CatchUp: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and your role at Google?

Aidan Chopra: My name is Aidan Chopra, and my official title is "Product Evangelist, Google SketchUp." Funny story about my title: Until about November of 2006, I managed the SketchUp for Education program, working with my team to get SketchUp adopted in as many schools, colleges and universities around the world as we could.

Starting in late 2006, I took five months away from the office to write Google SketchUp For Dummies for Wiley Publishing, during which I did almost nothing but work on the book. I "came back" in April of 2007, but by that time, the Education program was under other supervision and it wasn't entirely clear what I was going to do for the team. One of the first things I did was order new business cards (since the old ones had the wrong title), and I needed to figure out what to put on them.

Now, people might think that all big companies are quagmires of bureaucracy, but I've found Google to be refreshingly light on useless process. To order new business cards, you go to a website, type in what you'd like them to say, and press a button. Thing is, you can pretty much type in anything you like. My manager told me to pick a title, so I typed in "Product Evangelist" because I liked the sound of it. I've spent the last year or so figuring out what exactly a Product Evangelist does. Now I'm thinking I should have typed in "CEO."

At Google, I do a lot of writing, public speaking and working with the

SketchUp marketing, sales, training and product teams. My job (broadly speaking) is to represent SketchUp to the world, and to represent the world inside the SketchUp team. That's a murky description, I know; most of the time, I'm banging away at my computer, like almost everyone else I know.

CatchUp: Please tell us about your background. When did you decide you wanted to work with Google?

Aidan Chopra: I was born and raised in Montreal, and studied Fine Art at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Most of my time was spent in the jewelry and metalsmithing department, but I dabbled in illustration, photography and a bunch of other media as well. It was an interesting time: In college, I'd spent two years as an artistic person in a science program, and at art school, I was obsessed with pragmatism and function. When I took an architecture studio class, I knew I'd found a home.

John Bacus (the Product Manager for SketchUp) and I were classmates in the graduate program at the Rice University School of Architecture in Houston. One day, I was walking past his desk (on one of my hourly procrastinatory jaunts) when I saw what I thought was an Illustrator drawing MOVE on his screen. It ORBITED. I spent the next month in "I-just-discovered-SketchUp-and-I-can't stop-thinking-about-it mode" (you know what I'm talking about), and I've been a fanatic ever since. When I graduated in 2004, John and some of the other original SketchUppers offered me a job, and I moved to Boulder, Colorado to start an Education