AllThingsD » Google Calendar

Keeping Family, Sitter and Car on One Calendar

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:31:47 +0000

Sometimes, too much technology can be a bad thing. Busy families struggle to coordinate schedules among all the devices they have using Microsoft Outlook, Web calendars and a multitude of apps. Yet, no single program unites all of these calendars in one place.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I tested something that attempts to do just that. I’ve been using Skedi, a $10 app for the iPhone and iPod touch made by Rodax Software. It imports third-party calendars, lets family members create activities to which they invite or delegate one another (or other people, like a baby sitter) and it syncs Skedi events back to other programs, like Google Calendar. The best feature of Skedi is that it displays family members’ availability, much like Microsoft Outlook, so a person can see when others are free or busy.

As dreamy as this app sounds, it needs work. It’s only accessible on the iPhone and iPod touch and won’t work with Microsoft Outlook calendars. It also needs more adjustable settings. Future iterations will make it more accessible via other devices as well as the Web, according to Rodax. An Android app is planned for this year and an iPad app is expected this year or early 2012.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve come to really appreciate the value of an app like Skedi. My husband has been at a conference in California and I’ve made several attempts to make plans with friends for when he returns. One by one, I’ve had to cancel a Friday night dinner, a Saturday night concert and an attempted Sunday night rescheduled dinner because I made the mistake of thinking that no news of plans meant he had no plans.

Unfortunately, my husband couldn’t step away from the conference to test Skedi with me. (I tested it with a colleague.) This brings up another matter: Scheduling is a participation sport. The more people who use a scheduling app, the more useful it’ll be.

Skedi gives different people different permissions. Kids aren’t required or even asked to respond to an event, which is fine for younger kids whose parents plan their schedules. (The term “parents” can be used loosely; a grandparent or friend can be added as a “parent.”) One prompt encouraged me to add a car in the “kid” section so it was automatically reserved for an activity.

Left to right: The Skedi app lets you create an event, respond to the event and see when family is busy.

To set up Skedi, I created an account using my email and a password, and then followed prompts to add other parents, kids, baby sitters and friends to the account using their names and emails. People who are invited to Skedi get an email with a link that walks them through setting up an account. But they’ll each have to buy the app for their devices if they want to use it. The Rodax Software website suggests using Apple’s workaround for this: signing into each device with the Apple ID originally used to buy the app, but this can be a pain.

After adding people, I was prompted to add my calendars, though only calendars that follow an Internet standard called CalDAV will work. These include the Apple Calendar and MobileMe, Google Calendar, Yahoo and AOL. I added Google Calendar by entering my Google account email and password. In the final setup step, I told Skedi to use my Google Calendar as the default calendar for adding events.

Once setup is complete, Skedi doesn’t let users add or remove people from accounts. Rodax’s president and founder, John Boyer, said that fixes over the next two weeks would enable making these and other changes to calendars.

Skedi looks a lot like iCal on the iPhone, including “+” icons in the top of the screen that add events. Skedi is divided into three sections: Family Calendar, My Calendar and Notifications. Family Calendar shows an overall view of each person in the account, and color-shading—blue for parents, tan for kids and brown for baby sitters—on calendar dates represents when people are busy.

If someone in your Skedi account imports a calendar to his or her account, like her work calendar, appointments on that calendar are represented with the colored shading but are marked as Private. This lets family members know the times aren’t free but prevents them from seeing the details of that work calendar.

I created events by giving them titles, adding a location, specifying the start and end times, designating a person in charge and selecting the people in my Skedi account who I wanted to join. Skedi checks each person’s availability so I know who’s busy or free. Even if a person is busy, Skedi still lets me add them to the event.

The Notifications section tells you if someone has invited you to an event, delegated you in an event or canceled an event. Alas, these alerts are only accessible through the app, though Mr. Boyer said email alerts will be available in the next two weeks.

Back at my computer, I opened Google Calendar on my Web browser and saw events other people in my account and I had added using Skedi. A “booked by Skedi” note beside each event clued me in on how these events were added. This is especially helpful for people who add events on the go and forget they did it.

