crazy for this. Six elementary schools in New Jersey used 550 different third party apps during a single day in our pilot, all of them discovered and downloaded by teachers in Google Play for Education. Multiply that pilot by millions of classrooms in the US and you can see there’s a huge opportunity here for educators, students, and for you as developers. So this is where you come in.

We’re doing the heavy lifting of building Play for Education, bringing it to the schools, making it easy for them to find great content and buy it in bulk. Now you can focus on what you do best, creating awesome and innovative educational content. We’re going to be launching Google Play for Education in the fall. But starting this summer, we’ll be ready to accept your app submissions. Check out our developer micro site at developer.android.com/edu where we’ve posted guidelines on how to build awesome K-12 apps.

Also, come find us at the education sandbox here at I/O. Thanks, everyone.

It’s great to see Android making its foray into education. We’re going to invest a lot. We’ve already been doing this with Chromebooks. Chromebooks are really ideally suited for education because this literally no set up, no administration. You open the device, you’re good to go, and you have the power of web within you.

Just last year alone, we had over 1,000 schools in the United States running Chromebooks. In the four months this year, we’ve added 2,000 new schools and Chromebooks are going mainstream in education in schools in the United States just like Google Apps. And the area where this all came together beautifully is Malaysia.

So I want to talk about that for a minute. Malaysia has a nationalized education system. They have 10,000 schools in the country distributed, several of them in poor, rural areas. So they really wanted to provide for 4G connectivity throughout to all 10,000 schools to level the playing field. And they’re deploying Google Apps along with Chromebooks in primary and secondary schools so that they can bring computing in their schools. So let’s take a look at what they’re doing.

[Video Presentation]

Malaysia has so much to offer. There’s so much untapped potential. Just to walk into one of these small villages and look at the eyes of those children in that school, you see that spark, little fire in their eyes. There’s this whole world out there that would allow you to experience learning beyond what you ever thought possible. And a lot of our students don’t have internet access. A lot of them were just left behind.

In Malaysia we place a huge investment in the education of our young children. We’re providing 4G connectivity to all schools across the country. And the fact that we can spread it across 10,000 schools is amazing. Learning had to be anytime, anyplace. You didn’t have to be in a state of the art classroom. But you could be with a Chromebook sitting in a field and experiencing world class learning. It is so exciting to be a part of education in Malaysia today. This power that you place in a child’s hand and you say, the web is your school. Go and learn.

Look, to me and to a lot of us, this is what the journey of computing is about. What we are doing in education on top of platforms like Android and Chrome, we can do it for users everywhere, including the other 5 billion people on the planet. Android and Chrome are designed for not just Google, but for you all to create amazing experiences.

We’re going to switch now and talk about what we are doing on Google, what we call as the best of Google on top of Android and Chrome. You’re going to hear from three teams, from the Google+ team, from the Search team, and from the Maps team. And we’ll get things started with Vic Gundotra and Google+.

[Video Presentation]

Vic Gundotra – Senior Vice President, Google

We are incredibly grateful to the hundred and millions of you out there who joined Google+ in just under two short years. And we can think of no better way to say thank you than to continue to innovate and to build a product that people truly love. And so I’m here to show you what’s next with Google+.

Today we’re introducing 41 new features across three major areas of Google+. First, a newly designed stream, a new Hangout application, and a fundamentally new photos experience. We have a lot to talk about. Let’s get started.

Let’s begin with the Stream. Now, it’s no surprise that mobile devices are increasingly prevalent and important in our lives. It’s the computer that’s with us all the time. And so the Google+ has spent a lot of time making sure that that core stream experience on mobile absolutely rocks. And the feedback has been fantastic. And so today we’re taking that multicolumn design and bringing it to lots more devices.

Yes, from your phone to your tablet and even your desktop, you’re going to see a newly designed stream. We’re also fixing a longstanding problem with today’s social streams and that’s they’re flat. It’s very easy to see a long list of things that have been shared with you, kind of like a never ending newspaper. But it’s nearly impossible to go deeper on a topic or interest that you might have. And we think we can fix that.

So this new design, this new stream, is about design and depth. Maybe the best thing to do is just show you. What you’re looking at is Google+ as it exists this morning. What you’re going to see start rolling out later today is the new Google+, which looks like this.

You can see, we’ve taken that multicolumn design and brought it to the desktop and really made something beautiful. It’s dynamic, meaning depending upon the size of your screen, it can either be one column, two column, or three columns. And we’ve made sure to give you choice. So if you go into the More menu, you’re always able to go to a single column if that’s what you prefer. Of course, in this multicolumn design, we’ve made sure that posts like photos and videos can span multiple columns. So you get something that’s truly immersive. And we made sure that it’s fast, fluid, and fun. And so we put delightful animations throughout the product. For example, a share box that animates out, menus that slide in and out to get out of the way, and even cards and that flip and fade beautifully. Yeah, it’s pretty amazing.

But it’s not just about the design. It’s about depth. As I mentioned earlier, it’s very difficult to go deeper on a topic or interest you care about. We think we’ve solved this problem. And today we’re introducing related hashtags. What we’ll do is we’ll analyze the content of a post. And Google will put on the appropriate hashtag.

How does that work? Well, let’s take a look. Here’s a post about the San Francisco Giants baseball team. It’s not just about the Giants. It’s about Buster Posey, a particular player, as well. And note in the top, we’ve automatically tagged that post and we know it’s about those two topics. But that’s only half of the magic. We also then rank and search the entire universe of Google+ content. And we rank it just for you.

So when Matt clicks on one of those hashtags, watch what happens. We flip the card over and we then show you related items from the most important sources and social proximity to you. Amazing, isn’t it?

Now, if you think that’s impressive, let’s take a look at another one of these problems. In this case, one of the noted photographers on our service has posted a picture of Paris, and particularly the Eiffel Tower. Nowhere in his post or in the comments is the word Eiffel Tower. But if you notice, Google has automatically hashtaged this with the Eiffel Tower. How did we do that? Well, we did image analysis and combined with the Knowledge Graph that recognizes important landmarks. And Google knew that this was about the Eiffel Tower. So if you click, why, you can just go deeper and click through other posts about the Eiffel Tower.

Now, of course, we deeply respect the content producer. And so you always have the option of telling Google, either on a particular post or globally, whether you want your content to have this amazing related hashtags feature. And if we ever get it wrong and have the wrong hashtag, you could always X it out. In either case, we think what we’ve built here is a stream that’s about design and depth, really allowing you to go deeper on your interests.

Now, we don’t have time to show you all of the features. There’s just too many to talk about today. But we’ll be rolling this out this afternoon. We hope that you’ll absolutely love it.

Now let’s talk about Hangouts. You know, at Google we have a point of view about software and technology, namely that it should get out of the way and allow people to do what they do best, that’s live, learn, and love. That was true even when we started Google+. You know, other sites when we started often asked you to think of your relationships as either friends or not friends. And we argued that was not reflective of real life. In real life you don’t have this. You have this. And so we built circles as a core part of Google+. And we’re happy to report that today more than half of all sharing that’s done on Google+ is done to private circles.

Now, that same dynamic exists in the world of real time communications. When you think about a real time communication, somebody you want to talk with, you don’t think about wanting to talk to a computer. You want to talk to a person. And yet despite 50 years of work in real time communication products, we still are stuck with gadgets that get in the way. Think for a moment about some of the real time communications products, the choices that you have. Some are very nice. They work on one platform.

So if you think about your friend, you have to ask yourself – are they on a particular operating system? Why you should OSs matter? People matter. Or think about other choices that are very popular on mobile, fantastic ways to communicate on mobile. But if your brother is at work on a desktop or a laptop, why should he be left out? Or there are other solutions that do group video very, very well and messaging. But it’s very difficult to do photos.

Frankly, even Google’s own services have been fragmented and confused at times. What we want to do is fill in all the boxes. Because when we fill in all the boxes, we believe, finally, technology can just go away and people can focus on what makes them the happiness. And that’s just hanging out.

So we’re introducing today a new application, Hangouts. And we think we’ve built a product that is about conversations that last with people that you love. Let me show you the product.

Now, as Matt goes to the demo here, the first thing you’ll notice on Matt’s Android phone is the new icon, a standalone app. And Matt will go ahead and click on Hangouts and open up the application. Now, you’re looking here at a list of conversations, not contacts. Some of those conversations are one on one. Some of those conversations are group conversations. But the primary pivot, the focus is on those conversations.

Now, if Matt wants to get his contacts, maybe he wants to add someone, it’s one tap away. You can see Google will rank the important people that he normally talks to and make that easily available for either a message or a video call. But let’s go back to the conversations. There’s several attributes about these conversations that I want to talk about.

The first is my favorite. And that is these conversations can be long lasting. So as Matt goes back in time, you’re able to see that conversation. Imagine that you have your family in a conversation for many months or a year. There’s the holiday party. There’s the vacation you took together. There’s important moments like the birth of a child. All those things are stored with you even as you change devices in those long running conversations. Of course, we give you the ability to turn off history. Of course, we give you the ability to delete those things.

But having the ability to save those conversations is, I think, delightful and amazing. Another aspect is that the conversations are rich and alive. Your photos are stored in albums. This is amazing. This baby’s not even three months old and he’s already learned how to face pump. But all the images that you’ve shared as a family are all right there.

In addition to beautiful images that are easily stored and saved, the conversation feels alive. Look at the bottom. You can see there as people join, they show up. As they’re typing, they animate out. You can see exactly where someone has read to. It really feels like you’re in the same room together. And we think that’s delightful. By the way, you’re looking at it on the web, you’re looking at it on Android, and you’re looking at it on iOS, all available today.

