This past week, developers from around the world gathered in London at the Future of Web Apps conference. There were many great speakers there ranging from Kevin Rose: founder of Digg, Werner Vogels: CTO of Amazon, AOL's Chief Architect, Vodafone's head strategist, etc, etc. Needless to say, a great line-up.
It was great to see the new lineup of innovators outside the traditional big player from companies such as Last.fm who can recommend/target new song ads to your online playlists to the guys at Thinkfree who are building a pretty cool new online office suite to rival Google and Microsoft.
I was asked to speak briefly on the power of Open APIs and Google's approach to the developer community. Although we work very hard to support and create as many tools for our developers to have the power to tweak and modify our products and tailor into their own apps, I'm always amazed by the skepticism by some that think we only do it just to lock people into our technology. I guess people forget about the old paradigm where certain other software makers have kept their platforms closed for so many years and tried their best to stifle competition and innovation.
If only people could spend a day inside our company and see that we really are a company founded by Engineers that want to do whats best for innovation globally and on that same beat, for the environment. Well, here's a link to somebody blogging about my talk:
http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2007/02/jason_chuck_open_apis.php
