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JASON TITUS: Hi, everyone.
My name is Jason Titus.
I'm so happy to be with you here from my home
in Palo Alto, California.
I've been so impressed with all the great projects
that I've seen from the Google Developer Student Club
community, from solving for mental health and emergency
response support, all the way from universities
in Germany, South Korea, to Zimbabwe, and more.
You've all made a great effort and it had
an impact on your community.
I think the students have such an amazing opportunity.
You are so well placed to look at the problems
that we have in our society, in our local communities,
and figuring out how to use technology to solve them.
And I can think back to myself as a student and how I got
brought into the world of computers.
And when I was 11, I learned to program,
and started working on building a bulletin board system that
ran on something, an ancient computer like what
you see here.
And as I started putting it together and adding features,
I saw that there was something magical that
happened when you've got communities of people that
had shared interest getting to come together and talk
about them, even though they had never even met.
And it really got me excited about what technology could
do around creating community.
And later on, when I went to university,
I had a unique opportunity where I ended up working at a job
at the University of [INAUDIBLE] where
we had a Unix computer attached to the internet.
In 1992, that was a pretty big deal.
And so, my friend and I one day saw that there
was a new program released.
It was called Gopher.
And this was-- this predated the web.
But it was the first system that had the concept
that there was a menu of items that you could see.
And each one of those could be anywhere in the world,
and it didn't matter, you didn't have
to know server names or anything like that.
If somebody could spend the time to curate and pull together
information, you could make it easy to discover.
And so we created something called EcoGopher,
which was one of the earliest things on the internet focused
on environmental problems.
And we took a CD-ROM of all of the toxic information fact
sheets that essentially said what
to do if you were exposed to chemicals,
or if you're nervous about what kind of impact it might have.
And we made it full-text searchable,
so that somebody could come and say,
there's something Ammonia in the air, and it would tell you,
here's what happened.
And you can see the beautiful UI we created
for it, on the right hand side.
That was about as good as a Gopher got.
But the concept was, that with two students and a computer,
we could create something that ended up
being recognized by the W3C later as the Center
for Environmental Information on the Internet.
And that was just the two of us working
on a project as students to try and make a difference.
And what we discovered is that as we learned
how to do those things, and as we built up those tools,
it turned out that those are really useful skills
for a number of different industries.
And so, when the first web browser came out, for myself,
I was immediately, oh my god, this
is going to change everything.
And so, I left school and went and started
a company just focusing on, let's find a problem
and figure out how to use this new technology on large scale
data, the internet, to try and make it better.
And that really set for me, it set me on my path,
that-- my startup got acquired by Altavista back in '99.
And since then, I've worked at Yahoo and Shazam and Google.
And I really have had a great deal of my career
come out of the things that I did as a student.
And so, when I look at all of the work
that the folks in the Solutions Challenge
are doing, and broader, across all the Developer Student
Clubs, I think it's great that at the same time as you
are taking the things that you've been learning in theory
and bringing them to practice and solving problems,
you're building community.
You are building up your skills.
I think it's such an amazing opportunity and helpful thing
that all of you are doing.
And I think, in the long run, also really helps your career
and hopefully make a difference in the world.
So I also do want to call out these student club
numbers around the world that we've already seen.
A number of them are not just ending up
going into making a big difference in the startup
community, but also a number of them
are ending up working at some of the largest technology
companies in their countries and around the world.
So I'm definitely looking forward
to seeing what all of you continue to build and work
cool projects you work on.
Maybe one day I'll get to join your live-stream
and hear your early stage stories,
like you're getting to hear some of mine.
And so, lastly, I really want to congratulate
all the folks who joined the 2020 Solutions Challenge,
and congratulations to the 10 winning teams.
I encourage you keep learning, keep collaborating,
and keep building things that make an impact.
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