Check back tomorrow at 12PM ET / 9AM PT / 4PM GMT for the Google I/O 2011 keynote!
We're outside the big gates on the second floor of Moscone West in San Francisco waiting to rush into the event this morning. Stay tuned, the fun's about to begin!
And we're in our seats. Some very mellow ambient music is playing. It's all like a beautiful dream.
This music is very soothing. We may just take a nap. Kidding!
As you can tell by the photos, Google's big countdown clock is on the screen. And it's counting down. To extinction. Or a keynote. Either way, it's a win win.
Everyone is scrambling to get their seats right now. We've already seen one fanboy duel involving invisible laser swords and a battle cry of "dual core or death!"
Needless to say, we're probably now experiencing the most versions of a single operating system in one room at the same time. This should be a world record or something.
Here's what we can see on stage right now: a set of 4 speakers, an exercise bike, a laptop, a tablet. Google geeks.
I'm not kidding about that exercise bike, by the way.
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Okay, this music is getting a little funky now. Almost a beat. Could be a nerd dance party in here any moment. Good thing we brought our dancing shoes.
A British woman on the loudspeakers: "We will begin in just 8 minutes -- silence your cellphones."
Okay, we officially have a beat. This party is starting. And I think I like it.
"Good morning ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. We will begin in 5 minutes..."
There's a MacBook on stage. I think I see a Cr-48 crying in the corner.
Seriously, the music is absolutely bumping in here right now. This reminds me of my rave days in all the best ways.
The lights went down... and the countdown is over. We begin!
Vic Gundotra is out!
"Good morning, looks like you're excited to be here. Welcome to Google I/O. This is our fourth year, and I wanted to reminisce about how much we accomplished."
"Four years ago, smartphones were changing the face of clients, connectivity was about to explode. All that happened. In 2009 on this stage, we rallyed the industry to move the web forward with HTML5."
"Who could forget last year..." Ha! The Android eating the Apple image.
"We're excited about the 5000 plus that are in this room, but this year we did something new. We had developers set up viewing parties. We have viewing parties in 122 cities."
Wow, a shot of a grid of parties. There are a ton!
"We hope the next two days are valuable, exciting, and a lot of fun. Now I'd like to introduce Hugo Barra to kick us off."
"Good morning, and welcome to the Android keynote at IO."
"We have three things to talk about -- momentum, mobile, and more."
"Do you guys remember this device?" The G1!
"This is the first phone we shipped over two and half years ago. Back then there were many skeptics. What did Google know?"
"From those humble beginnings... how much progress have we made? We have some exciting news to share today, so we made a video."
This is fun, it's a video showing Android stat numbers... with loud techno music over top.
The crowd cheered at 100 million Android activations. "That's right, we have activated over 100m Android devices worldwide"
"And do you know what's exciting about this? The fact that we did it together."