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[intro music]
[applause]
Thank you so much for letting me speak here, this is really exciting I've got to say,
I feel like that one day back in school when I got to finally
hang with the cool kids.
[laughter] Was the, the best day of my life.
Um, I want to share to stories with you that I suppose
are about innovation. So I'm a workaholic,
and I hated that talk about work-life balance earlier,
[laughter],
and I'm a workaholic, and I'm kind of hooked on the idea
of trying to do something new and different,
and maybe even have, er, an impact on the world that way.
And I could talk for hours, I often do in fact about,
um, my previous project, which was...
So the first exception to the rule of most things
I do is go absolutely nowhere.
I could talk for hours about the rollercoaster that
we were riding when we got that built, how we started
building a prototype on a shoe-string budget, and then we almost raised money to build a
real company,
and that then totally totally failed. But then Google
got interested and they bought the prototype,
then it turned into Google Maps, and it was a really
exciting ride. But there's a different story I want to share
with you today and it's about a team of Google engineers
in India and how, in my opinion, they really changed the world
with their contribution to Google Maps. And if I'm not out
of time I'm going to tell you about a different
rollercoaster ride I'm having right now with Google maps,
as he was pointing out, excuse me, Google Wave.
So here's Google Maps, really quickly, show of hands,
has anyone ever used Google Maps? Yes!
[laughter]
I'm suddenly a lot less nervous...
[laughter]
That's not true, but thank you just the same.
So as you can see we have pretty good, good coverage
of maps all around the world.
It wasn't always like this. So this is Google Maps,
Year 2005 after we launched. As you can see,
we only have North America, the United Kingdom, we carefully placed them in the exact right
spot,
and then we painted everything else blue, [laughter]
um, as a problem of maths to come. We've got a lot of funny
emails about this, so this was 2 months
after George Bush had been elected to his second term.
[laughter]
And quite a lot of people thought we were trying to predict
what the world would look like four years later,
[laughter]
entirely, entirely not true. One of my favourite emails
ever has got in all caps, "YOU FORGOT POLAND",
[laughter], and so, [laughter continues], and so
here's a map of Poland [laughter], we now have Poland.
Um, so how do we do, how do we add another to Google Maps?
So if it's a so called "developed" country,
you can typically find several providers of digital
map databases. We go evaluate them, we find the best one,
we license their maps, we run it through a bunch
of software, we have a, it's actually not that easy.
But the real problem is, most countries in the world
don't have, or at least didn't have back then,
digital maps, databases. And India was an example of that.
And, um, when maps looked like I just showed you...
These two, er, super smart guys, Alid and Sunjay from
our Bangalore office, they wrote to me and they said,
"Lars, we'd love to put India on Google Maps, how do we do it?"
So I said, "Go find the database license".
They came back, three weeks later and said, you know,
there is none, where there were only the major cities
for maps, the quality's really poor. And I said why don't
we build these guys a thing on top of Google Maps
where volunteers could go and input maps, it's like Wikipedia for maps, right.
I love the idea, it's more power to you, please please
do it, what can I do to help?
And they went back to India, and a year and a half of hard
work later, not much had come out of it, because,
I think, you know... the distance, the communication problems, I also think Google Maps was really
not quite
ready, um, to have something that complex built
on top of it. And by then I was a big bad manager.
I actually travelled to India, stood in front of these
two guys and said ok, stop, enough.
Enough, too much distraction, you're not getting anywhere,
go work on something else, and I don't want
to hear another word. And they say ok, sure, fine, whatever.
[laughter]
And to their credit, they kept at it, [laughter], and a few, er, sometime later, don't know
exactly when,
they launched this amazing tool that does exactly what
they said it was going to do. So this is Google Map Maker,
um, in 160 countries volunteers are imputing maps all over
the world. And if you go look at Google Maps you'll see India
is now actively very well mapped. Um, here's a really
cool time-lapse, so it shows... This is a small town
in Peru, and this video here, it takes place in the course
of eleven months of volunteers just happily,
busily mapping away this town here. And so I think
these guys here truly, truly changed the world.
Here's, um, here's a place in, er, Haiti, when that
horribly devastating earthquake hit Haiti back in January.
