Summary of Some of Google’s 2013 I/O Keynote Today

I don’t know about you, but I get shivers when watching some keynotes… I just get that excited about technology, industry disrupts, and overall growth on a WORLD scale. That’s right, WORLD scale. Although most people didn’t watch Google’s Developer I/O Keynote today, what was discussed will effect many things “web” going forward.

The benefits of having 3 screens (one being my 40″ LED) is that I can run keynotes all day while working. Today I literally watched the entire 3 and a half hour keynote while taking conference calls and doing my usual social media sharing. Talk about multitasking! hah. In this article I want to quickly highlight some of the key topics discussed, without getting too much into the statistics…etc; if you’re looking for the full summary I’m sure there will be plenty posted 🙂

The keynote started off by discussing the growth of the Smartphone Operating System Android, and later steered off into Chrome, and even the new Google Music being launched in the US (more countries soon). It’s interesting how Google is getting into the Music scene, especially with Twitter’s new Music platform being launched just weeks ago. You know, this all contributes to the “downfall” of Apple‘s strong market share in mobile devices and music (iTunes); the growth of services such as Spotify, Songza, and more have certainly had an impact as well. Google’s new music platform allows users to purchase and store music “in the cloud” and have their library accessible across all devices (sound familiar). I’m downloading it on my Samsung Galaxy S3 today to have a look, and so far I’ve heard nothing but good things.

What really interested me was Google’s new innovations in Hangouts including large scale group chatting with a full chat history, and Free Group Video Chat! Don’t be surprised to see your favorite YouTubers (and myself) using Hangouts going forward.

There will also be updates in the Google Search Knowledge Graph, which basically means that you’ll get more information when searching and it will be presented to you in an intuitive fashion. Lets say you search for “population of India”, well now not only will you get the results you asked for , but Google will also show the population of “often compared” countries. That’s just one example, I definitely recommend checking out the Full Keynote if you’re interested in finding out more about what you’ll get when searching Google going forward.

Google has also updated their Knowledge Graph and results to include new languages. 

Finally the Keynote was closed with a Q&A from Google’s brilliant CEO and Co-Founder Larry Page, whom is actually suffering from vocal paralysis and STILL took the time to speak. I’m a big Eric Schmidt fan (former Google CEO), however if one person was to take over it would need to be Larry Page. I have nothing but respect for this individual and his ability to run such a large organization with such success.