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Google Launches “Save To Drive” Chrome Extension

Chris Crum — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 20:00:02 +0000

Google has launched a new Chrome extension for saving files to Google Drive, appropriately called Save to Drive.

Once installed, it places a Drive icon in the upper right-hand corner of your browser, and whenever you’re viewing a file, you can simply click it to save it to Drive. It also adds such an option to the right click menu.

It works with images, images of entire pages, HTML source code and web archives (.mht).

“After you save using the extension, you’ll see options to immediately open the file in Drive, rename it, or view it in your Drive list, where you can do things like add it to a folder or share it with others,” says product manager Josh Hudgins.

“There are also a few new ways to work with images you’re already storing in Drive,” he adds. “You can now zoom by scrolling or using the new ‘fit to page’ and 100% buttons. And if you have something to say about a specific part of an image, you can select a region and add a comment to it.”

Google clearly wants to push people more and more into the cloud (specifically, Google’s cloud), and more Drive integration into its other products is a good way to do this. They also recently launched some much needed Drive integration for Gmail.

The addition of Drive search results to Google search has proven extremely helpful in my experience. I think once this leaves the limited phase, people are going to love the feature.

Google Drive SDK Available To All Day One

Zach Walton — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:32:34 +0000

After months, maybe even years to some, of waiting, Google Drive is finally upon us. We already went over the basics of the service and even its potential relevance in search results, but the most interesting prospect of Google Drive is its SDK and how it works into the app ecosystem.

Google Drive is already off to a great start today with 18 apps that support the new cloud storage platform. These aren’t Google apps either. The company lined up multiple partners to have Google Drive apps ready one day one to display the versatility of the platform.

This isn’t some test run to see how Drive works with apps either. The Google Drive SDK is available to everyone right now. It’s an open platform and with 10GB of free storage available to everyone, people are going to get some good use out of it.

A lot of the apps that support Google Drive right now are the kind of things you would expect including design and document sharing apps. Imaging being able to edit video or pictures all from within the cloud. That’s the idea behind Google Drive. It’s similar to the Adobe Creative Cloud that’s launching with CS6 that allows users to take advantage of all of the software within the CS6 line of products from within the cloud. Sounds pretty awesome, but Google has the advantage of 10GB free storage and free apps on the Chrome Web store that can replicate most of the functions of popular programs like Photoshop.

If the 18 launch apps and the SDK already being made available didn’t tip you off, Google wants people to use Drive. This is a major new service for them and they want developers to make the most of it. That’s why the developer documentation is available right now so you can start building. Google will also be hosting a Hangout this Thursday at 10:30 a.m. PDT/1:30 p.m. EST to answer any questions you might have.

Google Drive is a bold new step for the company. Apps and the SDK are both positive first signs that Google Drive will be a great tool for developers as well.

Google Drive To Support Third Party Apps

Mike Fossum — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:10:51 +0000

Google’s upcoming cloud device, called Drive, might support applications developed by third parties. Drive might add support for third party apps and will also include a software development kit. Users would be able to open files stored in Google Drive using non-Google apps. The below shot of the Google Docs source code, grabbed by Alex Chitu, mentions “SDK” in connection with Google Drive and the “open with” feature:

This suggests that Google Drive will integrate even more with Gmail – The blog Google Operating System speculates users might “say goodbye [to] email attachments and hello to real time collaboration. Drag anything shared with you to My Drive for easy access.” This would make Google Drive an important upgrade to Google Docs, detaching its present online storage service, and making it more useful by adding space, syncing apps and third party integration.

The Wall Street Journal recently mentioned that Google Drive “is expected to launch in the coming weeks or months and will be free for most consumers and businesses. Google will charge a fee to those who want to store a large amount of files.”

Drive will be in competition with Dropbox, Microsoft’s Skydrive and Apple’s iCloud, and will replace its existing Google Cloud Storage.

Interestingly, SafeGov has recently questioned the general security of Google’s cloud device.

Google Preps To Launch Cloud Storage Service, But Is It Necessary?

Drew Bowling — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:48:37 +0000

It would be remiss of Google if they left one corner of technology unexplored, so in order to ensure they aren’t vulnerable to such an oversight the search engine company is working on launching yet another service so as to further their complete monopoly on your online presence: cloud storage.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google will soon be launching such a service, called Drive, in order to likely compete with existing services like Dropbox, Microsoft Cloud, and Apple’s iCloud. As you can expect, users will be able to upload files to the cloud service and then access them from any Internet-enabled device.

