Distinguished Lecture
Wednesday, January 9, 12:45 Haleakala Ballroom, Grand Wailea, Maui

	Google+ Hangouts: Changing Communication by Bringing People Together Face-to-Face-to-Face by Bradley Horowitz Vice President of Product Management, Google+ Project

Previously at Google, Bradley Horowitz has led the Product team for Google Apps and other products, including GMail, Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Talk, Orkut, Picasa, Blogger, Google News, and iGoogle.

Before joining Google, he founded and led Yahoo's advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and he drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO, and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

Bradley has a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Michigan, and a master's degree in Media Science from the MIT Media Lab, where he was pursuing his Ph.D. when he left to co-found Virage.

Abstract

Multiway video conferencing has been a powerful tool in business and corporate settings for more than a decade. However, this technology has typically depended on relatively expensive dedicated hardware installations.

Google+ Hangouts democratizes this experience making the face-to-face-to-face experience available to consumers around the world, using only commodity webcams, labtops, and even unreliable internet connections. Moreover, Google+ Hangouts is an extensible platform that provides a framework for real-time interaction across a number of modalities.

In this talk, we will briefly touch on the technical design of this project, but will focus on some of the unanticipated use cases projects and even businesses that have emerged from the user-community itself.