The Search Engine Room reveals the latest IT developments

I’m going to be a little self indulgent this week… I promise to get back to answering your questions next week. Cross my heart!

Last week, Annemarie, Liesl and I travelled to Sydney to Search Engine Room to catch up with the latest developments in our industry. It’s worth sharing some of the information we collected with you so you can get a feel for where online might be heading into 2010.

The first keynote speech was presented by Justin Baird, Innovationist at Google Australia. Speaking of ‘keynote’, his presentation using Apple’s keynote software was something to behold! Very flashy.

Justin spoke to us about how the web and search is evolving, how the web technology is allowing us to connect with your brand in new ways (like videos and channels in YouTube as just one example).

Speaking of connectivity, he talked about the way in which the ‘real’ world is increasingly connecting to online, through technologies such as QR codes, etc.

Then there’s the way we consume “video” and how technology is evolving so rapidly that it won’t be too long before we’ll all be watching TV pretty much solely through online channels.

Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC stated recently: “We’re less than five years away from fully individualised drag and drop TV and radio stations”. Sounds pretty cool.

Justin spoke about some of the new things coming through Google Labs such as Google Squared which presents information in a tabulated way enabling you to compare things at a glance.

Finally, (because I’m running out of space to talk about anyone else!) he demonstrated “Cross-language Information Retrieval” (sat THAT 10 times quickly).

He used his android phone to speak (in English of course), and it came back almost instantly with an audio translation in Spanish. This means that soon you will be able to speak to someone in China and the translation will happen via machines in the middle. Love that stuff.