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Google I/O 2011 was held May 10th and 11th and IWS was there! There were lots of neat technologies announced and demoed. Android and HTML 5 were the two major technology sets featured. Google showed all the new features of Android 3.1 for tablets and showed the future (later this year) of Android with the Ice Cream Sandwich release. Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) will be the unifying release of Android geared toward controlling the fragmentation that has occurred over the last 2.5 years with Android devices and markets.

HTML 5 was stressed on day two with demos showing the incredible speed gains in the latest Google Chrome browser release. Much like IE 9, the latest Chrome uses hardware acceleration for graphics via the GPU. To show the incredible speed gains, they took the Microsoft fish demo from IE 9 rollouts and showed 1000′s of fish being rendered with the screen frame-per-second updates staying above 30 per-second. They then switched to a version of the fish demo that utilized Web-GL and had 5000 fish swimming around in the browser. Further 3D demos blew the audience away and certainly inspired the audience as well as the team here at IWS.

Other announcements covered hardware prototyping toolkit for Android external devices, Google App Engine (GAE) having a new pricing model and the Go language availability, new Google Tasks API, Google Places API, and others.

Go to the Google I/O 2011 page for more information and links.

We’re looking forward to working with many of the technologies announced today in creating solutions for our customers and ourselves.