Hasta La Gadget!

Google has launched Google Compute Engine, an Amazon EC2 rivaling infrastructure-as-a-service that “just works” for scalable virtual machines. App Engine powers over 1m active applications each day, Urs Holze, Google Senior VP of infrastructure, said during the Google IO keynote today, and now developers will be able to harness the power of the search giant’s server farm themselves.

App Engine currently sees 7.5bn hits per day, and two trillion DataStore operations per month. Google Compute Engine throws in the scale and experience Google has built up over the years, together with the connectivity of the company’s mobile backbone.

Google’s primary example of the power of Compute Engine was a DNA crunching Institute for Systems Biology program. The center had been using a 1,000 core cluster that produced a single result every ten minutes; with Google Compute Engine’s 10,000 cores, it punched out a result every few seconds. With 600,000 cores, there were multiple results every second.

As for pricing, Google says Compute Engine will offer up to 50-percent more processing, per dollar, than the company’s rivals. Access is in limited availability from today, with up to 10,000 cores for systems that have heavy I/O requirements, while those which have lighter I/O needs can take advantage of hundreds of thousands of cores – Google added 771,886 alone during the presentation.

Google Compute Engine challenges Amazon with thousands of cores is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

You know, I am starting to wonder whether the larger a TV screen is, must the name itself get more and more complicated? After all, that seems to be the case with the Vizio XVT Series Cinemawide LED Smart TV with Theater 3D, which is touted to be the first 21:9 ultra-widescreen TV that is available in the US. Vizio intends for the XVT Series Cinemawide LED Smart TV to cater for movie lovers, where it lets you enjoy the latest Hollywood blockbusters without being distracted by the two black bars – one at the top, and the other at the top and bottom. Bear in mind that the 21:9 Cinemawide display is wider compared to the standard issue 16:9 display which is what the majority of HDTVs offer. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: VIZIO brings the cinema screen to your living room with their Cinemawide HDTV, VIZIO 65-Inch Theater 3D Razor LED HDTV with Battery-Free Glasses,

Google is getting serious about spreading the reach of Chromebooks. At its day two I/O keynote, it just revealed that the Chrome OS laptops are in 100 Best Buy retail stores across the US, effective today. British stores are getting a similar amount of care with a Chromebook presence in Dixons stores throughout the UK. We’re still waiting on more details, such as which models will grace shelves, but there’s good reason to suspect that Samsung’s Series 5 550 will be front and center. If you haven’t had the chance to make it out to a library or a cross-country flight to try a Chromebook for yourself, all you’ll have to do now is swing by the local electronics shop to give that cloud computer a real shakedown.

Check out our full coverage of Google I/O 2012’s developer conference at our event hub!

Google sends Chromebooks to some Best Buy and Dixons stores, starting today originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was once again time to speak about the cloud this week at Google I/O 2012, with Google Drive being revealed as being able to be connected to both iOS and Chrome OS. This update has the software connections for both the iPad and the iPhone and comes with a OCR search and lots of lovely image and text recognition built-in. You’re able to search through your photos and find the ones you want based on the content in the images – search for pyramids and you’ll get your images with pyramids in them.

This update also works with text recognition. You’re now able to search through the images you’ve got in your Google Drive folders by the text the system recognizes in each of those photos. This system also works with instant syncing with Google Docs via Chrome and Chrome OS, with instant updating on each device if they’re connected to the web.

Google Docs has been updated as well so that you’re able to edit your documents offline with instant syncing once you’ve re-connected with the web. Offline Docs as well as Google Drive for iPad and iPhone will be available later today – check em out! Be sure to also hit up our I/O 2012 portal for more news from Google’s developer conference all week!

Google Drive hits the iPad and iPhone is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google has just announced over 10 million users that have signed into Google Drive, Google’s new cloud-syncing storage platform. The product only launched in April of this year, so this is quite the milestone. Clay Bavor, director of product management for Google Apps made the announcement, also mentioning that Google Drive is now available on iOS and Chrome OS.

He demoed Drive on the iPad, searching through a file full of receipts in the search box. It used optical character recognition to find the search query inside an image. But going even a step further than that, he searched for pyramid and Drive offered up saved images of the Egyptian pyramids. Offline saving and collaboration have been added to the platform, and all of that is available later today on the iPad.

Bavor also demoed Drive on the Chrome OS, showing the Drive icon in the application tray. “Everything is synced in the background in real-time.” He opened up a Google Doc via the Google Drive, which is present on other devices like his Chromebook and smartphone. But that’s not the exciting part. The best part is that Google Docs is now functional when editing offline, and available for presentations too.

Google also announced a Drive SDK version 2, which stores files created with 3rd party apps alongside everything else. He also mentioned that developers say Google Drive users are more active than others.

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