everywhere you turn, it seems Google has a new offering. but how serious are these attempts to own your computer?

Google is rich, with a market cap of $183 billion — that’s billion with a “b” — already 71 percent the value of its much more established archrival Microsoft. With those resources, Google has created more and more software products in an attempt to build a sustainable business outside of the search-based ads that account for most of its revenue — and be the center of your computing universe.

For several years, Google seemed to be focused on Web-based collaboration tools, with its Blogger.com service and acqusition of JotSpot (now called Google Wave) as prime examples. but more recently, Google has moved into the cloud business, producing one product after another in a pattern that shows clearly a desire to replace the desktop paradigm — which has Microsoft’s Windows and Microsoft Office at its core. Google has designs to replace the desktop with the cloud, and Microsoft with itself.

The forthcoming Google Chrome OS is the baldest statement of that mission, redefining a laptop into a Net appliance that relies almost entirely on the cloud for the apps people would use routinely. but that’s just the latest salvo. Google has already launched its Google Apps set of services, which are starting to be taken seriously even by large companies and government agencies to handle e-mail, word processing, and more. Microsoft has responded to this direct strike at its business with its cloud/desktop hybrid version of Office, the forthcoming Office 2010 Web Apps. but Google keeps pushing: Its still-in-beta Google Wave promises to attack one of Microsoft’s most beloved products, its SharePoint collaboration software.

InfoWorld has put together a package of articles that explores Google’s attempt to become the center of everyone’s technology universe:

White Paper D2D Virtual Tape Library Replication Primer

This whitepaper explains the terminology and concepts behind Data Replication technologies and establishes some sizing rules through worked examples. Learn the new paradigm in disaster tolerance—protect data anywhere.

Download now » White Paper An Alternative to Virtualization for Datacenter Cost Savings

Server virtualization is a popular option for dealing with mounting datacenter costs. another equally promising approach is the use of an Application Delivery Controller. Citrix NetScaler provides a low-cost way for organizations to reduce their server count and accrue cost savings from a reduction in space, cooling, power and personnel.

Download now » White Paper why Your Firewall, VPN, and IEEE 802.11i Aren’t enough to Protect Your Network

the emergence of WLANs has created a new breed of security threats to enterprise networks.

Included in HP ProCurve WLAN solutions is security technology that alleviates threats from WLANs through:
* Monitoring wireless activity inside and out of the enterprise
* Classifying WLAN transmissions into harmful and harmless
* Preventing transmissions that pose a security threat to the enterprise network
* Locating participating devices for physical remediation

Download now » White Paper Bringing the Edge to the Data Center

Effectively address data protection challenges, implementing solutions that help store and protect business–critical data while cutting costs and improving efficiency and reliability.

Download now »

is Google going to change the Internet? well, that seems to be the idea. Isn’t the fact that the term ‘google’ is now a commonplace verb enough indication? Here’s a quick look at some of the bright ideas that they have spawned in the recent past.

Chrome OS: we all know about Chrome, the lightweight, lightening-fast browser. but is it smart enough to form the basis of an entire operating system? the answer is—you guessed it—of course. the open source Google Chrome OS (not to be confused with the Android operating system for mobile phones) is expected to see a first stable release in the second half of 2010, and is specifically aimed at netbooks to begin with. ‘Speed, simplicity and security’ are the key features of Chrome OS, and in their own words, it’s an attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Based on Linux, the Chrome OS turns the basic concept of an operating system on its head. the main interface of the system will the browser, with applications incorporated like web pages in a tab strip. of course, Google will retain the Chrome browser’s minimalist interface, and are said to be working towards security nuts and bolts in such a way as to make viruses and other malware history.

Aimed at users who primarily spend most of their time online, Chrome OS is rumoured to favour solid state drives—as seen in a wide selection of Netbooks—over regular hard drives. as to whether it can muscle out Windows as a preferred operating system is something only time will tell.

Google Wave: the latest wave to have crashed upon the Google shore is a real-time communication and collaboration tool called Google Wave. It is still in ‘preview’ status, and one has to sign up for an invite.

Wave merges email, instant messaging and social networking to form the ultimate Web-based collaborative service. A ‘wave’ is equal parts document and conversation, where people can communicate and work together, using not just text, but photos, videos, maps and so on. Wave users share and collaborate equally, and one can turn back to see who said what and when. Also, a wave is live, that is, the working, sharing, discussing, editing all happens in real time. whether it is working on collaborative projects, exchanging post-holiday photos, playing games, or conducting an official meeting, Google Wave helps us integrate the Web a little bit more in our everyday lives.

