Digital Media

Some commuters will see billboards such as these touting Google Apps for a solid month.

(Credit: Google)

Google is taking its marketing strategy for Google Apps to the next level by renting prominent billboards in major U.S. cities.

Commuters in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco will be greeted by a progressive series of ads for Google Apps starting Monday and running for a month. The idea is to catch IT managers stuck in horrific traffic spots like New York's West Side Highway or San Francisco's U.S. 101 and press them on the benefits of switching to Google Apps with a different ad for each day of the week.

Google has steadily increased the drumbeat behind Google Apps over the past several months, openly touting it as an alternative to Microsoft's suite of office productivity and e-mail software with customer testimonials and applications designed to make the switch easier. The company said 1.75 million organizations are now using Google's online services for word processing and e-mail, which is still a drop in the overall bucket but growing.

Traditionally Google hasn't been big on ads, but it has produced TV spots for its Chrome browser and posted a cryptic series of job ads on Silicon Valley billboards years ago.

Google is introducing video into Google Apps with the hope that companies will be attracted to a service that helps with training and internal communication but also removes the hassles of hosting video.

According to Google executives who spoke to CNET News last week, the search giant has tailored some of the technology developed by YouTube specifically for corporate clients. The offering is part of Google's continuing efforts to replace traditional office software with so-called cloud-computing services.

With the help of Google Video for Business, a company's employees can upload and share clips with the same ease as posting a clip to YouTube, according to Matt Glotzbach, Google's product manager director.

"Think of this as user-generated video for businesses," Glotzbach said.

A demo video provided to reporters illustrated the ways that Google employees use the service, which goes live to the public on Tuesday.

One Google executive said during the demo that instead of distributing an e-mail with a wrap-up of quarterly results to his team, he posted a clip of himself discussing the quarter. It was more personable than just sending an e-mail "especially for Google employees that work in remote offices" the video's narrator said.

The coolest feature by far is the Scene Browser, which presents a series of thumbnails that a user can click on to locate a specific segment within a video. It's slick and one has to wonder why it isn't offered on YouTube. Glotzbach said he didn't know for certain but speculated that it might be because YouTube's clips are generally shorter in length.

Some of the service's other features enable administrators to track usage, and employees can leave comments, insert tags, and embed a video into any Web page. Companies control who sees the video because only authorized users are able to watch.

The service will be wrapped inside the Google Apps Premier Edition which costs $50 a year per user. For that price, each user receives all the Google Apps, such as Gmail, Docs, and Calendar.

Glotzbach said Google has an opportunity to cash in on corporate video, a segment that many predicted would one day be huge but has been too complicated and costly for wide adoption. For Gmail, the company offers 25GB per mailbox. For Google Video, the company offers 3GB per user.

Google is hoping that companies will flock to a service that doesn't require them to host servers or worry about huge amounts of data. This is a bottom's up approach, according to Glotzbach. It used to be that companies were willing only to pay for high-level executives to make videos for internal communication, but Google Video for Business enables a company to allow employees at any level to distribute video content.

Google's always up to something, and here's a recap of some recent moves.

• Google is making room for gargantuan display ads on YouTube, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which cites advertising industry sources.

Google's search engine now translates text on command in some cases.

(Credit: Google)

Making money off the popular video-sharing service is a top Google priority this year, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has said.

•  "Transparency" is a hot computing buzzword as everyone from Twitter to SalesForce.com seeks to share information about Web service availability so customers and users don't feel quite so helpless when things go wrong. And Google has showed it got transparency religion while trying to reassure Google Apps customers hurt by an August Gmail outage.

"We've...heard your guidance around the need for better communication when outages occur," Google told Google Apps customers, according to MuleSource CEO Dave Rosenberg, one of those customers.

Specifically, Google is building a dashboard that shows specifics of any outages and an estimated time to fix it. The dashboard should launch in coming months, Google said. The company also will provide customers with a formal incident report within 48 hours and will help out with internal company communications about any outages.

• We knew Google's Android programmers watered down Bluetooth and instant-messaging features from last week's announcement of the software developer kit, but Google has shed more light on the decisions in a blog post.

The company decided to remove the GTalkService interface, which could deal with various instant-messaging features, because it was a serious security vulnerability.

