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Interview
Driving Google Apps for Education
A Q&A with Google's Jeff Keltner
9/10/2008
A humble little old bus left Google's Mountain View, CA campus Monday for a 5,000-mile trek across the US to visit 10 college campuses, beginning with southern California's USC. Of course, the 30-year-old bus was converted to biodiesel, updated with solar panels and other green features, stocked with tons of technology and wireless Internet, and given an adorable "Google" paint job. It departed on schedule, chock full of Google Apps for Education demos and tech experts (riding along or flying to meet the bus) with new ideas to discuss with students and faculty. Jeff Keltner (below), Business Development Manager, Google Apps, was on board. Campus Technology chatted with him before the bus left.
We've been selling Google Apps to universities for about two years now and have over two million users... at thousands of institutions. We formed an advisory board with six of our top customers and have had very productive dialogs with CIOs and campus administrators. But we began to realize we weren't having as much dialog as we would like with the actual end users of our products -- students and faculty.
So we decided to go, literally in this case, where the rubber meets the road. We're going to drive this biodiesel bus to ten college campuses, park on each for a day, set up a tent with demo stations outside, and talk to end users about what we're doing, see what they're doing with our products, and show them some things they may not have been aware of.
So this is not so much a "talk to the CIOs" tour as a "meet the end users" road trip?
At all the ten schools we already know the CIOs, who have chosen to offer these services to their students. So this is a chance to go talk with the students and faculty directly. It's not to say that this will replace our communications with CIOs -- that's still very important for us. But it's also important for us to understand what people are doing with our tools at an end user level, especially as we think about how we build the next feature set, the next tool.
For example, we're launching video [this week], which is going to be an internal video sharing tool where I can share a video with people at my school or with a group of users. And we look to our users to help point us in the right direction for that kind of innovation, and what would be most useful for them next.
One of the things I've always found when we talk to our end users, is they surprise us with how creative they are in using our products in new and different ways. So we're really excited to go out, find out what they're doing, show them some more things they can do, and share some of the stories we find about how people are using Google Apps.
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