Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>> FEMALE: So, can you introduce yourself and the company that you represent today at
Google I/O. >> BOUDEWIJN: Sure. My name is Greg Boudewijn
and I'm the General Manager of the eHow. And eHow is the world’s largest "how to" site.
Thirty-two million people come to the site every month. And they are there to learn how
to do just about everything. So something is simple as boiling an egg, something a little
more complex like formatting a hard drive. >> FEMALE: Very cool. So, you have an Android
application that you guys have been developing. What were your motivations behind creating
eMobile application? >> BOUDEWIJN: Yeah, we do. We have Android
application in Beta right now and we’re really focused on making what we’re doing
on the wired site more portable and accessible to people on the go. You can imagine, “how
to information,” you’re not always in front of your computer when you want to fix
something or learn something. So eMobile applications are the heart of that in getting that accessibility
and portability. And Android comes to the table with a lot of unique features that we
feel replicate what we’re already doing on the wired site and it made it really attractive
for us to work with. >> FEMALE: Cool. Can you tell me about what
were the specific features of Android that you found that were useful like, for your
application? >> BOUDEWIJN: Sure. We were really focused
on the latest release, the Cupcake release. So, for us, you know, a site that has a 160,000
professional videos, the video upload, the capture and play feature was just really something
that’s huge, huge for us. So, we’re really focused on that. And then plugging in to some
of the deeper ingrain functions of the phone, being able to hook into photo libraries, photo
galleries, and the video galleries, the email clients to distribute information, that all
came to work together. >> FEMALE: Great. So, what was the biggest
technical challenge that you faced while developing the Android application?
>> BOUDEWIJN: Yeah. I think the biggest challenge came from video. It was the feature that we
wanted to get in there; we wanted to showcase. But having a library as big as ours, how can
we do that in a quick manner. We wanted to develop it in an aggressive timeframe. And
we really solved that through another Google technology which is YouTube. We were able
to plug in to our YouTube library videos and use the YouTube data APIs and player APIs
to not only call our videos but stream them and show them to users on the phone. And so,
it’s a great solution for us. >> FEMALE: Great. So, what specific tips and
tricks did you use in developing your Android application?
>> BOUDEWIJN: Yeah. I think the great thing about Android, it really allows a developer
and our development team to tap into core features that exists on a platform in the
phone. And I just mentioned, being able to link into a photo gallery or video gallery
and connect to a media that someone already has on the phone. I think those are some quick
tips and tricks. And then ultimately, you know, being able to rely on YouTube to access
video data and play it solves a lot of the problems that someone might have. They have
to create their own video player. >> FEMALE: What is your favorite aspect of
the Android development tool chain and process? >> BOUDEWIJN: Yeah. Our developers will probably
say, I think the feature they like the best was just the ease of debugging. They felt
that it was really easy to work with and then the documentation was good, the research was
good. Ultimately, I like how seamless it is to work and call all the other features of
the phone and that makes it--that you’re not just building a single application, you’re
building something that leverages what’s already there in the platform.
>> FEMALE: Right. So you can talk a little bit more like about those features that you’re
pulling? >> BOUDEWIJN: Sure. You know, our application
is really about people, you know, finding information, so searching articles and searching
videos but then the ability to play back; so playing back a video. And then what we've
really done is try to plug into some of the features of the phone that allows users what
they’re doing on our wired site being able to upload their content to do the same on
a phone. So allowing someone who’s taking photos of tasks that they’ve done or projects
or a video of something that they just saw and then being able to pull that off their
phone and upload it on to the wired site through their phone and then immediately click the
share button and then plugging into the email client and they could share it with their
friends and family. I think that makes the whole experience work well.
>> FEMALE: Right. So I knew that your application is first being launched on Android. I guess--is
there a specific reason why you chose to develop it first for Android platform?
>> BOUDEWIJN: Yeah. I think, you know, Android has really matured the mobile market to a
point that we fell we can do a lot of what we’re doing on the wired site now on the
mobile application site. So video is, of course, very attractive to us. I think there’s a
couple of really cool features in cupcake, the home screen widget, speech recognition
for search. You know, we have 600,000 articles and 160,000 videos and being able to make
it really easy for people to search by talking to the phone or going through. I think--I
think all of those things really felt to us that Android was the right platform to launch
it. >> FEMALE: Right. And I know that this is--the
first application that you have built on this platform, what would be your, like, tips and
advice to [INDISTINCT] developers who are looking to develop, like, a mobile, like,
application for the Android app? >> BOUDEWIJN: Sure. You know, first and foremost,
obviously rely on the great information that Google provides and documentation and resources.
But ultimately, I think it’s--it’s really useful and we found it to actually have a
handset that’s running in Android because there’s only so much that you can do in
an emulator style of fashion. And at the end of the day whether it’s how you crafted
the design, being able to look at it on the phone and see how large the font size is and
is that the right behavior that I want and is it calling the right functions; that was
kind of the biggest lesson-learned for us. >> FEMALE: Right. Well, thanks for your time
today. >> BOUDEWIJN: Thank you.
>> FEMALE: And I hope you enjoy the rest of the developer conference.
>> BOUDEWIJN: That’s great. We will. >> FEMALE: All right. Thanks, Greg.
>> BOUDEWIJN: Thank you.