And, by the way, two other points. One is a point that Hugo made. I think you’re going to love how the notifications are all synced. So if you wipe a notification from the desktop or on Android, it’ll go away on another device. It’s beautiful. I think you’ll like that. But my favorite feature– sorry about that.

Let’s go back to the demo. One other feature I didn’t talk about that was pretty critical, which is at Google we always believed that the best way to do real time communications is face to face. And so in that conversation, Matt can tap on that video icon and everyone in that conversation will be dropped into a video chat. There, you can see Matt.

He’s into the video chat and everyone’s being dropped in. Group video at no charge. Isn’t that fantastic?

Okay, let’s go back to the slides. Now let’s switch topics.

And, finally, let’s talk about photos. Photography can be a very rewarding experience. I know for me it captures the most important moments of my life. I remember when I was on the beach and I asked my kids to stand together to take a picture. I didn’t know my son was going to wrap his arms around my daughter. I didn’t know my daughter was going to reach up and hold his hand. But for the rest of my life I’m going to picture them like this despite the fact that he’s now taller than me. That’s how I imagine him. I’m not alone.

You too have amazing images that are the most important precious memories of your life. But if we’re honest with each other, we’ll also admit that photography is very labor intensive. It takes a lot of time to organize, edit, enhance, upload and share your photos, time that many of us don’t have. At Google we think we can give you some of your time back.

By combining your camera with our cloud, we can do some of those labor intensive tasks automatically for you. In fact, today we’d like to introduce the notion of Google’s data centers being your new darkroom. Now, what does that mean? Well, when you think of the cloud, most of us think of back up. But today we’re going to go beyond back up, and we’re going to talk about three exciting new areas that combine the data center, Google’s cloud, with photography.

But before I do that, let me just begin with what you already know, back up. Now, since we’ve launched Google+, we’ve always backed up your photos, unlimited, all your photos at standard size. And a few months ago we introduced the ability for you to choose an option where we would upload your photos, not at standard size, but at full resolution. And we offered 5 gigabytes free. This week we announced that we’re going from 5 gigabytes to 15 gigabytes free.

Now, why does full resolution matter? Well, what you’re looking at here is an eight megapixel shot. An eight megapixel shot– you can clap if you want, go ahead.

I love it when you clap and I haven’t even made the point on the slide. That’s great. But I think you get it.

Eight megapixels is pretty common. Some cell phones like the Galaxy S4 go up to 13 megapixels. And when you have an important image, you don’t want 619 pixels or 1024 or 2048. You want all the pixels because some memories are not meant to be downsized. And we give you that ability on Google+.

Let’s move on. Now let’s talk about Highlight. What you’re looking at is 686 of my vacation photos from my trip to New Zealand. Now, there are some beautiful images in there, images I want to share. But I don’t have time to pick them out because my vacation is over.

Now, I suspect you’ve been in the same boat. It takes time do all this stuff. Google can pick the best pictures for you. We can go from these 686 pictures to these. It’s remarkably accurate.

Some of you must be saying, how did Google know those were the best? Let me tell you. We do lots of things to choose the best. Some of things that we do is we look for images that are blurry. And they’re not going to make the highlights. We look for images that are duplicates. I took four images of the same mountain. We’ll pick one.

We look for images that are not the greatest exposure and they’re unlikely to make your highlights. Or we even do amazing things like we recognize the Eiffel Tower. We can recognize in your images if you’re at an important landmark. In this case, this is a beautiful shot of Queenstown. And we boost that image so that it’s more likely to make the highlights.

We also analyze to see if there are people there. Are the people happy? Are they smiling? Might make the highlights. Our machine learning algorithms have also been trained by literally hundreds of human raters so that the machine learning algorithms have now begun to account for aesthetics, for human taste. What do people find beautiful? And we’re able to boost that image. And then my favorite is affinity. We recognize who’s important to you, who’s in your family circle. And we apply appropriate social boost so that your wife and your children are in the highlights. It’s absolutely amazing.

We think you’re going to love it. And it’s going to save you time. This is a shot of what we’re rolling out this evening. This is the actual product, the desktop version. You’ll note that we’ll give you your highlights. And right there at the bottom you could always click and see all the other images as well. So it’s right there for you.

Now let’s talk about enhancing your images. One of my favorite photographers famously said, you don’t take a photograph. You make it.

And if you know a good photographer, a professional, you know that’s true. Professionals can take a good image and make it amazing because they have access to tools like this, powerful tools that require lots of skills that run on expensive machines that take lots of time. And you can do amazing things. The problem is that for the average person these tools often look like this to them, like a bewildering set of knobs that they don’t understand. Today we’re introducing auto enhance. Auto enhance is an easy button to make your memories look beautiful. We can automatically take an image that looks like this and make it look like this.

Now, how in the world do we do that? Well, we’re going to show you some of the things that we do, things like tonal distribution, skin softening, noise reduction, structure, vignetting, red eye reduction, so much that we do. And we don’t have time in this keynote to show you all of them. But we’re going to highlight a few.

Let’s begin with tonal distribution. All of us have taken pictures that are over or under exposed. You might think Google would find the middle ground. We do better than that. Remember, our algorithms take into account human taste. So we can take an image like this and just make it perfect. Let me show you another example.

Let’s talk about skin softening. Now, I’m going to apologize in advance because you’re going to see a huge photo of me. But we thought we’d pick someone that no one could get offended over. So we’ll start that with me.

Now let’s talk about recognizing people’s faces. If you have an inexpensive phone or even an inexpensive camera, those devices can recognize faces. But the state of the art today is to put a rectangle around a face and say, we think there’s a face there. We’ve had several breakthroughs at Google where we’re now able to deeply recognize the human face and skin. We can tease apart exactly where is the hairline. What are the eyes, the teeth? Is the person wearing jewelry? Do they have glasses on? And we can separate all that out.

That breakthrough means that when we do the other effects, things like structure, tonal enhancement, we can do something different on the clouds, the water, the mountains. And we can treat the human face completely separately like a professional would in a tool.

Now, let’s talk about one of those effects. Let’s talk about skin softening. Now, how many of you like your passport or your driver’s license photos? No one does. Well, why not? Because photographs often exaggerate our flaws. In real life when you look at me or your friends, you don’t see every one of their flaws. But in a picture, you see all of them.

In fact, we’re going to make it worse. Let’s zoom in on this picture a little bit. Like I said, I used my own so I wouldn’t offend anyone else. Wrinkles, right? But chances are when you’re talking to me, you don’t stare at them. Watch what happens when we apply skin softening, just gently toned down. Let’s zoom all the way out. That’s the original image. That’s with skin softening enhancements. Just gently and beautifully enhanced. We think you’re going to love it when we apply this across your photographs.

Let’s talk about noise reduction. Maybe you’ve taken a picture in low light, particularly with a cell phone. You get grain, noise on your image. Look at the sky in this photograph. Well, our noise reduction filters can automatically take something that looks like this and make it look like that. Pretty amazing.

Let’s talk about structure. Here’s a picture that I took when I was in New Zealand. I remember that image having more life. It was more vivid. Well, what happened? Well, the camera palette balanced everything out so it became flat. A professional would go into a tool and they would add a lot more structure to the sky. We can do that automatically. And so we can take an image that looks like this and auto enhance it to look like that.

There’s obviously lots more that we don’t have time to talk about. But what we’re going to bring up a special tool, a debugging tool. And we’re going to tease apart some of these effects and show you how they layer on to make an image awesome. So here’s an image, untouched out of the camera. And we’re going to start layering on these enhancements. Let’s begin with tonal enhancement. Let’s add some skin softening. Before and after on the skin softening.

Now let’s add some structure for the clouds. Let’s add vignette to emphasize the human face. And let’s go before and then auto enhanced by Google. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

One more example. A beautiful landscape photograph of 2Queenstown that I took. I think it’s pretty great. Let’s see what Google can do. Once again, tonal enhancement. Doesn’t need any skin softening here. Structure. A little bit around the edges. Darken the edges. Look at the original and what Google did. Amazing.

All you have to do is upload your images and we will apply all of this for you on all of your photographs while still giving you control. This is an actual picture or an actual shot of the product itself that’s rolling out this afternoon. If you mouse over any photograph that’s yours, we’ll show you that enhanced icon. And when Matt clicks on that enhanced icon, we’ll go back to the original. And if you let go, you’ll see the enhancement. And if you want, you can click under the More menu, and you can always turn this on or off, either globally or on an individual photograph. So we think this is amazing, and it’s going to save you lots of time.

Let’s continue on. We’ve talked about backup. We’ve talked about enhancing, highlighting your photos and enhancing your photos. Now let’s talk about awesome. Auto awesome creates a new image from one that did not exist. Let me give you an example. We have lots of these. Let me give you an example. We recognize that you’ve taken several pictures in burst mode or taken around the same time together. We will automatically gift to you in your album something that looks like this.

Here’s another example. Maybe you’ve taken lots of shots of children. They’re never looking at the same time. Go back to your album. You’ll see a gift for you. You’ll have another one of these auto awesome motions. By the way, over the past two weeks in a dark launch state, we’ve gone through all the albums you’ve hosted on Google and gifted all of these to you. You’ll see them turned on this afternoon.

We’re introducing five auto awesome effects today. You saw a demonstration of motion. Let me briefly talk about the others. If we recognize that you have multiple portraits together of people, we will automatically create a collage. HDR is self explanatory. We’ll do that for you.