The current iteration of Skedi has too many kinks in it, and the app will be much more useful when it’s accessible by means other than the iPhone and iPod touch. Still, the idea of saving time by automatically showing family members’ availability is a big plus.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katherine.boehret@wsj.com

Google Earnings Today. Love to Hear From You, Larry.

Peter Kafka — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:39:38 +0000

Hey Larry! How are you?

Come on in! Take a seat! Tell us how things are going!

No? Gotta run?

OK, then. See you in three months …

That’s a replay, more or less, of Google’s earnings call last quarter, the first one under the Larry Page regime.

Lots of folks thought it might be nice to hear what the new boss had to say about his company, but Page didn’t play along. He showed up for the first few minutes, muttered 370 nondescriptive words, and took off.

You can argue, convincingly, that Larry Page is the co-founder of a really, really successful company, and that if he doesn’t want to follow Wall Street tradition — like sticking around for the duration of his earnings call — he shouldn’t have to.

Still, Google’s stock did plummet after that call, and has yet to recover, even after a post-Google+ runup.

It’s much more likely that Google shares dropped because Wall Street is more worried about the company’s spending, and competition from Facebook, than about Page’s presentational skills. But wouldn’t it be nice to remove that bit of uncertainty from the equation?

As usual, here’s Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney’s “cheat sheet” for today’s proceedings, so you can play along at home. The market is looking for revenues of $6.54 billion and earnings of $7.87; given last quarter’s performance, it’s reasonable to assume investors will also be looking closely at capital expenditures and margins. (Click image to enlarge).

Also as usual, many of us will hope to hear more about Google’s efforts beyond its core search business — YouTube, mobile and now social. That information doesn’t have to come from Page, of course. But if he wants to speak up, we won’t complain.

Google Makes It Easy To Try New Apps Right Away, Or Not

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:00:21 +0000

IT managers crave stability because new applications and features have a tendency to create chaos. If you’ve ever worked in an office where the IT manager hasn’t upgraded to the latest version of this or that application, you’ve probably seen that craving in action. New things can have unintended consequences, and so don’t get deployed until they’ve been tested–which in some places doesn’t happen until long after they’re new.

Cloud applications like those found in Google Apps are a little different. Since everything works within the browser, there are fewer, if any, things that are likely to break when a new app or feature gets introduced. And Google likes nothing more than pushing the latest shiny things–new features and apps–to its users as soon as they’re ready. Not all IT managers are cool with that, however, because it forces them to get familiar with the new apps and features before they’re ready to field questions about them from their users.

Today, Google is making it possible to choose between being an early adopter or taking a more careful approach by giving Google Apps administrators a two-track deployment approach. One track, known as Rapid Release, gives users access to new apps and features as soon as Google rolls them out.

The second track is known as Scheduled Release, and gives admins a week to familiarize themselves with new apps and then allow their users to get them on a weekly basis, with updates taking place every Tuesday. Google says new features for GMail, Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Sites will follow this new release schedule going forward.

NudgeMail Can Now Control Your Google Calendar

Liz Gannes — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:00:36 +0000

This is one of those little tricks that’s bound to be a total life saver for some people, while the rest of you will read this and never think of it again. NudgeMail, which currently helps users send themselves reminders in the future–for instance, you can forward an email you don’t want to deal with until next month to feb1@nudgemail.com and get it sent to you again then–has turned on a feature to control Google Calendar from within email.

So now, if you hook up your Google Calendar to NudgeMail, you can send an email to the service with the subject line of something you want to schedule, like “nextweek:get brakes checked,” and it will appear in your calendar. Learn a tiny bit of NudgeMail syntax, and you don’t have to click over to your calendar and add the event directly.

DocVerse–Now Google Cloud Connect–Head Shan Sinha Talks About Web-Based Biz Apps

Kara Swisher — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:22 +0000

Earlier this week, I motored the Mini down to the Googleplex in Silicon Valley to visit with entrepreneur Shan Sinha.

He headed the start-up DocVerse, which was acquired by the search giant in March for a reported $25 million to $30 million.

Since then, Sinha has been ferreting away on scaling up DocVerse’s product, which allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web.

Its new name: Google Cloud Connect.

