I attended Google IO Conference last week and I am really glad I was able to attend it. Of course, one of the thing that got everyone excited was that Google gave out their new android phone to all attendees, but more important reason that got me so excited was that I was able to see Google Wave demo live. I got this feeling that it might be a next big thing. I remember when I first watched F8 video, I got this thrilled feeling that something big will happen. I got similar goose bumps with Google Wave, as I had with not only Facebook, but Google, Twitter, iPhone, Salesforce, etc.

Since my thinking habit always tries to relate any new technology with localization,  I gave it a thought how it can be used to enhance existing localization technology.  As most of the people might naturally think Google Wave will change how we collaborate with people, My thinking was also around how it can be used to improve localization collaboration process. I think it could be some sort of new GCMS built on top of Wave enabling real-time Loc engineer - PM - linguist - LQA - Vendor collaboration, collaborative linguistic review,  LQA - Linguist collaboration, real-time crowd sourcing collaboration, and so forth. We are at a time that our traditional localization paradigm is slowly changing toward to something new - crowd sourcing and machine translation for user generated content.

One thing that I think the next big thing for localization might be around applying the concept of Facebook Translations to companies that are not possible to attempt crowd sourcing for their products for a various reasons by promoting direct customer involvement through incentives, micropayment or a sense of pride. I am sure Google wave can be the technology that make it all happen.

One other thing that I noticed at Google IO was how all the pieces that Google invented with a slew of their beta products fit all together nicely for their cloud strategy. Amazon and Salesforce also seem a bit scared about Google being aggressively expanding to their turf and busy implementing their solutions around Google’s technology. Soon Croud will be ubiquitous and Google is well positioned to be a leader in that arena.  So, one might ask, “Will Google stock hit $1000 within 2 to 3 years?” I think it will.

Google IO  Session Videos:http://code.google.com/events/io/