If we see multiple pictures of the same people in burst mode where they’re not all smiling, we will find where they’re smiling and we will construct a new image with all of them smiling. It’s amazing.

And, finally, a pano. So if you’ve taken an image, we recognize it’s at the same spot, we’ll stitch them together beautifully and put that in your album for free.

So to summarize, today we’ve shown you a new, modern, multicolumn stream, a stream that’s about design and depth so you can explore your interests on Google+.

We’ve shown you a new Hangouts application, one that’s about conversations that last with the people you love. And, finally, we’ve shown you a new photos experience and shown you what can happen when Google is your darkroom. Taken collectively, we think we just put the Google into Google+.

And we’ve finally allowed technology to get out of the way and allow you to do what you do best, live, learn, and, yes, even love. Thank you.

Now we’d like to talk about what was possibly your first Google love, Search. Join me in welcoming Amit Singhal to the stage. Thank you.

Amit Singhal: Yes. It’s a provocative title, indeed, especially coming from Google. But I believe with good reason.

Search is dramatically changing right before our eyes. And in the next 15 minutes, I want to show you how and in fact why. But before we dive in, let me just tell you why I’m so excited to be here.

I grew up in a small town in India in the foothills of the Himalayas. And, yes, that’s me when I was three. Very cute. Indeed, my friends asked me too, what happened? Growing up, like many of you, I was hooked on Star Trek. I would watch endless episodes of Star Trek, captivated by the future technology it showed. I mean, a computer you could talk to and it will answer everything you ask it? I dreamt of building that computer one day.

And little did I know that I would grow up to become the person responsible for building my dream for the entire world. Now, at Google we are building three experiences that are making huge advances towards building that dream. The search of future will need to answer, converse, and anticipate. And today we have announcements across all these areas.

So let’s start answers. And let me show you what we have been up to recently. Last year, when we launched the Knowledge Graph, it was a huge advance in search technology. Knowledge Graph enabled Google to move beyond keywords and understand real world entities, unique people, places, and things, and the relationships between them. Knowledge graph allowed us to answer questions we couldn’t have answered before like what are the movies by J.J Abrams? Or what’s the release date of one of the most anticipated movies of the season?

Now, we have been continuously improving the Knowledge Graph. With over 570 million entities and growing, the graph becomes more and more powerful each day. And today I am happy to announce that very soon you will start getting important statistics powered by the Knowledge Graph.

Now you can already find answers to questions like what’s the population of India. However, starting today, we will be anticipating your next question, which may very well be, how does it compare to the population of other countries? And not only will we give you the answer alongside the trend line, we will show you all that in comparison to China and the United States, the two countries who are most often compared to India population wise.

Now, we have launched Knowledge Graph in English and eight other languages. And today we are adding Polish– Yes, my friends — Turkish, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese as new languages for the Knowledge Graph. And while we are incredibly excited about our progress here, we’re just getting started. And we know we can do a whole lot better because sometimes the answer you’re looking for is that song or that video that your friend may have sent you or it’s your upcoming flight or restaurant reservation. And you should be able to find those answers from your own world without having to dig and sift through your email, your documents, and your calendar. You should simply be able to ask Google for your upcoming flight or your trip plans, even your restaurant reservations or the package that’s about to arrive, and even, of course, your vacation photos.

Now, people who have opted in to over Gmail search field trial are already enjoying this powerful experience. However, something that is as important as giving you the answers and giving them to you in the most natural way possible is so that you can pretty much ask Google like you would ask a friend and not by having to type keywords into a search box. This is why we have been working hard on technologies like voice recognition and natural language understanding.

Now, we have already launched conversational search on Android and on iOS platform. You can tape the mic, ask Google your question, and you can get a spoken response back. And today, for the first time, I’m happy to announce that all this goodness of conversational search will be coming to all your desktops and laptops through Chrome.

While you can already use the microphone in Chrome to search, we will be bringing conversational search and hot wording, a new interface, or as I call it, no interface so that you don’t even have to click the mic to search. You can sit back, relax, say okay, Google– Ask your question and have Google speak back the answer. So we talked about the power of building these new powerful experiences to answer your questions and letting them ask you in the most natural way possible.

However, we think that another essential experience is our ability to anticipate and suggest to you the right thing at the right time even before you ask for them. Here, of course, I’m talking about Google Now. Google Now was launched for Android last year. And within a short amount of time, it has become a must have for its users. Recently we launched Google Now for iPhones and iPads through the Google Search app, and users are loving it. It’s getting better and better by the day. And the more you use it, the more useful it becomes for you.

And today we are happy to announce that very soon you will be able to set reminders for yourself in Google Now and they will show up at the right place at the right time whenever you need them.

In addition, we’re also launching public transit commute time cards and more cards for music, television, TV shows, and video games you are interested in. Now, we are confident that all this momentum in Google Now will make Google even more useful as an assistive tool. And we are very excited about it. But what we are really excited about is how all these experiences are coming together to make your life easy.

And the best way to understand this is to actually see them in action. I’d now like to invite Johanna Wright on the stage to show you how all these experiences are coming together in a beautiful way.

Johanna Wright: Thank you, Amit. I’m so excited to be here to bring to life what Amit was talking about.

Let’s start with a scenario that might happen in my family, planning a day trip to Santa Cruz with my husband and kids. I’m going to walk over to the computer here. And what you see here is a Chrome browser in full screen mode. And Amit was talking about hot wording. Now, this is really hot.

We just took it off the press this morning. And I’ve actually never tried hot wording in a room with so much ambient noise. So no hands.

Okay, Google. Show me things to do in Santa Cruz.

Google: Here are popular attractions in Santa Cruz.

What you see here is coming from our Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph knows the Santa Cruz is a place and that this list of places are related to Santa Cruz. I like the Natural Bridges State Beach. It’s a nice place to relax with my family. But I kind of like something more active. 8What about the Boardwalk?

Okay, Google, Show me pictures of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

Google: Here you go, some pictures related to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

Nice. I love a wooden roller coaster. So does my husband. It’d be nice to see if our kids like it too. The only question is will the drive be too long? Okay, Google. How far is it from here?

Google: The drive from your location to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is 73.9 miles.

That was my favorite search. And you know why? It’s because I barely said anything. It, here, well, somehow Google knew that it was the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and here was right here.

Now, the final thing that I’m going to need to prepare is where to eat. My kids love seafood. My daughter actually loves muscles. And it’s pretty funny to watch a four-year-old eating muscles. So why don’t we try and find a seafood restaurant? Okay, Google, show me seafood restaurants in Santa Cruz.

Google: Here are addresses for seafood restaurants near Santa Cruz.

Now, I’ve heard of this one, Johnny Harborside. I can click, look at the details, and even go ahead and 2make reservations right here. So there you have it. This is the latest voice experience coming to Chrome and Chrome OS.

Now let’s fast forward to my trip to Santa Cruz. Here I am enjoying the beautiful weather with my kids. We’re going on the kiddie rides. But you know what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about how I can get back to the Giant Dipper, that old wooden roller coaster. I don’t know if my kids are tall enough to ride it. So we can walk over and check. Or wouldn’t it be more convenient to just ask Google? How tall do you have to be to ride the Giant Dipper?

Google: You must be at least four feet, three inches tall to ride Giant Dipper.

Nice. Looks like my son can go on. My daughter’s too short so my husband’s going to have to wait this one out.

So the next thing I’m going to have to check is will I have enough time to get to the Giant Dipper and get back in time for my reservation? Now, Google Now anticipates my information needs. So when I swipe up into Google Now, I see the reservation right here. It’s at 2:00 PM and it’s only five minutes away. So now I know I can make it over to the roller coaster in time.

And when I come back, I can click on this Navigate link and get turn by turn directions right to the restaurant.

So now let’s fast forward again. I’ve ridden the roller coaster. I’m in the restaurant. We’re eating our muscles. And my husband and my conversation turns to an upcoming business trip I have to New York this week. Usually on Wednesdays I take my daughter to school. But I’m not sure if this Wednesday I’m going to have enough time to get her to school and then make it to the airport to get my flight. I don’t quite remember when my flight is. So wouldn’t it be great to just ask Google? When does my flight leave?

Google: Delta Airlines flight 1940 from SFO to JFK leaves at 11:30 AM on May 22.

For those of you participating in our search field trial, this will work today. Now, the last time I was in New York, I was there with my family. I wasn’t there on business. I was there with my family to take them to see the sites. I saw some old friends. I had them meet my kids. And my friend Katie asked me to be sure to give her call the next time I’m in town, be sure that we can get together. So before I forget, why don’t I get in touch with Katie? Send an email to Katie. I’ll be in town on Thursday and was wondering if you’re available for dinner. Okay, sent.

Now, Katie’s a bit forgetful. So I want to make sure to give her a call right when I get to town. Remind me to call Katie next Wednesday.

What you see here is our latest voice action, reminders, that are launching in Google Now today. Reminders work on times, dates, and locations, including home and work. Now, when I set this reminder Google Now will remind me at just the right moment.

Fast forward again. Fly to New York. I get out of my plane. I go to get my taxi. In the past what I would be doing is rifling through my backpack for the reservation so that I could tell the taxi driver where my hotel was. But Google Now has just the right information just when I need it. So I can swipe in, see my reservation at the W. I scroll down, I see my reminder to call Katie. So I’ve talked to the taxi driver. I’ve talked to my friend Katie. I’m just sitting back. I’m so excited to be back in New York.

