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  • New capability for Android

    Google has boosted its Android mobile device software platform by offering developers a kit that enables them to call native code from Android applications.

  • Ads come to mobile apps, thanks to Google

    IPhone and Android users may increasingly see ads appear in their phone applications, now that Google is expanding its advertising program for mobile applications.

  • Google tests cloud-based database

    Google has released an early version of a new type of database, with an approach to data management that will be ground-breaking says an analyst who has studied the technology behind it.

  • Google urged to beef up Gmail security

    Google is weighing whether to encrypt its Web-based Gmail service by default, as suggested by a group of internationally prominent Internet security and legal experts as a way to mitigate privacy and security risks.

  • Google unveils plug-in to marry Outlook, Gmail

    Google Tuesday unveiled synchronization technology that supports Microsoft Outlook as the front end to Gmail, giving users an option to scrap Exchange on the back end while allowing users to keep their familiar desktop client.

  • HTML5 could kill the operating system

    For companies that compete with Microsoft, HTML5 is almost the Holy Grail, offering the ability to run applications regardless of the underlying operating system. While the browser isn't more important than operating system today, Google has firmly suggested it is only a matter of time.

  • US Justice Dept investigates IT firms' hiring practices

    The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is investigating whether the hiring practices of Google, Yahoo, Apple and some other technology companies may have violated anti-trust regulations, The Washington Post reported last week.
    The focus of the investigation is not clear, but appears to address the possible agreements among these companies not to poach top executives from one another. The investigation includes biotech company Genentech, as well as other tech companies, the Post said, citing two unidentified sources.
    Tom Ajamie, managing partner of the Ajamie law firm in Houston, says he was surprised by the reports of the investigation. Ajamie's firm focuses on antitrust and employment cases, and Ajamie has represented several tech companies in lawsuits over employees leaving for competitors, he says.

  • Google guru calls JavaScript a performance killer

    Nowadays, even regular web surfers know some of the things to avoid when designing a website for fast performance. Cut the number of requests to the web server. Shrink JPEG sizes. Employ a content delivery network vendor like Akamai Technologies or Limelight Networks.
    The problem is, according to Steve Souders, steps like these aimed at optimising the web server make only a tiny impact.
    "We used to tear apart the Apache [web server] code to figure out what Yahoo was doing," said Souders, who was Yahoo's chief performance engineer for several years before moving to Google in the same role.

  • Aussie devs make Wave with Google Web Toolkit

    Google's latest offering, the Web-based real-time collaboration suite dubbed Wave, began life in Sydney, Australia, as a start-up project built with Google's open source Web Toolkit project.

  • Private clouds prompt Google-VMware clash

    Google and VMware are clashing over private clouds and the question of whether customers benefit more from building highly virtualised datacentres inside their own firewalls or from outsourcing IT needs to public cloud providers, such as Google and Amazon.
    VMware is trying to convince enterprises to use its new cloud operating system, a software layer that virtualises and aggregates servers and storage into one computing pool, making it easier to manage internal datacentre resources and provision new services to users.
    Google took a swipe at VMware's approach with an official blog post late in April titled "What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing". Google doesn't mention VMware by name, but the blog post downplays the benefits of using virtualisation to build private clouds, and was published after VMware's private cloud announcement.
    "There's quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a 'private cloud' with concepts like virtualisation, and there can be significant benefits to this approach," writes Google Apps senior product manager Rajen Sheth. "But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacentres provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft."
    Some industry experts have contended that cloud computing cannot exist without virtualisation. If true, that contention would certainly benefit VMware's business. But Google officials say they do not virtualise production hardware and instead use a job scheduling system of Google's own design to manage its many thousands of servers.
    Google's approach is the one best suited to providing businesses the scalability and cost-efficiency they need, Sheth contends. The public cloud doesn't have to be limited to small business customers, either, he writes, saying that the model's "advantages in cost and innovation continue to attract hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes".
    "In the virtualisation approach of private datacentres, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency," Sheth writes. "We do the opposite by taking a large set of low-cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer... Enterprise hardware components are designed to be very reliable, but they can never be 100 percent reliable, so enterprises spend a lot of time and money on maintenance. In contrast, we expect the hardware to fail, and design for reliability in the software such that, when the hardware does fail, customers are just shifted to another server."
    VMware has taken exception to Google's blog posting, saying Google's approach works for the limited set of applications that Google delivers, but it can't provide the level of functionality most enterprises are looking for.
    "If you take a very narrow view of the world that says 'I just have a couple of applications I need to do – search, online advertising, web applications – sure, you don't necessarily have to virtualise," says Dan Chu, VMware's vice president of emerging markets. "Sure, you can take a very custom way of [delivering a few applications] but that has nothing to do with the business and enterprise world we all know."
    Chu has responded to Google with a blog post of his own, which VMware has posted.
    Chu's blog says that VMware, like Google, ties datacentre resources together into "one large supercomputer", but that it does so for individual customers, and provides connectivity to the services of cloud providers. This gives businesses consistent management over internal and external resources, and doesn't limit them to using Google-built applications, Chu writes. With features like live migration of virtual servers and storage, and high availability and fault tolerance, VMware customers can achieve the levels of business continuity and availability that Google is boasting of, he writes.
    While Google argues that customers should use Gmail instead of running virtualised instances of Exchange inside their own datacentres, Chu responds that Gmail is not ready for the enterprise.
    "Enterprises aren't going to move off an enterprise class mail platform for a personal-use platform," Chu writes. "Exchange … represents the kind of business-critical core IT application that … customers want running on VMware today."
    Google, obviously, is not a VMware customer. Neither is Amazon, which uses the Xen hypervisor. This is one of the limitations of VMware's approach to building public-private hybrid clouds – it only works if the cloud vendor is using VMware. But there are more than 500 service providers partnering with VMware on this front, including major ones such as AT&T, Savvis and Terremark.
    While VMware touts the ability to use both private and public datacentre resources, Google's Sheth argues that the private datacentre is plagued by management hassles and a slow pace of innovation that relies on the two or three-year release cycle of software vendors.
    "In our model, we can deliver innovation quickly without IT admins needing to manage upgrades themselves," Sheth writes. "As companies weigh private datacentres vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: 'Can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud'?"
    Sheth also touts Google App Engine, which lets customers deploy applications on the Google cloud without having to worry about purchasing and maintaining their own servers and databases.
    VMware contends that the App Engine simply isn't robust enough for an enterprise to run its core applications.
    "For customers looking to maintain the flexibility to move back and forth between the external cloud and internal IT, Google's proprietary platform is like the Hotel California or the roach motel, where your apps go in, but they can never leave," Chu writes.

  • Google outage won't threaten cloud adoption: CIOs

    Late last week, Google suffered a highly-publicised and widespread outage that affected most of their products, and while this heightens caution around the use of cloud computing in the enterprise, Australian CIOs believe adoption won't be compromised.

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