About 4,000 companies quickly signed up to be early testers in the preview program, and Google said it had thousands of requests to be notified when it becomes available, which will be in a few weeks.

DocVerse was founded in 2008 by Sinha and Alex DeNeui, who both used to work at Microsoft. It raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant.

Google’s acquisition of it was yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow, along with a range of mashups of cloud computing and productivity applications.

For example, Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs to compete against the Office juggernaut.

For its part, Microsoft has committed itself to moving its hugely popular productivity suite–which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel–into the cloud, in order to protect its software hegemony.

Why? Simultaneous group-editing and collaboration online is the future of Office.

Clearly, the race for productivity applications is in the cloud.

So–along with Cloud Connect –Sinha has been put in charge of deploying a $50 a person package of them, including Sites, Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Video, to millions of business users.

Here is Sinha talking about all of that and more in the video interview I did with him:

[ See post to watch video ]

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Is My Email Address My Identity?

Liz Gannes — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 05:46:31 +0000

Google and Facebook may act like toddlers fighting over a toy, but there is a lot more going on in their recent too-public spat about user emails.

Google publicly shamed Facebook this week for not giving its users the option to export the email contacts of their Facebook friends and import them to Gmail. The rapid-fire kerfuffle between the two companies came after private talks about sharing such data had broken down, and is apparently working, with tech industry opinion seeming to side with Google, even though few if any users seem to actually care about the issue. Sooner or later, if users start demanding to own their email lists and complaining about Facebook being evil, it will happen.

But the actual battle isn’t about reciprocity. If it’s on purely moral grounds, everyone’s hypocritical here. Facebook has arrangements to share user email addresses with Microsoft and Yahoo, and Google has in the past impeded Orkut users from exporting emails to Facebook. The reason this is playing out this way is because of the contentious relationship between Facebook and Google, and Google’s planned competitor to Facebook, a.k.a. Google Me.

As a larger question, what captivates me is how much value people are putting on user email addresses. Are our email addresses really the best proxy for who we are?

If you peel back the back-and-forth, the substance of Facebook’s argument is that Facebook users are on the service because it’s a social network, not an email application. When you use Facebook, your friends are identified by their (usually real) names, and you hardly ever see their email addresses. From Facebook platform tech lead Mike Vernal’s comment on TechCrunch:

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But to Google’s point, if people want to deactivate their Facebook accounts and/or try another service, they shouldn’t lose what they’ve created. When you join a new service, the best way it becomes useful and interesting is to quickly find and invite your existing friends (see: network effects)–and the best way to do that is to import a list of your email contacts.

The problem is you don’t own your friends’ email addresses; they do. Email is the only successful example of a decentralized social network.

Facebook has a privacy setting that lets you decide who specifically can view your email address. But that’s just within the centralized system of Facebook; you don’t (yet) get to choose where your email address can be shared. Plus, as we all know, Facebook’s privacy settings can get rather complicated, and both we users and the company change them over time.

Say I have a business contact I don’t want to share my personal email with, and she goes and exports her Facebook email contacts so she can fill out her Yahoo Mail contact list. Those settings need to carry over. And even if they do, spam and invasions of privacy are pretty much inevitable.

But am I my email address? As someone who’s very recently changed jobs, I know firsthand that link can be broken. I registered for so many of the sites I use with my old work email, and my whole address book was locked up there too. Now I have to reconstruct those relationships with a new identity. But I can do it. I’m still myself, after all.

Probably all of you reading this have more than one email address, and often multiple people use the same email address or the same computer. There’s not a one-to-one link between self and email, and the overlaps are often confusing and annoying.

Besides email, other options for an identity token might be your phone number, your social security number, your Facebook user name or your fingerprint.

But email seems to be the agreed-upon best proxy for Web services. Companies like RapLeaf run their businesses on connecting and aggregating information about people based on identifying their valid email addresses (and incur concerns about the implications of getting all that data in one place and selling it).

The stakes in this battle are increasingly high. Both Facebook and Google want to be our identity on the Web. I stay logged in to Gmail and Facebook all day from my laptop, and reap the benefits of those services being integrated with other ones, whether it’s a related service like Google Calendar or a new doodad that I can use Facebook Connect to register for.

