Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
Google Canada brought their tech, their toys and some of their more notable video bloggers on YouTube to a loft in downtown Toronto today to showcase the connected life at the Google Loft.
Laid out with various stations showcasing real-world situations where Google's cloud and search technology can come into play, I received first-hand demonstrations on just how capable Google's solutions are and discovered a bunch of tools I never heard of before.
Google was demonstrated in the kitchen using a Nexus 7 device and Google Now to search for smoothie recipes requiring bananas and avocadoes. YouTube videos pulled down Martha Stewart's award-winning concoctions while another video showed our demo lady how to cut an avocado into two. We also queried the calorie content of honey as well as asked the search feature to convert various measurements.
Next up, Google Drive, which is Google's suite of office applications that are based in the cloud. We saw a demo for collaborating on schedules and documents in a real time basis, great backup and sharing capabilities of the Google Drive as well as some of the photo features of Google Plus.
The photo features are quite impressive. Google will backup all the images taken by your smartphone and then find the highlights or the best looking photos of the bunch. There's also the option to auto enhance a picture to improve it in various ways but automatically.
Auto-awesome is particularly impressive, since this take photos that were shot in succession and stitches them together smartly into an animated .gif.
Best thing about backing up photos on Google + is that these can be shared with anyone via email, other users don't need to subscribe to Google + to enjoy the images.
We also learned about Google's https://www.google.ca/flights/ service that quickly searches the cheapest flights from your location to any destination. This is better than various airline booking websites which usually focus on specific airlines over others.
Also demoed were Google's solutions for weddings which integrate a website, various planning tools and even invitations, budgets, schedules and even song lists for the big event.
Google also demoed these various technologies on their devices. There was an abundance of Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, Nexus 4 smartphones as well as a range of chromebooks including the precision cut Chromebook Pixel. The demoes and showcases did feature the many ways Google can make everyday life a little bit easier.