In keeping with their open source policy, the code of Google Wave will be released to allow developers as well as users to build extensions that will support additional features, including the possibility of embedding the service on Websites.

Google Go: the company is also developing a brand new, open source programming language—Google Go—whose USP is performance and speed. Despite leaps and bounds in hardware, the software that runs this technology is a dinosaur from the past. Go is Google’s attempt to help programming language catch up with hardware and web developments in an efficient manner. at present Go compilers are available for Linux and Mac OS platforms, but a Windows implementation is on the horizon. unlike what the Merry Melodies toons tell us, with Google, ‘that’s certainly not all, folks.’ Watch this space.

Payal Dhar is a freelance technology writer

Google has accepted that there are lots of positive responses to Google wave by the people who have tried this voluntarily. Google wave has hosted several unique areas like personal, business, government, education and even not-for-profit. Google is still in a limited preview and not able to grant permission to everyone who have requested for Google wave invitation for trying the beta version.

Google cannot communicate with all the users personally so in order to collect the feedback Google has taken help of an online Survey and collected feedback on the users experience on Google wave. The Survey was distributed via email and a link in a help center and a tweet.
It’s just an overview in which people have given their view point

The Wavers like to ‘Wave’ as wave is a central place from where the people can communicate and collaborate easily. This is a single platform from where people can work together and also discuss with each other with the help of messages, documents sharing but number of users indicates that existing tools are not fulfilling their needs and wants more improvement with more tools for this new concept.
What Wavers like most

Many users like the collaboration and ability to extend Google wave’s capability to function through gadgets and robots.

The Wavers don’t like is the limited invitation acceptance by Google. The users feel that it is really tough to communicate and collaborate if you have no contacts. So the earnest request to Google is to offer Google Wave to large number of users instead of limited invitations.

Google wave should be integrated with Email and other existing tools and also speed enhancement is demanded. The Google is busy in organizing a team which will handle the core issues collected through the feedback and the team will put hard efforts to improve the Google Waving.

WTF is Google Wave? It’s a question that’s been troubling the web for months, and troubling me for a good few days. And it appears, finally, to have been answered. Sort of.

Last week, I became one of the latest, er… wave of web users granted invitations to a preview version of Wave, which Google says is what email would look like had it been invented yesterday instead of 40 years ago. It’s a lot like webmail, a little bit like instant messaging, and a tiny bit like a chatroom.

GoogleWave has been trending heavily on Twitter, meaning lots of people either have it already or want it ASAP. When they get it, however, I’m not sure they’ll be able to use it immediately. the complicated clutter of the Wave homepage isn’t nearly as straightforward or simple to grasp as, say, Twitter or Facebook. nor is the software self-explanatory – hence the extensive library of YouTube videos explaining what the heck Wave is and how the heck one is supposed to work it.

It involves “Waves”, which are something like email conversations, but ones that can be re-edited or added to at any time, and which new participants can join along the way. “Blips”, meanwhile, are the individual components of each “Wave”, while “Pings” seem to be some sort of Facebook-poke-cum-IM combo. everything on Wave happens live, so you can watch your correspondents type new messages or re-edit your old ones in real time. Wave conversations lend themselves to the inclusion of links, documents, pictures, maps and video.

Unfortunately it’s hard to tell exactly how exciting a new communications tool Wave is, because so far only about three of my friends are on it with me. trying to start a conversation – sorry, a “Wave” – when there’s nobody to start it with is like shouting at the top of your lungs in the middle of a deserted Google server farm. I persuaded some work colleagues to have a go, but our shared Wave fast became a contest to draw the most lifelike genitalia on a map of Cockfosters. As an experiment in the power of online collaboration and instant communication, it was inconclusive.

If you’re at the early-adopter end of your social spectrum, you’ll frequently find yourself alone at the digital coal-face. But Google is counting on the early adopters – those nerds who’ll happily pay $70 to get a Wave beta invite from eBay – to be the sort of people willing to take the time to figure out how to use the darn thing and what to use it for, then evangelise on its behalf.

They’ll work hard to find new users without being paid by Google, because the best way for them to optimise Wave’s potential is to get as many friends and colleagues using it as possible. this principle has a name: the “viral loop”, which is also the title of Adam L Penenberg’s new book about online virality. “A viral loop,” Penenberg told me, “is what happens when you have a product or service that your users are spreading because they want to, or because it’s built into the product.”

The guys at Google are old hands at the viral loop: it was an integral part of their marketing for Gmail, for example, and it’s how they’ve launched their new web-based operating system, Chrome OS.

