Mario Sundar's Speakeasy

Bringing Sexy Back to technology! And, you thought that was solely Apple’s prerogative. Today was one of those “I was there” moments. It took me back to the day I watched Jobs demo the iPhone, when he had us all at “scrolls like butter“. Yes, I’ve watched that demo quite a few times since then.

Today, Google demoed a technology that has been 4+ years in the making to an adoring crowd of 4000 developers. A collaboration and communication platform that makes traditional email look like the abacus in terms of instant gratification. So enough with the teasing, you say.

Surfing a Google Wave?

Participating in a Wave is a little like an email chain, and a little like instant messaging; you can embed documents, Google Web Elements, photos and other multimedia, and the whole bailywick is presented as one stream of conversation. People can jump in or jump out at any time, and they can track back in conversations to see where things got started. [Source: Fast Company]

What Google continues to do is completely turn on its head the traditional understanding of a mainstream technology (with the iPhone it was stuff like visual voice mail and with gmail it was threaded conversations and tagging) and provide us with a radical, new way to get stuff done.

But, I digress. So, let me cut to the chase and outline for you the 5 key moments in the really long demo below that had 4000 developers cheering like they had just heard Steve Jobs announce the next version of the iPhone (read Arrington’s great piece on Google’s impeccable launch timing). Key portions in the video are highlighted after the jump.

Yes, at an hour and 20 minutes, the video is way too long. So if you’ve five minutes and want to catch the most interesting parts, check out the following timestamps in the video. And, could somebody slice-and-dice these clips together to create a succinct 3 minute video.

The Basics

5:05 – 7:05 The philosophy of Waves

The Components / Demo

7:35 – 12:05  The metaphor of hosted conversations. Quick usage scenarios on how a Wave takes multiple elements and  fits it into a Wave.

10:10 – 12:05 How a real time conversation within a wave mimics Instant Messaging

15:20 – 17:20 Sharing multimedia. How it’s done in a wave.

27:30 – 33:05 Inline discussion, content collaboration and the playback button. Oh, yae! it’s pretty cool.

35:05 – 37:42 Multiple individuals collaborating real-time on a single doc. It’s even better than what Google Docs does today!

And, two more things…

44:00 – 46:04 Spell checker. It’s different this time. Pretty impressive!

1:12:00 – 1:16:00 And, one more thing. Real time translation demo, followed by (what I think was) an extended standing ovation.

So, I’m way past my bedtime having taken a couple of hours to revisit the video embedded above.  And, one thing’s for sure, Google put on an Apple’sque show today and totally wowed us all with what they believe is the future of communication. I can’t wait to try out the product.

Filed under: Miscellaneous