Geo on the Road: The 2011 European Google Geo Developer Roadshow

Developer Advocate Mano Marks recently stopped by in Europe for a whirlwind tour on the Geo APIs.

I started to write up a description of every event I attended in the last two weeks, but it became a book not a blog post, so I’ll keep it simple and list the events in order:

• Paris GTUG
• Prague meeting with lead Geo developers
• Barcamp Ostrava
• Moscow GTUG
• Google DevFest Saint Petersburg
• WhereCamp EU (Berlin)
• Berlin GTUG
• Hamburg JavaScript Meetup

Here’s a map:

View European Geo Roadshow 2011 in a larger map


I'm a little proud of that map, I added a beard to the pegman icons. I thought that cool. Anyway...

I’d say it was exciting, but we Googlers get made fun of for over using that word, so I’ll just say it was fantastic. I spent two weeks traveling Europe talking to developers about new stuff in Google Geo. And I found most people had not heard of all the cool stuff we have going on. In particular, I talked about:

• Google Fusion Tables
• The Places API
• Custom Street View
• Google Earth Builder

I saw amazing demos, from using barometric pressure in Xoom tablets to determine what floor someone is on, to photo sharing, customer loyalty cards, and tracking cows inside meat factories.  I also learned a lot in Russia and the Czech Republic about how people are eagerly anticipating the launch of Map Maker to help deal with data quality issues in those countries. These are all new parts of Google’s Geo platform that most developers hadn’t heard about. And most of those events were Google Technology User Groups or a Google DevFest!  So I met with hundreds of developers, and it only encourages me to come back for more. For the many of you I didn’t get to meet, I put all my presentations on-line in my new slides repository.

Here’s a few pictures from the events ...

Barcamp Ostrava:

Including one of our youngest GTUG members playing on the new Samsong Galaxy Tab:

Berlin GTUG members at the awesome c-base site:

Thanks for everyone who was so welcoming and helped me put this on. I’m eagerly anticipating a follow-up trip.

Posted by Michael Mahemoff, Google Developer Relations