Future

First thing is a bit of a housekeeping point: when running through the giveaways yesterday, I forgot to mention that attendees also got a Verizon Mobile Hotspot, with 3 months of free connectivity. Pretty sweet little unit!

Keynote

Though not terribly well rested, I did make it to the packed keynote on Wed., May 12. This multi-speaker presentation covered the three flavours of Chrome:

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Overview

Google I/O is always a fun conference to attend. Of course, there’s always the awesome giveaways for attendees. This year, the big gift was a Galaxy 10.1 tablet, customized with a distinctive Android pattern on the back. There was also, if you went to the right sessions, an Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK), to use your Android phone as an Arduino controller, and a Sony Xperia play phone. Rumor has it that tomorrow, they will be handing out another phone. [UPDATE: no phone, but a Chromebook, Jun. 15th!] (Last year’s early bird attendees got both an Evo and a Nexus phone, while regular attendees got just the Nexus.)

Then of course, there’s always the announcements of hot new software and hardware Google’s been working on. I went to the sessions on Android Based Businesses, Google Chrome Frame and Google Web Fonts. (It was a slow day because I slept in – hey, we arrived late and our hotel, The Petite Auberge, as wonderfully quaint and charming as it is, was plagued by the sounds of  trucks unloading at about 5 or 6 am.)

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A number of recent events – including a recent interview with Tim Bell, creator of Computer Science Unplugged, and the closure of Hagley School's futuristic College of Computing for the 2009 academic year – have motivated me to want to do something about the lack of interest in CSSE (computer science in the broadest sense) and – in particular – the misperceptions young people have about it. I believe it is these misperceptions that results in the lack of interest.

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