This post comes from Antonio José López, who is at Google I/O 2012 this year on behalf of BlueVia.
The second day on Google I/O centred around Chrome, Drive, AppEngine, and the new shiny Compute Engine. Although Glasses & Hangouts, were given another skydiving demo with parachutists jumping from an airship wearing Google glasses, this time with Sergey transmitting it from Moscone’s roof.
Chrome
Much like in yesterday’s sessions, Google is clearly focusing on the mobile arena. By reading their overall numbers, we found out their new apps are used more on the go than on PCs, and their thought is that mobile internet accesses will overtake fixed access by next year. Therefore they aim to have a unified Chrome experience across all devices; PC, phone and tablet – sharing sessions, bookmarks and preferences between all three. They have already launched Chrome for Android & Chrome OS in recent weeks, but to really get the unified experience running, on day two of I/O they finally announced Chrome for iPhone and iPad.
Google apps in business
As almost everybody knows, Google apps are being used more and more for business purposes. Google Docs, Google Talk & the new Hangouts are as useful at work as we find them at home; so more and more employees are aiming to make the most of these tools. Well, as one video stated, “the meeting has gone Google’, more companies are introducing Google technologies for internal collaboration: 45 states, 66 universities & 5M businesses so far.
Drive
After the recent launch of Drive to bring together Google Docs & cloud storage, the Drive team announced the new availability on iOS and Chrome OS. Moreover, 2 impressive new features were shown in a demo:
- Drive search bar uses OCR to recognise text included in images, and even some intelligent algorithm to look for given patterns/objects in them. In one example, Drive looked for a photo with the term “pyramid” and a photo including an Egyptian pyramid appeared.
- Google Docs works offline from now too. Even if the browser is not correctly closed, the content is saved in the local cache and sent to the cloud once internet connection is restored.
Chrome OS
“The (always) new computer” also appeared in the second session, but only to announce that the ChromeBox and ChromeBook are going to be sold in 100 BestBuy stores in the States.
AppEngine & Compute Engine
The Google AppEngine presentation centred on the importance for developers to focus on the app core, relying on the back end infrastructure in a properly tested and scalable product as AppEngine is.
For supporting this, Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google, showed some numbers about his product: 7.5B hits per day, 1M active apps and 2T data store per month. In fact a TV song contest in Japan used AppEngine to support up to 24,000 requests per second.
But the real news came next. A step forward AppEngine: Google Compute Engine – Linux virtual machines at the service of high scale computing demand algorithms. The different virtual machines configurations & prices have been published at https://developers.google.com/compute/.
And that’s a wrap, if you missed day one of Google I/O 2012, take a look at our post here, covering Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Google Play, Nexus 7, Nexus Q, Google+ events and hangouts and their glasses project.
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