Google Docs to Allow Storage of Any Type of File

PC World

By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

Google is opening up its Docs hosted office productivity suite so that users can store any type of file in it, giving the popular software-as-a-service product an important online storage component.

The functionality will be rolled out over the coming weeks to all Docs users, both the ones who use the stand-alone suite as well as those who use it as part of the broader communication and collaboration Apps suite for organizations.

Now, Docs users will be able to store all their important files in a single place online, where they can access them from anywhere and share them with other people, according to Google.

"This is a natural extension and progression of what we've been doing with Google Docs," said Vijay Bangaru, Google Docs product manager.

One thing it's not, according to Bangaru, is the G-drive, the often-rumored cloud storage service from Google that has yet to see the light of day. "On the consumer side, this isn't a virtual drive. There isn't a client that's going to help you sync terabytes to the cloud," he said.

Google did work with some partners that built applications that take advantage of this new functionality via a Docs API (application programming interface). Those external applications were built specifically for users of the Premier version of Apps, which is the most sophisticated and the only one that is fee-based, priced at US$50 per user, per year. Companies that use Apps Premier will also be able to build their own applications in-house using the API.

Just because users will be able to store any type of file on Google Docs doesn't mean, however, that they will necessarily be able to work on those files on the Docs cloud, as is possible in the suite today with Adobe PDF files, Microsoft Office files and, of course, the native Docs file formats.

"Unfortunately, it's not possible to write Web editors for every file content out there," he said. In those cases, users will be able to access the files online and share them with others, but in order to work on them, they'll have to download them to their PCs and fire up the necessary application.

Along with the new capabilities, Google is lifting the ceiling on file sizes to 250MB. Users of the stand-alone Docs suite will have 1GB of free storage for files stored in their native formats, as opposed to converted to a native Docs format. They'll be able to buy additional storage for $0.25 per gigabyte per year. Google Apps users will also get 1GB of storage, and will have the ability to buy additional storage for $3.50 per gigabyte per year.

While Docs currently doesn't have one-click buttons to post or publish files to third-party sites and services like Facebook, Google isn't closing the door on adding that functionality and more.

"The idea behind this feature is that it's really an opportunity for Google to invest in cloud storage and provide value added services to its users around sharing files, uploading files and being able to collaborate and search on all of that content," said Anil Sabharwal, Google Docs product manager. "There's a great opportunity for us to provide value-added services on top of any of those file types."

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Google To Acquire DocVerse; Office War Heats Up

TechCrunch, by Michael Arrington on December 19, 2009

Docverse is something in between Google Docs and Microsoft Office
(screenshot docverse.com)

Google, which is currently on one heck of a spending spree, is closing an acquisition of San Francisco based DocVerse , a service that lets users collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. The purchase price is supposed to be around $25 million.

Docverse lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents. Appjet, another recent Google Acquisition, has a related product called EtherPad, although that team is reported to be working with Google Wave and the EtherPad source code has been released to the community.

DocVerse is a product Google is likely to keep. The company was founded by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui. Sinha drove product strategy for SharePoint and SQL Server, $1.6B and $3.0B products, respectively. DeNui ran Microsoft SQL Server’s web strategy.

With DocVerse Google will have a direct software connection to Microsoft Office, allowing users to collaborate real time on documents. Microsoft is also moving in this direction with Office 10. In effect, Microsoft is countering Google Docs with the new Office. And Google is countering that move with the acquisition of DocVerse. For more on this fight, see Imitation Isn’t Always Flattery: Microsoft Previews Google Apps Killer To Beta Testers.

DocVerse has raised just $1.3 million , in 2008, from Baseline Ventures , Harrison Metal Capital and Naval Ravikant .

The deal has not yet been finalized, says our source, but is past the term sheet stage.

