How the New Google Wave Will Change Emailing, Doc Sharing, Blogging, Your Life

Just as Microsoft is unveiling a search engine to take on Google Search, Google is unveiling a software program to take on Microsoft Office. It's called Google Wave, an online "collaboration" tool that brings document sharing, emailing and instant messaging under one program that works a bit like a live chatroom. Google says it developed Wave to answer the question, "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?" It would look like this:

What the heck is that! Here's how the guys at Gizmodo described it: "a frothy...live chatroom with a spread of documents, photos and/or videos, where you can reply to any part of any message or anything that's shared, and it's all real-time." That's sounds splendid and the Wave -- which is essentially a real-time communications stream -- really does sound like the you-know-what of the future. But I'm somewhat of a tech simpleton. Features schmeatures: How will it actually change the way I work? Here's a simple breakdown:

Email: Take it from TechCrunch: "Clicking on any of the wave threads will open another pane to the right of the inbox that shows that wave in its entirety. Let's say one wave is a message from a friend and you want to reply to it. If they're not currently online, you can do it below their message just as you may in Gmail. Except there's no bulky new message creator to pop open, you simply start typing below your friend's message. But perhaps you want to respond to a particular part of their message -- well you can do that too simply by starting to type below the part you're replying to."

Documents: Google Docs as they exist are a great way to allow your team to group edit a document, but (as anybody who's worked with it knows) the edits appear a while after they're made, which can make simultaneous editing a real problem. In Wave, not only are the edits much more instantaneous, but also you can rewind the edits to see how the document changed.

Photos: Google Wave can work like a Flickr stream, but it's built into your email program. Just drag the photos in and users can see icons from their end and comment on them immediately.

Blogging: Google Wave can turn blogging into Wiki blogging. Instead of relying on comment boxes, I can upload my pieces into the wave that I share publicly and link to from this article. Once you're in my public Wave, you can point out exactly where I'm wrong by writing right next to the sentence ("You're wrong here, and here are the stats..."). Since the blog post has become an editable Wiki in the Wave, you could also see where other readers agree/disagree. No more blog, followed by comment sections. On a Wave, the blog is the comment section.

Online invitations: They stink. And if we're all very fortunate, something like this will kill Evite:
No more pop up tabs with weird party images and over-clever invitations (guilty), no more "But how do I get there?" questions. The invitation is a map. Yes.

The program isn't public yet, but it's still making techies everywhere stand and applaud or sit down to start breathing again and for once, I think they're right to do so. Google Wave is not just a Spork, because that's only two functions. It's a Swiss Army Inbox that really could change the way we work.

Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.

As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point, and I was immediately sold. (Jens insists it took him hours to convince me, but I like my version better.)

We had a blast the next couple years turning Where 2's prototype mapping site into Google Maps. But finally we decided it was time to leave the Maps team and turn Jens' new idea into a project, which we codenamed "Walkabout." We started with a set of tough questions:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

After months holed up in a conference room in the Sydney office, our five-person "startup" team emerged with a prototype. And now, after more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we're very eager to return and see what the world might think. Today we're giving developers an early preview of Google Wave.

A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.


Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we're inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

• The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
• Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
• The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

So, this leaves one big question we need your help answering: What else can we do with this?

If you're a developer and you'd like to roll up your sleeves and start working on Google Wave with us, you can read more on the Google Wave Developer blog about the Google Wave APIs, and check out the Google Code blog to learn more about the Google Wave Federation Protocol.

If you'd like to be notified when we launch Google Wave as a public product, you can sign up at http://wave.google.com/. We don't have a specific timeframe for public release, but we're planning to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview. We're excited to see what feedback we get from our early tinkerers, and we'll undoubtedly make lots of changes to the Google Wave product, platform, and protocol as we go.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html

