Last week our CTO and Co-Founder Aidan Sliney headed over to the world renowned Google I/O event in San Francisco. It hasn’t even been 2 months since the Soundwave founders were last in the States for the SXSW event in Austin, Texas which was a great success and Google I/O proved just as worthwhile.
The event ran from the 15th - 17th of May with Aidan traveling over for the full week. The first day kicked off with the main keynote speech which lasted 3 hours and included an unexpected appearance by Google Co-Founder Larry Page. Lots of good news came out of this speech for Soundwave including the following:
1. Google’s new streaming serviceGoogle have entered the music streaming service space which means another partner that Soundwave will be capturing plays from.
2. New IDE - Android development tool: Android StudioA new development tool to develop Android Apps; very exciting news for the geeks in Soundwave!
3. Alpha/ Beta roll outs from the Google PlaystoreDifficulties we had handing out our Beta to our trusted private users will now be a thing of the past. When we need to hand out our Android app we can now do it using Google Play store.
4. Fused Location ServiceLocation is a big part of Soundwave and this new method of capturing location accuracy means things are only going to keep getting better and better.
5. Cross Platform sign inOne for the backlog but it is pretty cool that a user can now login to our website and be automatically logged into the app.
The event itself was packed with talks and classes on best practices in coding for Youtube, Google +, Google Maps, Chrome and of course Google Glass. Aidan even managed to get a firsthand sneak preview of Google Glass. He was very impressed with the ease of use but feels that for the functionality you gain it is hard to justify wearing them for now but they are definitely on to something!
As the main Soundwave features that rely on Google Services include location, Youtube and Google + these were the events that Aidan attended. One of these talks was presented by Ade Oshineye who we are happy to say is one of our first 100 users and a real Google + evangelist.
Throughout the three days there were many ‘Google friendly’ companies presenting their work. There were some great conversations and we are now friends with companies such as Snapette, Pocket, ibotta, Gracenote, MusiXmatch and many more.
As you all know by now, everyone attending got presented with a Google Chrome Pixel. For those of you that don’t know what a Pixel is it’s a touchscreen, Retina display laptop that runs Chrome OS. Thanks Google!
Outside of the event there are always people to catch up with. Aidan got a tour of 8tracks’ very cool and trendy office as well as spending some time hanging out with the Swedish arm of Spotify who were also on tour in San Francisco. With all this going on he somehow managed to cycle across the Golden Gate bridge. If you are one of the lucky people on the private beta you can check out what songs he listened to once he got across!
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