Both Facebook and Google are striving to do two things:

Represent us best by collecting our connections and experiences
Be our token to bring that identity the rest of the Web

So think about where this is going. Facebook last week introduced a single-sign-on feature for phones (first on select Android apps and soon iOS). The way this will work is when you open a participating app, you have the option to connect to Facebook and bring your identity and friends with you. So the first time you use the app, it knows you and your context. You can imagine if this were to extend to Facebook’s Instant Personalization product, and you were to get a phone that out-of-the-box got your Facebook account and then automatically set up your contacts, preferences, apps and anything else you want or need. It’s powerful stuff.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Palm Pixi Needs a Dusting of Speed

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:52:55 +0000

Since the debut of the Palm Pre in June, Palm has talked about the value of the device’s webOS operating system, which offers fast responsiveness, multitasking, universal search and smart synchronization. These features are accessed using delightful multitouch gestures like swiping with a fingertip. So it makes perfect sense that Palm would want to expand its family of products running this great mobile operating system.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, Palm (PALM) introduced a second device with webOS: the Palm Pixi (palm.com/pixi). This is a stripped-down version of the Pre and it costs $100 (after a $50 instant rebate and a $100 mail-in rebate and with a two-year service contract) compared with the $150 Pre. Walmart.com is currently selling the Pixi for even less—$50 (http://3.ly/oSE). Both the Pixi and the Pre run on Sprint’s (S) network.

I’ve been testing the Pixi and I’ve found that the physical differences from the Pre are acceptable variations that most people won’t mind and may not even detect. These include a smaller, lower-resolution screen, a two-megapixel camera rather than the Pre’s three-megapixel camera and stationary keyboard instead of one that slides out. The Pixi isn’t as pebble-shaped as the Pre, but its back cover is rounded to fit comfortably in a hand. And like the Pre, it has an eight-gigabyte storage capacity and it’s thin and light enough to forget in a jeans pocket or to comfortably hold up to your ear during phone calls.

The Pixi’s internal changes are much tougher to accept. It lacks Wi-Fi capability and so must rely solely on Sprint’s 3G network for its connection, which I found to be frustratingly slow at times. This littler phone also runs on a weaker processor than the Pre, a decision that Palm says helped cut costs and make the Pixi small. But this processor’s speed is slow enough to notice immediately and it robs webOS of its lightning-fast speed. The Pixi’s progress indicator—a spinning, white circle—appeared on my screen too often.

The $100 Palm Pixi is like a mini version of the Pre. A $70 Touchstone accessory (right) magnetically holds the Pixi as it charges.

Like its super-smartphone competitors, including Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) newer BlackBerrys and Google’s (GOOG) Android phones, the Palm Pixi taps into a virtual store from which users can download apps for the device. But Palm’s App Catalog currently holds fewer than 400 apps and roughly 80 of those aren’t yet configured for the Pixi. This means that people who buy the $100 Pixi can choose from just around 300 apps for download, compared with the 100,000 apps available for Apple’s $100 iPhone 3G.

Some apps come preloaded on the Pixi, like Facebook and NFL Mobile Live. I downloaded others, including Pandora radio, Tweed for Twitter and a game called Word Whirl Lite. I logged into my Pandora account and played songs from one of my personalized radio stations while reading through email. A tiny “P” icon at the bottom of the Pixi’s screen notified me that Pandora was running. Other notifiers, like new emails or instant messages, appear at the bottom as well.

If you aren’t familiar with webOS, it’s easy to learn. Functions are designed to be more people-centric rather than program-centric. For example, I can look at a name in Contacts and see how I’m linked to that person—like through Facebook or Google Talk. If I want to start an instant-messaging conversation with that person, I can do so right there rather than opening AIM or Google Talk first to find a person’s name and then initiate conversation. I logged onto the Pixi with a Google account and the device was smart enough to also synchronize data from my Google Talk, Google Calendar and Gmail contacts.

