I found the following YouTube video, where Eric Schmidt and Douglas Merrill talk about how they are using the same applications which are available to everyone else in the world internally to store all their documents, handle collaboration and use it for all internal running of the company.

Could this be something that could grow bigger and maybe into other enterprises and companies ?

I see it as it is all right that they use it for themselves, as they are in control of the servers and data, but for a 3rd party company I still see the risk of an external company being in control of your data. What do you reckon ? Will Google Apps be feasible for large corporates out there ? It could work for small startups though …

written by Arné

Google Docs Blog has announced that they will be slowly rolling out Google Docs Offline.

This will enable you to work one your documents offline and when you come back online it will be synchronized again. All this is brought to you by the Google Gears open source framework that has been making the headlines lately.

I’ve checked my Google Docs and there is nothing yet of this feature.

written by Arné

I’m planning to attend the next 27 Dinner in Johannesburg with the next one coming up the 27th of May 2008. I probably would have gone earlier, but some strange reason I thought is was only in Cape Town some time ago when I heard people talking about it.

This will be my very first time at such an event, and I’m already taking two people with me that I feel will be a great asset taking with, as they’ve got lots of ideas floating around, and this would only do them good getting those ideas out and getting in touch with other people in the industry.

Hope to meet the faces behind the sites and innovations. See you there!

written by Arné

 Google has announced that they are launching there newest offering, also FREE(i love putting this in caps) called Google Ad Manager.

I’ve applied for my account today, to start evaluating this new offering.

As most of you know I’m a big OpenX ( phpAdsNew/OpenAds) fan and have been using this for more than 2 years, could even be longer).

The guys at OpenX has come up with a good article on their blog. ( click here to view ). They go with the fact that it is never good that Google knows everything about you, and also that Google can now see all your revenue streams, and thus can reduce their prices etc. to fit in with other campaigns, but give it a read and you’ll understand better.

I will still keep on using OpenX, and don’t know if I’ll be using Google Ad Manager, but as always, they do make good products, but we’ll see how this one rolls out.

written by Arné

I was looking into Amazon Storage Services again (s3), as I was thinking of writing a small application for backing up my personal documents daily.

But before I start I just quickly had a peak at the Solutions catalog, and found quite a few nice solutions built around S3, and some other AWS(Amazon Web Services) components.

Also something very interesting is Amazons’ Elastic Compute Cloud (E2) platform .

If I”m not mistaken, Vinny Lingham also mentioned that they are looking at using cloud computing Synthasite - though I stand to be corrected on this one …

Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

To use Amazon EC2, you simply:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use our pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
• Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
• Choose the type(s) of instance you want to run.
• Start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs.
• Pay for the instance-hours and bandwidth that you actually consume.

written by Arné