Coded In The Clouds: The Awesome “Chrome-to-Phone” Android App Happened Over Belgium!

Entrepreneurial Googlers have a five-day week, and one of the cool things about working at Google is that they are allowed to work on their own ideas on one of these days. They can work on projects unrelated to their job at Google or develop something – totally up to them. This is officially called the “20 percent time.”

We’ve seen them working on Google products across the company and around the world and also in their 20% time. In fact, all the wonderful stuff from Google: Google News, Gmail, Google AdWords & AdSense, Google Reader, Google Earth, Google Talk, Orkut and many others are a result of this 20% time.

But now they do it in the skies – 35,000 above ground!

No plane ride is too daunting for the Engineering Director for Android, Dave Burke, who used the Google App Engine for the first time, on a 12-hour plane ride to Tokyo.  Well, what’s so special about a Googler using the Google App Engine, you might say.

Wait till you hear the rest of the story!  His love for coding got the better of him and in the time that was supposed to be his 20 percent time, he built the “Chrome-to-Phone” Android app and Chrome Extension.

People have fallen in love with this app and it is now used by nearly half a million people.  The Chrome-to-Phone Android app and Chrome extension allows you to automatically send links to your Android device from your computer, obviously using the Chrome browser.

Here’s a little background on how it works…  You can send everything including a YouTube video, a map or a webpage.  It’s extremely useful with maps. If you’ve looked up an address in Google Maps on your Chrome browser, you can just click the extension and it will automatically push it and open it in the Maps app of your Android phone. Another most useful aspect is the “link push” ability, which means, if something catches your eye when browsing, you can just use a Chrome extension and have it appear on your phone with a single click.

Of course, if you’re looking for downsides… Imagine the “unwanted” possibilities of letting your naughty friends get their hands on your computer with the extension installed.

Burke’s job is to manage software engineers working on different projects. Being at a higher level, he worries that his technical skills may get rusty and uses all the time he gets to code.  He says, his bi-monthly trips from London to Tokyo and California are spent using up his 20 percent time, or what he calls his “license to innovate.”

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I’m sure most of us would end up reading a book or catching up on sleep on a long flight, but this one being a Googler – worked on device-to-device interaction; although he has never done anything like this before.  Leave alone writing a Chrome extension, he has never used App Engine, which is a platform used by developers to build web applications.

His first-time effort paid off and a prototype of Chrome-to-Phone was born, over the Belgium skies. He got the Chrome-to-Android app approved before he returned back.

Google is smart for allotting 20% of each person’s time to innovation.  Good things are bound to come out of it. We may soon carry our “phones” which are nothing but “pocket-sized computers.”

Tags: Android app, Chrome to phone, Chrome-to-Android app, Google, Google Chrome