Visit to Google (Silicon Valley 08, day 2)

Our second day in Silicon Valley started with a bus ride from our hotel -two blocks from Union Square- to Google's headquarters. As always the visit started with a brief tour of some of the main buildings in the main area (close to the main cafeteria). Yes, we did see the famous map to conquer the world...

The main talks for the day were from Luis Garcia, International Product manager at Youtube. You can see the presentation and some comments on the event at Marco's blog. The message was clear: this is about communities, trying fast and failing soon to be able to give new stuff to the public sooner than the rest of the market. Some of the questions were oriented towards the special culture of innovation and openness of Google and how it permeates Youtube. The answer, implicit, is that youtube was too young to have a strong culture and Google's appealing approach to dealing with projects and people has been adopted.

The next confernce was by Bernardo Hernandez, recently appointed to lead the geomarketing efforts of Gooble. Bernardo was the personification of the vision and ambition of Google in this field, sending a compelling message to the group on the possibilities of the combination of information in context with maps. Marco has also posted some info and even a video of Bernardo's presentation.

in all, a strong message of the value of UGC combined with a strong management of content and a platform that is ready to monetize these efforts and even share it with the ones that create traffic. Not bad for a company that is still in its infancy... learning how to solve big problems for humanity.