Events

Today, we carry around in our pockets devices that easily outstrip the capabilities of a desktop computer at the time that Google was founded: 600Mhz CPUs, 256MB of RAM, and with graphics engines capable of rendering 7 million 3-D triangles per second.In addition to the powerful hardware, we’re seeing an active marketplace of very different, very polished smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone, consumer-oriented BlackBerrys, and Google’s own Android platform.

Across all these devices and operating systems, the common element is the desire of the users to search and browse the web, and reasonably standards-compliant browsers are in the market or being built for every significant device. The browser, coupled with increasingly powerful capabilities from the HTML5 draft specification, has become a great platform for delivering software to non-technical users who want their phones to “just work” with a minimum of difficulty.

We’ll explore what capabilities are commonplace and discuss where the boundaries are for building mobile web applications, with demos as motivational examples.

Speakers

Alex Nicolaou
Alex Nicolaou joined Google in 2006, shortly after Google opened an office in Waterloo, Ontario, where he is involved in the development of mobile apps and ChromeOS products as an Engineering Manager. The mobile apps include Gmail, Buzz, and YouTube amongst others, while the ChromeOS effort is focused on building ChromeOS for ARM platforms.

Until 2006, Nicolaou was president and board member of aruna.ca Inc., a startup developing a unique RDBMS based on text-search algorithms and data structures. Prior to that, Nicolaou was part of LiquiMedia Inc., a startup developing a real time kernel extension and Java Virtual Machine. In 1996, Nicolaou and Jay Steele won the games category of the Java Cup Competition run by Sun Microsystems. In the early ’90s, Nicolaou was principal investigator for six algorithm patents. He holds an Honours BMath in Computer Science and Combinatorics and Optimization and a MMath in Computer Graphics, both from the University of Waterloo.

Punit Soni
Punit is the lead Product Manager responsible for Google’s Mobile Apps effort. He joined Google in 2007 and since then has launched two products in the News/Books domain, and most recently, Google Buzz for mobile. Before Google, he graduated from Wharton with an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial Management. He has had smaller stints at Wharton Ventures and at Intel Capital in their wireless group.

Before his MBA, he was managing and developing products in Cadence Design Systems and has years of experience in Semiconductor space. Punit has also worked in the ground floor of a very early stage startup which used electronic design algorithms in the space of enterprise software. Besides his business degree, he has a Bachelors and Masters in Electrical Engineering.

Generously Supported by

Part of the MobileMonday Toronto Series