Each day was aimed at a specific group of people.
Day 1 (8 Dec): For Computer Science students and professors
Day 2 (9 Dec): For software developers/programmers/engineers
Day 3 (10 Dec): For companies and entrepreneurs.
I've managed to register for a place on the 2nd day. I can say it was quite an interesting event and was very educational and useful. We were presented with existing Google technologies as well as made aware of new ones. There were lots of new features implemented by Google and tailored to the needs of the Middle Eastern market. Below is Day 2's agenda along with a short description of some of the sessions that I attended.
Day 2 Agenda:
Main auditorium :
09:45 - 10:00 Welcome Address
10:00 - 10:30 Keynote
10:30 - 11:00 Google in the Middle East
11:00 - 11:30 Work in Open Source
11:30 - 12:10 Google AppEngine & Google Web Toolkit
12:10 - 12:30 Break
12:30 - 13:45 Google AppEngine & Google Web Toolkit - continued
13:45 - 14:30 Lunch
14:30 - 15:20 Panel Discussion : from idea to product
15:20 - 16:10 The latest on Maps APIs
16:10 - 16:30 Break
16:30 - 17:20 Introduction to Mobile Development
17:20 - 18:00 Google Apps, APIs & Apps Marketplace
18:00 - 18:25 Closing comments
Parallel sessions :
11:00 - 11:30 The New Social Web: It's About Open Standards
12:30 - 13:45 Search 101 - a great website is nothing if it can't be found
14:30 - 15:20 Chrome Extensions
15:20 - 16:10 Presentations on using Google tools by external speakers
16:10 - 16:30 Site Clinic (live review of websites)
16:30 - 17:20 Web-based Language Services
17:20 - 18:00 Introduction to MapReduce
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Welcome Address and Keynote:
Quite a strong start and powerful Introduction to a great event. They started with introducing the all the Google staff to the audience and then moved on to talking about Google itself and its operations in Egypt and the Middle East.
Google in the Middle East:
One of the biggest and most impressive presentations during the event. The session covered a very wide range of topics starting from Google's core search engine and how it has been made to fit the needs of Arabic speakers surfing the web all the way to development technologies for platforms like Google's App Engine and Android. One of the highlights of this session is the HTML5 demonstrations, they introduced HTML5 to the audience, highlighted the new features of HTML5 like the canvas and showed us how all this is compatible with Google's own Chrome Internet Browser.
Work in Open Source:
Another very interesting session presented by Chris DiBona. The session talked about open source software, its advantages to both consumer and developer as well as all of Google's open source projects like Android for example.
Google AppEngine & Google Web Toolkit:
We were given a quick tutorial on Google's new platform called the Google App Engine. The required software and SDKs were distributed among the attendees so they can follow up on the coding session instantly. The tutorial covered the the basics of App Engine. The Google staff then announced that there is a coding competition taking place through out the rest of the day and the best App Engine application is to win an Android phone as a prize. At the end of the day each team presented us with their application. They were quite impressive and creative especially for people who had no prior experience in App Engine and were coding on it for the first time. A panel of judges from the Google staff was set up and the winner(s) were chosen.
Almost every session during G-Egypt was great, interesting and taught us something new. I'm very happy to have had the opportunity to attend such and event and plan to attend the next event.
Additional Links:
List of presentations and videos of the event: http://sitescontent.google.com/gegypt/presentations-videos
List of Speakers at the Event: http://sitescontent.google.com/gegypt/speakers
Additional Links:
List of presentations and videos of the event: http://sitescontent.google.com/gegypt/presentations-videos
List of Speakers at the Event: http://sitescontent.google.com/gegypt/speakers