As the Internet Turns 40, No Signs of a Midlife Crisis

The Jakarta Globe / Glenn Chapman/Agence France-Presse

Leonard Kleinrock poses with the first Interface Message Processor. (Photo: AFP)

San Francisco. Leonard Kleinrock never imagined Facebook, Twitter or YouTube that day 40 years ago when his team gave birth to what is now taken for granted as the Internet.

“We are constantly surprised by the applications that come along,” Kleinrock said as he and others at the University of California, Los Angeles, prepared to throw the Internet a 40th birthday party this Thursday. “It’s a teenager now. It’s learned some things but it has a long way to go. It’s behaving erratically, but its given enormous gratification to its parents and the community.”

On Oct. 29, 1969, Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to “talk” to one at a research institute.

Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones.

“I thought it would be computer to computer, not people to people,” Kleinrock said in a nod to online social networking and content sharing that are hallmarks of the Internet Age. “I never expected that my 99-year-old mother would be on the Internet like she was until she passed away.”

A key to getting computers to exchange data was breaking digitized information into packets fired between on-demand with no wasting of time, according to Kleinrock.

He had outlined his vision in a 1962 graduate school dissertation published as a book. “Nobody cared, in particular AT&T,” Kleinrock said. “I went to them and they said it wouldn’t work and that even if it worked they didn’t want anything to do with it.”

US telecom colossus AT&T ran lines connecting the computers for ARPANET, a project backed with money from a research arm of the US military.

Engineers began typing “LOG” to log into the distant computer, which crashed after getting the “O.”

“So, the first message was ‘Lo’ as in ‘Lo and behold,’ ” Kleinrock said. “We couldn’t have a better, more succinct first message.”

Kleinrock’s team logged in on the second try, sending digital data packets between computers on the ARPANET. Computers at two other US universities were added to the network by the end of that year.

“We had four-node network and tested the heck out of it,” Kleinrock said. “We were able to break the network at will. It was very valuable to shake those things out early on.”

Funding came from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency established in 1958 in response to the launch of a Sputnik space flight by what was then the USSR.

US leaders were in a technology race with Cold War rival Russia. Kleinrock’s team ran a 4.5-meter cable between an Interface Message Processor device referred to by the acronym IMP and a “host” computer and tested sending data back and forth on Sept. 2, 1969.

“That was the day this baby was born,” Kleinrock said.

The National Science Foundation added a series of supercomputers to the network in the late 1980s, opening the online community to more scientists.

The Internet caught the public’s attention in the form of e-mail systems in workplaces and ignited a “dot-com” industry boom that went bust at the turn of the century.

“The original plan was that it should be very creative, basically it should be like a sandbox,” British professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said of creating the World Wide Web in 1990.

Kleinrock pegs the launch of “the dark side of the Internet” to the 1988 release of the first malicious software “worm.”

It was April of 1994 when the first spam e-mail hit, according to the engineer. “We started sending e-mail back to those folks saying ‘Stop it,’ ” Kleinrock said.

“We sent so much e-mail we crashed their computer. Inadvertently, the first spam e-mail created the first denial-of-service response.”

Kleinrock, 75, sees the Internet spreading into everything.

“The next step is to move it into the real world,” Kleinrock said. “The Internet will be present everywhere. I will walk into a room and it will know I am there.”

He also foresees intelligent software “agents” that do people’s bidding online.

During an onstage chat at a Web 2.0 Summit that ended last Thursday in San Francisco, Berners-Lee said governments and big firms shouldn’t meddle with the Web. “I’m always worried, of course, about anything large coming in to take control,” he said.

“Web technology itself should not tell you what’s right and wrong; humanity has ways of doing that. It isn’t the Wild West.”

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Google Wave to be released to 100,000 testers Wednesday

By John D. Sutter, CNN

(CNN) -- Google Wave, a product that promises to revolutionize online communication, will go out to about 100,000 beta testers Wednesday.

Google Wave hopes to replace e-mail as the main way people communicate online.

The Web application from Google Inc. combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communication called a "hosted conversation," or a "wave."

