I’m delighted to present today a guest post from Kara Gillis from the Product Marketing team in San Francisco.

Skydiving out of a blimp. Remote control drones. AutoCAD WS.

What do these three things have in common?

They could all be found at Google I/O 2012!

At the end of June I attended the annual Android Developers conference, Google I/O, which takes place in downtown San Francisco to showcase our Google Drive integration in the Developers Sandbox.  As the conference approached, I geared up for a three-day adventure with 5500 Google developers.

Moscone Center West was buzzing with activity when I arrived at 8:30 am on the first day. Already, there was a line wrapped around the entire foyer waiting to ascend the escalators to get a good seat for the opening keynote. I navigated my way over to the Developers Sandbox Participant registration and procured my very large name tag that doubled as a full agenda of all of the sessions.

Google Keynote

I met up with my colleague, Dusty, and we headed to the keynote room. We were introduced to the new Android platform release – Jelly Bean – as well as the brand new Nexus 7 tablet, Nexus Q and Galaxy Nexus phone. Then, sometime during one of the new product demos, Sergey Brin interrupted the speaker by running onstage wearing the elusive Google Glasses.  The screens quickly cut to a real time Google+ Hangout featuring skydivers wearing Google Glasses while hovering above the Moscone Center in a blimp.  We watched them descend through the air and land on the roof of the conference center, hand off the Google Glass prototype to BMX bikers, who then gave the Google Glasses to individuals who rapelled down the side of the Moscone Center, entered the keynote room and delivered the Google Glass prototype directly to Sergey on stage to a round of applause.

AutoCAD WS

In order to set up the Autodesk Developers Sandbox station, Dusty and I left the keynote fifteen minutes early and found our booth.  We displayed the AutoCAD WS web browser interface, showing how easy it is to view and edit your AutoCAD drawings in your browser.  We also demonstrated how easy it is to use Google Drive to store and view your AutoCAD drawings using the AutoCAD WS Chrome app.  Check out a demo of the Google Drive integration here.

Throughout the day, conference participants and Googlers stopped by our booth to learn about the possibility of CAD in the cloud.  We met so many interesting and enthusiastic current users of AutoCAD WS. We also met AutoCAD users who were excited to learn about the flexibility and mobility that AutoCAD WS provides.  To all those people who stopped by our booth – thank you! My big grin reflects how much fun we had meeting you.