Google Apps

From some slides of an internal presentation given by Google, it appears that where there is now Google Docs, there will soon be ‘Google Drive’.  Most of the functionality, like uploading files of any type, of the mythical Google Drive now lies in Docs Hopefully, with this upcoming rebrand, Google allows more storage (let me buy it) and also has some utilities like backing up the home folder on Windows or Mac.  Seriously, what better way to get users to adopt your system than to offer to sych your files to the cloud.

Oh, now that we have all of your files, you might as well get a Chomebook.

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Google announced on the Gmail blog this afternoon, the ability to use the multiple sign-in feature on their mobile Gmail site. Multiple sign-in is currently a feature many of us enjoy on our desktops, so it’s great to see it land on the mobile platform too. You can switch between multiple accounts at the bottom of the page.

A feature we really like is that you can have multiple bookmarks to sign-in to specific accounts. For instance, a “personal” bookmark can sign-in to your personal email and a “work” bookmark can sign-in to your work email.

Also made available on mobile Gmail is email signatures and auto-reply. Just like the iPhone, and many other devices, if you respond from mobile Gmail it can have the signature “Sent from Gmail mobile” if you so choose — you can also pick something else. Auto-reply, or vacation responder, will let people that email you know when you’ll be able to reply. Check it out on your iPhone or Android device!

Those of you that crunch numbers using Google Docs: The company has just added a cool new feature to the spreadsheets editor – merging cells vertically. In addition to the existing horizontal merging functionality, this new feature allows for some pretty complex layouts. Just drag the set of cells, hit the down arrow next to the merge icon and select Merge vertically. You can also assign headers to sets of rows. Why would anyone want to merge cells vertically? Google offers an example:

In the spirit of the NFL season, let’s say you want to host a football tournament for your friends. To make it easier for them to cast their votes on the winning team, you organize the NFL teams by conference and division in a Google spreadsheet. After applying vertical merges to all of the conference and division headers and horizontal merges across the team names in each conference, you’re ready to share with your friends for the tournament!

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Trying to get in before the October 4th flood perhaps, today AT&T announced their Galaxy S II varient would hit shelves on October 2nd.  We’ve talked extensively about the Galaxy SII here (read).  As a refresher, AT&T’s is closest to the international version with the same 4.3 inch display – contrasted with the 4.5 variety that T-Mobile and Sprint are carrying.  Interestingly, it will also have NFC, which Sprint’s surprisingly doesn’t.  Sprint is a partner in Google’s NFC-based Wallet initiative.

This is an amazing phone but it is interesting that AT&T is squeaking it in before the iPhone announcement.  On the other hand, it says something that AT&T is going with the Galaxy SII moniker rather than something like “Captivate 2”.  It seems like Samsung’s Galalxy S line can stand on its own.  T-Mobile called its 4G Vibrant model the Galaxy S earlier this year so it appears to be a trend.

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Google Apps customers can now roll revert changes to contacts for up to a month.

Google announced customers who host their domain on Google’s servers are now able to take advantage of the Contacts interface which has been available in consumer Gmail for some time. Users of Google Apps for Enterprise will notice that adding new contact information now defaults to “Work” instead of “Home”. Thanks to the prettified interface, you can quickly add email addresses to groups, and pick from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis. Most importantly, the new Contacts manager lets you undo contacts import and go back in time up to a month in order to salvage deleted or merged contacts.

Add multiple contacts to a group in a snap.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p_jUltvwng]

As you know, Google Takeout, a recently introduced service, allows you to export your data from the Google cloud. For example, you can download an archive from Google Buzz, Picasa Web Albums, Contacts and Circles and Google Profile – even Google Voice. Beginning today, it is possible to pull your Gmail chats to an email client such as Thunderbird, via IMAP protocol.

Even though Gmail’s been working with your local email client via IMAP for ages, you were not able to retrieve chat logs – although they appear as email messages under the Chat label in the lefthand side of the web interface. Per Google’s blog post, recorded chat logs can now be downloaded to your local email client provided it’s configured to use IMAP. You only have to tick the “Show in IMAP” checkbox for Chats in the Labels tab of your Gmail settings. A step-by-step instructions in the video above.

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Google Docs, the office productivity suite from everyone’s favorite search provider, has gotten updated with three new tools that Google says “put the fun in functional”. These are the format painter (finally!), fusion tables and drag & drop images. Format painter has been long in the coming and was arguably an important missing feature that probably put off some people from entrusting the cloud with their office productivity.

It’s real simple, just select a chunk of text and press the paintbrush button to copy its style (font, size, color and other formatting features) and apply it to one or more (double click the paintbrush button) blocks of text. Handy shortcuts are also available:

To copy the style of your selected text

• Mac: Ctrl+Option+C
• Windows: Ctrl+Alt+C

To apply any copied styles to whatever text you have selected:

• Mac: Ctrl+Option+V
• Windows: Ctrl+Alt+V

More on fusion tables and drag & drop images after the break.

