Ideas were brewing in Google’s office over the past few weeks. NIC Plugfest International Programming Competition and Showcase, an event organised by IEEE and Google Developer Group, kicked off its inaugural competition in February 2013 and ended with a prize giving ceremony on 3 April 2013. Participants were tasked to create professional and valuable web applications with publicly available data sets from data.gov.sg using mobile technologies and cloud computing.

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Day 1! The start of our trip to Silicon Valley! The heart of technology powerhouses and innovative startups! It took a total of around 16 hours to fly from Singapore to San Francisco and we were all quite beat when we landed! But the weather here is just too good to be true It’s really awesome! It feels like a giant outdoor aircon! Of course we were re-energized by this cooling breeze of air!

First up, sightseeing of the city! San Francisco was built on multiple hills and two of the tallest ones, the Twin Peaks were preserved to be a sightseeing area! From here, we could see an aerial view of the city! Look!
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Today is the last day of the entire trip. Before we headed back home, we have our final stop at Microsoft!

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It was a sunny Sunday and also a father’s day for all dads, the group was given the chance to visit the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom and The Marine World Theme Park, to have some chilling and relaxing time after the hectic visits for the past few days. Six Flags Discovery Kingdom is the only combined marine life, wildlife and wild rides theme park in America.

We woke up early and had a heavy breakfast before hopping onto the bus and make our way to our “Dreamworld”. The place was filled with families and tourists. Our group started our first ride with their famous Medusa roller coaster ride which was featured as one of the tallest vertical loop in the world. We eventually split into two different groups as some of us didn’t enjoy the exciting rides there.

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The group spent the morning at the Computer History Museum. The museum is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computing history. It is the home to one of the largest international collections of computing artifacts in the world, encompassing computer hardware, ephemera, photographs, moving images, documents and software.

The museum is organized to take you chronologically through the history of computing starting with the abacus and covering everything from WWII code breaking to educational electronic toys of the 1980s to the thought leaders of computing on screen philosophizing about the future. We learnt about the history of computing and how computers came about in the past to fulfill or overcome certain problems that mankind then were facing.

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Our first visit for the day is Waze, a start-up company founded in 2008 that has been developing a community-based GPS traffic and navigation application that allows smartphone users to build and use live maps, get real-time traffic updates and turn-by-turn navigation for an advantageous commute. All of us squeeze in a cosy corner where the host who is a designer at the company explains their business proposition.

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Every one of us were very excited as we will be visiting our “dream” University today, Stanford University. On reaching the campus, we are greeted by the beautiful sceneries and the view is breathtaking. Palm trees line the main entrance to campus, opening into an expansive lawn and the University’s main quadrangle. Stanford has a huge reputation as a number  of their alumni have founded many prominent companies including Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems, Paypal, Google, Linkedln, and even Yahoo!.

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Facebook! Many of us were looking forward to the visit to our favourite social networking site. The working environments are very much like Google, free and relax! The walls were beautifully decorated with graffiti and there was even a chalk wall called “The Facebook Wall” where we are allowed to write on using chalks!
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We have our sumptuous breakfast at the hotel restaurant before embarking on our very first company visit to Google.

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A group of Nanyang Polytechnic, Raffles Institution and Hwa Chong Institution students and lecturers was given the rare opportunity to participate in the all expenses paid IDA Knowledge Acquisition Trip to Silicon Valley, CA, USA in June 2012. This trip was a reward for the 3 institutions for winning the National Infocomm Competition for the respective tertiary, Junior College and Secondary school circuits respectively. We headed to Silicon Valley, which is located at the southern part of San Francisco Bay Area where it is home to many high-tech corporations. The name Silicon derives from the large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers after Silicon was found to be the better material for making transistors. During our trip, we visited many high-tech companies, museums, universities as well as famous landmarks.
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