And the Bluetooth interface was removed because "we plain ran out of time," according to Android engineer Nick Pelly. "Rather than ship a broken API that we knew was going to change a lot, we chose not to include it. We absolutely intend to support a Bluetooth API in a future release, although we don't know exactly when that will be...I would love nothing more than to start seeing some neat third-party applications and games over Bluetooth. In my opinion, Bluetooth is completely under-utilized on most mobile platforms and I'm excited to someday see what the developer community can do with Android."

• Google appears to be trying a new way to mix videos into search results, according to Google Blogoscoped. The new technique puts two videos side by side.

• Just as Google's search engine can in effect be commanded to perform specific tasks--"time London" tells you just what you'd expect, and "5+5" tells you "10"--Google's search engine will now translate on demand. Typing "translate jaune" into the engine produces a top result of "Translation for jaune: French » English: jaune - yellow, scab." Google Operating System picked up the change.

• And in case you missed it before, Google's search suggestion feature is now enabled after a period of development at Google Labs. The feature suggests possible searches based on the first keystrokes a searcher types.

Users of Google Docs, the online applications for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, now have a wide range of templates from which to choose.

Google on Thursday announced the templates, which were created by Google and a number of companies with experience in the business. They can be browsed and opened through a template gallery that currently has 294 to choose from.

Google Docs users now can use a wide range of templates.

(Credit: Google)

Among the options: wedding planners, business cards, cover letters, screenplays with proper formatting, invoices, loan amortization schedulers, fantasy basketball standings predictor, wedding photo albums, and party invitations.

I personally was excited to see the Sudoku template, was initially disappointed that it looked broken, but then realized much of its interface, including a solution checker, is available through tabs at the bottom of the document. When can we get a Kakuro template?

Some templates, such as the group shared expense report, are explicitly designed to take advantage of the fact that Google Docs can be edited by multiple people, one of the natural advantages the technology has over PC-based editing.

Microsoft has long shipped many templates with its Office suite, and many companies and individuals offer their own online, but I see some interesting potential here for some good user-generated content. So far, though, I don't see any way for people to upload their own templates to the gallery.

Update 12:00 p.m. PDT: Google said user-generated templates will be an option later. "Eventually, we want to give everyone a way to submit templates so we can capture the broadest set of use cases and let the user-rated favorites bubble to the top. But we don't have a specific timeline to share at this time," the company said.

Google doesn't deny that it's working on bringing offline access to two major Web applications, Gmail and Calendar, but a sign emerged Thursday that the feature--which would be a major expansion of the applications' utility and competitive threat--is due soon.

"Gears on Gmail and Calendar in approximately 6 weeks. Just had a preview at Google offices. Not sure if it is Google Enterprise only," said Andrew Fogg, chief marketing and strategy officer for Web 2.0 consultancy Kusiri, in a Twitter post Thursday.

Gears, formerly called Google Gears, is an open-source extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer now and Safari and Opera later that, among other things, lets Web browsers store and use data even while offline. That can make Web applications vastly more useful and a more viable replacement for PC-based software such as Microsoft Outlook. With Gears, Google today offers offline editing for its word processing service and offline viewing of its spreadsheet and presentation service.

A view from 2007 that indicated Google work on offline access to Google Calendar.

(Credit: Shared under Creative Commons by Noticias-TIC)

Google Apps competes with Microsoft's Outlook-Exchange combination as well as with many other online and offline applications, including Yahoo's online e-mail application, Zimbra, which already offers offline access to e-mail.

Gmail has won plaudits from some users--I like it myself--but today they can't use it directly unless they're connected to a network, and I spend a lot of time working where there's no access. Of course, with Google's free use of IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol), software such as Mozilla's Thunderbird also can be used to handle e-mail while offline, so it's not as if Gmail users are helpless without a network connection.

Customers who pay $50 per year per user for Google Apps Premier Edition get more storage space, better technical support, and other features. Personally, I'd be surprised if Google restricted offline access only to those customers, in particular because offline access imposes a burden on the local PC, not Google's data centers, and makes the service and Google's cloud computing argument stronger. But it could be an opportunity to sell more subscriptions.

Just yesterday I asked Google about offline access for Gmail and Calendar and they gave me their usual noncommittal reply that more or less indicates it's in the works.

Two tricky things about Gears is deciding what data to cache locally on a computer and how to synchronize data when a network connection is restored, especially with group-edited content such as documents or calendars. There are hints how Google might go about getting around one challenge, though; according to the Google Operating System blog, some users saw a "Use Google Calendar Offline" note last year that said Gears would let a user view and edit the next three months of a calendar.