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Google has just published a study entitled “Google’s Green Computing: Efficiency at Scale” comparing traditional business email solutions with Gmail. The results? Gmail is “almost 80 times” more energy efficient than conventional in-house software. This takes into account all Google infrastructure necessary to support the service.

A report from the Official Google Blog explains:

“…cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.”

To help put it all in perspective (kind of), Google offers the comparison presented in the graphic below showing one year of Gmail is comparable to drinking a bottle of wine, stuffing a letter inside, and throwing it in the ocean. Google also put YouTube to the test and discovered that 1 minute of video consumes approximately 0.0002 kWh of energy. Thus, 72 hours of video would be equivalent to one packaged and delivered DVD. 

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfTmpKmLRjM&feature=player_embedded]

As of today, Google Voice has been added to Google Takeout, a service which allows you to quickly export data from specific Google applications. You can now export voice communications (transcripts too) with voicemail and greetings as mp3s, phone numbers as a vcard, and text messages as html.

The service lets you create a quick full archive of all your data, or select just Voice or another service. You can check out Google Takeout now, which also allows you to download data from other applications including your contacts, stream and circles from Google+, Picasa Web Albums, and your Google Profile info.

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Strangely enough, offline mode in Gmail is a standalone web app (pictured above) rather than being baked into Gmail directly. Click for larger.

Google announced in a post over at the official Gmail blog that it is bringing offline functionality back to Gmail, Calendar and Docs. The feature had initially been enabled in select Google services via Gears, the company’s proprietary browser extension that was later retired in favor of HTML5. It took longer than expected to re-write the offline functionality in HTML5, though. This was in part because Google had to wait until the World Wide Web Consortium ratified new HTML5 features that allow for local browser storage and other technologies that make it possible for developers to write web apps which sync seamlessly between offline and always-on modes of operation.

Gmail offline will be available today, Google said, and offline for Google Calendar and Google Docs will be rolling out over the next week, starting today. In the case of Gmail, offline functionality is enabled via a Chrome Web Store app dubbed Offline Google Mail. As for Calendar and Docs, clicking the gear icon at the top right corner and choosing the Offline mode lets you view events from your calendars and RSVP to appointments while offline, as well as view your Google documents and spreadsheets. Offline Docs editing isn’t supported yet, but Google is “working hard to make it a reality”.

The question is, will you care about working offline now that mobile/broadband Internet and wireless hotspots have become ubiquitous?  (YES!)

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Google has just filed a trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office detailing a coding language related to computer applications called ‘Spot’. There isn’t much more known about Spot as of yet, but it looks like GOOG has also registered a few Spot related domains including spotlang.com, spotlanguage.net, spot-lang.com, and spot-lang.net.

Perhaps Spot is something being worked on by Google’s recent acquisition of Java guru James Gosling (who has voiced concerns with Android in the past). We’ll keep you posted as more becomes available.

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You’d be forgiven for thinking that the official Google Docs app for Android does web clipboard, a handy feature allowing you to copy and paste content between Google documents through the cloud. Having recently added vector drawings to web clipboard, the team today announced in a blog post the updated Android app which now supports 45 additional languages and cloud clipboard. This opens up interesting possibilities, like pasting images taken on your Android phone into a Google document on your desktop, without syncing anything.

Just tap the camera icon from the Docs widget on your home screen, snap a photo then select Send to Web Clipboard and press OK. The image gets uploaded to the cloud, ready for pasting by clicking the Web Clipboard icon on a Google document toolbar. Another improvement: The updated Android app, available on Android Market, lets you open your documents with any compatible viewer application or send a doc as an attachment through email or another app on your phone.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvIYjsRwt5A&feature=player_embedded]

Google has just launched a nifty new weather layer for Google Maps that provides you with current weather conditions from around the globe generated by the U.S. Naval Research Lab. This will definitely save you the frustration of jumping from Maps to your current weather app of choice when planning your next excursion.

You can click the icon for any given city to get a four-day forecast and more detailed data including wind and humidity conditions. In the left-hand pane, you can select temperature(F/C) defaults, wind speed (km/h, mph, or m/s), and optionally “hide clouds”.

Click here to start using the new weather layer now. You can also enable the weather layer at any time from the menu in the upper right corner (image below).

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Google’s photo-sharing social network Photovine (previously invitation-only) is fresh out of beta, open to all users, and ready to install to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch as an iOS app.

Photovine is a fun way to learn more about your friends, meet new people, and share your world like never before. It all starts with what we call a photovine: a group of photos around a single, shared caption. Start a new vine with a photo and caption of your own or add your photo/take on someone else’s vine.

Many are comparing the service to Instagram, or a photo-centric version of Twitter. Some are also pointing out it looks quite similar to Piictu. Essentially, users upload photos that can then be grouped thematically to create what is known as a “vine”. While you can follow other users and receive their content directly in a personal feed, all images appear to be shared publicly either through your profile or the vine in which the image is included. You then also have the option of sharing individual photos or vines directly to Twitter or Facebook (no Google+ support?).

