Google gears up offline access for Web apps
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(InfoWorld) - Google will tackle offline access, one of the thorniest problems facing Web-hosted applications, when it releases an early-stage browser extension called Gears to developers worldwide on Wednesday. The launch of the open-source Gears is tied to Google's Developer Day, the company's largest event aimed at third-party software developers, which is scheduled for Thursday. For the first time, it will take place in 10 cities around the world. Google hopes developers will give Gears a test drive and send feedback on how it can be improved. Ultimately, Google would like to see the Gears effort yield an industry standard for providing offline access to Web-hosted applications. "This effort is very significant and interesting. It's, in a lot of ways, the next step for the Web," said David M. Smith, a Gartner analyst. Although some makers of online applications have developed offline components for them, the Google approach stands to have a widespread impact because it is focused on developers and on creating an open standard the entire industry can benefit from, Smith said. Backing Gears publicly at this time are Adobe, Mozilla, and Opera Software, although Google is in confidential conversations with other IT vendors, Google officials said. A glaring omission on the list is Google rival Microsoft with its Internet Explorer browser, the most widely used in the world. "Microsoft will have to either decide to join this effort or come up with something of its own," Smith said, adding that the issue of offline access is screaming for a solution. Adobe will make the Gears API available on its Apollo platform, which itself is designed for building offline components for online applications. As makers of popular alternatives to IE, Mozilla and Opera are collaborating with Google on the Gears project because they share the belief that offline access is critical for Web applications. Google is a major backer of the Web-hosted application model, which has been gaining momentum over the past year. Because applications are hosted by vendors, customers generally spend less time, effort, and money deploying and maintaining them than packaged software they install on their own servers. Another perceived benefit is that these Web-hosted applications often are designed from the ground up to allow groups of users to share documents easily and collaborate on them online instead of each employee working individually on a file on his PC and later using e-mail to gather feedback on it. However, real challenges exist for the hosted model, including concerns about the availability and reliability of vendors' servers and about the security of corporate data when it is housed externally on vendors' premises. Also high on the list of objections to hosted applications is that many of them lack an offline, or desktop PC, component, which prevents users from accessing them when they aren't connected to the Internet. The Gears project aims to address and, in fact, eventually stamp out this problem. "It's a big shortcoming. It's one of the main ones people mention" for online applications, Smith said. "This [Gears project] isn't a silver bullet. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done." Currently, Google's own Apps suite of hosted collaboration and communication applications offers what officials acknowledge is rudimentary and less-than-convenient offline access: It lets users export and import files to and from equivalent desktop applications, such as Microsoft's Word and Excel. "The offline experience is definitely a hole in the product," Rajen Sheth, product manager with Google's Enterprise unit, said several weeks ago. As part of Wednesday's announcement, Google is providing offline capabilities to its online syndicated feed manager, called Reader, the first concrete example of what developers can accomplish with Gears, Google officials said. Smith said the Reader example is a fine one, but the real excitement will be generated when Google does the same for its Gmail Web mail service and for Docs & Spreadsheets, the online word processor and spreadsheet software that is part of Google Apps. Gears works with all major browsers and operating systems. It is available online. Google also has a Developer Day Web site where it will webcast the U.S. and U.K. events and post photos, presentations, and related material. Other expected announcements include: *Â Google Mashup Editor, an experimental online code editor designed for creating mashups, or online applications built using components like services and data from existing Web sites. Mashup Editor will simplify the creation of AJAX user interfaces, according to Google. *Â Google Web Toolkit, which has been downloaded more than 1 million times since its release in May 2006, will get support for Gears in its API Library.
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Google Inc. said on Wednesday it  had created Web software that runs both online, and offline,  marking a sea change for the Internet industry by letting users  work on planes, trains, spotty connections and even in the most  remote locations.
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Look, but don't touch, on a mobile phone Google has slipped its Web 2.0 Docs application onto its mobile portal, allowing users to view documents, spreadsheets and presentations on their mobile phone browser.â¦
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Web search leader Google Inc.  said on Wednesday it will soon make it possible for users of  its free Gmail service to check their e-mail via Microsoft  Outlook or on certain handheld devices such as mobile phones.
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Google gets into the Web registration business.
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Google reached agreements with several major research libraries to digitize the content of thousands of books in their archives, adding momentum to the search giant&#39;s effort to catalog vast amounts of offline information in addition to Web pages, the
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Last week, Google, a company renowned for its search service, released the Google Desktop, a software program that lets users search through materials stored on their
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InfoWorld - Google announced on Thursday evening that a domain name search and registration service will be added to its Google Apps for Your Domain offering.
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Google's privacy and content policies for Google Applications give Google full rights to use your content however the company wants.  Are you nervous?
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Global publishers, fearing that Web  search engines such as Google Inc. are encroaching on their  ability to generate revenue, plan to launch an automated system  for granting permission on how to use their content.
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Media & professional: Offline software launches fresh challenge to Seattle.
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Google Inc. on Wednesday plans to offer free, high-speed Internet access to everyone in its Silicon Valley home town &#151; a hospitable gesture that the online search leader hopes to see spread to other parts of the country.