Fogg also twittered another potentially useful extension of the Google Apps service is under way, support for technology called SyncML that would make it easier to synchronize Gmail contacts with the address books of mobile devices. Newer versions of SyncML also support "push e-mail," which means a mobile device automatically gets new e-mail without having to be commanded to check.

"SyncML for Google contacts next month. Soocial (sic) watchout. My guess: its related to the sync that they worked on with Apple for 3G iPhone," Fogg said in the Twitter post.

Update 11:02 a.m. PDT: Google offered an official but vague comment on the Gears work in Calendar and Gmail: "We're working on Gears-enabling a number of our products, but we don't have a specific timeline to announce."

A large number of Google Docs users couldn't use their online word processor or presentations for about an hour Tuesday. But the glitch illustrates not just the troubles with cloud computing, but also the gradual progress in making the concept palatable.

Cloud computing, in which software runs not on PCs or company servers but instead on computers on the Internet, requires something of a leap of faith both technologically and culturally. Those making the move must get accustomed to a reliance on somebody else's computing infrastructure, and that can be scary.

What's gradually emerging, though, are guarantees and practical tools that likely will help ease the transition.

Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger version.)

Google, for example, offers a service level agreement (SLA) promising that Gmail, the online e-mail component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9 percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers if Gmail dips below that level.

And SLAs are coming to the rest of Google Apps.

"We don't have an SLA yet for Google Calendar or Google Docs, but it's something we're moving quickly toward," said Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Apps. Google wants "to get the same level of reliability for all of Apps," he said.

Google is a major proponent of cloud computing, with advocacy work down to the level of trying to build ubiquitous high-speed networks, and Yahoo has just formed a cloud computing group of its own. The trend has the potential to seriously redistribute wealth within the computing industry.

There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online applications such as Google's Apps, Yahoo's Zimbra for e-mail, Zoho for office and business software, Adobe Buzzword for word processing, and Salesforce.com for managing customer relations. Second are general-purpose foundations such as Amazon Web Services, Saleforce.com's Force.com, and Google App Engine on which customers can run their own applications.

Taking the plunge into the cloud
Service level agreements are the kind of contractual guarantees that appeal to CIOs making cost-benefit analyses. But there's a gut-level factor at play here, too.

Psychologically, it's well-known in risk analysis circles that people feel more comfortable with risk if they feel in control. Thus people are often more comfortable driving a car on a congested freeway compared with being flown somewhere in a commercial jet, regardless of the relative safety of the two forms of transport.

So naturally there's some fear with cloud computing: it means you can't reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data center servers.

Google showed this status warning during Tuesday's outage.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Companies are working to address this side of the equation, too. One prime example is the Trust.salesforce.com site, which shows the response time for a Salesforce.com server transaction. It also details when problems happened, what they affected, and what caused them.

"We've found working with our customers they want transparency. They want to know exactly what's going on all the time," said Bruce Francis, Salesforce.com's vice president of corporate strategy. "If there's an issue, they're not furious; they just want to know exactly what's going on."

Amazon.com, too, offers a basic status report dashboard for Amazon Web Services. "A service dashboard is something our developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as soon as possible," said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.

"Own your own risk"
And some others are even trying to make a business out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-source monitoring and management software company Hyperic, which launched a CloudStatus service in June that monitors Amazon Web Services in greater detail. The company is working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too, including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of marketing.

"You can't get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the adoption of the cloud," she said.

Amazon Web Services shows what's working or not. (Click image to see larger version.)

Google is trying to communicate better with users and customers, Chandra said, though he stopped short of revealing what the uptime is for Google Docs or detailing why exactly it had problems earlier this week.

"With the docs outage, we posted immediately in the administrative console that there was an issue. We posted to the help center and the phone line system that we were working quickly to resolve it," Chandra said.

Asked whether Google plans its own status dashboard, Chandra wouldn't share details but promised better help for users. "We're trying to find even more ways to be more transparent about reliability," he said.

Risks of non-cloud computing, too
Much ado can and should be made of the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks. Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty servers, is a serious problem there, too.

Those with high-end services boast of "five nines" of reliability, where services are available 99.999 percent of the year and therefore down no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Google's Gmail SLA, at 99.9 percent uptime, promises downtime of less than 9 hours per year.

That might not be five nines, and it's for Gmail only today, but Google chooses to see the glass as half full.

"We talk to customers, and 99.9 percent is mostly much higher than most organizations with their internal service today," Chandra said.