I’m remembering the trip I had last year when I took my kids around, when they met my friend Katie. I’d love to show Katie the pictures from this last trip. Now, for my final demo, wouldn’t it be great if I could just ask Google? Show me my pictures from New York last year.

Oh, and those are my pictures from New York. And there’s Katie reading a book to my kids. These are the building blocks and the experiences Amit was talking about. I hope you are starting to see how it’s all coming together.

With that, let’s welcome Amit back on stage.

Amit Singhal: Thank you, Johanna. I’m incredibly proud of the search experience that we are building and tremendously excited to bring it to hundreds of millions of people around the world on the devices they rely on every day. It’s important to remember, though, this experience is rapidly developing. And it will take some time before it becomes the predominant search experience. There are several complex and unsolved scientific problems that we will have to solve before we get there. But our investment and commitment to getting there sooner rather than later is immense.

The announcements today are a really good sign of the progress we have made. With more features in the Knowledge Graph and more languages, conversational voice search and hot wording coming to Chrome on desktops and laptops, and new Now functionality including reminders and various other cards, Search is really becoming a beautiful ubiquitous experience that intelligently answers your questions and assists you throughout the day across all screens. The idea of building such a powerful means of getting knowledge to the world is what inspires us every day.

With the simple touch of a mike, from the Queen of England to the most humble farmer in Africa, from the developer who just joined the Glass Explorer program to that the mother in a rural village in India who just got her first basic smartphone, everyone can easily access all of humanity’s information and get what they need to improve their and their family’s lives. That, my friends, is the power of the new search experience that we are building at Google. And it will change how you and I experience this beautiful journey that we call life.

And so we have talked about the future of search and how it’s changing right before our eyes. And we know that a perfect map of the word is foundational to delivering exactly what you want, when you want it, and where you want it.

So I’d like to turn it over to Brian McClendon to talk about the future of Google Maps.

Brian McClendon: Thank you very much. Hi. I’m Brian McClendon and I lead the Maps team here at Google. Google Maps help you navigate from place to place. But it also helps you explore and discover the world around you.

Today we’re going to talk about the future of Google Maps and where it’s going. But to talk about the future, I need to talk a little bit about the past.

Back in 2005 Maps was a problematic experience on the internet. It was very slow, 10 to 20 seconds for a map, multiple boxes you had to type things into. Google Maps came up with the idea of pre rendering the map tiles, providing that single search box, and making a smooth, fluid experience. And we launched. And many people were very excited about it.

But Europeans had a bit of an issue. And they sent this screen shot. We had launched with only part of the world. And it shows the data is very important. We worked incredibly hard. And by 2008 we had licensed data and had turn by turn directions in 22 countries. But we discovered that keeping data up to date was very hard. We created a project called Ground Truth.

Ground Truth is taking authoritative data sources, combining with all of the process and algorithms at Google, and making the best data set we can possibly make. Recently we launched two more countries, Thailand and Indonesia, bringing it to a total of 43 countries overall with the Ground Truth data. But this doesn’t cover the whole world. In many cases, countries didn’t have good maps. We created a tool called map maker. Map maker allows users to contribute their data and make the best maps they can. And in some cases, those maps are now the best maps that country has anywhere. And that’s helped us cover 199 countries around the world.

But there’s one country that was missing. We had some of it in map maker. But just very recently we published North Korea, making 200. Now, you can take a look at what North Korea looked like before. We just had this river and the city name. But adding all of the detail for Google, actually having people tell us the POIs, the places, the parks, the neighborhoods, the street, gives it so much more depth.

And there’s another thing you see on this map that was really important to us. Geocoded photos changed the experience of everything. They allow you to dip into a place and really get a sense of the place exactly. And those Geocoded photos inspired us. And in 2007 we launched a product called Street View which actually created these big panoramas. And we launched it in seven cities in the United States. But those seven cities weren’t enough.

Recently we launched two more countries, Hungary and Lesotho. And we now have 50 countries around the world covered with Street View imagery. We’ve driven 5 million miles with these cars. But we haven’t just taken Street View on the road. We’ve taken it on trains up the Swiss Alps. We’ve taken it down the Amazon on a boat. And even added beautiful imagery from the Great Barrier Reef and other places around the ocean. And as you can see here, this is an incredibly immersive experience.

So being able to go here, unless you’re a snorkeler or scuba diver, you’ll never visit this place. But you can really get a taste of how the different places look and preview the place overall. This was the imagination that created Google Earth in the first place. Imagery is very important to us. And we’ve been working with satellite imagery and aerial imagery for a long time. But in 2012 we started generating new data from our existing aerial imagery. Combining oblique images, many different photographs from around a building, we’re actually able to generate 3D geometry of large, urban cores. And we’re now covering far more places with 3D buildings than we ever had before. This idea of generating data from other data is fundamental to what Google does.

We have so many different sources of it that there are also so many different kinds of areas you can have. We have the base maps. We have Street View drivers with GPS tracks of their cars. We have images from Street View, Satellite, aerial, those 3D buildings I talked about, and also terrain data that we generated. Each one of them is good but can be improved in combination. And this combination, it’s called bundle adjusting. And it’s incredibly important to improving the quality of Maps overall.

You know, one of the best examples of this is our local business data. Locating local businesses precisely is actually pretty hard. But using Street View, computer vision, and algorithms we now have over 40 million precise geocodes locating these businesses around the world, making ours the most comprehensive data set of precisely located local businesses. So this data is at the basis of everything that Google does with its products. But it’s also at the basis of everything that you do.

In 2005 Google Maps API launched. But in the last year we’ve had 30% year over year growth. And today, I’d like to announce we have over one million websites using Google Maps in their site and improving their site. These sites are visited by over a billion people every week and actually get more use than Google Maps does on Google products alone. So Google Maps API is incredibly important to us. And it’s thanks to people like you who’ve added their Google Maps to the power of their application.

Now, obviously applications are important to you. And you heard about Hugo introducing the various mobile APIs for Android. And they have really improved things with user location and the Android SDK for Maps V2. We also have Google Maps SDK for iOS. And being able to bring Google Maps 3D camera motion and fluid motion into your applications, I think, has changed a lot of the applications around. And the uptake has been incredible.

I’d like to quickly introduce the 17 sessions that we’re going to have in the Google Maps track over the next couple of days and highlight one thing in particular. There’s a product called Google Maps Engine that you may have heard of, uploading your data into the cloud. If you can do that, you can serve your data to everybody with the same performance and quality and integrate it with the Google Maps experience. And with the Google Maps API, you can actually have your applications read and write that data set and really change how things work.

But now I’d like to introduce Daniel Graf, who is going to talk about the next generation of Google Maps for mobile. Daniel?

Daniel Graf: Thank you, Brian. Hi, everyone. I know when it comes to mobile phones, everyone in here is probably here for Android. But as most of you probably heard last December, we launched Google Maps on the iPhone. It has been a tremendous success. The feedback has been very positive. People called it sleek, simple, beautiful. And let’s not forget, accurate.

So if you’re an iPhone user, you don’t have it on your phone yet, go to the app store. Download it today. Brian talked a lot about the power of Google Maps data. He mentioned we’re going beyond just directions and navigation. Maps are also about exploring and discovering places. And nowhere is that more critical than on a mobile phone.

Today we’re going to announce and we’re going to give you a sneak preview of the next major release from Google Maps for mobile coming to enjoy and, of course, iOS. For that we’re going to take a little stroll through San Francisco.

I’m going to start here on my Nexus 4. And, as you can see, when I start this it’s a brand new design, a new look. And actually we’re at Moscone. I can zoom in. I can see all the beautiful 3D buildings, which we also saw in the Android demo before. But for now, as I mentioned, sometimes it’s about what is the right place to go. So at the moment, let’s say I’m in the mood for Burmese food and here in San Francisco. So I’m just going to search for Burmese food.

And when you look at the results, the first result we get is Burma SuperStar has a 4.0 rating, over 1,000 reviews. Well, I want to find out more. I actually see my friend, Salahuddin. He rated it five stars. I trust his taste. So I want to look a little more. I just swipe down. I have different imagery I can look at. Of course, once you go there, you can rate and review. You can upload photos. And as some of you, here I have different reviews I can see. And some of you noticed here, there’s a rating scale of 4.0 there. So today we’re going to announce a new five point rating scale across all Google Maps products, so if you search for a restaurant on google.com or if you use Maps on the desktop or on a mobile phone.

Now I want to go to a different use case. And it’s actually quite a common one. Now, how often have you searched for pizza? That’s what we’re going to do. And we’re going to do it this time in the Mission District. And let’s see where we are. Let’s see what results we’re getting here. And no surprise, we’re getting a lot of results. And with this new UI, it’s very easy to browse through it. I can just swipe to different results. I can bring up the details and look at, this is a good place to go. But something caught my eye here. It’s the Zagat badge. What does that mean? And before we look at user reviews and my friends reviews. But sometimes you want to have a trusted opinion from an expert. We integrated a brand new Zagat experience. And, as you know, Zagat is one of the most trusted brands on opinions about restaurants and places to go.

Here you see a little cart. And you see the Pizzeria Delfina is actually on a list called restaurants worth the wait in San Francisco. I can also get all the details, such as the editorial review from Zagat and the Zagat scores. So sometimes it’s important to get a trusted expert to tell you, hey, this is a place you can go.

Now it has been quite a long morning, an exciting morning. But I’m going to go back to where we are right now around Moscone and downtown here in San Francisco. And what I’m going to look for is I’m in the mood for some coffee. So I’m going to search for coffee. And let’s see what the results are here.

