Google Video for Business has got a couple of new features. They are captions and larger uploads.

Captions can obviously open up communication on a whole new level with subtitles alone. This makes videos more accessible to those who cannot hear well and those who speak other languages. As far as uploading, users with Google Gears can upload videos of up to 1 GB. Before it was only 300 MB.

On Friday Google contacted some Google Docs users to alert them of a privacy issue. Less than 0.05% of user docs were accidentally shared with people with whom they were not supposed to be. 

As you’ve probably read by now (if not experienced firsthand), there was an outage for Gmail the other night. This ended up impacting a lot of businesses, and was not exactly the greatest demonstration of Google’s 99.9% uptime guarantee. I guess there’s always that other 0.1%.

Today Google announced an improvement to the mobile version of Google Docs. That is list view for spreadsheets, which allows you to view, edit, sort, and filter your spreadsheets from your mobile device.

Previously, you could only view your spreadsheets on mobile devices. Now, they basically have full functionality.

Users of the Google Affiliate Network can now access the network through a regular Google account. This means uses will be able to access Google’s other products like AdWords, AdSense, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc. with the same log-in.

Google has started a program in which resellers can begin selling Google Apps to businesses. Naturally, you would sell the apps to customers, and then kick up money to Google.

Google Apps for Education has had a big year, further emphasizing Google’s push for cloud computing. A push that has included a recent guarantee of 99.9% uptime on certain Google Apps. Cloud computing with Google Apps has often been discussed in the business context, and it is clearly quite relevant to the education field as well.

If you use Google Docs, you might be pleased to know that Google is now offering templates for forms. And to start off they’ve got 13 different ones to choose from.

If you are not familiar with templates in Google Docs, to utilize them, you go to New and select from template from the pull-down menu.

As mentioned previously, Google is spending a lot of time "in the clouds" so to sepak. They’ve been emphasizing cloud computing a lot lately, even going so far as to make a 99.9% guarantee with regarding to up-time for Google Apps.

Yesterday Google guaranteed 99.9% reliability for Google Apps like Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. This stemmed from a similar guarantee the company made for Gmail.

Today Google is touting the reliability of Gmail, and comparing the service to several "on-premises" solutions in terms of downtime and lost productivity. In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google Enterprise Product Director Matthew Glotzbach writes:

Some people check their email once an hour.  Others, every five minutes.  But a recent Google Apps outage made a number of accounts inaccessible for around 30 hours, and a prominent blogger had his account disabled to boot.

A Google Apps outage that occurred earlier this month concerned a lot of people.  Users of the Premier Edition were paying for the service, and 15 hours of downtime and questionable communication is not good, regardless.  So now Google’s unveiling a free extension of service and the way in which it will handle any future problems.

A game of word association would have to go on for quite some time before most people would put "Google Apps" and "Gmail" together with "outage."  The two services recently took a partial tumble, though, and the experience has left some of the affected users less than happy.

Google Apps is something we don’t hear about too often; compared to search, it simply doesn’t come up.  Google Apps is getting along just fine, though, and a new development involving Taylor Woodrow proves this point.

Old line business models and the new Internet can’t cohabitate, claims the guy who had a chance to sell Zoho to Salesforce’s Marc Benioff.

This interesting update comes via the Jaiku blog… Today we’re taking off our welding goggles to announce Jaiku will be one of the first apps to run on the new Google App Engine. See also www.jaiku.com App Engine is an interesting concept (I’m not terribly familiar with it) but its free for developers to get started and seems like a real time (and money) saver…

Users of Google Apps, say "thank you" to users of Gmail.  Now that they’ve acted as something similar to guinea pigs, you’ll be receiving a nice, if not overly significant, upgrade.

Google opened a new version of its Apps service, with a catch that limits it to a workplace or a school by design.

My seven year old son wants to program online games badly.

After playing Pokemon online he got the notion that he wanted to make something like that. He pestered me for days about setting him up so he could make cool games where his friends could checkout his games. I struggled for a few days trying to find a solution for him. He’s seven so there has to be some reward for the initial work he does to keep his interest. You can’t just throw a seven year old in the deep end and let him flounder.

Andrew Miller’s getting a whole lot of link-love for his notes from a recent Ann Arbor Chamber event hosted by Google. Scott Johnston, the former VP of Product Development at JotSpot and new Googler shared some snippets on what’s coming down the pipeline for Google’s online office suite, Google Apps.