There were no online maps of Haiti anywhere, so I think
literally a thousand volunteers used Google Map Maker
to quickly map out, um, Haiti. And you can see active,
this is some small town in the Eastern part of the country,
you can see how detailed these maps are, it's even better
in the capital, and you can see this is, this is Haiti.
So these, these are the sort of things. I'm pretty
far removed from this, but I'm really quite proud
to have been involved in that sort of thing. To be honest
I got into maps because I have no sense of direction,
yeah, I got lost in my own house, and it's not a big house.
[laughter].
Um, but it turns out, maps are actually very important,
um, well, for a lot of things, but when disaster strikes
it's really good to have a map. We learned that the first
time back in... it was 2005 that horrific Hurricane
Katrina flooded New Orleans, and, er, the US government
very quickly took satellite images of the area so that
you could see where the flooding was. But they didn't really
have a place to get it out to people, so they asked us.
Um, and we scrambled to put the maps out there. I couldn't find a picture of it, when, I think
it was very
useful in these, in, in the, er, in a ready reference back then.
Same with, er, the Boxing Day tsunami a few years ago,
we were actually better, there's actually a team on Google
as part of the Google Maps team that specialises in being
ready for this sort of thing. Um, the, the, the, the bush
fires down, down South a few years ago, some people,
um, went on Google Maps and mapped out where all the fires
were so the people knew where they could go.
And on Go I found, I checked and, and so I don't work
on maps anymore but er, here's a map that you can find
right now that's tracking those horrific, horrible
oil leaks in the Gulf of Mexico.
So, so that's maps, and like I said, I'm profoundly proud of these, these sort of things.
And maybe, just maybe, that word life bound on a string
is okay after all. But, um, enough about maps...
excuse me... Um, I promised you a rollercoaster story,
what was the question,
"is Google Wave really going to be the next big thing?"
Er, indeed, so we launched Google Wave finally to the public
just a few days ago, in San Francisco...
It's not really important what Google Wave is, if you
don't know, well, I'll give you just a little context.
Um, so Google Wave is about, er, getting work done,
and here's, er, here's a subset of the email thread
that's, that I exchanged with the TEDx organisers to get
me to come here today.
Um, there's a lot more of them, we think everyone here uses email as a, as a key tool in their
work, right?
These threads here, when I looked through them,
there's a lot of them, and they all sort of have different
people involved, and there's a good deal of confusion,
even though we're, you know, everyone's obviously
super smart here. But it's hard to keep track of who's
seeing what. Questions get asked many times over,
and then when I came back here this morning I needed a bunch
of information, you know, where to, where to show up,
what time, how to register, what's the phone number
of the organiser, when am I talking, when am I getting
interviewed, is there a party tonight? [laughter]
You know, all that important stuff. And to get that out of here
I had to kind of read through at least half of those threads
to find just the right messages that had that information,
and then make sure that no one had sent a subsequent
email that contradicted that. And that's how email works,
you know, we're all used to this. I think most people
just kind of shrug and, you know, that's, that's been like
this for decades right?
And Google Wave, we think we can do better. Call us crazy,
we get called crazy a lot. We think we can do better,
I don't want to talk too much about what it is, um, but,
but we think, er, we think these sorts of problems happen
because email was invented more than 40 years ago.
And it essentially just mimics paper mail.
And we think the problems like this happen because email,
these conversations, they're made up of individual messages
with different people on them and everyone has their own copies
where you can't change anything once you've sent it.
And so on Wave we tried, instead of having a conversation
just be a single object that's in a single place,
everyone shares it, everyone can see the same thing,
and we tried to construct it so that that list
of pertinent information, so the product of the work
in these conversations here, can actually be constructed
between all of the people at the same time while you're having
the conversation. If you're not confused yet,
then I haven't done my job. I'm not really good
at promoting Google Wave but if you could, you know,
go use your favourite search engine, wink wink,
[laughter] um, and you can find out what it was.
I promised you a rollercoaster story. So, Google Wave is,
um, no longer... um, actually, I wanted to just,
I forgot, this is my favourite, favourite image.