Cloud Computing Aiding Entrepreneurs

Salesforce: Force.com provides the building blocks necessary to build any kind of business app, simple or sophisticated - and automatically deploy them as a service. The multi-tenant Force.com platform has a complete feature set for the creation of business applications including the ability to create any database on demand, any custom workflow, the Apex code programming language for building complex logic, the Force.com Web Services API for programmatic access, mash-ups, and integration with other applications and data, and Visualforce, a framework to create any user interface.
What exactly is AppExchange? What kind of applications does it host?
A marketplace for business applications, AppExchange provides a complete environment that enables developers and partners anywhere in the world to develop, publish, market, and distribute their products to a global audience and instantly engage with salesforce.com's 55,000+ customers. Applications built natively on the Force.com platform run entirely on demand, eliminating the need for developers or partners to create and manage their own data center or infrastructure. Partners benefit from building on the Force.com platform, and are able to leverage salesforce.com's world-class security, scalability and reliability for their own solution.
Today there are more than 800 applications available on the AppExchange, solving a wide variety of business issues they not only dramatically extend Salesforce CRM, but also include diverse new areas such as ERP, document management, project management, credit and collections, professional services management, human resources and many, many others. These applications are being built by Indian companies like CRM Orbit and Theikos, small start ups and major global tech nology leaders like CODA, Fujitsu, Adobe and Skype.
There s so much confusion and overlap between terms like platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, cloud computing, SaaS, what s the difference?
There are a new generation of leaders rising in this cloud computing space: salesforce.com, Google, Amazon.com -- all of us are building platforms for cloud computing. We all believe that the future of the computing industry is in the cloud and are in fact partners on many levels. But as you say, we have different offerings, and the cloud computing space is becoming quite crowded as it gains popularity. Companies need to look closely at the various types of services being offered, and decide what is best to suit their needs.
Software-as-a-Service is really about applications. It means that there is no software to install or maintain on the computer applications are delivered over the Internet and can be accessed anywhere, anytime with only a browser. The SaaS model has a number of benefits: applications are easy to use, lower cost, and do not have the maintenance and upgrade hassles of traditional software. In addition, the SaaS model does not require the large up-front investment in software and hardware which makes it lower risk. Since companies generally pay on a per-user, per-month basis, licenses do not go unused and shelf-ware becomes a problem of the past.
Cloud computing is about harnessing the power of the Internet to deliver computing services to users. Cloud computing encompasses both Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). In the case of salesforce.com, we are an enterprise cloud computing company. We work like Google and eBay. We deliver business cloud applications (our SaaS Salesforce CRM, which is our flagship product) and the Force.com platform services via the web, with no software or hardware to buy. With the Force.com platform, you can build, test, deploy and run applications in the cloud. Now a CIO can develop a new app quickly, test it out, and deploy it. Security, reliability, backup, scale-- they all become non-issues. IT departments can spend more time on serving business needs and less time on serving the needs of their infrastructures. We have been amazed at what companies as diverse as Dell, the Japan Post and BT are doing with the Force.com platform. Anyone who is following cloud computing should watch this area-- it's very vibrant, very innovative.
The current economic climate is causing customers to take a hard look at how they are spending money on technology. In these days of scare capital and tight credit, big-ticket purchases for hardware, software, and data centers just don t make sense. Cloud computing has a better answer: low, predictable costs, flexible, pay as you go deployments, and fast results. Customers don t want to finance multi-million dollar software purchases, and then back that up with big purchases of hardware and data center services. In this environment, companies just don't have the credit to do that. What's worse, these projects then take years to implement, and once you do, you are stuck paying 20% or more in maintenance for nothing. These factors are causing more companies to look closely at cloud computing and salesforce.com than ever before.
What is also exciting about this movement to cloud computing is that it is enabling a new class of entrepreneurs. They don't need to build offices, distribution centers, data centers or really infrastructure of any kind. This will unlock huge pools of innovation around the world, since the cost of developing, distributing and supporting apps has dropped dramatically. I look at a company like Appirio, which is building apps on our platform. They need relatively little capital to grow and can tap into vast IT expertise in India. Appirio is one of a new generation of companies that will be very nimble and innovative.
Leveraging the Internet, and building on Cloud-based platforms like Force.com, these new entrepreneurs need relatively little capital to get started and grow. The web offers great marketplaces like the Force.com AppExchange - that provides global distribution. This means that we are entering a new era of democratization for developers around the world, a huge shift in power in the software industry, and for customers, an explosion in choice and innovation.
A recent report by Mckinsey & Co states that adopting the cloud model will be a money-losing mistake for large corporations. What is your take on that?
Cloud computing is suitable for both large and small businesses. In times like these, people are looking for alternatives major capital expenditures and massive maintenance costs. Thus companies (both enterprises and SMBs) are turning to cloud computing and salesforce.com because it lowers the cost, complexity and risk of deployments.
Over the next five years, IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012. More importantly, spending on cloud computing will accelerate throughout the forecast period, capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year.
It s been 5 years since Salesforce launched its web-based CRM, you have not introduced any new services since, also the planned introduction of ERP apps has not happened. Why?
For the past 10 years, salesforce.com has concentrated on the development of killer applications across CRM. In 1999, salesforce.com launched with our flagship sales force automation application, and have continued to build on that adding customer service and support, and marketing functionality. We typically add new functionality 3 times per year across our CRM products which is an incredible pace of innovation. As a company, we are committed to having the best CRM product out there versus distracting ourselves by running in too many directions. Today we are considered the leader in CRM by analyst firms like Gartner, and are very proud that we continue to lead the market in innovation on that front.
There is a lot of opportunity left in CRM, so I wanted to provide some further detail around the innovation we are driving. There are still plenty of companies who have spent millions trying to automate their sales force and they have received little in return. Even if they got those systems up and running, they are paying huge maintenance fees for zero innovation. They are paying tolls on the road to nowhere, and you'll see us go after these captive customers aggressively. We are ready to make them successful with what we now call the Sales Cloud.
We see another huge opportunity in customer service and support. These days, when you have an issue with a product or service, what do you do? You probably Google your query, or increasingly you are likely to turn to your social networks on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe then you phone the call centre. The reality is these call centers are cut off from the web. Agents can't push solutions out to portals easily, nor can they benefit in real time from the knowledge that is being created by the consumer community. We call the unification of all this information the Service Cloud. Because it runs entirely in the cloud, it is always up to date and is far less costly than traditional solutions.
Over the next 10 years, we will continue to drive cloud computing forward. While we continue focus on CRM, the Force.com platform is another major area for us. We think this is a huge opportunity and will be another core focus for us moving forward.
If you talk about the Indian market, how have concepts like SaaS, cloud computing and your own service offerings picked up?
According to Springboard Research (January 2009) report Software as a Service in India: An Overview :
Indian SaaS market will register a compounded annual growth rate of 76% between 2007-2011 and reach US$260 million in revenues by 2011.
The Indian SaaS market is poised for high growth with 76% of survey respondents, who have not adopted SaaS, planning to do so within the next 12 months.
SaaS-based ERP and CRM solutions are likely to see highest demand in the country.
Analysts say this positions India as the fastest growing SaaS market in Asia Pacific, growing with a CAGR of approximately 71%, and is expected to reach $267 million by 2011 (according to Frost & Sullivan).
Cloud computing has witnessed quick adoption by product and service companies in the banking, finance and healthcare verticals. Other verticals like IT, BPO, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, government and education are also embracing this model.
The beauty of cloud computing is that is democratizes the applications industry by allowing businesses of all sizes to make innovation their primary focus, not infrastructure. With Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform, all businesses, regardless of their vertical industry or geographic location can buy, build and deploy solutions that are right for them.
Salesforce.com believes in continuous innovation and demonstrated this with the announcement of its Spring 09 release in February 2009, the 28th major product release and with the latest Summer 09 release the company s 29th generation release in less than 10 years. In the last year, salesforce.com hit major milestones by recording 100,000 custom applications built on the Force.com platform and more than 124,000 Force.com developers.
Globally what are the trends likely to be on the cloud computing and SaaS fronts in the future?
As a pioneer in cloud computing, salesforce.com spent its first 10 years focused on delivering a great application, salesforce CRM. While we are committed to maintaining our leadership in the CRM space, we see huge potential in the custom application development market as well. The Force.com platform enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy across the enterprise, and is the fastest way to build apps in the cloud. There is no hardware, software or datacenter equipment to buy, provision, and maintain. We take care of that for you on the most secure, proven and reliable platform in enterprise cloud computing. In the past year we have continued to build out this strategy and inked partnerships with Amazon.com Web Services and Facebook, extended our existing partnership with Google, and launched Force.com Sites.
For internal IT departments, we envision that the Force.com platform as a service will completely change the role of IT departments. The break-fix-patch-upgrade components of IT will become irrelevant. But it also creates a new role for IT departments: innovation. When you can develop, deploy, and run apps in the cloud, without having to worry about buying and maintaining hardware and software, you can really add value to the business.
Going forward, what new initiatives are you planning in the Indian and global markets?
Sales force.com has come up with its latest Summer 09 release the company s 29th generation release. Summer 09 will deliver new features across the Service Cloud, the Sales Cloud and the Force.com platform delivering innovation to every department and every user.

