Matthew Glotzbach (Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise) listed 10 things that you could do in the clouds in 2009 that you couldn’tdo the year before. Not surprisingly, he mostly talked about Google-related things, so his list is not complete. Still, Matthew’s list is a reminder of how far we’ve come in a short space of time.

1. Having access to everything on the go—through an iPhone an Android-based phone like Google’s Nexus One, a BlackBerry, or Apple’s new iPad.
2. Being able to search through all my e-mail quickly from any device using Gmail or Google Apps (see http://mail.google.com/ support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7190).
3. Chatting with customers and partners—in any language. Matthew gave a very cool live demo of inline translation of chat; my Web site, eyeonthecloud.com, implements a translate button provided by Google. Last I looked, it translates the site into 52 languages on request. You can do use it too; just copy this code
   snippet into your Web page:


<div id=“google_translate_element”></div><script>
function googleTranslateElementInit() {
new google.translate.TranslateElement({
pageLanguage: ‘en’
}, ‘google_translate_element’);
}
</script><script src=“http://translate.google.com/ translate_a/ element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit”></script>

4. Easy collaboration with Google products Sites and Docs. (Lee Lefavre provides a great explanation of document sharing at http://www.masternewmedia.org/online-collaboration/document- collaboration/Google-Docs-explained-in-simple-words-by- Lee-Lefever-20070919.htm). Online collaboration has been a goal for years; it’s now coming of age.
5. Organizing travel using TripIt, a personal travel assistant (www.tripit.com/).
6. Easily collecting data from co-workers and customers using Google forms (see http://docs.google.com/support/bin/ topic.py?topic=15166).
7. Building a scalable business application on the cloud platform with Force.com (see www. salesforce.com/platform or http://developer. force.com/appengine) to create Web and business applications that span both salesforce.com and Google’s cloud computing platforms and take advantage of the key features of both.
8. 8. Using online-templates for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
9. Running fast, secure, and stable Web apps (Chrome; see http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html ).
10. Securely sharing video in apps with Youtube for Google apps (see www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/ 20080902_video_in_apps.html).

Cloud Computing: A Practical Approach By

Anthony T. Velte
Toby J. Velte, Ph.D.
Robert Elsenpeter