Google demonstrated Wave at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, California, in May. The closed group of beta testers will help Google fish bugs out of the application before a public release by the end of the year, according to the Google Wave Web site.

The app was created by Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the Australian brothers who developed Google Maps. The Rasmussen brothers said they hope Google Wave will eventually replace e-mail as the main way people converse on the Internet.

"This should be something everybody uses and something everybody knows," Jens Rasmussen said.

In Wave, e-mail-like communications can be edited by several users simultaneously. And users can chat about certain sections of Wave documents in real time, where all users see what a person is typing as it is typed. If a person comes to the conversation late, they can replay everything they've missed.

The Rasmussens hope these functions will make online communication more efficient and collaborative.

Jens Rasmussen said e-mail is a computer version of snail mail. Wave will be something new, a real-time communication system designed specifically for today's faster-paced, multitasking Internet, he said.

"We really have a much too strong tendency to just take things we know and just adapt them to the digital world," he said.

Tech bloggers have largely cheered the release of the product. But there are some concerns that the app may be too complicated for mainstream Web users.

In a video demonstration, the Rasmussens spend an hour and 20 minutes explaining Wave.

Initial reviews of Wave also noted a number of glitches in the application.

Ben Parr of the social-media blog Mashable writes that Wave still has bugs but that the product is improving over time.

"As an initial user of Wave, I have to tell you: things have gotten much more stable. It still has a slow response time in certain situations and it can still crash, but these things happen far less often than they used to," he writes.

The blog TechCrunch wrote that Wave "drips with ambition" and will be "a new communication platform for a new Web."

"Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the Web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale," TechCrunch's MG Siegler wrote.

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Accenture starts re-hiring binge, throws spotlight on local CIOs

Manila Bulletin, By MELVIN G. CALIMAG, September 6, 2009, 2:37pm

With the global economy beginning to show signs of recovery, BPO and consulting firm Accenture has started to rehire about 100 of the 500 employees it laid off in the country recently.

Kenneth Corless, Accenture senior executive for CIO Business Applications, shares the company’s perspective and approach in addressing the many challenges that CIOs face today.

This was disclosed in a recent press briefing by Accenture Philippines country managing director Beth Lui who reiterated that the company remains firmly committed in doing business in the country.

Lui was joined by top Accenture executives Kenneth Corless and Shane Ryan who visited the Philippines to talk in a forum meant to engage local CIOs (chief information officers) to find ways to cut IT costs.

The US-based BPO giant gathered 50 CIOs from various industries in a bid to share its expertise in adopting new business strategies and technologies, among other areas of concern.

“CIOs should not be just technology-savvy but business-savvy as well,” said Lui, adding it was the first time that Accenture held a CIO forum where the company also recounted its own success story in terms of streamlining its IT infrastructure.

Corless said one of the emerging technology trends that CIOs can seriously consider is the hosted or software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for their local operations.

The American executive said that by adopting new computing approaches such as SaaS, CIOs could optimize their IT assets. He said it is wrong to cancel IT and business projects during the downturn as this widens the capability gap.

Ryan, meanwhile, said the tough economic environment is providing the chance for CIOs to shine in their respective business organizations by embracing new technologies or practices that make processes more efficient and reduce expenditure.

“This is one of those times when IT plays a major role in a business organization. CIOs just need to look at the right approach in their IT infrastructure,” Ryan said.

Research firm Ovum recently said in a report that Accenture’s revenue in 2009 is up 10 percent over last year.

Jens Butler, principal analyst for Asia Pacific at Ovum, said Accenture’s “continual ability to realize growth in existing accounts can often be attributable to the strength of its C-level engagement, especially in Asia Pacific where a long-term relationship and trust are the keys to success.”

Thus, Ovum noted that even if Accenture shed 500 workers in the Philippines, it has been able to continue to convince clients that it still has the capability to satisfy their needs.

“Even though Accenture does not rate as the cheapest of providers, clients still choose them to aid with the resolution of complex business problems that cannot simply come out of a box and often return for more,” Butler said.

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