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On May 31, I attended the Google Developer Day in Paris where I introduced Google Gadgets and the AdWords API to a technical and passionate crowd.

Technorati Tags: gdd07, gdd07fr

I arrived at the Bastille Design Center pretty early, around 9AM as the numerous teams were busy working on getting the place ready for the event. I sat down for a while, enjoying the beautiful space eating a pain au chocolat, and then browsed my presentations once again, to kill time.

Patrick Chanezon arrived second and since we don’t meet as often as we wish (he being in Moutain View and I in New York), we spent a good hour catching up on things. By noon, everybody from Google had arrived, the place was all set up and we all got some quick lunch. Then for the next hour, we tried out our wifi connections, video feeds, etc.

At 1PM, the place opened and it took more than an hour to get everybody in. Very strict process, people had to provide official ID and a matching invitation, or wouldn’t be let in.

Sandrine kicked off the event at around 2:30PM and Mats gave a quick overview of Google France and our collaboration with the developers community. Nice to get the big boss to come and talk.

Patrick gave the first presentation about multiple Google APIs. I watched most of it, Patrick is a great speaker and has been doing this for year — which might explain why Google gives him a salary for doing it
Before he was done, I was getting ready for the Gadgets presentation. I put on a black Google NYC t-shirt and went on stage. The presentation was probably about 40-min long and hopefully interesting, but I’ll leave this up to bloggers. It was followed by a 10-min Q&A session where I handed out Google NYC t-shirts for questions. The audience was very involved, knowledgeable and fun. I had a good 20-min long follow-up session with participants. The presentation is below:

I then hung out a while to chat with developers, a guy from neteco.com interviewed me about the AdWords API. I was chatting with more developers and eating a jambon-beurre when Thomas and Sandrine rushed to me saying I was late for the API session! I ran down to the lower ground and, with my mouth still half full, proceeded with the presentation. I hope people forgave me for this. The presentation follows:

After all the sessions were finished, a lot of people stayed until about 10PM to discuss with all of us, it was a great time all around. The remaining Googlers all went out for a late dinner and I was back in my hotel room around 1AM. I already had received some great feedback about the Developer Day from people I had met during the day, so if I don’t answer to you right away, please give me a little time, but I will!