I suspect Google Wave will be brilliant, just as soon as I get a little practice and a few more friends; but as long as I attract those friends to try it with me, it doesn’t matter what I think, or WTF Google Wave actually is. Thanks to the viral loop, it’s going to be huge anyway.

I recently had the opportunity to live in an apartment with no TV set. It wasn’t so much banned by the flat’s existing inhabitants as unavailable – and possibly frowned upon, though I didn’t press the issue hard enough to find out. For someone who often has to write about television for money, it seemed an impossible situation. But, on reflection, I probably could do without the box itself. I can see pretty much anything I want as long as I have a laptop, a wi-fi connection and a budget for DVD boxsets. Yet something will be lost if the future is TV set-less: cheering at a Champions League match, sniffling through a state funeral, yelling incorrect answers at University Challenge, seeing Jedward get voted off the X Factor. these are experiences to be shared, and not just on YouTube.

‘); } else { document.write(’

Google wave is introduced for communicating and collaborating and really this has lot of potential to make you more productive. The beta version is under testing and lot of people are actively using Google wave and Google is busy in collecting Feedback from its ongoing Survey. Everyone has accepted that Google Wave has potential to make you more productive.

People who have tried Google Wave have given the feedback that they have easily managed their project on it, some has accepted that it store brilliance but not yet at use many users like the simply love Google and use all the apps of it and given the feedback that Google wave is very nicely integrated service.

Google has indicated that users love the Google Wave concept and everyone has well applauded the collaboration feature. People like the extension, robots and gadgets but most confusing part of Google wave is that the user’s who are trying the Google Wave beta version their friends, colleges or other business contacts don’t have access to Wave.
The beta testers also experiencing slow speed and want to get email integrated with it.

Many users are feeling that Google is not offering contacts to add and if no contacts than this is of no use at all.

• Entire new version of Google News for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users
• Aricent Metamorphoses the Android Experience
• Google Social Search: a new experiment on Google Labs
• Puru Pratap Singh: my India full of Life
• Google 4 Doodle Winner announced: Puru Pratap Singh
• Gmail video and voice conferencing current and future prospects
• Download Sesame Street doodles courtesy Google
• Google Offers Google Dashboard Service
• Informate Mobile Metrics Reports says Google is on top followed by Gmail, Yahoo and Orkut
• Google tops on mobile web: Informate Mobile Intelligence

San Francisco — Google is currently testing a new appearance for its iconic search page, featuring cleaner, bolder graphics and a default side bar with bigger search buttons, brighter colors — bold white typeface on bright blue — with a slightly different logo, one without the shadows.

The new aspect is being discovered by a small number of Google users over the past week or so who have already been witnessing the changes as the company tests the new user interface, but not everybody was able to gain access to the interface, although it is not clear when, if ever, the new search interface will be widely deployed.

As you can notice from screen shots below, the revamped Google logo ditches its 3D shading and shadows while the search buttons switch to white text against a bright blue gradient background. it would appear the search team has been smitten by the look of the company’s new collaboration stuff, Google Wave.

The appearance of the search results also have been altered with the left panel added to the page. the panel suggests a user to choose between image, video, news, maps, and other kinds. Besides, the sidebar similar to Bing’s version also includes a list of similar searches with the option to filter the results based on the date Google sniffed out the website.

According to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, informed Search Engine Land last week that the new pages are intended to eliminate inconsistencies in how Google presented search results after it added several new elements to the page. But it also mimics what Yahoo and Microsoft have been doing with their search results pages, focusing on presentation and new ways to sort results.

On Wednesday, Gizmodo issued some tips on how to force Google into serving the new pages, and therefore we can bring you some screen shots of the new look and feel for Google search. for those who cannot resist the temptation for a wider roll out, the code below allows users to try the new look ahead of schedule.

First log out of your Google account. Next, from Google.com, copy and paste the following piece of code into your browser’s address bar:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U= 4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

(Those outside the US may need to force the .com locale by using google.com/ncr/)

After reloading the page, the redesign should appear. Note the new look appear across the entire website. Services like Google News and Maps will still use the current Google UI.

We’re pretty into Google Wave, and we want to give our readers get a crack at playing around with the invite-only preview, so we’re back with our weekly Google Wave invitation donation thread. Note: Read the entire post carefully before commenting.

If you’ve got Wave invitations you’re willing to donate, post a comment below, saying something like: “I’ve got 10 Wave invites; who wants one?” in that case, the first ten people to reply to that comment providing that generous soul with a means to invite you get invitations.

