It was really, really hard to get into Google I/O this year, so a lot of people that wanted to attend the show just couldn’t make it out to San Francisco’s Moscone Center for the event. Geek.com was lucky enough to be on scene, so we made sure to write lots of articles and take lots of pictures to get you up to speed.
The gallery above will give you a quick (well, relative to flying out to San Francisco for three days) walk through of I/O, including the 3+ hour keynote, the Sandbox, the crowds at Moscone, the famed I/O Day 1 after hours event (complete with a Billy Idol concert), and some of the sessions. It’s not quite an all access pass, but it’s close enough.
And — don’t forget — the most important part of I/O after the keynote are those sessions. Google has been excellent about making a large number of them viewable on YouTube, so if you really want to know what happened at Google’s developer conference you should watch as many of those as you can take.
From Maps to Chrome OS right on to Billy Idol, it was a pretty incredible developer conference. There wasn’t much new hardware this year — just the announcement of the Galaxy S4 Google Edition — but we did learn a lot about where Google is now and where the company is headed in the future.
At I/O this year Google set the stage for some big announcements from their developers, an improved Maps, a completely cleaned up Hangouts/instant messaging experience, and a lot more on the practical side. The company also gave us a peak into Google’s research process, how things are developed at the company, and — if nothing else — just how big they are thinking. Glass may have gotten most of the headlines from I/O 2013 but, if anything, it’s important because of how much it tells us about the future of Google.