That Google would just now be launching a cloud service after several of its competitors have already entered the market is peculiar and yet the decision seems ceremonial rather than functional. For years now, Google has been in the business of cloud storage by allowing users to upload and access files through several of their services. Since 2007, Google Docs has been allowing users to upload documents that can later be accessed, edited, and download from any Internet-enabled device. Additionally, Picasa has been Google’s online image hosting site since 2004 and last year Google launched an online music-streaming service, Google Music.

So… what is there really to gain from a Google-brand cloud storage service?

This may not be widely known, but Google already has a cloud storage service simply titled Google Cloud Storage. The service, however, is only for developers who want “direct access to Google’s scalable storage and networking infrastructure as well as powerful authentication and data sharing mechanisms.” However, users have to access the service through REST API, Google Storage Manager, or GSUtil. In other words, users need some hefty computer skills to use this service, and even then it’s not for casual users.

A cloud storage service more readily decipherable and usable for the general public would be a good idea… if Google didn’t already offer several services that probably accomodate users’ general needs. Maybe Drive will look to consolidate the storage needs of users and will thus act solely as a space to store files as opposed to services like Docs and Picasa that promote the sharing of files. Then again, a cloud storage service that seemingly duplicates the purposes of existing Google Apps could prematurely cause Drive to join Buzz and Wave in Google’s been of rejected apps.

And then – you knew it would come to this – there’s the whole issue of Google’s new Privacy Policy. How willing are people going to be to use Google Drive knowing that users’ information would be shared across Google platforms, not to mention with third party Google partners as well? People are already unhappy with the change and it’s uncertain whether their ready to trust Google with even more personal information.

Given all of this, any of you readers have some first impressions you’d like to share? Would you give Google Drive a try or are you reluctant to use more of their services given the impending change to the Privacy Policy? Or, is this destined to be Google’s next Buzz or Wave? Give us your thoughts below.

Search Engines Drive Traffic To Retail Sites

Mike Sachoff — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:43:41 +0000

Retail Web sites received 25 percent of their traffic from search engines for May 2007, according to findings from Hitwise. This was an increase of 0.7 percent over May 2006.

Hitwise also found that Google was the main driver of traffic for shopping and classified Web sites and is growing more rapidly as a source of shopping traffic than the search engine category as a whole.

In May of 2007, Google was responsible for 15.6 percent of shopping and classified visits, an increase of 8.7 percent since May 2006.

Single word search queries accounted for 23.7 percent of search terms driving traffic to shopping and classified Web sites in May 2007. This was an increase of 20 percent since May 2005, which revealed that search toolbars are being used more often as the main way to navigate.

The top 20 social networking Web sites also grew as a source of traffic for shopping and Classifieds Web sites, which accounted for 3.6 percent of visits in May 2007. This was an increase of 86.7 percent since May 2006.

Leading social network MySpace, accounted for 3.2 percent of visits to shopping and classified Web sites in May 2007.

"Search data provides a wealth of information about how consumers look for what they need and shop online," said Tancer. "Marketers can leverage search data to better understand their brand and that of your competitors’ brands to make smarter business decisions moving the needle on their brand equity and associations."

Google Research: Conference and Hard Drives

Nathan Weinberg — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:45:49 +0000

The Google Research blog has announced they will be holding a conference on scalable systems on June 23 in Seattle. They’re soliciting speakers and offering free food, all in an effort to spread knowledge about systems that scale in order to handle big jobs for huge amounts of people.

We care a lot about scalability at Google. An algorithm that works only on a small scale doesn’t cut it when we are talking global access, millions of people, millions of search queries. We think big and love to talk about big ideas, so we’re planning our first ever conference on scalable systems. It will take place on June 23 at our Seattle office. Our goal: to create a collegial atmosphere for participants to brainstorm different ways to build the robust systems that can handle, literally, a world of information.

(via Greg)

Google software engineer Christophe Bisciglia has started a class at the University of Washington, a “Google 101″ that teaches students to program the way Google does, with distributed systems. You can read more at the Seattle PI, which makes mention of Google’s “10 percent” program. Is Google only allowing engineers half of the 20% time they used to have?
(via TechMeme)

Google has also released data on the huge amount of hard drives it uses in its system, analyzing the failure rate of those drives and releasing lots of information on drive stability. Turns out used hard drives are no less reliable than new ones, especially for the price paid for them. Basically, if a drive is strong enough to last the first year, it should be okay, so buy used, but don’t buy barely used, if that makes any sense.

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Cerf: Cell Phones To Drive Internet Growth

Doug Caverly — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:19:23 +0000

There are about 5.5 billion people on the planet. Roughly 2.5 billion of them use cell phones.

Only 1.1 billion surf the Web.

