Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

One of the benefits of working at Global-Roam is the strong emphasis we have on self-improvement. We do everything short of eating books and articles concerned with marketing, software development practices, and creativity. Very regularly we brainstorm, philosophize, furrow eyebrows and pull serious faces in an attempt improve some aspect of the company.

One day, the boss-man (aka Paul McArdle, or as telemarketers like to call him, Paul McArdie) was bulldozing his junkmail collection when he happened upon an advertisement for The Warren Centre’s 2009 Innovation Lecture (http://www.warren.usyd.edu.au/bulletin/NO58/ed58art1.htm). He was about to feed it through the woodchipper when he noticed that the guest speaker was Dr Lars Rasmussen of Google Maps fame.

He immediately emailed the rest of us to see who might be interested in attending. He already knew that interest would be unanimous and yet unfortunately the company coffers were not bottomless. With grave finality (and maybe a hint of sadistic glee) he announced that there would only be three tickets purchased, and that he himself would attend. The reaction to this news was immediate and the air was cold with a sense of hostility (and perhaps the onset of winter). Tempers flared, teeth gnashed and Paul appraised the scene from atop his desk, rubbing his chin. Animals. How could he dispense the tickets without creating dissent among those who would miss out? Should it be first-in best-dressed? Should they be doled out based upon performance? Organised cage matches? Or perhaps he could just throw the tickets into the crowd and let God sort it out..

Then the most obvious question struck me. “Hang on. Is this during work hours?”

“It starts at 6pm”.

“PPFFFFFFFT!”
Tears flowed as I tried to stem the flow of coffee from my nose. Before I could react, excuses were flying around the room like angry hornets.

Shane the Canadian chimed in: “It sounds pretty cool eh, but I’ve got to write another hilarious blog post. They don’t write themselves and I have too many NEM-Watches to sell eh.”

Stephen: “I would really love to attend, but it has come to my attention that my sock drawer is approaching critical mass and I really must deal with it”.

Josh: I’ve got 6 assignments due this week and I have a presentation last Thursday.”

Kim: “I’ve seriously had Google up to the eyeballs. If I hear any more about Google, I’m swear I’m gonna Bing the tallest building I can find.”

Todd: “I think the idea of physically attending a Google Maps conference is self-defeating.” Spitting on the carpet.

All eyes turned toward Adam and I, standing high and dry with all of the good excuses taken. Traumatic childhood memories of musical chairs came flooding back. Of being a chairless wonder, a leper, always the one who got the short end of the stick. And never the chair…

Okay, I concede that the above account isn’t entirely historically accurate. In fact about 90% of it is utter horsesh#%t. It was the sensationalised Michael Bay version with added pyrotechnics. I’d have thrown in a love scene, but I was scared it would get edited. Besides I doubt anyone reading this likes tasteful love scenes anyway.

The actual lecture was held at Customs House in Brisbane. They gave us nametags at the door. Unfortunately someone mistyped mine. How embarrassing, but noone called me out on it.

It turns out that we were the least well-dressed people at the event. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. I believe that it merely accentuated our geek-cred. Such a thing is important when networking at an “Innovation” gathering. I suspect the poorly-groomed nerd stereotype is still seen as a goldmine among venture capitalists. “Look at him” they say, “He’s so busy thinking the big thoughts that he forgot to bathe this week. That’s alright son, we forgive you. Impress us enough and we’ll pay someone to do it for you.”

After a couple of drinks we sat down to enjoy the lecture. Dr. Rasmussen is an interesting character and shared some fascinating anecdotes about working with his brother in a small organisation that was ultimately acquired by Google. It is interesting to note that Google Street View was actually a separate technology that was being developed by a team at Stanford, who were later grafted onto the Google organisation.

He assures us that working for Google is very cool. He CAN tell us why, but only in very general terms (as much as his NDA allows). From what I can gather, Google is like a giant macrophage that eats the competition in its infancy and assimilates it like something out of a horror movie. Only difference is, every baby company is stepping over its mother in order to get eaten by the Google monster. No one really knows what’s inside its gullet until they get in there. But once they do, they turn around and yell out to the rest of us “Hey, it’s pretty sweet in here. You won’t believe what it ate last week, but don’t worry. You’ll see it soon enough.”

Lars Rasmussen’s latest project is Google Wave. He claims that Google Wave will do for email, what Google Maps did for maps. Bold claim indeed. It appears to be a real time messaging system that I suspect (famous last words) will have a large impact on social networking. It allows two or more users to see what the other is typing (spelling mistakes, Freudian slips and all) in real-time. This will allow you to pre-empt your colleagues, which is not always such a bad thing. You may be able to get the gist of what someone is saying before they’ve wasted five minutes typing it. On the other hand, this could lead to all kinds of misunderstandings and wires crossed. Fortunately you have the ability to disable that particular feature.

He demonstrated how he could use Wave to edit the captions on a photo gallery. At the very same time that he was changing one caption, two of his colleagues were changing captions on other photos in the very same album. Analogous to three painters sharing the same canvas simultaneously. Lars also asked one of his colleagues to start typing in Chinese. It appears that Wave could recognise some of the words and would convert them to a different character set. It also incorporates a contextual spell checker.

While everyone was chafing at the bit to see Dr. Rasmussen’s latest and greatest, audience questions were primarily focused on what were the factors that he thought led to innovation. My interpretation of his replies was that innovation often gestates under pressure. People tend to be most innovative when they are out of their comfort zone. This is not really news to anyone. Everybody knows that a high payoff of any kind usually entails high risk. But hearing stories like his certainly remind me that I should always be seeking to innovate.

All in all, I quite enjoyed the lecture.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Event Review, Innovation, Personal Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.