The application is the work of the Slide team, a social-media start up acquired by Google last year. Its not clear yet how much of a focus Photovine will be for Google, but the Slide team has released a number of apps recently and seem to be getting support from Google to carry on with their projects. As of yet the service only has an iPhone app, but presumably there’s Android support on the way and some type of integration with Google+.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdT3eKdto4w&feature=player_embedded]

Historypin, a user-generated map displaying historical data of nearby locations (previously only available on Android devices), is now available as an iOS app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Created in partnership with Google by not-for-profit We Are What We Do, the app allows users to add their own historical photos by pinning them to a map, capturing historic moments as they happen, and creating replicas of historical images. The images are then shared with users requesting data for a specific location….

Historypin uses Google Maps and Street View technology to reveal the user-generated photos and data related to historical events that happened close to your current location. It does this by “overlaying them onto the live camera view”…essentially aiming to give you a live snapshot of what your surroundings looked like in the past.

Simply holding your phone up in the street will provide you with relevant nearby images. Selecting one of the images allows it to be overlaid onto the iPhone’s camera view. You can then fade between the image and your live shot for comparison, as well as pull up stories and data related to the image and your current location.

Full list of features and some shots of the app in action after the break…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaPgVUJ9A8w&feature=player_embedded]

Today Google has announced “Google Catalogs”, a new app designed specifically for “tablet devices” (iPad only, Android coming soon) that allows you to flip through digital versions of catalogs from a number of popular brands and “interact with new layers of rich-media content”. Not too long ago Google updated their Shopper app for iPhone… and now, with the Catalogs app, are providing an entirely new experience for browsing products and finding local retailers (presumably integrated with Google Offers).

Some of the more notable features include the ability to zoom, tap elements of a page to learn more, view and create photo albums, and most importantly, find products you’re viewing in nearby stores (an interesting approach to offering local deals).

There are currently a bunch of well known brands partnering with Google to create content for the newly launched free app… some of which include Urban Outfitters, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Williams-Sonoma, among others.

You can swing by the App Store to grab the free Google Catalogs app for iPad now. Unfortunately Android users are going to have to wait a little longer to get their hands on it as the blog post notes “stay tuned for Google Catalogs for Android tablets, coming soon!”.

A full list of features from the announcement below:

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Jack Halprin, currently lists his employer as Autonomy where he was the Vice President, eDiscovery and Compliance.

But we’ve heard from a source in the know that he’s made a move to Google and will be in charge of Google’s management of electronically stored information (ESI) for both legal and information governance purposes in their Apps/Postini wing.  His background includes “managing social media for legal and governance purposes, defensible processes for managing discovery, proportionality, and the reduction of eDiscovery costs” –which will certainly help Google prepare companies who are moving infrastructure into Google’s Cloud offerings.

This follows Google’s Enterprise’s pickup of Matthew Eichner, who now manages Global Enterprise Search, earlier this year.

Halprin provides the following background in his Linked in Profile:
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Google has just pushed an update for the official Google+ app for iOS, bringing with it support for iPad and iPod touch, two devices the app was previously unavailable for, among a few other features including aggregated circle add notifications, huddle settings, and the usual “Performance and stability improvements”.

You should be able to update the app now via the App Store or swing by iTunes and grab the new version now. We’ll keep you posted with any other discoveries we might make in this latest update.

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While it hasn’t officially been announced, Google Operating System has discovered how to enable the new design for Google Docs. The new design matches the Google+ design we’ve seen Google enabling across all products over the last month — adding more whitespace and new colors. To enable, all you have to do is select “enable new look” below the settings icon in the Google+ bar (shown after the break).

Along with the new design are five new keyboard shortcuts: up and down arrows will highlight documents to open, shift + T creates a new text document, shift + S creates a new spreadsheet, shift + C creates a new collection, and “?” opens the shortcut guide. If the new design isn’t for you, you can enable the old theme back, but we don’t think you’ll want to change. Check out a few more screenshots after the break.

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If you have ever used Gmail on a tablet, you’ve probably appreciated the improvements made to the mobile UI and missed them when forced to use Gmail from your desktop browser. Luckily, Google just introduced a new preview pane feature for Gmail that allows you to quickly view snippets of messages, much like the mobile interface currently accessible on tablets (which, yes, dates from Outlook 2003 – thanks commenters).

You can enable the feature by turning it on from the Labs tab in your Gmail settings and switching between views via a new toggle button in the upper right corner of your inbox.

You can also move the preview pane below your message list if you have limited screen real
estate.

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Two nice-to-haves discovered earlier this week over at the Google Operating System blog. The first deals with using templates in Google Contacts. You can choose between two templates by hitting the More Actions button when creating a new contact: Standard and Business. The latter has added custom fields such as job title, company name, mobile phone and work phone. Hopefully, Google will allow us to edit and create our own templates in the future.

The other feature available in the Google Translate service seeks to tap the crowd-sourced knowledge in order to improve the quality of translations. From now on, you can mark each individual translation as Helpful, Not helpful and Offensive by clicking the Rate Translation button. Also, you can click on the translated word and up pops a menu with alternate translations that you can re-order by holding down the Shift key and drag the words around.

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