So when Vinton G. Cerf, who currently serves as Google’s vice president, states that mobile phones will fuel the growth of the Internet, well . . . maybe we should believe him.

“The mobile phone has become an important factor in the Internet revolution,” said Cerf. “You will get those other 5.5 billion people only when affordability increases and the cost of communication goes down.”

Anil Penna reported on Cerf’s presentation, and wrote that he identified India and China as two of the countries that are most ripe for growth in Internet use (thanks mostly to the rapid growth of their populations).

And although India and China aren’t the world’s wealthiest nations, Cerf noted, according to Penna, that “handset manufacturers and mobile-phone companies are offering an array of Internet-enabled features and services . . . while dropping charges under the pressure of growing competition that will bring many of the new subscribers to the Internet.”

By referring back to a 2005 interview with Ubiquity, we can see that Cerf’s discourse on mobile phones isn’t something that he cooked up the night before – he’s long believed that they drive Internet use. We can also see what he believes will come as the “next step.”

“[A]s more and more of the mobile phones become Internet-enabled,” Cerf predicted, “eventually they will be sufficiently Internet-capable that the traditional telephone call will evaporate and be replaced by applications that make use of Voice-over-IP.”

Cerf is one of the founding fathers of the Internet, and spent several years working at MCI. His word is good enough for me.

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Google Spins Out Hard Disk Paper

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 15:52:19 +0000

If you’re a hardcore hardware geek, then the work compiled in the 13-page paper by some Google engineers on the failure patterns of disk drives will be like a belated Valentine from the little red-headed girl.

Google’s paper titled ‘Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population’ was crafted for the Usenix conference on File and Storage Technologies.

With little published formal research on why drives fail available, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso did what engineers do and researched it themselves.

They suggest in the paper’s abstract that 90 percent of the new information produced around the globe has been tucked into storage on electronic media somewhere; that’s based on 2002 research performed at UC-Berkeley.

In most cases, that storage means a hard drive. Since the engineers just happen to have access to "a large disk drive population in a production Internet services deployment," they decided to look at that and see what they could learn about drive failures.

That research made it into their report (PDF). It’s what they didn’t find that proves the most interesting.

Modeling based on the self-monitoring facility, called SMART, of a drive, looking at parameters that tend to match failing drives, was dubbed "unlikely to be useful" for predicting other drive failures. "Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported," they wrote.

Spinning and overheated disks have long been considered an early warning sign of drive failure, but to the engineers these symptoms were not a red flag of imminent failure.

Drives failed in their analysis without tripping any SMART indicators.

They also noted that after a drive suffered its first scan error, it was 39 times more likely to fail within a 60-day period than drives lacking those errors.

Predicting failures based on SMART alone looks like a very inaccurate endeavor, and SMART may be more useful for determining trends in a drive population instead.

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IT and Help Desk Customer Satisfaction Surveys Drive Performance

Howard Deutsch — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 21:25:31 +0000

IT and help desk customer satisfaction surveys provide information and insight for achieving breakthrough increases in IT and corporate effectiveness.

This article describes the reasons for and benefits from conducting IT and help desk customer satisfaction surveys. The article also lists the IT services that IT customer satisfaction surveys are conducted for, and some of the metrics that are included in IT surveys. This article is based on Quantisoft’s experience in conducting IT and help desk customer satisfaction surveys for companies with outsourced and in-house IT and help desk services.

IT Incident Follow-up vs. IT Periodic Perception Surveys:

IT customer satisfaction surveys measure the performance and effectiveness of internal and outsourced IT resources, providing IT managers with the information and insight they need to increase performance and customer satisfaction. There are two types of information technology surveys. The first type gathers performance feedback on individual incidents from IT customers. The second type gathers perceptions about IT effectiveness and service over time:

Incident (transaction) follow-up surveys: Incident or transaction follow-up surveys assess how customers feel about how well specific service incidents were handled. These surveys provide information for immediate performance improvement actions by IT management and staff, and for monitoring performance and satisfaction trends.
Semi-annual and annual IT customer satisfaction surveys: Semi-annual and annual satisfaction surveys capture user perceptions about their service experience over the past six or twelve months. Semi-annual and annual satisfaction surveys provide broader and more comprehensive information and insight for understanding and improving customer service performance and overall customer satisfaction levels, and for measuring performance and satisfaction trends.