Some of the new features that will be introduced for the Service Cloud with Summer '09 include:
Real Time Partner Collaboration: For the first time, customer service agents will be able to collaborate in real-time with third party service partners on a single version of every case - ensuring that everyone has access to the same information. Companies gain a competitive edge by delivering a consistent and measurable service experience to every customer, regardless of the channel the customer chooses.
Case Workflow Optimization: With Summer '09, customer service agents will be able to automatically trigger an email alert to the appropriate person based on a change in the comments section of a case. Now, companies can respond even faster to customer requests and issues.
Community Management Tools: Online communities have grown in popularity, so much so that many companies have multiple communities to serve a diverse set of audiences. Summer '09 will provide companies with the robust set of tools they need to scale as the size and number of online communities grow.
Summer 09 will deliver new features to the Sales Cloud focused on helping companies close more deals and grow their business including:
Visual Charting: Sales reps and managers will be able to leverage more powerful analytic tools with the release of Summer '09, including new displays, colors and two entirely new chart types. Being able to access this information in real-time and in a host of customizable displays, will enable companies to make quicker and more well informed business decisions.
Triggered Emails: With Summer '09, a sales rep will be able to set up an automated email alert based on prospect behavior, and create custom campaign fields to manage marketing offers and campaigns more effectively. Companies will be able to generate more leads by creating these sophisticated marketing campaigns.
Deal Team Management: Colleagues that sales reps bring in to assist in closing a deal will now have access to the deal information in the opportunities tab with Summer '09. When the right people have access to the opportunity's information, companies can close more deals and grow their business.
Summer '09 release will make it even easier to build and run custom applications on Force.com. New features will include:
Workflow Visualizer: As company approvals and procedures get more complex, Summer '09 simplifies the process by making it completely visual, interactive and easy-to-use. Companies can now map their business processes through a visual representation, which will make managing complex workflows simple.
Visualforce for Dashboards: Visualforce for Dashboards will allow developers to leverage Visualforce to create rich, customized dashboards and help pages for the first time.
Advanced Application Tracking: With Summer '09, salesforce.com partners can now manage and upgrade custom applications, while maintaining backwards compatibility, just like salesforce.com.
With this new offerings Salesforce.com is the only company that can instantly and reliably provide the latest innovations to all customers, without the hassles of upgrades and maintenance. Summer 09 proves the value of the cloud computing model for customers by bringing major product breakthroughs to everyone at no additional cost.

