GDrive Opens For Business – Well Maybe Not

The fabled GDrive, basically a cloud-based web drive rumored to be in the Google plans for the future, is now operational as part of the Google Docs web application. It is NOT GDrive, as TechCrunch is quick to point out, but basically is the same thing. Users can upload any kind of files (images, movies, etc) to Google Docs, up to 1GB max. More storage can be purchased for $0.25/GB. Sweet! Be interesting to see what developers do with this – I myself plan to use it as a file sharing system for my family, as we usually use GMail, FTP and flash drives to move large files around.

What is Chrome OS – AKA the Google OS for Web Computing

What is Chrome OS? If you use the Google Chrome browser, you know that its targeted for those users (I myself am one) who do work, make notes, write blogs and do programming all on the web – in the cloud in other words, rather than on old style applications that reside on you computers hard drive. The newly announced Google Chrome Operating System promises to be the OS for working in the cloud – it is primarily aimed at netbooks, which depend on cloud computing for most if not all of their appeal.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Will you use Google Chrome? The answer for me is heck yeah! I think this is the technology that will finally remove us from being chained to our PCs – now computing will be netbook-to-smart-phone-back-to-netbook, and repeat as needed.
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Why Google Wave Is Going To Change What You Do On The Web

Google Wave, which was just in the last week introduced to the world at the Google I/o 2009 Conference, is basically a new email/IM client. So why is Google Wave going to change the way you use your computer every single day? At work, at home, on your mobile device.
Remember how GMail changed email by making the email threads look like a conversation? Well Wave, just for starters, is going to turn everything into a conversation. Want to email? Want to IM, want to share photos? You can do it, in the browser, in real time,with Google Wave. That may not sound that groundbreaking – but seriously, watch the first 10 minutes or so of this video from the Google Wave presentation at the Google I/O Convention. Google Wave was created by the brother who created Google maps, and the best part of Google Wave is the API promises to be much like the Google Maps API, which is a developer favorite due to its low learning curve and ease of use. That’s just the first set of features from Google Wave, which is in closed Beta right now. To sign up for Google Wave Beta, go to the Google Wave signup page.

5 Free Business Applications You Need To Do Business On The Web

1. Wordpress - It’s almost impossible, and very inadvisable to have any kind of public business without a blog. Wordpress is the easiest blogging/CMS there is, and also the most feature-packed. The plugins directory is huge, and with the number of developers working on plugins, themes, and improvements to the Wordpress base, you need to use Wordpress.

2. Google Analytics – You’ll never know how much traffic you’re getting, where they are coming from, where they are going, without an traffic analytics tool. Google Analytics is free and has tons of features – the interface can be a bit puzzling at first, but my advice is to figure out one report/feature at a time (say, 1 per week). Pretty soon you’ll be a Google Analytics pro and can actually use the information to make more traffic (and more money).

3. Freshbooks – I use this for all my freelance invoicing – it really is a snap to set up and use, I promise. And I hate invoicing!

4. Twitter – Use Twitter. And a blog. Combine. Repeat. USE TWITTER.

5. Google Webmaster Tools – Can’t tell you how many times this has answered many questions about Google Page Rank algorithms, and where to improve my SEO.  Invaluable.

6. Delicious – I work on several different computers, and I am always using google to search for solutions to tricky programming problems, or graphics resources for projects, etc – so Delicious is one of my most used applications – being able to store bookmarks on the web and access them from anywhere is beyond useful – it’s necessary.