Bumping seats with Google’s Michael Jones at SMX Local Mobile
At the SMX Local-Mobile keynote session on Oct 1st, I sat right in the front row, with co-hosts Greg Sterling and Chris Sherman alongside of me at the same table. Greg had turned his head my way and said, “I’m really looking forward to what you’ll have to say!”
I replied, confused, “what I have to say?”
To which Greg responded, “Oh no, I mean him.”
I looked to my immediately left, and that “him” he was referring to was Michael Jones, Chief Technologist for Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Local, and the keynote speaker for the event. I had been talking with Michael minutes beforehand and he was oogling my super-small digital camcorder (a Sony Xacti VPC-CG65) I brought just for the purpose of testing out in the session. Kind of amusing that I wasn’t more aware of who the speaker was, but hey, he was a fill-in for the originally scheduled speaker. (According to Greg, IAC’s Peter Horan was slated to be the keynote but he had a family issue and had to withdraw.) It would be unfair to characterize Michael as a “replacement” because he was an excellent top draw, and seemed perfectly suited for the conference them. He even pulled double-daty and sat in on one of the other panels of the conference.
And I think Greg was still interested in what I had to say, anway. 