Here’s the important part:

Do not start a thread unless you have invitations to hand out. these threads get unwieldy very quickly if we don’t follow some ground rules. despite that, we really want to help give our readers a chance to try Wave, so we’re giving it a go anyway. Please, please only start a thread if you’ve got invitations. Don’t just post your email address thirty times hoping someone will grab it. If you want an invitation, reply to someone who’s offering one. Finally, it takes our interns hours to admin comments every day, and these threads wreak havoc on their efforts, so if you don’t already have an approved commenter account, please don’t comment on this thread.

Make sense? Good luck, and thanks to everyone who’s donating invitations. If you do happen to secure an invitation, be sure to check out The Complete Guide to Google Wave, Gina and Adam’s comprehensive book on Wave.

Note: If you’re posting comments but they aren’t showing up on the post, that means you are not an approved commenter. how can you become an approved commenter? Read our comment FAQ. in the meantime, please don’t post any more comments on this thread asking for invitations if you’re not an approved commenter.

Send an email to Adam Pash, the author of this post, at tips+adam@lifehacker.com.

Google appears set to revamp its homepage and search results page – something it doesn’t do very often.

The page isn’t officially live yet, but has been apparently made the default for some users as a trial. Others have figured out how to access it, however.

The new homepage isn’t much different from the old one, with new colouring to a few buttons, keeping in line with the design of Google Wave.

The search results page has also been tweaked, to include a new sidebar with categories for topics and time – similar to what would-be rival Bing from Microsoft has.

Some users have already been given access to the new page, but if you’re not one of the early ones, Gizmodo published a simple hack.

Go to google.com, making sure you’re not signed in. Paste the following code into the URL:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U= 4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com/ncr/”);

Then hit refresh. You’ll notice some of the buttons are now blue – how’s that for change?

Click here for our history of search.

Search engine giant Google is testing out a new look for its search page.
Designers have removed the 3D shading and shadowing from behind the Google logo, while blue boxes with white text have been used for the search options “Google Search” and “I´m Feeling Lucky”.

The new design also includes a left-hand sidebar on the search results page which allows the user to quickly select between images, videos, news, maps, and other options.

A “see also” section, which suggests related search terms, search queries and an option to filter the results based on the date Google sniffed out the website, has also been added.

According to a Softpedia news editor, the new interface is a step in the right direction.

“It´s still the same minimalist Google design that we all know and love, but it´s gotten a bit livelier,” he added.

The new design has been compared to Google Wave, the search engine´s online tool for real-time communication.

Rumours of a new Google design boasting a revamped logo and three-pane search page have proved to be true.

A Gizmodo writer has discovered a code which enables users to preview the new layout when entered into a browser URL bar.

The new design features a striking logo with less shadowing, bright blue buttons, and most notably, a permanent pane on the left containing the search options menu.

The search options – which currently have to be toggled on manually – make use of colourful icons alongside tabbed categories such as news, images, blogs and video.

Also new to the layout is a “see also” section suggesting related search terms, and the lower half of the sidebar displaying filters tailored to the type of content selected.

Gizmodo welcomed the change, praising the cleaner, more streamlined page look.

“Like the Google Wave-inspired interface for Gmail, the new user interface is cleaner and bolder than the current version, offering more options to the user … it’s good to see some changes after so many years of same all same all.”

Meanwhile, a Softpedia news editor said the jazzed-up interface was a step in the right direction.

“It’s still the same minimalist Google design that we all know and love, but it’s gotten a bit livelier. a lot livelier actually, thanks to the small icons adorning the categories in the now-permanent sidebar, but especially to the bright, new blue, which is everywhere from the links to the logo.”

Said endofweb blogger Matthew Rogers: “It’s not a huge difference, but it’s noticeable to those who use Google regularly. The front landing page is now more obviously inviting and accessible for touch-screen devices. The results page is cleaner with formerly hidden options brought to light as standard fare, and sidebar prominence. Overall, they’ve upped the efficiency while keeping it classy, and that’s all anyone could ask when something as iconic as Google’s design gets tweaked.”

Webmonkey’s Scott Gilbertson wasn’t sold on the layout, however.

“The brighter, more Wave-like look of the prototype doesn’t bother us, but we’re not so sure about the sidebar, especially given that the same options are already available in the infinitely more compact menu that runs along the top of the page,” he wrote.

And a Daily Tech Log writer said: “For people unfamiliar with Google’s many features, it’s a smart move as it’s way more user friendly. For the rest of us, I prefer the simplicity of the old setup – Google’s minimalism has always tickled all the right spots – but I can deal.”