Author Archive

Posted by Steve Hardt, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google Mobile Blog)

We don’t have to tell you that the workforce is increasingly mobile, and that workers on the go expect to be fully productive on email and calendar from their mobile devices. But we do want to tell you that we have a few new features for Google Sync users that will help employees work efficiently from anywhere on their iPhones and iPads.

Google Sync keeps your phone’s native mail and calendar apps in sync with your Gmail, Calendar and Contacts. Today, three new updates to Google Sync for iOS will allow you to:

• Search all your emails in Gmail, not just the emails stored locally by the iOS mail app.
  
  
  
  
• Accept, decline or edit calendar events from the iOS calendar app.
  
  


• Send email from the address you want. We recognize that some of you manage multiple email addresses from a single Gmail account.Gmail’s “Send Mail as” feature lets you send messages with another email address listed as the sender instead of your Gmail address, e.g. joe@altostrat.com instead of joe@gmail.com. Now the iOS mail app will respect these settings.

These three updates are available to both Gmail and Google Apps email accounts.
For more information, visit Setting up Google Sync with your iOS device

Posted by Jessie Jiang, Group Product Manager

Google’s cloud services allow you to host your applications in the cloud and leverage the same infrastructure that power Google's own applications.There are more than 200,000 developers who have created apps on Google’s cloud services. Today, we are announcing several enhancements to our services targeted at businesses looking to build applications in the cloud.

New enterprise level service and support option for Google App Engine

When choosing a platform for your most critical business applications or standardizing on one across your organization, we recognize that uptime guarantees, easy management and support are just as important as product features. So today, we are launching Google App Engine Premier Accounts. For $500 per month, you’ll receive premier support, a 99.95% uptime service level agreement and the ability to create unlimited number of apps on your premier account domain.

To sign up for a premier account, email our sales team at appengine_premier_requests@google.com.

Google Cloud SQL - Your database in the cloud

Last week, we announced the limited preview of Google Cloud SQL. It powers your App Engine applications with a familiar relational database in a fully managed cloud environment. This allows you to focus on developing your applications and services, free from the chores of managing, maintaining and administering relational databases.

Cloud SQL is available free of charge for now. It will continue to evolve as we work out the kinks during the preview. Let us know if you’d like to take it for a spin.

Google Cloud Storage is out of Code Labs, with new features and lower price

Last year, we introduced Google Storage for developers, a service that lets you store data on Google’s infrastructure with very high reliability, availability and performance. You can use it for your online archives, storing and serving static content (e.g. images and video), sharing data with your customers and partners, as well for use with other Google services like App Engine, Prediction API and BigQuery.

Today, Google Storage for Developers is out of Labs, and has a new name - Google Cloud Storage. In addition to leaving Labs, we are announcing several new features. You can now read and write files to Google Cloud Storage via the App Engine Files API. We are also making detailed usage information, including access analytics and storage use data, available to all our customers.

Finally, we are lowering the prices for storage and bandwidth across the board. We are not charging for ingress and introducing volume discounts for our larger users. Depending on your usage patterns, you could save over 40% of your monthly bill. Please see our updated pricing here.

Google Prediction API graduates from labs, adds new features

Since the general availability launch of the Prediction API earlier this year, we have been very excited about giving you access to machine learning in the cloud to build smarter apps. Today, we are announcing the latest release of Prediction API - v1.4. With the release of this version, Prediction API is graduating from Google Code Labs. The new release will also includes two of your most requested features: PMML v4.01 support and data anomaly detection.

Prediction API has a variety of use cases from helping increase fuel economy to creating movie recommendation services. It is one of the services which provides a clean and simple API to  machine learning that anybody can understand. At the same time, it is hosted in the cloud and ideally situated for integration with your web application.

We are enabling our enterprise customers to build business solutions that take advantage of the computing power and scalability of Google’s cloud services without all the hassles of deployment of applications. We have been making great progress on Google App Engine, Cloud Storage, and Prediction API. There is more to come, stay tuned.

Let us know if you are interested to talk to a Google representative to get more details. We are always happy to hear from you, so feel free to leave your comments below.