The Card View, a display of all the programs that are simultaneously running at any given time, can be exposed with a simple, upward finger swipe starting below the screen. To close a program, simply touch it with a finger and toss it upward, as if throwing it away. This is one of the most satisfying gestures in webOS. And it’s a good thing, too, because Pixi users will need to use it more often than they did with the Pre. Palm suggests running only seven programs at once for the best performance, rather than the 10 you can leave opened on the Pre.

But my Pixi stuttered with just five programs—sometimes fewer—opened. Simple tasks like opening an email or searching for an app in the App Catalog were painfully slow. I received an email containing one digital photo, and the process of opening just the email—not even the photo—took about 10 seconds. When I finally opened the email and its photo, I saved it to my Pixi and tapped on a menu option to upload it to Facebook. But five minutes later, the spinning progress indicator was still on my Pixi’s screen and I gave up. I tried again and the same thing happened. Finally, on the third try, my photo posted to Facebook.

As was the case for the Palm Pre, the Pixi can be charged by plugging into a normal AC adaptor or by resting it on the Touchstone, a $70 accessory that, with the help of a special back cover that snaps onto the Pixi, magnetically holds this device as it charges. A handful of stylish “Artist Series” back covers will sell on Palm.com for $50 each and will ship in early December.

The Pixi’s 2.6-inch screen has a 320×400 resolution, which is a step down from the Pre’s 3.1-inch, 320×480-resolution screen. Palm estimates the Pixi’s battery lasts for five hours of talk time, the same as the Pre, but for 350 hours of standby time—or 50 more hours than the Pre.

The Palm Pixi’s keyboard is tiny but sufficient. People who are used to BlackBerry or even iPhone keyboards might be irked that the Pixi keyboard doesn’t have built-in shortcuts like holding down a key to capitalize it or pressing the space bar twice to add a period to the end of a sentence.

Like its predecessor, the Pixi has a designated Gesture Area just beneath its screen where users can swipe a fingertip for quickly navigating through screens, like swiping right-to-left to go back a screen. Unlike the Pre, the Pixi doesn’t have a silver button below its screen that immediately takes users to Card View, but I didn’t miss this button.

Though the Palm Pixi is $50 less than the Palm Pre, its downgraded performance doesn’t make that dollar savings worth it.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Countertrend: H-P Says Please Print Often

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:18:02 +0000

If your company makes printers but general trends are leaning toward using less paper and moving digital content to e-readers and smartphones, what can you do? Hewlett-Packard’s solution is to find new ways to get people to print more.

The $399 H-P Photosmart Premium All-in-One with Touch-Smart Web (hp.com/go/touchprinting) will print, copy, fax and scan like other all-in-ones. But it connects to the Internet using built-in Wi-Fi and displays customized Web applications on its 4.33-inch touch screen. These apps are designed to promote printing in any way possible, including photos from Snapfish, Sudoku puzzles, movie tickets from Fandango, coupons, maps from Google (GOOG) Maps, coloring-book pages and news articles—all without using a computer.

[ See post to watch video ]

The print apps are part of the new H-P App Studio, H-P’s (HPQ) answer to the flurry of app stores—Apple’s (AAPL) App Store, RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry World, Android Marketplace, Palm’s (PALM) App Catalog and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Zune Marketplace—that ease the process of downloading onto mobile devices. A “Get More” icon on the printer’s touch screen presents descriptions of available apps. There are currently 15 available for download onto your printer, and more will be added in coming months.

The Photosmart All-in-One connects to Web apps that promote printing of everything from photos to tickets.

This printer is designed to work with more than just the H-P App Studio. A downloadable tool called the H-P Photo Print Gadget installs on computers running Windows 7 or Vista (not Windows XP) so people can drag and drop photos to it for printing. PlayStation 3 owners can capture and print screen shots as evidence of their game success. And a long-available free app in Apple’s App Store called H-P iPrint Photo lets iPhone and iPod Touch owners send photos to this and other H-P printers.

The goal of this product is obviously to get people to print more, and in my case, it worked. I used more paper in a week of testing the Photosmart Premium All-in-One than I normally print out in three weeks at my office. The printer quickly churned out dual-sided pages with photos in rich colors.

