Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re not one of the lucky few who met Google’s requirements (be a U.S. citizen attending IO) and don’t have $1,500 to drop on an early dev unit of an unproven technology, you might be wondering, “when can I get my hands on Glass?” The answer, straight from Sergey Brin’s mouth, is 2014… hopefully. The Google big wig told Bloomberg that, if all goes according to plan, Google Glass will become available to consumers en masse sometime in 2014. Of course, how much cheaper they’ll be two years from now is anyone’s guess. But we wouldn’t expect the first-gen to be an impulse purchase. When you check out the video after the break, you might notice that Sergey is wearing a new set of Glass glasses (how’s that for awkward sounding), these ones with some snap in shades. If you’re wondering if progress could be made any faster, we wouldn’t count on it. Brin says he spends more than half his time on this project — which means Google is putting a lot of stock in the future of wearable computers. Check out the complete interview after the break.

Continue reading Sergey Brin hopes to bring Google Glass to market in 2014

Sergey Brin hopes to bring Google Glass to market in 2014 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 14:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

Google looks to be getting serious in its quest for online storage, announcing some new features at the Day 2 I/O keynote that will take on competitors like Dropbox and Evernote. One of those is in the introduction of Google Drive SDK 2.0, which will allow app developers for Android and iOS to implement Drive functionality straight into their mobile apps.

Developers will be able to implement uploads, downloads, or simple file edits within their own applications by leveraging the SDK. It mimics similar functionality that Dropbox has been offering developers for some time. On top of that, the programming interface has seen some tweaks, now coping with conversions and revisions.

Google Drive SDK 2.0 is up for download now, and some apps have already been updated to take use of the new functionality. Google says that others will be updated in due course. If you’re a developer and want the full details as well as the SDK, head on over here.

Google releases Drive SDK 2.0 is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

As anticipated, Google has just launched its cloud service for businesses at Google I/O 2012, called Google Compute Engine. Starting today Urs Holzle announced “anyone with large-scale computing needs” can access the infrastructure and efficiency of Google’s datacenters. The company is promising both performance and stability — Amazon EC2 they’re coming for you — claiming “this is how infrastructure as a service is supposed to work”. It’s also promising “50 percent more computes per dollar” than competitors. Beta testers will be on hand at later meetings to give impressions of the service, if you want to know how running your apps on 700,000 (and counting) cores feels. During the presentation we got a demo of a genome app and we’re sure if we understood what was going on, it would have been impressive. Hit the source links below for more details on “computing without limits” or to sign up for a test yourself.

Check the live blog for more details as they’re revealed.

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

Google Compute Engine brings Linux virtual machines ‘at Google scale’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google has added offline editing to Google Docs, allowing users to open and edit their text, spreadsheet and other documents even when they don’t have an internet connection. Announced today at the second Google IO keynote, the new offline Google Docs system uses local caching to save the latest copy of any documents changed, automatically synchronizing whenever a connection is restored.

Offline functionality has been something of a theme at IO this week. Google Maps has been updated to support selective offline use, allowing Android device owners to select a portion of the map to locally cache. Meanwhile, Jelly Bean supports offline voice typing for Android phones and tablets.

The connection-free editing should also improve the user-experience of Chromebooks, which so far have only been fully functional when they’re online. Google added the ability to locally cache documents for reading on Chromebooks several months ago, but not editing.

Offline Google Docs will be available today, the search company says. You can sign up for a free account here, as part of Google Drive.

Google Docs offline editing added today is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.