Posted by Peter S Magnusson, Engineering Director

(Cross-posted from the Google App Engine blog)

Happy New Year! As we return from our New Year's celebrations, brush the dust off our workstations and gear up for our first release of 2012, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at improvements we have made and what developers have accomplished with App Engine in 2011.

Posted by Freeman Liu, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Google Docs Blog.)

There may be times when you don’t have an Internet connection on your Android device, but you still want access to a file you’ve saved in Google Docs. Now you can select any file in Google Docs to make it available offline. So regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet, you’re always connected to those files.

Even better, Google Docs automatically updates your offline files when you’re on Wi-Fi. You can also manually update files anytime you have a data connection by opening the file or tapping ‘Update’ from the Offline section of the app.

Make file available offline	Update online file

Make file available offline

Update offline file

For those of you with Android tablets, we’ve also improved the Google Docs reading experience. Now, when you open a Google document on your tablet while online, you’ll get a high-resolution version of the document. Swipe left and right to flip between pages, or use the slider at the bottom to page ahead quickly.

New reading layout on Android tablet

You can learn more about offline capabilities and the new reading layout in our Help Center.

Whether you’re offline or online, these improvements will make it easier to be productive from anywhere.

Posted by Navneet Joneja, Product Manager for Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage enables developers to store and access massive amounts of data on Google’s infrastructure with high reliability, availability and performance. Since Google Cloud Storage graduated from preview last year, many developers have tapped directly into Google’s storage capabilities.

We are also seeing lots of technology providers integrating Google Cloud Storage directly into their offerings. For example, several providers of enterprise storage solutions have integrated with Google Cloud Storage to make their products and services even better.

Here’s how a few of these companies are helping their customers build a bridge to the cloud with Google Cloud Storage:

• Panzura allows globally distributed enterprises to store, collaborate and backup files in the cloud using Panzura File System and Google Cloud Storage.
• StorSimple offers a single integrated appliance for primary storage, data protection and disaster recovery. Now, you can connect your StorSimple appliances to the cloud with Google Cloud Storage.
• TwinStrata’s storage gateway can now be used in conjunction with Google Cloud Storage for data storage, backup and disaster recovery in the cloud.
• Zmanda provides backup and disaster recovery solutions for businesses. You can now use Zmanda’s software to backup your on-premise data to Google Cloud Storage.
• Gladinet makes it easy to upload a file from your desktop to Google Cloud Storage, share it with your team and manage access controls using a web-based interface.

I'm thrilled to see other companies building innovative products using Google Cloud Storage. Today, we're also announcing lower storage prices to make it even more affordable to store your data in Google's cloud. The new pricing will be effective retroactively from March 1st, 2012.

If you’re interested in learning how you can tap into Google’s cloud storage capabilities to serve your company’s storage needs, we’d love to have a conversation or you can get started online.

Posted by Joe Faith, Product Manager

Google Cloud SQL frees you from the chores of managing, maintaining and administering relational databases. It powers your App Engine applications with a familiar relational database (MySQL) in a fully-managed cloud environment.

Since we launched preview last October, Cloud SQL has improved performance and added features like scheduled backups, multihoming to increase availability and to improve application performance, and more powerful instances. Many businesses and developers have also started using Cloud SQL to administer their databases in the cloud.

For example, Daffodil, a global software firm, wanted to build and scale cloud applications with an easy-to-use database management system. After trying different solutions, they migrated to Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL last year. After the migration, the engineers at Daffodil saved 100 hours of engineering work, allowing them to focus on their app and worry less about infrastructure.

Today, we’re announcing a two-tier pricing plan to Cloud SQL that will be enabled on June 12th:

• If you’re a business building lightweight applications or just want to try out the service, the flexible pricing option is for you. You pay for what you use.
• If you’re a business building heavy-traffic applications, we offer pricing packages, which are more economical and help you predict costs in advance.

We hope the new Cloud SQL pricing plans help you build App Engine applications tailored to your business’s needs. Post your questions in our user forums or comments on our Enterprise Google+ page.