I know, I know, you’re all waiting breathlessly for my report on WebFountain, but to be honest, the stuff I saw there last Friday was rather complicated, and it’s going to take me a bit more time to figure out how to relate it. Given that I’m swamped at SES, I’ll hope to get to it sometime later in the week. Meantime, I did get a chance to swing by Google’s NYC offices, which are near Times Square, in the old About.com space (you gotta love this trend of taking over space from once-highfliers). I met Craig Nevill-Manning, the engineer responsible for Google’s 30-odd NYC-based engineers. Craig is the man behind Froogle, and we had a good chat about approaches in the shopping space. Net net: watch the space. Work continues apace. My old colleague Patrick Keane, late of Jupiter, who now works in the NY office, was out with some nasty food poisoning. Get well soon…
The NY office is dominated by a large sales force, mainly late 20s, busily hawking AdWords or its variants. Clearly a happy group, but a very different feel from the Googleplex in Mountain View. The colors scheme and lava lamps are the same, but this is New York, after all. Sell, sell, then…sell some more.