I was going to show you this when I was going to praise
my Indian colleagues about how they had persevered... imagine that, er, anyway, the um Google Wave
is no longer
just a Google product, project. So we have like German,
SAP, American novelles, several open source organisations
and a few starts ups are all getting involved in trying
to solve this problem, and we wanted that to happen from
the beginning. And because of that we, we, we showed what
we were working on long before we were done.
Actually almost exactly a year ago we gave this 80 minute
demo, highly choreographed, I rehearsed it for a year,
um, in a big conference in San Francisco. And it was really
well received. There was about four thousand people
in the room, they actually gave us a standing ovation.
That beautiful woman in wife, in white, she's my wife
sitting up there. Um, and the press afterwards was phenomenal.
We put the demo on YouTube, it's gotten nine million hits,
which is crazy. But here's a, er, few examples of the press,
"Google Wave Drips with Ambition".
Here's another tech-press, you can't read it but it says
that Wave represents a profound advance in the state of the art.
Even in the mainstream press, we had CNN calling us genius,
and showing how cute we were when we were kids.
[laughter] Does it get any better?
This is, er, this is Time Magazine, my favourite headline
of all time, "Wave New World".
We asked if anyone wanted to try it, about six million
people asked to, to get a shot when we at some point
in the future launched it. Um, which we did, sort of nervously,
um, six months ago. Was still really quite, um, quite flaky,
we called it a preview, and we let the first million
or so people and they just loved it. It was the best time
ever um, and we felt sort of like this, like rock stars.
In the seventh heaven you can see from the shape of that
rollercoaster what's going to happen next. [laughter] Indeed.
So this is actually not a non-comment thing, I know now,
so typically new technologies there's a, there's a concept
that gets studied a lot, so new technologies are often
met with a lot of excitement, um, some call it even hype
over expectation, and so on. And then when you put
it in the hands of people it gets, it's met with an equal
amount of disappointment, typically because, well,
no one really knows what to do with it.
It's new after all, it's typically mature, and so and.
And then you go through this beautifully called the
trough of disillusionment until, if you do your work right,
and then things go well again. And that's exactly what
happened [laughter], like, in a big way. So we, so in November,
December, we invited the next five million people,
and they just totally had no idea what to do, how to,
so they were not into new technology.
There was this new meme on the internet, Google Wave,
and they were "what?".
Er, a not so favourite headline of mine: "Google Wave crashes on the beach over over-hype".
Um, and, um, by the end of the, by the end of the year,
we appeared in equal measures on "most promising"
and "most disappointing". Technology lead us till 2009,
in January, February, we hit rock bottom.
Even those early adopters who'd loved it started leaving,
I think because they couldn't really get their friends,
um, to use it just yet. And so I wish, you know,
I'm no spring chicken anymore, I wish I could tell you that
I'm used to this sort of thing, and it's fine, but it's,
it's kind of painful actually, you know, maybe I should read
that book about life or balance. [laughter]
The good news is, is that we kept at it, we're working
much harder than that book would recommend,
and little by little [laughter], little by little,
those, you know, the hecklers are, maybe they're just
getting tired of heckling, but little by little we're
hearing more and more stories of people actually
using Google Wave. And so maybe there's hope.
In the spirit of this conference I want to call out a few
things that I was very happy happened. So when, again,
that horribly devastating earthquake hit in Haiti,
a bunch of people used wave to coordinate, um, their
relief efforts in Haiti, which was a fantastic thing,
I thought. Um, er, at some point there was an organisation
called Debatewise that had a thousand young people from
a hundred and thirty countries debate the climate summit,
the climate change summit in Copenhagen, in Wave, and they
liked it a lot. Um, and then just a few weeks ago, er,
we saw this blog where a fifth grade teacher had her kids
get on Wave, um, and do all their class research in Wave.
And she said those magic words: "the kids thought it was cool".
And so that's when we decided to launch it to everyone.
I have no idea what's going to happen, and when I look tired
it's because, well, you can imagine.
So I don't actually know exactly what ideas that might
be worth sharing here, um, but I do want to just end up
with that favourite picture of mine, and thank you so much for your attention.
[applause]
Captioning services provided by Michael Lockrey