And, for example, well, first result, surprise, surprise. There’s a lot of Starbucks in town. Has a high rating. And something else caught my eye here, an offer. Let’s have a look at it. And actually we have integrated here a brand new offers experience with great deals from some of the world’s best brands. In this example, this is Starbucks.

And as we see, they’re introducing a new drink, Starbucks Refreshers this afternoon. Half price off. Please don’t run there. I’m giving you a preview here. And if we go in there, I can get the details about the offer. And then I can save it for later as well. So we see here the offer about it. I use it later. And then I can go this afternoon if I want to. We have many launch partners beyond Starbucks. And there’s many more to come. This is the new offers experience in Google Maps for mobile.

So now I want to talk a little bit about directions. And a lot of you are using public transport. I know that when I look at our numbers. We have currently over a million transit stops in the whole world which we cover. And for those who are using cars or ride around with bicycles, 50 billion kilometers of turn by turn directions. Imagine, 50 billion kilometers.

Today we’re going to announce several new key features to make your navigation experience even better. For example, we have a revamped incident experience. We’re adding live coverage of incidents from all around the world. So in traffic view, for example, you can see in real time incident alerts. You can just tap on it to see details and then you know what’s going on. Even cooler, another feature is dynamic rerouting.

Let’s say you’re driving along your route and something happens ahead of you. The conditions worsen. Google gives you an early warning and it tells you, hey, there’s a better route to take. So this was the next generation of Google Maps for smartphones.

As we all know, mobile today is not just about smartphones. Should we go a little bigger? Screen size? So I’m very happy to announce today that we have a brand new fully dedicated tablet Maps experience. And we’re going to have a little look here. So we’re still here in San Francisco. I’m going to scroll around a little bit. And actually we are here downtown.

Here’s something pretty cool. And, by the way, all the features you have seen on the smartphone and on the tablet, they work vice versa on both platforms. Here we’re at Macy’s. We have indoors. We have tens of thousands of places in the world where you can see into the buildings and see what stores are there, what you can find out there, what’s going on in those buildings. But sometimes you don’t really know what you’re in the mood for. You’re like entertain me, show me. What can I discover in San Francisco? I’m visiting here. So you’re not typing in a search query. All you do is — and this is a new experience. You say let’s explore. And it’s a beautiful explore experience where you can say, I’m in a mood to eat something, to drink, to shop. It’s a little early to sleep right now.

So I would say, let’s play. Let’s get entertained. And when I go through this, I can go to museums, to public parks, and– well, let’s take one you probably heard before, the Golden Gate Bridge. Very high rating, 4.6. As you get all the details here and just at the touch of a button, you want to see how it looks like there. You have the Street View experience. And, of course, it’s very easy to go there afterwards. So this is a new way to explore and discover your surroundings. There you have it. So these were just a few of the new features for Google Maps for mobile. It’s a brand new experience.

And as I mentioned, we emphasize a lot on discovery, exploration, better navigation, and a beautiful new design. We are truly excited about this new product. It’s coming to your Android devices and your iOS devices, smartphones, and tablets this summer. It’s pretty cool, right?

But where are we going to go next with Google Maps? As Brian mentioned earlier on, Google Maps launched in 2005. We currently have over a billion users every month using our products. And as you all know, Google Maps has defined modern mapping. And we’re about to reinvent it again. And for that I want to introduce Berni and Jonah. And they’re going to tell you a little bit more about the future of Google Maps. Berni, Jonah.

Berni Seefeld: Remember the first time you used Google Maps. And now imagine that same feeling again. We have been working on something that we believe that’s just that. We looked at we have today and we saw there’s three things missing.

Number one, you and me and everybody else, we look at the exact same map. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could build billions of maps, one for every user? And not only that, a map that adapts to what you do, a map built for you.

And number two, Google has all this imagery, from satellite to streets, indoors, and even under water. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could bring this all together into one experience that would be fun and easy to explore?

And number three, what if you could make everything simpler and more powerful by coming up with whole new ways to interact with the map itself, making that map-to-user interface. With these three principles and our great data foundation, we went ahead and rebuilt Google Maps on the ground up. Jonah, show us how it looks.

Jonah Jones: This is the new Google Maps. Focusing the design and the interactions on the map have made everything simpler and a real pleasure to use. The map is rich and beautiful with vibrant colors and textures.

Berni Seefeld: So this is a computer running Chrome. And we’re using the latest open standards like WebGL to make the experience really smooth since snappy. These are vector maps in a browser. So let me tell you a little story.

I just moved here about a year ago. This is a nice neighborhood. And it was an exciting time as I got to explore a new area. And I love exploring. And so one of the first things I did was search for restaurants. And this is our new search experience, no more just ten pins. All the results are labeled directly on the map. This makes exploring really fast and easy. And the top results, they come with a useful description that gives you a flavor of the place so you can make decisions very quickly.

No need for cross referencing, everything is right there on the map. The map is the user interface. Now, of course, there’s this other way how you can find restaurants. You can ask your friends. And now you can do that directly in the new Google Maps. We added a filter. And now you see those search results are the sushi places that my friends have reviewed, like Kiji here that my friend Stephanie likes. And these are our new cards. They summarize everything that is important about this place.

But earlier I was talking about imagery. And you see those three photos. And I love this part. Let’s take a closer look. We just flew into our new immersive imagery experience. And it actually looks like a great place. I might go there tonight. Let’s head back out. Clear the search.

So earlier I was saying this map is built for you. Let me show you how that works. So I’ve been living in this area for about a year now. And I’ve done many, many searches. I’ve reviewed places, starred places, and I made great new friends. And my map got better and better. The places you see on this map, they are my landmarks. Like Frances here, that’s one of the first places I went to. It’s a great restaurant. I love it and I keep going back. So it’s very important to me.

And just the other day someone told me about a bike shop and said it’s right next to Frances. And I knew exactly where it is. It is a landmark for me and that’s why it’s on my map. But it’s a fairly small place. So it might not be on Jonah’s map. It might not be on your map. But it’s a landmark for me, and so it’s on my map.

And when you are logged in, you get your map and we’ll highlight everything that is important to you. Now, it’s not just about all the places that I already know. A good friend of mine is in town for I/O. And I thought we could try a new restaurant. My map is going to help me with just that. See these places here, they are recommendations. Like Bar Tartine shows up because it’s similar to Frances. And I looked like Frances so it’s a recommendation for me. And Foreign Cinema shows up because my friend Anita likes it. So these two look like great options. And this is how Google Maps helps you discover new places without even having to search. So this is how we can build a map for you using the same data as Google Now so it will get better and better the more you use it.

So that’s how we build a map for every person. Now let me show you how we build a map for every place. So next weekend some friends of mine from Italy are in town, and they have children. So I thought we could go to the Randall Museum. It’s near my home, and it’s really great for kids. But it’s a little bit tricky to get to. See, this little road here that leads up to the museum, it’s not even labeled. And that makes perfect sense. It’s a very small unimportant road. But it’s important for the Randall Museum. So watch what happens when we click on it?

Now the street is labeled and all the other streets that lead to this place are highlighted as well. Let’s have another look. Before, a regular map. And after the roads are highlighted and labeled. This map makes it so much easier to understand how to get to this place. So we can build a unique map for every place on every click. Isn’t that amazing?

But I know my friend’s kids and they will definitely want to explore more. Now that’s going to be really easy because now all the landmarks you see on the map are related to the Randall Museum. And so they’re all about kids and museums. You can see the Cartoon Art Museum. You can see the Walt Disney Museum. And when we click on that, we get a whole new map with new places to explore. So we can click on the Exploratorium.

And when we click on Exploratorium, another map appears. So we can keep going and going. This is a great way to explore new places. It’s really easy, just clicking and clicking. So it’s simple and powerful. The map is the user interface. So now let’s see how we can get there. So we could click here on directions. But for the most common case there’s an even simpler way. See, my home is right there on the map. And it says a 60 minute drive. So if I want to get directions from my home, I can just click on that. And this is our new directions experience. A great new thing is that we directly compare driving with public transit on the map. And that’s going to be really useful because this weekend we won’t have a car. And we wanted to make public transit much, much smarter.

Before, we showed you the next three departures. But now we are going to look at every departure, every second, for the entire next week and summarize that for you. So you can see here that you can take any of these lines and they run every three minutes. So that makes taking public transit so much easier.

And if you want more details, you can use our new schedule viewer. So the kids, they don’t want to walk too much. So I’m looking for a trip that has less walking and less transfers even if it takes a bit longer. And, here, that looks like a great one. So this is the future of getting directions.

Jonah Jones: Now, as Brian talked about earlier, we’ve collected tons of imagery. And we made a real focus of the design to make sure it’s easy and fun to explore.

Berni Seefeld: So my friends, they’re from Rome, and so they insist that next time I come and visit them. So let’s take a trip. So this is a really nice 3D model of the Saint Peter’s Basilica. But can we have a more realistic view? No plug-ins. No downloads. This is the Google Earth experience right here on a browser. And that’s not all.

You see those row of images at the bottom. These are other great views of that area. That makes it really easy to explore. And the beauty of this place is really on the inside. So let’s go on a tour. This is a 3D photo tour that is automatically generated from user uploaded photos. So it will only get better and better. So let’s head back to San Francisco. So this is the Moscone center from a skydiver’s perspective.

