Google, other Silicon Valley firms nurture app developers
They crowd the lobby of Google's Building 43 one evening a month, waiting to climb the wide stairway under a mock-up of the world's first private spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, prepared to delve deep into the Internet giant's brain.
Over the next two hours, they will get a lecture about Google software, along with a free, catered dinner in this sanctum sanctorum of the Web. But the 30 to 100 software programmers who regularly attend the Google Technology Users Group don't even work for Google -- at least, not directly.
"You want to build something to help people, to make money, to become famous -- for all the right reasons," said GTUG member Siamak Ashrafi, explaining his passion for software applications that allow smart-phones equipped with Google's Android operating system to become a kind of personal medical assistant.
When Facebook in 2007 began allowing independent developers to write software applications that ran on the social network, the response was immediate -- the site now features games and other software applications by more than 1 million programmers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries. Now Web portals like Google and Yahoo, telecom companies like Sprint and smart-phone-makers like Palm, and even providers of online services like PayPal and LinkedIn are scrambling to position themselves as open platforms where highly motivated, independent software developers like Ashrafi can build and market their software -- known as "apps" -- to the world.
In turn, those apps woo Web traffic and consumer interest back to the platform, the way flowers attract honeybees to their pollen.
The popularity of Apple's iPhone and its more than 100,000 apps that allow users to check everything from surf conditions to a bank balance has accelerated the trend.
"It's a paradigm shift in how companies deliver value to their customers. Instead of trying to do it all on their own, it's solidifying this very motivated group of developers -- even more motivated than an employee in many cases -- to go after a large number of ideas in a very effective way," said Osama Bedier, vice president for product development for PayPal, the San Jose online payment service that opened its platform to third-party developers this fall.
"Imagine if every app on that iPhone had to be built by Apple," Bedier said. "I don't think the physics of that would make it possible." Typical of its culture, Apple keeps a tighter rein on those apps than many of the open-source models used by companies like Google.
The proliferation of smart-phones and global open platforms has created potentially lucrative opportunities for programmers.
"We're dealing with the golden age of development," said Christie English, a doctoral student at the University of California-Davis who commutes to Silicon Valley for GTUG meet-ups.
"For someone like me who has a software engineering background, it's hard to consider it as work, because it's so exciting, and because the field is wide open as to what I can do," she said.
Many Silicon Valley developers know somebody who has come up with the Facebook game or iPhone app that struck gold. Consider success stories like Playfish, which built three of the 15 top gaming apps on Facebook, and was recently acquired by Electronic Arts for $400 million.
When he was still working at a startup, Bret Taylor remembers sharing an office with a former Google engineer who was building a virtual pets game on Facebook called "(fluff) Friends".
"I didn't really get it," said Taylor, now director of the Facebook platform.
But he asked his office mate, who toiled alone with his laptop, how many users he had.
"And he said, 'Ten million.'"
No one can say if there is a gold rush of people moving into software development, but recent meetings like an open developer conference held by Sprint at the Santa Clara Convention Center, and this year's Silicon Valley Code Camp at Foothill College have drawn record numbers. When PayPal held its first developers' conference this month, Bedier expected 1,000. He got nearly double that.
What excites many developers is the ability to use their creativity to hack something that could change lives.
"If I write something that is really popular, I can scale to worldwide scale from my desktop in my den," said Edward Murphy, founder of Conceptual Calculations, a four-person startup in San Rafael that writes educational software. "You could never do that before."
Ashrafi works for a local biotech company researching prostate cancer by day. But what really gets him talking is his vision for Android applications that would allow a smart-phone to make sure an elderly relative has taken her medication that day, or hasn't fallen in the bathtub.
One mobile app Ashrafi calls RxDigita allows users to set alarms so their smart-phone tells them when to take medication. Future improvements would include storing data on drug interactions and diseases. Another app would use the smart-phone's GPS and accelerometer to make it a monitoring device, text-messaging a relative if the elderly person doesn't move their phone for a long time.
"You want to make humanity better," he said. "You want to be able to support your mom as she gets older."
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