Google I/O 2023 event: How Google’s annual event got its name and what it means

This year’s I/O event marks the event’s fifteenth anniversary. Ever wondered what Google I/O means and how it got its name? 

In a blog post, Google gives two possible explanations behind the name. First is that the name stands for “input / output,” referencing the computational concept of interfacing between a computer system and the outside world. The second explanation you’ll see is that I/O stands for “innovation in the open,” which also lines up with the event nicely.

Google in the blog post says that both origins are true, but there’s more to the story. Digging deeper, the company says it held its first-ever developer conference, Geo Developer Day in May 2006. 

“The very first ‘I/O’ in 2007 wasn’t called I/O at all,” says Lorin Platto, director of events and experiences operations and one of the original I/O event organizers. “It was an event called Google Developer Day, which we hosted at the San Jose Convention Center with 1,000 tickets for developers.”

The event was centered around Google’s first publicly available developer tool, the Google Maps API, which launched the previous year. 

“Flash forward a year and our suite of developer tools had expanded significantly — and we needed a bigger event to represent our products and engage with our growing developer community. Thus, I/O was born,” the blog post further states.

In 2008, the event moved to a bigger venue — San Francisco’s Moscone Center West — and with the move, got its official name. Originally, the name I/O was actually based on something numerical: a googol, the eponymous number that lends our company its name.

“A googol is a one, followed by 100 zeroes, so that’s where the I/O name and logo came from. We just took the first one and zero, and we left off all the other zeroes. It all goes back to Google,” says Lorin. “And then as we were brainstorming, we started talking about what that one and zero could mean. That’s where the ‘input / output’ and ‘innovation in the open’ slogans came from.”