But before the keynote started I came up here on stage. And with the camera up on my Android phone, I took a photo sphere and submitted it to Google Maps. And there it is. This is how you guys look from up here. So everybody can upload a photo sphere and submit it to Google Maps. And so it’s like user generated street view. And we also took a photo sphere out there on our geo pod. And if you go there tomorrow morning, we’ll have — and you can get the experience you just saw with elite motion.

Let’s get back out. So we jump back out. And as we’re zooming out and we’re leaving the Earth’s atmosphere, you can see the whole world. And those clouds, they’re real time.

But we can go further. This is the Earth traveling through space. And you can see the stars and the Milky Way at the right position. And as the sun sets behind the earth, the night lights come out. And this is the future of Google Maps.

Brian Mcclendon: Berni, Jonah, this is beautiful. Now, when are we going to get this? How long is it going to take for you to deliver? I don’t think these people want to wait. Do you guys want to wait? No. Well, you can try this today. This is the new Google Maps. It has a preview on the desktop. So it’s the perfect thing to try to with your new Pixel.

So when you pick it up, check your inbox and you will have an invite. And everybody else, please go to maps.google.com/preview and sign up and we’ll send the first invites tomorrow morning. Thank you very much, Berni, Jonah, and Daniel.

So that is the future of Google Maps, data, APIs, a beautiful new Google Maps for mobile coming in the summer, and a desktop Maps coming to you in the room today. So with that, I’d like to think the geo team and all the people who have worked on this because it has been incredibly hard. But with that, the future of Google Maps. Thank you.

Larry Page – CEO, Google

It was actually a while ago I asked for the picture of the earth at night. And I’m really excited to finally have gotten it. Although, I’m still waiting, actually, for a higher resolution. So let’s give a big around of applause to the Maps guys. I think this is amazing.

I’m really excited to be here. And first I want to start with a story. I was very, very lucky growing up. And I was thinking about this as we were preparing for this Google I/O. My dad was really interested in technology. And I was just remembering he actually drove me and my family all the way across the country to go to a robotics conference. And then we got there and he thought it was so important that his young son go to the conference and one of the few times I’ve seen him really argue with someone to get in someone underage successfully into the conference. And that was me.

And one of the themes I just want to talk to you about is how important it is for us, all of the developers here in the room and watching, to really focus on technology and get more people involved in it. And also thinking about my dad, his degree, he was lucky enough to get a degree in communications sciences. And you might ask what the heck is communication sciences? That’s what they called computer science when computers were a passing fad. Sounds kind of funny now, right?

But there was a time when that was true. And I think everyone today is excited about technology. We don’t have to worry about that so much anymore. And I think that Android and things like that are being adopted much faster than anything else in the past. I look at the rate of adoption of those things, on almost any basis they are much, much faster. And it’s incredible. When I pull out my smartphone, it’s amazing what we have on the smartphones. We have almost every sensor we’ve ever come up with. I recently got a scale and it measures air quality and uploads it to the internet. I’m sure those things will end up in your smartphone. That’s amazing.

Your phone can talk to anyone in the world almost anywhere in the world. And I was kind of remarking, I was talking to my teams about this, if you take out your phone and hold it out, it’s almost as big as the TV or screen you’re looking at. And it has the same resolution as well. And so if you’re nearsighted, which I see many of you out there with glasses– and even some Google Glasses, thank you. I think many of you are near sighted. And, you know, smartphone and a big display are kind of the same thing now, which is amazing, absolutely amazing. So I think we also have a lot more devices that we use interchangeably.

You know, we use tablets, phones, laptops, and even the Google Glass, all those things we’re using. And that’s why we put so much focus on our platforms, on Android and Chrome. It’s really important in helping developers and Google build great user experiences across these different devices to have these platforms. And I’m tremendously excited about all the innovation that you’re bringing to life. Technology should do the hard work so that people can get on with doing the things that make them happiest in life.

Take Search for example. Perfect search engine, as Amit mentioned, is the Star Trek computer, right? And understand exactly what you meant and give you exactly what you wanted. And our Knowledge Graph, which you saw, really brings that a lot closer. I think Google Now, which Johanna just demonstrated, gives you information without even having to ask and it understands the context of what you talked about before so you can use things like pronouns. It’s amazing. Flight times, your boarding passes, directions, next appointment, all with no effort.

Think about a really smart assistant doing all those things for you so you don’t have to think about it. You saw how easy some of those experiences felt. And we’re just getting started. The opportunities we have are tremendous. You know, we haven’t seen this rate of change in computing for a long time, probably not since the birth of personal computing.

But when I think about it, I think we’re all here because we share a deep sense of optimism about the potential of technology to improve people’s lives and the world as part of that. And I’m amazed.

Every day I come to work the list of things that needs to be done is longer than the day before. And the opportunity of those things is bigger than it was before. And because of that, I think we, as Google, and as an industry, all of you, are really only at 1% of what’s possible and probably even less than that. And despite the faster change we have in the industry, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities that we have. And some of that I think is due to the negativity. You know, every story I read about Google is kind of us versus some other company or some stupid thing. And I just don’t find that very interesting.

We should be building great things that don’t exist, right? You know, being negative is not how we make progress. And most important things are not zero sum. There’s a lot of opportunity out there. And we can use technology to make really new and really important things that make people’s lives better. And if I think back to a long time ago, a very long time ago, all of humanity was basically our farming or hunting all the time. And if you lived at that time you probably hoped that you could feed your family. And, unfortunately, that’s still true for a lot of people in the world. But certainly for us we don’t worry about that. And the reason for that is technology. We’ve improved how we grow food and so on. And the technology of that has allowed people to focus on other things if they choose. By the way, I think being a farmer’s great if that’s what you want to do. But it’s not great if that’s what you have to do. And that’s what technology lets us do is free up ourselves to do more different things. And I’m sure that people in the future will think we’re just as crazy as we think everyone in the past was at having to do things like farming and hunting all the time.

So to give an example of this, Sergey and I talk a lot about cars. You know, he’s working on automated cars now. And imagine how self driving cars will change our lives and the landscape. More green space, fewer parking lots, greater mobility, fewer accidents, more freedom, fewer hours wasted behind the wheel of a car. And the average American probably spends almost 50 minutes, five, zero minutes commuting. Imagine if you got most of that time back to use for other things. And, unfortunately, even in other countries commute times are still pretty large, not quite as large as the US, but still very significant.

Now to get there we need more people, more people like you, markets falling in love with science and math at school, more students graduating with science and engineering degrees, and more people working on important technological problems. And it’s why Google got involved with the movie “The Internship.” I’m not sure we entirely had a choice. But they were making a movie. We decided it would be good to get involved. Lorraine’s upfront. She’s really responsible for that. And I think the reason why we got involved in that is that computer science has a marketing problem. Where the nerdy curmudgeons. I don’t know about you, but that’s what I am.

And, well, in this movie the guy who plays the head of search, the Amit Singhal you just saw, is by far the coolest character in the movie. And we’re really excited about that. So I think today we’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible. That’s why I’m so excited. Google’s really working on the platforms that support all of your innovations. I cannot wait to see what comes next. I got goosebumps as I was watching some of the presentations here. And I really want to thank you for all of your contributions.

So with that, I’m going to do something kind of unconventional and try to take some questions, actually, from all of you. So I’ve got two microphones set up towards the back here. And don’t be shy. Line up and ask some questions. I’m sure some of you have thought of some good questions. And we’ll get started. So thank you so much.

All right, so we got a few racing up. Please line up so we can get through them quickly. And one question per person, please. We have 6,000 people. I also want to call out the one million people. It’s over one million people watching this live on YouTube. It’s just unbelievable. So let’s thank them for participating.

Okay, yes, sir, on the left here.

Question & Answer Session

Question: I’m Robert Scobler, one of the first Glass-holes. So thank you. Thank you for getting my glass. Here at Google I/O several contextual things start coming out. We start seeing an API that’s going to tell us whether we’re walking or running or what not. Where are you going to take that in the future now that we have more sensors? And are you going to talk about the little sensor inside the Google Glass that watches our eye?

Larry Page: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, this is a big area of focus. I think you saw that in the presentations. I think really being able to get computers out of the way and really focus on what people really need. Mobile has been a great learning experience, I think, for us and for all of you. You know, the smaller screens, you can’t have all this clutter. I think you saw on the new Google Maps how we got all sorts of stuff out of the way. There’s like 100 times less things on the screen than there was before. And I think that’s going to happen with all of your devices. They’re going to understand the context.

Just before I came on stage, I had to turn off all of my phones so I’m not interrupting all of you. That’s crazy. That’s not a very hard thing to figure out. So all that context that’s in your life, all these different sensors are going to now pick that up and just make your life better. And I think that we’re, again, only at the very, very early stages of that. This is very, very exciting. All right, let’s take another question.

Question: Hello, Larry. My name is Buckner. I have the opportunity to work at Mozilla on a lot of the web technologies with you guys here at Google. And I saw a lot of the great web technologies you had here on display. And I know people had this question leading up to Google I/O. But are we ever going to see the web up-leveled in Android or subsume what is there now to be the operating system of mobile and your platform?

Larry Page: Sorry. You’re asking about the future or the web?

Question: Yeah. Are we going to see it– I mean, Android right now runs on Java. It’s a native platform. It’s great in a lot of ways. Are we going to see the web and all the fantastic technologies you showed off here today be the center of that?