But the concept of adding apps to a printer while also asking people to become more paper-reliant seems like one step forward, two steps back. I could see this concept working on a thin, stylish printer that could fit neatly on an entryway table, making it a cinch for people to grab maps, movie tickets and coupons on their way out the door. But this is a large, all-in-one machine that takes up some serious space.

And if this all-in-one is truly meant to work without a PC, it should do a better job of letting you interact with pages, like zooming in on a document to preview before printing. In the current document preview screen, the text is too small to read. Likewise, the Google Calendar app printed a nice one-page calendar month view, but I couldn’t zoom in on the print preview to see specific appointments. This forced me to print the page to see its contents, using more ink and more paper.

Other apps are shamelessly begging users to press Print. A Toys and Crafts app made by H-P itself includes paper dolls with cut-out clothes that can be snipped and folded to stay on the doll’s form. For the doll’s face, kids are encouraged to use a photo of themselves that–surprise, surprise—they can print using their all-in-one.

Coupons.com supplies two apps—one for coupons and one for recipes. I browsed through 87 product coupons in my ZIP Code and marked those that I wanted to print using a small check-box on the touch screen. Pressing “Print” compiled three coupons on one piece of paper. Recipes from Coupons.com printed with brightly colored photos of the end result; I’m looking forward to following one for Curried Chicken Salad.

For now, the Google Maps app isn’t ready for prime time: It prints only maps, not directions. H-P says it’s planning to add directions but wouldn’t say when. And a Nickelodeon app couldn’t load on my printer. Some apps took from 10 to 30 seconds to load—precious time when you’re running out the door.

One of the smartest apps, Tabbloid, lets people assemble a personalized tabloid-style print-out of news from a variety of sources like Daily Kos for politics and FanHouse for sports. But this assembling must be done on a computer, thus negating this printer’s no-PC approach. I chose from a list of 10 topics including automotive, celebrity, politics and sports and created a printable Tabbloid that, with one click, was sent wirelessly to the corresponding app on my printer. I printed it out to read during my commute.

I liked using the Photosmart Premium All-in-One’s generous screen for touch gestures like flicking left-to-right through a carousel of icons that represent apps. An on-screen keyboard appeared when I had to type in passwords for things like my Snapfish account.

H-P says it will introduce other products with TouchSmart Web capability and access to the HP App Studio, and one hopes these products will include low-end printers rather than expensive all-in-ones. The apps on the H-P Photosmart Premium All-in-One with TouchSmart Web are user-friendly, but I’m not convinced they’ll incite people to print more things more often.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Gmail Exits Beta

John Paczkowski — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:00:54 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Wait. "Gmail Beta" Isn’t a Registered Trademark?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:24:29 +0000

Gmail is finally out of beta. Five years after it was launched, Google’s email service has gone gold and shed the beta label, having met whatever mysterious criteria the company uses to assess final-release software. Also freed of the beta label, the rest of the Google Apps suite: Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk.

Seems that Google (GOOG) has finally realized that it wasn’t doing itself any favors in enterprise by essentially advertising Apps as an immature product suite. IT managers are easily spooked at the mention of the word “beta.”

“We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase,” Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management for Google Enterprise, wrote in a post to the company blog. “So we’ve focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.”

That mark presumably being the point at which Google is ready to guarantee uptime and reliability to end users….

Wait. "Gmail Beta" Isn’t a Registered Trademark?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:24:29 +0000

That mark presumably being the point at which Google is ready to guarantee uptime and reliability to end users….

Google Android Phone: 3G, $179, Amazon MP3, App Store, 1GB, Copy and Paste

John Paczkowski — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:24:43 +0000

The first handset to be powered by Google’s Android OS debuted this morning at a T-Mobile launch event in New York. Manufactured by HTC, the G1 is largely as anticipated. Peter Chou, CEO of HTC describes it as “iconic,” but that’s being a bit generous, I think (“The G1 won’t win any beauty contests with its Apple rival,” writes Walt Mossberg. “It’s stubby and chunky, nearly 30 percent thicker and almost 20 percent heavier than the iPhone.”)

