- Introducing App Engine for Business – Google App Engine – Google Code – App Engine for Business enables you to build your enterprise applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications. App Engine for Business provides all the ease of use and flexibility of App Engine with more power to manage enterprise use cases, more capable APIs, straightforward pricing and the SLAs and support you need for business-critical applications.
- Google Storage for Developers – Google Code – Google Storage for Developers is a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data on Google's infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilitie
- Google Code Blog: Enabling Cloud Portability with Google App Engine for Business and VMware – New data presentation widgets in Google Web Toolkit speed development of traditional enterprise applications, increase performance and interactivity for enterprise users, and make it much easier to create engaging mobile apps with a fraction of the investment previously required.
- Official Google Blog: Google I/O 2010 Day 1: A more powerful web in more places – This week we’ll celebrate this ongoing evolution of the web and share some of our latest work in moving the web forward and keeping it open.
- Expanding the Cloud – Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage – All Things Distributed – Today a new storage option for Amazon S3 has been launched: Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS). This new storage option enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy
- Five JavaScript Frameworks Comparison | TechnoForum – Ext JS is emerging as an “industry-strength” framework and is being increasingly used in the enterprise. Ext JS also supports a robust client-side data model and support for component model and design patterns.
- Google buys VOIP engine behind Yahoo, AOL, WebEx, Lotus conferencing | ZDNet – Given Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 and its existing Google Voice service, the search giant appears to be collecting enough assets to give Skype and others competition on the consumer and business fronts. GIPS’s software can also be layered into Google Apps in multiple areas as a business collaboration tool.
- Marco.org – The iPad doesn’t need to do everything – Find the balance: use the iPad for what it does well, accept that it won’t be everything, and use other tools for the rest.
- Amazon Stealing the Cloud « SmoothSpan Blog – It’s still relatively early days, but Amazon’s competitors need to rev up pretty soon. Amazon is stealing the Cloud at an ever-increasing rate.
- Foursquare Growing Like Crazy: Up To 600,000 Check-Ins Per Day – Foursquare, the hot mobile "check-in" app, has basically doubled in usage over the last two months
- Querydsl – Querydsl – Mysema Source – Querydsl is a framework which enables the construction of type-safe SQL-like queries. Instead of writing queries as inline strings or externalizing them into XML files they aren be constructed via a fluent API like Querydsl.
- The Atlantic :: Magazine :: The Enemy Within – THE CYBER-SECURITY ELITES OF THE WORLD HAVE JOINED FORCES IN A HIGH-TECH GAME OF COPS AND ROBBERS, TRYING TO FIND CONFICKER’S CREATORS AND DEFEAT THEM. THE COPS ARE FAILING. AND NOW THE WORM LIES THERE, WAITING …
- Bill Maher Thinks The Government Would Work Better If It Was Run By Apple – “If we wanted a president that didn’t understand gizmos and doohickeys,” Maher reminded the President, America would have elected McCain and Palin. “McCain thinks an iPad is something women wear on their Xboxes once a month.”
Tag Archives: gdrive
Google hits a home run with Google Spreadsheet
I just got my invite to play with the latest offering from Google, the Google Spreadsheets and my initial reaction after playing with it for the past hour is incredibly positive. Unlike some of the duds Google has launched recently, this is a pretty nice, robust and useful offering.
I started off by creating a simple spreadsheet and tried out some simple formulas and it worked – I shouldn’t be surprised but I was. Tying in =(a1 – a2) actually worked and that’s pretty cool. Here are 2 simple screen-shots from my playing with the formula.
After I hit enter, the results are plopped into the cell.
The other neat thing was that the formula was saved in my document and the numbers updated when I changed one of the columns involved in the formula. I know it sounds pretty simple but it’s great to have a web application behave like a fat-client application.
Google Spreadsheets have a ton of other formulas that you can apply and it seems to offer all the functionality I use out of Excel. The collaborative feature also has great possibilities but that’s limited to people who have Google Accounts only at this point. Weird but I guess that’s something that they are working on to include anyone with an email address.
A couple of other nice features include options to export to Excel (xls), CSV and HTML. The Excel export works great and I was able to open up the exported spreadsheet in Excel as you would expect. The HTML export also works but the generated HTML does not validate which seemed odd but I know this is beta [insert your own joke here] software.
In addition to creating new spreadsheets, you can import existing Excel documents and this application did a great job of importing the spreadsheet with a ton of data and some complex formulas. I am very impressed with the overall functionality and overall usability of this application. Would I dump Excel to start using this? No – The accessibility and collaboration features are great but there are privacy concerns that would not make me comfortable using this application with some personal and confidential data. Maybe when GDrive launches, we will feel more comfortable about how data is encrypted in storage, segregated from other users and protected from hackers. Till then, I’m sticking with Excel for my rudimentary needs.