Google Tour

Our visit to the Google office in Mountain View was certainly like being a small boy in a toystore. Lots of fun! Our fantastic tour guide Leslie Hawthorne showed us...

• The live view of search phases being entered into Google
• Tyrannosaurus Rex
• Lots and lots (and lots) of (did I mention lots?) great free food
• Google Toilets, complete with testing on the toilet
  
  
• Beach volleyball court
• Lots of large, open, rather pleasant working spaces
• Their swimming pool
  
  
• A replica of SpaceShipOne. Just to make it clear: if anyone wishes to donate me one, I won't say no...

If there was one thing that surprised me, it was the lack of Google signage. It really made you feel like you were in a pleasant life style rather than a billion dollar company...

So in addition to this lovely tour, we did do some work too. I did an hour-long presentation to Google, and we had some brief chats with web superstar Doug Bowman and Ajaxian.com's Dion Almaer. Dion's mention of SilverStripe on Ajaxian at the start of the year got us the biggest concentrated burst of traffic to our website in SilverStripe's history.