In design, the device seems to borrow quite a bit from T-Mobile’s Sidekick, and its touchscreen GUI owes a thing or two to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. Which makes perfect sense, since that’s the device it’s clearly intended to compete with. The G1 will run on both 3G and Wi-Fi and be tethered to the T-Mobile (DT) network. It will come preloaded with a version of Amazon’s MP3 store and Android Market, an application store similar to Apple’s App Store. And it will support and sync with the broad spectrum of Google (GOOG) apps–Google Talk, Google Calendar, etc. Its browser is something the dev team refers to as Chrome-Lite, a mobile version of Google’s new Webkit-based Chrome browser.

Oddly, the G1 has no built-in video player. Odder still, it has just 1GB of memory. T-Mobile has helpfully outfitted it with a 1GB/month bandwidth cap, though.

The G1 supports PDFs and Microsoft Office documents as well. Email will be handled through Gmail; there is no Exchange support, though presumably, engineers developing for Android Market will fill that void in short order.

Oh, the device offers copy-and-paste functionality. Hear that Apple?

It will arrive at market Oct. 22. Price: a highly-subsidized $179.

New Trends in Docking-Station Design

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 01:05:01 +0000

There’s no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help.

Here are a few questions about computers I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

A lot of the laptop companies seem to have abandoned the traditional docking station. These docking stations have a large rectangular connector that interconnects with the notebook from the bottom. The newer docking stations seem to be much smaller, with fewer connection options. Is a new trend in docking-station design emerging?

The kind of large, fully equipped docking station you describe was born years ago, when laptops were different. They tended to have smaller screens and hard disks, more-cramped keyboards, weaker batteries, only wired Internet connections, and many fewer ports and connectors.

But the need for such docks has diminished, since modern laptops come with more ports, larger screens and keyboards, better batteries, wireless connections, and more-spacious hard disks. The old-style, more fully equipped docking stations are still available for some laptop models.

I suggest you look around at laptops meant for large businesses, which typically have been the market segment most interested in these accessories.

My daughter was given a Sony laptop. It has a 40-gigabyte hard drive that has two 20-gigabyte partitions. What is the best way, either using software that comes with XP or an after-market program, to remove the partition and then have one 40-gigabyte hard drive again?

I suggest you use a program from Symantec called Norton PartitionMagic, which can either split a hard drive into partitions, or merge partitions into one, without data loss. It can be downloaded from symantec.com/norton/partitionmagic or purchased from various other merchants.

I notice on my iPhone calendar that I can’t get a “week at a glance.” Is there a solution or alternative available?

The only built-in alternative I know of is the calendar’s “list view,” which displays all your appointments in a scrolling list that is organized by day, but not by week.

There is a third-party calendar program for the iPhone called SaiSuke that appears to have a week view, as well as a detailed month view. It costs $9.99 and is meant to sync with Google Calendar. I haven’t tested it, so I can’t say how well it works.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns online free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Google, Salesforce.com Expand Strategic Lovefest

John Paczkowski — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:00:09 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Galeforce.com

John Paczkowski — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:06:46 +0000

Salesforce.com will be acquired in 2007. We believe the growing importance of online delivery of software and business services will make Salesforce.com (and particularly its AppExchange hub) a very tempting target to both large players (like IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft) still struggling to scale down and move online, and consumer-heavy players (like Google, Yahoo, AOL) trying to ‘scale up’ to the business market as a way to further monetize their online presence.”

–IDC Predictions 2007

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (photo, right) wasn’t kidding when he said in May of 2007, “We’re the Google of business.” The customer-relationship software pioneer this morning announced an alliance with Google (GOOG) that will see it integrating Google’s online services into the Salesforce.com (CRM) platform.

Christened Salesforce for Google Apps, the offering embeds Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs directly into Salesforce.com’s core sales force automation, marketing and customer-service applications.

The partnership is quite an endorsement of business-workspace applications delivered from the cloud. It’s also an aggressive move against Microsoft’s (MSFT) Dynamics Live CRM, Redmond’s customer relationship management software, which is integrated with its Office suite.

Together Google and Salesforce.com are clearly seeking to challenge Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar Office franchise. As Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, told the New York Times, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend.” And perhaps even a potential acquirer.