GDayX Mumbai 2013 : 12th Oct Event Coverage

[ This article has been contributed by Amit Zaveri,our community builder from Mumbai ]

Event Details

 Event Coverage:

Google has been conducting events and workshops worldwide under “Google Day” banner to share knowledge about online opportunities and how you can leverage them by using Google products. In Mumbai, the GDayX event was organized by GBG (Google Business Group) in collaboration with GDG (Google Developer Group) on 12^th Oct.

Key Takeaways

• It was a great platform to understand how one can leverage Google technologies to increase the digital market presence
• Google is not limited to search only. It has dozen of products like Google apps which can help you to increase productivity as well as online presence
• Google Business Group (GBG) and Group Developer Group (GDG) wants to enhance Google’s knowledge sharing platform by expanding its reach and wants more people to join in the initiative

Combined Track

** Digital landscape in India & significance of community

The event started with keynote address by Sunil Rao, Country Head-Outreach Programs at Google India. He mentioned:

• The importance of Internet is increasing day by day. India has 137 million internet users out of which 87 are mobile internet users.
• Asian countries like India are major driver of global economy
• Searching the internet makes the world’s information available to all. It is very important to have democratization of information and content.
• Indian spend large amount of time surfing the net.
• Today before purchasing the goods, consumers spend large amount of time researching about the goods. Hence the concepts like FMOT (First Moment of Truth) don’t exist and now it’s ZMOT (Zero MOT) i.e. internet where they know about goods before purchasing
• People in India ROPO (Research Online & purchase offline)
• India is the 2^nd largest Small Medium Businesses (SMBs) in the world
• Google wants to help SMBs by offering its apps (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15zSL5infoc)
• Google places can help businesses to easily have online presence (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpZan96KHOM). Companies can also publish business premises photos (3D) with the help of franchised photographers at very low cost.
• Google Glass is future vision from Google and it can add new dimension to the way advertising is done!

There was brief introduction about Google Business Group (GBG) Mumbai and Google Developers Group (GDG) Mumbai which are two major initiatives of Google Outreach Program.

Later the event was divided into two tracks i.e. Business track which was focused on SMEs, marketers, publishers, content owners, etc. and Developer track which was dedicated to webmasters, app developers, etc.  From the attendees point of view, business track scored better marks than the developer track at the event.

Business Track

** Starting your App business with Android – Aakrit Vaish from Haptik.co

Aakrit very well explained the audience how they can start Android app business and what all points they need to take care. He mentioned:

• When developing think about how you will acquire users, how you will make money out of it and how will users use your app
• Launch website along with app and use platforms like LaunchRock to quickly build sites.
• Create start up videos. Refer sites like startup-videos.com and appvj.com for examples
• Use social media, press and other offline medium to publish about app
• Put on business card, flaunt on t-shirts, etc.
• Have user acquisition strategy and make sure they love using the app always
• App store optimization
  • App name should be short
  • Include company name instead of personal name as publisher
  • Put proper category
  • Design good icon
  • Put relevant screenshots
  • Put detailed description with all possible keywords
  • Concentrate to maintaining quality and user ratings
  • Use growth hacking to sell products (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_Hacking)
    • Airbnb
    • Zynga
    • Waze
    • Monetizing options
      • Freemium
      • Ads – static, video, rich media
      • Retention
        • Appointment mechanism
        • Pamper ego & status
        • Community
        • Give complete control
        • Multi-platform & multi device support

** Understanding Google Search, Webmaster Tools and SEO – Syed Malik from Google

Syed Malik, Google

Syed Malik has excellent knowledge about Google Search, Webmaster tools and SEO in particular. He explained how Google search engine works and then gave few SEO tips. He mentioned:

• Google search engine steps
  • Crawling & Indexing 60+ trillion pages
  • Ranking content based on 200+ factors
  • For SEO referring Google Webmaster Guidelines is a must (https://support.google.com/webmasters/?hl=en )
  • Do website listing on open directories like DMOZ
  • 7 Visibility Tips
    • Make sure your content is “crawlable”
    • Make sure its “indexable” eg certain flash content might not screened by bots.
      • Use sites like  Site:domainname.com
      • Webmaster tools
• Look good in search results making your content very relevant
• Describe images:describe,alt,caption (prefer using caption & description)
• Remember rich snippets like ratings, structured content, etc.
• Expand your presence
• Avoid common pitfalls: Don’t get caught in seo trends, don’t hire rogue seo,watch out for guarantees, create great content for users and rest will follow

** Google+ for Business – Pooja Srinivas from Google

Pooja Srinivas really took the audience in confidence by displaying the power of Google+ for business. She mentioned:

• Google+ can help businesses in building awareness, influence, drive and maintain consumer behaviour towards their products
• Businesses can setup Google+ Business page with following features
  • Vanity URL
  • Integration with maps
  • Google + YouTube common presence
  • #hashtags
  • Google+ Badge, G+ share
  • Please refer “Google+ learn more” to understand in detail
  • Also they can use various Google apps like
    • Gmail for businesses
    • Hangout on Air
    • Google+ communities
    • Google+ events

** The Future of Digital Marketing – Sreeraman Thiagarajan from media2win

Sreeraman who heads the GBG Mumbai chapter presented interesting and visionary presentation on future of digital marketing. He mentioned:

• Fundamental shift is affecting
  • 1.5 billion smartphone users base, which is growing fastly
  • Cultural shift
    • People search on google reveals it all (try searching “I am xx years” with age range 10-60)
    • Future technologies like Google glass may bring concepts like “Pay per gaze”
    • Video revolution is changing the world e.g. YouTube
    • Contextual and peer recommendation are becoming more important
    • CYCO is hyper local community initiative launched by Google
    • Chromecast could change TV viewing experience

** Google Apps for Business – Dinesh Varma from Consularis

Dinesh Varma who is experienced in helping companies leverage Google Apps for business gave good overview of Google apps and how these apps can increase productivity. He mentioned:

• The concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is now visible in some corporates
• Google apps like docs, drive, calendar, mail, etc. can increase organization productivity and reduce capital cost
• You can follow latest news on Google Apps at http://whatsnew.googleapps.com/

** Open panel talk with Googlers and Q&A

Post all presentation, the speakers had Q&A session where in major questions were around SEO and Google+ features. The speakers addressed the questions in best possible manner and also requested attendees to meet online for specific queries.

Overall it was great experience being part of the event and we hope Google continues to arrange such events and help end users to leverage opportunities.

 Developer  Track (Covered by Vikrant Cornelio, Software Developer)

It was a great learning experience to be a part of passionate web developer team alongside business leaders, IT Professionals content owners. It was a pleasure to be a part of this event compromising of the usage of Android technology, its applications, statistics and latest trends in the upcoming universe of apps.

 ** Developing Casual Games for Android by Manas Gajare

The speaker talked about the rise of Casual Social games and its ascension into a new horizon of mobile technology. He also covered evolution of computer games into hi-tech 3D games.

** Google: A Developers Paradise (Platform) by Yogi Udgire

The speaker educated on various statistics on the world of android and usage of mobile phone for a number of applications like 50% of apps downloaded are games,40% of time spent on mobile is in playing games. Game Discovery, Marketing and Development on all platforms are the challenges faced by game developing companies.

** HOL on HTML5 and Web Designing by Kaustubh Barde

The speaker introduced to the world of Google aping which aroused an interest in audience for developing their own app. He familiarized audience with latest trends like cloud computing, networks, database and processing.

Google App Engine lets you run web applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it’s ready to serve your users.

**HOL on PHP for Web Development by Jacky Satpal

The speaker presented about the graphic technology of parallax scrolling which helped to know about the latest trends in animation and computer graphics followed by the basics and function in PHP.