Larry Page: Well, I think we’ve been really excited about the web, obviously, being birthed from it as a company. And I think that– and we’ve really invested a lot in the open standards behind all that. I’ve personally been quite sad at the industry’s behavior around all these things. If you just take something as simple as instant messaging, we’ve kind of had an offer forever that we’ll interoperate on instant messaging. I think just this week Microsoft took advantage of that by interoperating with us but not doing the reverse, which is really sad, right? And that’s not the way to make progress. You need to actually have interoperation, not just people milking off one company for their own benefit. So I think Google has always stood for that.

I’ve been sad that the industry hasn’t been able to advance those things, I think, generally because of a focus on negativity and on zero sum games. So we try to be on the right side of all those things. But we also try to be practical and look at what other people are doing and not just rely on our principles to shoot ourselves in the foot and our users in the process. So I don’t know how to deal with all those things. And I’m sad that the web is probably not advancing as fast as it should be. We certainly struggle with people like Microsoft. We’ve had a great relationship with Mozilla, I think, and value that deeply. I’d like to see more open standards, more people getting behind things that just work and more companies involved in those ecosystems. I think that’s why this conference is so important.

But I wouldn’t grade the industry well in terms of where we’ve gotten to. In the very long term, I don’t think you should have to think about as a developer, am I developing for this platform or another or something like that. I think you should be able to work at a much higher level. In software you should run everywhere easily. And people like Mozilla should be able to add meaningfully to that and make platforms and other things. So that’s how I would think about.

It’s a very, very complex and an important question though.

Question: Hi, I’m from Colombia. And the only reason because I didn’t quite finish my law studies was thanks to Google. So I have dreamed in this question many times. And I would like to ask you how Google will let us protect our freedom of speech through internet. Thank you.

Larry Page: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think– I mean, this is part of the area where business gets interesting, right? I think we at Google pretty clearly have a strong desire for freedom of speech for free flow of information. And one of the main things we do is probably translate that into practice in hundreds of countries around the world and make sure we’re talking to government leaders and making sure we’re helping advance that. And our chairman, Eric Schmidt, has been kind of traveling the world talking about that. And I really applaud those efforts and thinking about. So we’re working very hard on that, making sure we’re protecting your private information, making sure that we’re ensuring computer security, which is required to make sure we’re protecting your freedom of speech and your private information as part of that and making sure we’re being as transparent as we can about the requests we get from government and things like that. So this is a big area of focus for us.

And hopefully we can do a lot to help the world and move it along there. It’s a very difficult and important issue also. Yes, another great question.

Question: I’m Ryan from Provo, Utah. Just recently Google Fiber was announced for there. And part of the marketing campaign is 100 times the speed, 100 times the possibility. What do you see as the possibilities from that fast of internet?

Larry Page: Well, I think from an engineering point of view it’s just kind of a no brainer. I mean, we got started building data centers. And one of the biggest problems we have was networking in the data centers. And so I guess as a computer scientist I just view it as kind of sad we have all these computers out there and they’re connected to each other through like a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little pipe that’s super slow. And so in a sense, all the computers we have in the world, most of them are in people’s houses. Most of them can’t be used for anything useful.

So it’s obviously ways to go from where we are now. We don’t really have software that’s designed to use those things yet. We know if we build that capacity, we’ll be able to use those computers for all sorts of interesting things. And even basic things like the bandwidth of your visual system is pretty high compared to the bandwidth most people have. And I think it’s pretty clear we want to deliver bits to your eyes just as a basic thing. So I’m really excited about what we’ll be able to do and what you’ll all be able to do as we get more people with super high speed connections. And probably gigabits or just the beginning for that. What we really need are low latency connections that operate at computer speed, whatever that is that you have inside your house. So I’m really excited about that. So we’re just getting started.

All right, in the middle now. Yes. The black shirt there.

Question: I’m — from Vancouver. We’ve seen Google move into some physical real world products like Google Fiber and the autonomous self driving cars and their renewable energy cheaper than coal initiatives. Curious if you can elaborate on further projects that Google is planning to get into regarding physical world type initiatives.

Larry Page: Yeah. Well, my compatriot, Sergey Brin, who last year arranged the sky diving, but this year did not, I mean, he’s focused– Google X is focused on real sort of atoms and not bits. And part of why I feel there’s a lot of opportunity there. And Sergey’s having a great time doing that. And that’s, I think, a really, really fascinating and an amazing job. I think that possibilities for some of those things are incredibly great.

If you look at technology applied to transportation, it hasn’t really started yet. We haven’t really done that out. So I think automated cars are just one thing you could do. You can do many, many other things. So I think we’re very excited about that area. And we also think it’s a way that the company can scale. I think that to the extent all of our products are interrelated, we actually need to do a fair amount of management of those projects to make sure you get a seamless experience, both as a user and a developer, that it all makes sense.

When we do some of these other kinds of things like automated cars, they have a longer time frame and less interaction. And so I’d actually encourage maybe more companies to try to do things that are a little bit outside their comfort zone because I think it gets them more scalability in what they can get done. And so I think we’ve been surprised also even when we do things that are kind of crazy like automated cars, it turns out you just saw the mapping stuff we finished with. The technology for doing mapping and automated cars turns out to be the same. And so we have a bunch of great engineers that have just moved over from those efforts and they did it naturally and scalability. And they’re excited about it. And so I’m really, really excited about that too. So every time we’ve done something crazy– Gmail, when we launched it, I think we had 100 people in the company when we launched Gmail. And people said, you’re nuts. You’re a search company. Why are you doing Gmail?

It’s because we understand things about data centers and serving and storage that we applied to email. And that was a great thing we did that. And so I think almost every time we’ve tried to do something crazy we’ve made progress, not all the times but almost every time. So we’ve become a bit emboldened by that. And the good news is too, no matter how much money we try to spend on automated cars or Gmail in the early stages, they end up being small, small chunks. So they don’t really cause a business issue either. So I’m really excited about that. And I tried to talk about that in my remarks. That’s why I say I think we’re at 1% of what’s possible. Yeah, another question.

Question: Yeah. Hi, Larry. It’s Greg with the D-Sky 9. We’re developing apps for Google Glass. And I was really excited to see all the new things that Google is providing and also realize that it kind of trounced a bunch of existing businesses. I was wondering if you could speak to what you feel are the largest area of opportunities for developing on Glass outside of what Google will provide naturally. And a bonus question, what will be the production run for Glass for consumers?

Larry Page: Well, I mean, I’d have to ask Sergey that. So I don’t know what the production numbers will be. So I think we’re more focused on with Glass– Glass is a new category. It’s quite different than existing computing devices. And so I think it’s great that we’ve started on it. But I think our main goal is to get happy users using Glass. And so we’ve put a bunch out to developers. I see a lot of people with them in the audience. We want to make sure we’re building experiences that really make people happy. And so the team has tried to build the minimal set of things, just for practical sake, minimal set of things that will provide a great experience and make happy users. And then, you know, we can get going and work on it for the next 10 years.

And every successive one is going to be better obviously. So I think part of the answer is we don’t know. I think the basic use cases we have around photography are amazing. I love taking pictures my kids with Glass and movies and so on. And I find that for me that’s enough. I have the young kids. For me that’s enough reason to have Glass just there. I think if you didn’t have young kids you might not feel exactly that way. I’m not sure. I have young kids, so I can’t tell. Communications are also pretty amazing. Navigation is amazing. Certainly if you’re walking if you’re in Manhattan or something. Having Glass for navigation is unbelievable. I find it’s really, really nice. And so navigations is amazing. Some of the core experiences we have are, I think, pretty amazing. Communications, phone calls, SMS, voice. You saw the things we’re doing around voice. It’s amazing to always have the device there to do that. So I think ultimately, a lot of your experiences can move to Glass. And we’re relying on all of you to figure all that out. We’re trying to get the base thing to make happy users so we can get on with it.

Question: Hi, my name is Caleb Allen. And I was wondering what advice you would give to the rising generation of technologists? What would help technology keep moving at the pace it’s been moving at for the last five or ten years? And how would they do that responsibly?

Larry Page: Yeah, I mean, that’s a good question. I think for me, I actually try to use Google a lot and I research things really deeply. So, you know, before we get something started, I try to actually understand it. And not just really understand it, like, understand the crazy people in the area. And Google’s great for that. You can find the craziest person in any given area. And I think normally people do not do that. So I think you want to think about the base thing, whatever it is. We’ve been, obviously, working on smartphones a lot. They’re relatively expensive now. With Nexus 4 we tried to improve that a bit. But, you know, if you look at the raw material costs of a smartphone, I guess mostly glass and silicon, tiny bit of silicon, a little bit of fibre glass. I don’t know, the raw materials cost of it is probably like $1 or something like that. I think Glass is $0.50 a pound or something like that. Certain metals are $0.20 a pound. Phones don’t weigh very much, right? And silicon is very, very cheap. So, I think, when I see people in industries who are making things, I ask this question, like, how far are you off the raw materials cost? And they never know the answer to that question.

So I think kind of as an engineer or as a technologist trying to go to first principles and say, what is the real issue? What is the real issue around our power grids? Or what’s the real issue around manufacturing or whatever it is? I think people usually don’t answer those questions. And as a result, most of the work that’s done is very incremental. And because of that, we don’t make the progress we need to. With that said, I mean, it’s very hard. If you’re going to make a smartphone for a dollar, $1, I mean, that’s obviously almost impossible to do. But I think if you took a 50 year time frame or something like that, if you took a longer view, you’d probably start to make the investments you needed to. And along the way you’d probably figure out how to make money. So I’d just kind of encourage non incremental thinking and a real deep understanding of whatever you’re doing. That’s what I try to do. Yeah, all the way over on the right. And then I’ll make another pass.

