If life is like a box of chocolates in that you never know what you’re going to get, trade shows such as Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, well, they’re more like a sack of potatoes — for the most part, you know what you’re in for. Take the Android Garden that Google set up between halls 2 and 3 at the Fira Gran Via. It’s a veritable tuber showcase for apps on the Google Play Store, Android Automotive, and every bit of automation you can program from Google Home. If you’ve never been to one of these big conventions and want to know how these potatoes taste, then sit back and let us do the chopping and frying. No, seriously, we’re having french fries.
The Android Garden includes multiple demo areas styled after different everyday scenes like the metro, some shops, and, in my and my colleague Manuel’s case, a restaurant that exclusively serves papa fritas (or patates frigedes for the Catalans) styled after six different cuisines. We happened upon the friterie late on our first day at the show, but a little too late to be served, so we made sure to power luncheon there the next day.
Participants queued around the restaurant were grouped into tables of four — we were paired up with a very enthusiastic couple eager to load up on some loaded fries.
Once we settled around our standing table (the whole shebang was only going to take 5 minutes max), we were able to glance at the menu. All the dishes had a base of twice-cooked fries with payloads of toppings themed around six different cuisines: French, Greek, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. The menu was mostly in English except for the crucial bits — the actual toppings — which were printed in the associated cuisine’s language.
How were we going to figure out what “mayonnaise à la truffle” and the rest were? Why, thanks to an extended marketing relationship between Google and Samsung, with the help of the all new Galaxy Z Fold3 and Google Lens! Our host passed along his fancy foldable phablet for us to snap a picture of the menu and determine what was actually what.
So, now we know what we were actually ordering, Manuel decided to go for the Spanish bravas-style potatoes while I went for the Japanese. I forgot what our cohorts got, but they were pretty jazzed all throughout this song and dance. But it turns out that she doesn’t understand anything but Spanish (for the premise of this segment of the demo). Time for Google Translate to come to the rescue by taking dictation of our order, jumbling our words through its translate-o-tron, and then reciting it back in Spanish. What cheer!
Wait, I thought these chips were supposed to be free, not just cheap! Now we’re stuck with a €10 bill all of a sudden! Were we going to be washing dishes to pay off our debts? Well, no. Instead, our host took out his Galaxy Watch4 Classic and used the virtual card he put into Google Pay to settle the check. Man, it’s nice to know Google is paying Google to do this kind of stuff.
Another minute later and we finally got our cups of dressed-up pommes de terre. They were short-lived, but plenty delectable.
With any given tech conference or maybe even a state fair or concert that can have a tech angle inserted into it, Google may just show up with a booth, some freebies to give away, and perhaps an experiential gimmick like some colorful slides running into a ball pit at CES 2020 (via TechCrunch). This fry stand was just one of several guided feature tours for Google at this year’s MWC Barcelona, all in the hopes of capturing some attention and fostering awareness from trade show attendees that pay big sums to just visit or exhibit their own wares (except for media who pay nothing at the gate… we still need to pick up the cost for travel and other expenses). These efforts might lead to one more sale, one more sign-on, one more bit of data that will help its learning machines mature, maybe even one more integration into something you haven’t even heard of. So it goes in this business-to-business fishbowl.
At the end of the day, while they didn’t amount to much, the potatoes were tasty. Thanks, Google.
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