Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase additional computing resources.

Platform: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

Download: Google App Engine SDK 1.0 

Labels: App Engine, applications, apps

Google announced on Monday the release of Google App Engine, which allows outside developers to build and run their applications on top of Google’s infrastructure, making it easier for them to focus on the applications, rather than on system administration and maintenance, the company said.

Pete Koomen, product manager at Google, said in a statement: “Google has spent years developing infrastructure for scalable web applications. We’ve brought Gmail and Google search to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and we’ve built out a powerful network of datacenters to support those applications. Today we’re taking the first step in making this infrastructure available to all developers.”

Full article: efluxmedia.com 

Labels: App Engine, applications, apps, developers, hosting

Fred Vogelstein of Wired speculates on a possible announcement at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next week of a strategic alliance between Apple and Google. It’s not unlikely. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple’s board for a reason, and I don’t think that he got the seat because he and Steve Jobs share their iTunes playlists.

Google likes to makes strategic alliances, but not of great significance so far. The company has collaboration with Sun, without much to show, and this week announced a relationship with salesforce.com that leverages AdWords.

What could Google do with Apple, or more correctly, what does Steve want from Google?

Read more: blogs.zdnet.com 

Labels: Apple, applications, Macintosh

Almost all my experience with the investment community is from the research side, but I did once work on the propaganda side: investor relations [IR]. For a short time after the troubles began, I was ambushed into doing IR for the ill-fated shared-memory processing manufacturer Kendall Square Research.

And if you know the story of KSR, you know why I did IR only once and for a short time. So based on this meager IR experience, it was with wonderment that I noticed that Google (GOOG) was letting two engineering VPs loose at a Goldman Sachs conference.

By just being there, Alan Eustace and Jeff Huber answered my question posed on seekingalpha on March 7: Is Google a media play or an IT investment? (And with the pending DoubleClick acquisition, add to that question the possibility that it should be measured like a large advertising/communications agency).

Full article: seekingalpha.com 

Labels: applications, DoubleClick, market, technology