Google engineers held a two day conference on 3-4 September 2009 to give a technical overview of key Google technologies (like Google Maps and Earth, Open Social, Friend Connect, AdSense, AdWords, Analytics, the App Engine, the Web Toolkit etc.) for software development and for enhancing business processes.
During the news item, I explain how important it is for a major IT company like Google to come to Mauritius and how beneficial Google technologies can be for the local economy.
I am always in awe of how easy it seems for Google to create new technologies mostly out of thin air in a very short amount of time. For example, I use Gmail on a daily basis and, seriously, I don’t think that there is anything as good as it elsewhere. The beauty of Gmail is, of course, that it was created by someone out of passion during his 20% of free time that all Googlers get.
Naturally, the essential word in the above paragraph is seems. This is because nothing could be further from truth. Google succeeds in creating great products and technologies because it only recruits the best (and, ouch, I know that…) and encourage them to innovate.
During the conference, someone asked a really bizarre question: “Were we going to receive training certificates at the end?” This is bizarre for two reasons (i) the conference was not a training course and (ii) we already had received more than a mere piece of paper: the Googlers were sharing their knowledge with us! Once more, lorsque le sage montre la lune du doigt, l’imbécile regarde le doigt…
[This video is extracted from the MBC national TV news bulletin.]
pas truv mwa ditout :(
lol
Actually Mauritians are lucky to have such conferences especially from Google. Here in France it would have been like this: taking 2-3 days off just for travelling, about 300€ for train/air tickets, and some more 500€-1000€ for participating. A whole month’s salary for a well off engineer if his/her company doesn’t cater for him/her. Added to that are travelling and food expenses.
The other thing is that you do not have thousands of persons at the conference which lets you get more concentrated and closer to the subject.
For the “paper” issue, this is simple Mauritian certificate diktat… people just think about going around saying “I’ve been trained by Google and I have a certificate to prove it”. This also shows that they are not acquainted to Google’s training system. All can be done online for the Google Adsense Authorised Consultant as well as the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.
Good ending quote BTW. Really appreciated your tweets during the conference.
Thanks.
I loved writing those tweets as well. This forced me to focus more on what was being said, to look up for URLs and to rephrase everything under 140 characters. And, in some ways, that felt liberating compared to writing pages and pages of drivel (re: most “reseach” papers)
Training certificates at the end, saying I missed the point, what is Google again?
I’m not sure I understand your comment Andy.
Google is just too great. Till now i have been exploiting only adsense and i am satisfied. not to tell quite satisfied ..at least some of my basic expenses are catered :)
im sure that will be very beneficial for our little ile moris :)
so how did you guys get an invitation to this forum??
I think the person was right to ask the question. He/She had something on his/her mind. It takes a lot of courage to stand up and ask a question in front of a crowd. Besides, we all know that there is no such thing as a stupid question. I’m sure you told that to your students when you were teaching at the MCCI and U of Mauritius, right? And I’m sure you tell that to those who come to your Linux courses, right?
I, too, have asked questions which some would consider stupid, but I did not care. I would be the stupid one leaving a conference or whatever and not having had my questions answered. A good analogy would be a shy guy who is too chicken to ask a girl out thinking she would say no. She could say no, but what if she would have said yes but the guy never asked? Wouldn’t he be missing going out with who could be the woman of his life?
Some people told me they were told about the event by the Board of Investment. Personally, I was contacted by someone working at Google.
Yeah. You’re right Patrick. [Incidentally, the guy/girl didn’t ask the question verbally — rather, he submitted the question to an online pool of questions.]