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Google is releasing a new edition of its hosted applications suite that end-users can bring into the workplace without the involvement of their IT department.It means that IT managers who fret about employees using unauthorized software at work will have another tool to worry about, especially in industries where information management is heavily regulated, like health care and finance.The new release, called Google Apps Team Edition, is due to be available Thursday for free. It is aimed at employees who are interested in using Google Apps but whose employers haven&#39;t signed up for it, said Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager.Team Edition contains the core communication and collaboration services and applications from other editions, like the word processor, spreadsheet, Start page, Talk instant messaging, and calendar, but not Gmail, which requires IT participation to re-route the company&#39;s e-mail flow.So far, more than 500,000 mostly small organizations have signed up for Google Apps, but the other versions -- Standard, Education, Partner, and Premier -- require IT to implement the suite because its services are linked to an organization&#39;s Internet domain.That changes with the Team Edition, which will let employees set up Google Apps workgroups as long as they have valid e-mail addresses with their organizations&#39; domains, Sheth said.&quot;Google Apps has been, by definition, an IT project, and now we want to let people use it without IT involvement,&quot; Sheth said.Once signed up with Team Edition, people can see who else in their organization&#39;s Internet domain is also a user, and invite those who aren&#39;t, Sheth said.&quot;It provides a quick way for workgroups to start collaborating,&quot; he said.IT departments shouldn&#39;t get angry about Team Edition, according to Sheth, because, unlike other software that employees use without IT approval, it provides an upgrade path to IT-manageable versions.&quot;The IT department always has the option to sign up for the Standard Edition for free if they want to provide control over this,&quot; Sheth said. &quot;This is a solid, happy medium.&quot;Team Edition can also be upgraded to the other editions, like Education, which is free, and Premier, which costs $50 per user per year. Although Gmail isn&#39;t part of Team Edition, Google is exploring ways to make it a part, Sheth said.By its very nature as a Web-hosted software suite, an unmanaged Google Apps deployment can represent a concern for IT departments, since the applications and the data generated are stored outside organizations&#39; firewalls in Google data centers.However, Team Edition will be far from alone among the hosted software that employees use in their organizations without getting approval from the IT department, said Erica Driver, a Forrester Research analyst.The IT department reactions to Team Edition will depend on the organization&#39;s culture, which range from those in &quot;lockdown mode&quot; to those more tolerant and aware that Web 2.0 technologies are seeping in from the consumer world to the workplace, Driver said.Team Edition, with its bottom-up, end-user-driven focus, fits in with Google&#39;s traditional strategy of appealing to individuals, grown out of its consumer services, and will likely boost the adoption of Google Apps in companies, government agencies, educational institutions and other organizations that don&#39;t currently use the suite, said Matt Cain, a Gartner analyst.&quot;The Google model is to prime the well at the end-user level and assist IT somewhere along the way, but the demand generation for the suite will definitely be at the rank-and-file level, not at the IT level,&quot; Cain said.Google needs to make sure it strikes a balance between rallying end-users and giving IT managers a way to enter the picture and exert control, he said. &quot;Google will encourage end-user adoption but it can&#39;t disintermediate the IT staff, which will have to ultimately clean up any mess that&#39;s created,&quot; Cain said.
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In the latest step in its continuing effort to focus the Web services model around its own servers, Google this morning introduced a way to enable individuals to embed some Google Gadgets within Web pages, without the need to install software.
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Known for its Internet search engine, Mountain View-based Google Inc. on Thursday announced a beta desktop search application that it says enables users to search their e-mail, files, web history, and chats.
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INTERNET giant Google has taken its searching tools one step further with a service for individual desktops. Its new desktop search application means users can search their email, files, web history, and chats
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(InfoWorld) - Google touted on Thursday its building-block approach for application development, which features mashups and open source software. Mashups link different Internet applications to form a new application. They are becoming the model for developers to build applications, said Jeff Huber, Google vice president of engineering, during a keynote presentation at the Google Developer Day 2007 event in San Jose, Calif. Other building blocks in the company's application development model include ads and standards, Huber said. Google expects developers will use technologies such as a MySQL database, a Linux OS, and programming languages such as Ruby, Python, or PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). "By being able to leverage these building blocks, youâre able to create amazing applications [in] probably a tenth the time," as was previously possible, Huber said. Google with its developer tools seeks to make the Web better; this may result in boosting traffic to the Google home page but not necessarily, according to Sundar Pichai, Google director of product management. The newly announced Google Gears project, for example, involves an extension to make Web applications work offline, Pichai noted. "To us, we believe we benefit, users benefit, and everyone benefits if the Web works better," Pichai said in an interview after the morning keynote. In addition to formally unveiling Gears during the morning presentation, Huber touted two other products: Google Mashup Editor, an online editor for building mashups with a few lines of XML, and Google Mapplets, for putting online gadgets on maps. With Mapplets, an application could be built such as one that searches for hotels near an airport, according to Google. Google's free event in San Jose attracted 1,500 persons. Meanwhile, a total of 10 Google Developer Day 2007 events are being held throughout the world on Thursday, including in places such as Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Moscow. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the company's president of technology, briefly addressed the audience in San Jose. The Internet, he said, has reached the point where systems can re-create themselves, such as a mashup editor that creates Internet applications using Internet applications. A compiler, meanwhile, can compile itself, Brin said. "For the Internet to be truly self-sustaining, you really need to get the person out of the loop, and that's why we corralled all of you here in one room today," Brin said in jest. On a more serious note, Brin thanked the audience. "We want to do as much as we can to repay the community that creates such a fantastic ecosystem for us to work in," Brin said. The explosion in interest in Google of late can be attributed to its brand awareness, said blogger Frank Taylor, author of the Google Earth Blog and an attendee in San Jose. "Obviously, they just have a huge brand awareness and an ability to reach many people through their search engine," Taylor said. Even when other companies do the same thing as Google, Google gets more attention, he said. Google also is attracting top talent, said Taylor. Huber called 2006 a spectacular year for the company, with its introduction of technologies such as its AJAX search API, the Google Web Toolkit, and Google Project Hosting.