Question: I have a question about the future of Android. So with Oracle taking control of Java seven forward. How does Google and advance Android when one of the core technical underpinnings is not necessarily in its control?

Larry Page: Yeah, I mean, we’ve had a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court as a result of it. Again, I think we’d like to have a cooperative relationship with them. That hasn’t seemed possible. And I think, again, probably money is more important to them than having any kind of collaboration or things like that. So I think that’s been very difficult. I think we’ll get through that. And I think, obviously, Android’s very, very important to the Java ecosystem. And so we’ll get through that just fine, just not in an ideal way.

Question: Hi. My name is Prishan. I’m an Android developer from India. I’m a heavy Google user. And most of my opinion, actually, I can trace back to a Google search. And as we saw today, it’s become more and more personalized and predictive. I kind of worry that it kind of enforce my worldview and kind of rule out the possibility of some serendipitous discovery of other side, you know? So any comment on that?

Larry Page: Yeah, that’s a really great question. People have a lot of concern about that. I’m totally not worried about that at all. And it sounds kind of funny to say. But that’s totally under your control and our control, as Google. So I think it’s very important to have a kind of widened world view, to have education, all those kind of things. But the right solution to that is not randomness. So you can’t really argue doing a bad job of returning whatever you wanted is the right way to educate you. It’s just not.

It’d be better to return exactly what you wanted when you wanted and use that saved time to have you read the news or read textbooks or books or other things that might be more general. And we can put that into the algorithms. So I guess in my very long term worldview, 50 years from now or something, hopefully our software understands deeply what you’re knowledgeable about, what you’re not, and how to organize the world so that the world can solve important problems. You know, people are starving in the world not because we don’t have enough food. It’s because we’re not organized to solve that problem. And our computers aren’t helping us do that. So I think if you think about it that way, if you think about we need to make computer software and the internet that helps people solve important problems in the world, that will cause, as a side effect, for people to be educated about the things they should get educated about. And that’s not the same as a demand.

I’m asking for a particular thing I’m searching for. Those are different modes. So just kind of make sure we’re serving both modes and that computers can help you do that. So I cannot be more optimistic about that. I think computers and software and things that you all write and we all write are going to help us solve those problems for people rather than just doing it at random.

Question: Hi, Larry. I’m [Asman from GBG]. It’s great that Google has developed a lot of new technologies and allows us to live in a better way that we are today. My question is not about technology. It’s just a basic question for the developers and the countries that I came from in the Far East. We developers have been developing, trying to develop applications. But one of the main issues for us in many of the GDGs is that we can’t sell. That’s one part. The other thing is that I have been asked many times why can’t we buy paid apps? That’s my simple questions. It’s a great opportunity to voice this one out to you. And I hope things can be done because I don’t see any reason why because people want to buy. And they can use their credit cards. Thank you very much.

Larry Page: Yeah, I mean, that scenario we’ve had huge focus on. So I think we’ve made a lot of progress. I think we’ll make a lot more progress. But hopefully that’s a very temporary problem and we’ll get through that quickly. But thanks for bringing it up.

Question: Hi, my name is Kevin Nielson from New Jersey. And I was intrigued about your comment about the positivity and the negativity. And I’m very interested in helping other people be positive about technology, as you are. And I’m interested in what your advice would be to help us sort of reduce the negativity and focus on positive and focus on changing the world.

Larry Page: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think people naturally are concerned about change. And certainly not all change is good. And I do think the pace of change in the world is increasing. Part of what I would think about, I think, is I think that we haven’t adapted mechanisms to deal with that. And maybe some of our old institutions, like the law and so on, aren’t keeping up with the rate of change that we’ve caused through technology. If you look at different kinds of laws we make or things like that, they’re very old. I mean, the laws when we went public were 50 years old. The law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old, like, it’s before the internet. That’s a pretty major change in how you might go public. So I think maybe some of you or maybe the million people watching who love technology, maybe more of us need to go into other areas and help those areas improve and understand technology.

And I think that’s not happened at the rate it needs to happen. And the other thing in my mind is we also haven’t, maybe, built mechanisms to allow experimentation. There’s many, many exciting and important things you could do that you just can’t do because they’re illegal or they’re not allowed by regulation. And that makes sense. We don’t want our world to change too fast. But maybe we should set aside a small part of the world. You know, I like going to Burning Man, for example, which I’m sure many of you have been to.

Yeah, a few burners out there. That’s an environment where people can try out different things. But not everybody has to go. And I think that’s a great thing too. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out what is the effect on society, what’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it kind of into the normal world. And people who like those kinds of things can go there and experience that. And we don’t have mechanisms for that. So those are the kind of things I would think about.

I also think we need to be honest. And we don’t always know the impact of changes. And we should be humble about that. I’m not sure getting up on stage and saying everything is amazing and so on is the right thing. Maybe we should launch things in a little more humble way and see what the effect is and adapt as we go. So those are kind of my thoughts.

Question: Larry, Ben Schacter, Macquarie. Health care impacts the society in so many profound ways and impacts the economy. What are the strengths of Google that you can bring to help improve health care?

Larry Page: Yeah, that’s a great, maybe, segue from the previous question. I think it’s been difficult. We had Google Health. We didn’t make much progress on it. And I think primarily we found that all the issues were regulatory. It’s very hard to get technological leverage there. So I was talking about we’re 1% of where we can be. That’s by doing real amazing technological things.

We found, certainly, in the kinds of things we were working on in health care, we weren’t able to move beyond that due to all the constraints that we were under. And so I think we’ll see amazing things in health care. But I think they’ll be things that have technological leverage like DNA sequencing. You know, we’re clearly all going to have that. It’s going to cost $1 or whatever. You’re all going to have your sequence and something amazing will happen. You know, I just disclosed yesterday my voice issues. I got so many great emails from people and thoughtful advice. And I realized, you know, I had the kind of notion, like, this stuff should be very private. And at least in my case, I feel I should’ve done it sooner. And I’m not sure that that answer is not true for most people.

So I ask, like, why are people so focused on keeping your medical history private? And the answer is probably insurance. You’re very worried that you’re going to be denied insurance. And that makes no sense. And we should change the rules around insurance so that they have to insure people. I mean, the whole point of insurance is that it insures everyone. So, again, maybe we have a safe place where people can go and live in a world like that where they’d make those kind of changes. We can see if they work.

And then the world can learn from that and move on. But not everybody has to participate in that because I’m worried we’re not making some of the fundamental changes we need to make fast enough. All right, maybe one or two more questions. We’re going to run out of time.

Question: Yeah, I’m John Sarriugarte with Form & Reform, one of the Burning Man artists you invited here tonight for the after party. Thank you. I’m very inspired to see that you’ve reached out to the educational aspect. I have a six-year-old. Glad to see the Google’s moving that direction. My question is about women in the development community. I’m looking around and I don’t see a lot here. And I’d like to know what we can do to encourage women to be here?

Larry Page: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been super focused on that forever. Sergey and I, when we were interviewing people, we spent a lot of time interviewing women for that reason, trying to make sure our company didn’t end up all male, which I think is a really, really bad thing. So I think ultimately the only answer is we have to start early and make sure we’re getting more young women and girls really excited about technology. And I think if we do that, there’s no question we’ll more than double the rate of progress that we have in the technology world. So we all need to do that.

We’re trying to help with that in any way we can. And thank you for the question.

All right, one more question.

Question: Jeffrey Siegal with the University of Michigan. While you had mentioned that regulation is usually the biggest problem trying to get technology into health care, I’m curious if you’re going to be doing anything with DNA sequencing considering you actually have all the horsepower behind it, and also image analysis, with things like surgical slides and whatnot because it seems like that’s a really big area that we could get into to help people as a whole.

Larry Page: Yeah, I think those are good questions. I don’t have anything to announce at the time. But we always look at these areas. We have felt it’s a difficult area for us to work in. I think it’s certainly worth doing though. All right, let’s take one more.

Question: I’m Josh Constine, Techcrunch. Could you discuss Google’s plan for bringing the developing world online and what you see as the social, cultural, and political impacts of democratized access to the internet?

Larry Page: That’s a really great question. One of the things I always talk about in the company when I talk to the company is that smartphones are going to basically be amazing in these places. And so you don’t quite have smartphones, for example, going into India or Africa because they’re just too expensive. The average cost of a phone in India is very, very cheap, $50 or $100 or less. I think more like $50. And I think that we need to make sure that the prices of what we all are using quickly make it down to those levels. And I think they will.

That’ll be the smartphone you have today two or three years from now will be in Africa and India. And that will be amazing because I find, I try to mostly use smartphones now just to make sure I’m living that future. I find – I can get almost everything I need done. Unfortunately I don’t get to program that much. But I can do most things I need to do to run the company on my phone. So I think that’s pretty amazing to think that that can go to three billion, four billion, five billion, six billion, seven billion plus in not very long period of time. And I think people are underestimating how fast that’s going to happen. I think it’s clearly going to happen very, very quickly. And I’m really, really excited about that.

We’re trying to help that happen quicker. But I’m very excited about that. So thank you all so much for spending so much time.

Related Posts

• Dark Side of AI – How Hackers Use AI & Deepfakes: Mark T. Hofmann (Transcript)
• Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT’s Origins, and Building AI Hardware (Transcript)
• Transcript: Perplexity CEO Srinivas on Winning Search With AI
• Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful (Transcript)
• Transcript: Sam Altman on AGI, GPT-5, And What’s Next — the OpenAI Podcast Ep. 1