A big thanks to Zachary Applegate from Plumber Surplus for contributing this blog on the subject of his team's recent visit to Google's Irvine complex. Hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as I have:

While our small team from PlumberSurplus.com was excited to be able to go to the Google open house in their new Irvine California office, we were unsure of what we would see and learn about Google and their new office. Google is known to use these opportunities to announce new products such as analytics at last years Web Masters World PubCon November. Google always puts on a good show with lots of great food, networking, and presentations.

GooglePlex Irvine C.A.

The office was plush of course, meeting the high expectations people have come to love from a Google offices. The rest of the building was, however, still under construction with the Google office and a gym being the only business currently open. The office had everything from a projector that displayed recent Google searches and another that displayed Google Earth zooming in on different cities, to the complete Google snack bar, ping pong table and huge bean bag chairs. The food catered in was fantastic as was their open bar. Check out these pictures of the event and the office.

Google AdSense Audio - http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/dmarc.html

Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, which specialized in audio and radio advertising, in January of this year and is now finally starting to unveil the big picture of how they hope to do to radio advertising similar to what AdSense did to internet advertising. The presenter stated that

“The platform simplifies the sales process, scheduling, delivery and reporting of radio advertising, enabling advertisers to more efficiently purchase and track their campaigns. For broadcasters, dMarc's technology automatically schedules and places advertising, helping to increase revenue and decrease the costs associated with processing advertisements.”

They demonstrated the product and gave an overview of how they are able to dynamically generate and change commercial content according to demographic and what is currently going on in the geographic area of radio stations. Their example - if its really hot in one area, McDonalds may not want to roll their regular burger ad, but instead an ad for their cool drinks and frozen treats would be played. The overall feel was to make radio advertising more accessible and targeted for everyone.

They cited that most radio advertising campaigns require a $20,000 spend, and when people are not willing to spend that it’s hard for them to break into radio advertising. They said Google AdSense Audio would enable people with a $200 budget to break into radio advertising, making targeted and area advertising via radio, IPTV and podcast more effective and viable for smaller businesses.

The inclusion of reporting and content creation tools was discussed as well as a way to help advertisers track and account for their radio advertising as well as create their own audio content for the system. Below is a picture of the beta interface they were using to demo the product.

This is a queue style layout where the radio content is lined up color coded in the queue along with the commercial content. They said the system automatically knows when to start playing the commercial content by starting after the radio host is finished talking. Also a feature that lets the advertiser’s listen to fifteen seconds before and after recording of the commercial content is played to let them check to make sure their content was actually aired.

Google's mission to organize the world's information

Jeff Huber, VP of Engineering at Google, spoke for a while about Google’s mission to organize the world's information and some of the custom solutions they have created to help them achieve this endeavor. This included:

• Hardware solutions that help them to run everything
• The Google File System which is a distributed files system that enables them to store, organize and add redundancy to their data
• MapReduce that analyzes and organizes data
• Sawzall - their programming language that helps automating such analyses and coding.

He also went through a brief history of Google datacenters, from one of their first servers that had a case made of Legos, to server cages that had floor fans setup in front of them to help with cooling. Below is a member of our team with Jeff Huber and others of the presentations.

Google’s new data center in Oregon

Questions were asked about the new Google datacenter outside of Portland, Oregon. Jeff Huber discussed the necessity for Google to have available the computing power and space for their growing needs. He said that the data center was designed by and for Google for this specific application and that a main concern was being environmentally friendly while providing for the needs of Google. Jeff mentioned that the cooling towers were strictly for cooling the servers and that, surprisingly, he has not actually seen the site as of yet but should be traveling soon to check it out.

-Zach
PlumberSurplus.com
http://www.plumbersurplus.com/

Thanks a ton to Zach and the entire Plumber Surplus team. Information and photos like this help to give a view of how the search engines present themselves at more private events.