“Finally, our code is working.”

- Famous Last Words.

Note: I’m under a strict Non-Disclosure Agreement signed at the Google Bangalore office, so anything I might say in the following paragraphs may be a figment of my deranged imagination and entirely fictitious bearing no resemblence to any person or event occuring in the real world. Sorry.

Google India announced its Google Product Prodigy Conclave, 2008 and scheduled it for March 26th, 2008. Google graciously provided us (and the other finalists, along with its new recruits and some representatives from universities across the nation) with Air-tickets to Bangalore, a Cab to drive us around in Bangalore, and an ultimate 5-star hotel to stay in with cool luxury. I’m seriously glad those guys paid my food bills during the stay in the hotel as my frugal dinner consisting of two rotis and two vegetable items got billed to Rs. 715, and our later proper team-dinner got billed to Rs. 5000+, and I was close to heart-failure when the restaurant manager refused to acknowledge the existence of Google. Thankfully a quick call to the reception desk at the hotel (called Chancery Pavillion, by the way. Nice hotel, give it a try sometime if you’ve got the money) solved the crisis. The rooms were great, double bedded, and with a refrigerated mini-bar, complimentary chocolates, food and tea/coffee along with an electric kettle. There was a nice bath-tub, and finally I managed to try one out (believe it our not, never been inside one before!). Floating inside a bath-tub is definately on my “hobbies” list from now onwards.

We had WiFi Internet connectivity in our room, and we worked all night finishing up the project. I didn’t sleep at all, which is another story. The breakfast was nice, a buffet actually - pick up whatever you want, and was with best compliments from the hotel. A bus picked us all up at 8.30 am sharp and we landed at GooglePlex Bangalore. However, the surprising bit about the Google Campus is that there is no mention of Google anywhere around the building or the grounds it occupies. It is based on three floors and shares the building with other companies (maybe that’s ‘coz its just recently set up here). But they could provide a simple “Google Inside” board somewhere outside the building, so that people wouldn’t pass by the building a million times looking for the Google India Headquarters. Here is where we signed the famous Non-Disclosure Agreement, so beware of the factual accuracy of the following paragraphs!

At Sparta, their conference hall, we got initiated to the idea of Product Prodigy by a nice guy who gave the stage to another cool guy who talked about the Indian relevance of Google India. That cool guy happens to be the Engineering & Site Director of Google India, and the initiating ‘nice guy’ is the Head of Staffing I think. This was followed by a complicated seminar on a problem of cloud computing, that had something to do with “How to decide who the new master of the cloud would be if the current master was to be shot dead.” Wierd discussion ensued, and I got to eat a chocolate for being one of the three people to ask certain doubts and for making ‘beep’ noises amidst the general shocked silence.

Following this was a neat coffee-break where we could pick up anything from their refrigerators (Sodas, Cold Drinks, Juices, etc etc) or get awesome coffee from the Cafe Coffee Day outlet free of charge. And the fun part is that it wasn’t free just for us. The Googlers working there get to do that everyday and they can do it at any time of the day, as many times as they want! Free food! That apart, the Googlers had set up an exhibition of sorts of their latest innovations; the Translingua team, the Orkut team, the On-screen keyboard team along with others were there explaining their products, and we were free to eat their brain! How cool is that?!

Then we had our presentation, explained our stuff well. People thronged our kiosk, and people liked our idea, but the critical part of our code- the interface where the latest traffic feed is fed failed to work right that morning, and I was just too tired to think of any way to fix it. And therefore I had to shrug and explain to the judges that the proof that the traffic feed code did infact work was that we had used it to feed information for over 130 roads, which wouldn’t be possible manually. But I’m really lame at shrugging, and we lost a lot of points because of that I think. We made our own Google Maps-like draggable map with sections of the map loading as we dragged along, and the search box working like a Google Suggest, that suggested hot locations around the city as one typed the keyword in. I think people liked these nifty things. I for one really loved it, at being able to make stuff like that. I will release the code of my Google Maps-clone soon on this blog. Its not sophisticated, doesn’t have any API. Its the interface. People haven’t really shared any code of that kind anywhere I looked, so I think I’ll do it for the benefit of anyone else interested in making a GMaps-clone.

Then in the evening, we were blindfolded and taken to an unknown destination for the closing ceremony. We were told that we would be taken to Taj, but I thought we were lost in the wilderness. Oh wait, I think I’d slept off during the bus journey. Anyway, the important thing is that the ballroom was opulent, and we kept getting fed all through with cranberry juice and veg kebabs and other appetizers. There was a panel discussion between big-shot people - the Chief Scientist at IBM India (Mr. C. Mohan), the Head of Google Asia-Pacific (Mr. Deep Nishar), the CEO of Yahoo! India (Mr. Sharad Sharma), the MD of Helion (Mr. Ashish Gupta), an IISc Professor (Mr. Jayan Harista) and a Google Engineer (Mr. Lalitesh Katragadda) on various topics. Hey wait a minute, what was the CEO of Yahoo! doing at a Google Conclave? Anyway, the discussion was interesting, but quite stretched and we were quite hungry at the end of it, and that is what the Food people at the Taj (was it Taj?) were more than happy to satisfy. The Food was good. The food was good throughout this “Google Experience”, which led to my stomach refusing to digest the amounts of junk and non-stop trash I was sending in. Spent the following few days recovering from indigesion. Too bad, but the food was worth the trouble. That’s all I really care about. And people would be wonderstruck at that declaration of eternal love for food, looking at my relatively skinny frame.

Can’t write anything more. I’ve squeezed out most of my brain, and I think that’s all there is to say about the Google Experience. Loved it. 42.