Information Technology Surveys Measure a Wide Range of IT Services:

Help desk support
Desk side service and support
Break fix support
Install, move, add, change (IMAC) support
Resolver applications maintenance support
Software development
Server operations
Hardware repair
IT procurement
IT training for IT employees and customers
Project effectiveness feedback
Project management office effectiveness (PMO)
IT employee engagement/satisfaction

IT and Help Desk Survey Metrics:

Survey ratings provide a clear indication of current and ongoing levels of performance and satisfaction. Verbatim comments and suggestions provide critical actionable information and insight for achieving breakthrough results.

Survey performance metrics include the following and other service and performance criteria, depending on the type of survey being conducted:

Ease and time required to contact IT / help desk with inquiries and to report problems
Timeliness of initial response from IT / help desk
Timeliness of problem resolution
Courtesy / attitude of IT /help desk staff
Knowledge of customer’s environment and other customer pertinent issues
Communications effectiveness
Effectiveness of problem resolution
Follow-up to ensure satisfactory resolution
IT customers’ awareness of SLA’s (IT service level agreements), service channels, and service policies
Effectiveness of individual IT and help desk staff and teams
Satisfaction levels of customers sorted by their location, business unit and other demographics
Effectiveness of outsourced IT services
Effectiveness of systems developed
Timelines in meeting system development deadlines
Intranet uptime

Benefits of IT and Help Desk Surveys:

Internal and outsourced IT resources are an integral part of any business today. Technology impacts your organization’s ability to attract and retain customers, compete effectively, provide high levels of customer service, drive workforce productivity and much more. Quantisoft’s IT and help desk surveys enable organizations to realize significantly greater value from costly IT and help desk resources, achieving the following and other benefits for your organization:

Increase IT performance, enabling significant improvements in the performance, effectiveness, competitiveness and satisfaction of IT’s internal and external customers
Pinpoint and diagnose IT problems and opportunities, and connect the dots across the organization
Gain insight for prioritizing IT performance improvement initiatives and projects
Achieve breakthrough improvements in IT and help desk service attribute performance including timeliness, professionalism, courtesy, knowledge, communications with customers, problem resolution effectiveness, etc.
Identify and deal with lowest performing IT and help desk staff
Enable IT customers to communicate more effectively with IT and help desk service providers
Increase IT service quality and productivity
Reduce IT costs
Make better, more objective decisions based on customer and employee feedback.
Identify problems and opportunities by agent, IT team, product, site location, communication channel, customer business unit and type and other criteria
Focus investments in IT staffing, training, equipment, teams and programs where they will have the greatest payback
Identify and fix recurring problems
Improve coaching using customer feedback
Increase validity of IT staff reward and recognition based on customer feedback
Send an important message to IT staff and IT customers that IT management cares about performance and satisfaction
Sample survey reports can be viewed at http://www.quantisoft.com/Surveys/Reports.htm

Summary:

IT and help desk customer satisfaction surveys can provide a strong payback in terms of increasing the performance of the IT organization and staff, and in increasing company performance and competitiveness. Whether companies operate their own IT function, or they outsource IT, they need to ensure that they are getting value for their significant expenditures, and that the business is being supported well by IT. For more information about IT surveys please go to http://www.quantisoft.com/Index.htm.

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Howard Deutsch is the CEO of Quantisoft, LLC, a survey company that
conducts employee satisfaction/engagement and other surveys. Our clients
include businesses and governmental organizations ranging in size from
Fortune 500 companies to fewer than 100 employees across many industries.
For more information please visit http://www.quantisoft.com/Index.htm or
contact Howard Deutsch at hdeutsch@quantisoft.com or (609) 409-9945.

View their website at: http://www.quantisoft.com/Index.htm

SES Session: Drive Traffic with Google

Thomas McMahon — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 15:46:12 +0000

This was more of a speed intro to some of Google’s newer services. Topics included Google Analytics, Google Gadgets, Webmaster Tools and Personalized Search.

Each presenter gave a quick 10 minute overview of their topic and it was hardly enough to really get to know much about each service. The real value of this session was in the question answer portion. I learned that Google’s personalized search is going to offer analytics in the upcoming weeks so that you can see what people are looking for in your custom search. Customized Google Analytics reports are also being discussed, however it’s hard to say when that may become a reality.

They also made a point to say come and ask me questions’ at their booth. That’s what I’m saving my questions for as it they are a bit more complex than can be answered in the Q&A area. I do know though that I’m going toinvestigate Google Gadgets a bit more as a traffic driving opportunity.

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Thomas McMahon is a SEO Designer for TopRank Online Marketing in Minneapolis, MN. His specialities inlude technical optimization of existing web sites, creating search engine friendly web designs, and blog optimization. He has also created a number of blog marketing tools, WordPress plug-ins and FireFox add-ons.

Blog: http://bloggerdesign.com