LeWeb3 - Google's Nelson Mattos: Users come first

(Running notes from the LeWeb3 conference in Paris.)

Key points from the keynote by Nelson Mattos, VP of engineering for Google in Europe:

What we see happening in the world, the three key drivers of change:

• Ubiquitous connectivity (250+ million broadband users worlwide; wireless)
• Falling costs of storage ("every 13 months we manage to put twice as much info in the same digital space -- in 2020 a device the size of the iPod will hold all the knowledge ever created"; and the cost of storage is also coming down) and increase in processing power (an average car today has more electronics than the Apollo lunar system 1969)
• Democratization of the tools of production (people are now able to do things than in the past only organizations/corporations could do)

Causing major shifts in the way tech is being used. Chronologically:

• Information
• Communication (currently daily about 60 billion e-mails, 33 billion IM, 120'000 blog entries)
• Ecommerce (in Europe, currently about 130 billion euros)
• Community (250 million Internet users using actively a social network, 3 teenagers out of 4; 3.7 million pictures a day uploaded to Flickr every day)

To keep up, you have to constantly innovate. Three major elements on Google's innovation:

• Culture ("users come first", "at Google revenues and profitability are an afterthought, our engineers focus on address customer needs"; recognize that needs of every user is different from place to place; that's why we have engineers distributed around the globe; 20% of engineers' time devoted to personal projects) (Mattos announces the launch of a new layer on GoogleEarth: they have uploaded several hundred pictures of the Earth from above, by French star photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand).
• Collaboration
• Speed ("the fast will eat the slow"; iterative ("beta") development and release)

Comments

[Tom Guarriello]

Thanks for the update, Bruno. I'm especially interested in Mattos's remarks because of my intense YouTube involvement. His comments about community are in tension with many of the decisions YouTube management is currently making, which seem geared to enabling professional content creators much more than community connectivity. I just made a video on the subject, which you might enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv-X-5534AM

Look forward to seeing you in Monterey!