Refer to: http://www.cxotoday.com/India/Interview/Cloud_Computing_Aiding_Entrepreneurs_Salesforce/551-102308-906.html

Google targets business users with Blackberry connector

Beta software promises to make it easy to run Google Apps on the popular smartphone (Blackberry)

By Sharon Gaudin

May 4, 2009 (Computerworld) Google Inc. is looking to pull more business users into its hosted Google Apps fold by making it easier for Blackberry users to use Gmail and Google Calendar.

The company late today unveiled the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which is now in beta and slated to be available in July.

The connector is designed to make it easier for people with Blackberries to access hosted applications like Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts. The new tool also integrates features in the Google applications work with built-in BlackBerry applications, allowing users, for instance, to receive Gmail messages via the BlackBerry smartphone's built-in email client.

Dan Olds, principle analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group, called this a smart move for a company eager to bulk up its business presence.

"This is going to make it a lot easier for Blackberry people to use Gmail accounts and Google calendar," he added. "I think this is a big market for Google. If they're going to offer Gmail and other applications, it's definitely in their best interest to make them run on as many devices as possible and Blackberry is a big one. We know they want to get into the corporate market more and become sort of an enterprise replacement for Microsoft and Exchange. This gives them a more compelling story toward this end."

Olds also said a lot of people will find it helpful to have their calendar automatically updated on their Blackberry when it's updated on their computer and vice versa. "This is just going to make it easier on people," he said. "That's a handy thing. Anything you do in Google calendar gets into your Blackberry, and your contacts will be synched as well. It's just helpful."

Raju Gulabani, a product management director at Google, noted in a blog post this afternoon that engineers have been working hard to make sure that using Google Apps on Blackberries is an easy transition for corporate IT administrators.

"Admins are given full control of the solution and can continue to manage BlackBerry smartphones using BlackBerry Enterprise Server," he wrote. "Google Apps Connector installs on BlackBerry Enterprise Server, connecting it to the Google Apps cloud and synchronizing email, calendar and contacts for all BlackBerry smartphone users."