April 19, 2007

Presentations To Web Based Tools By Google

Speaking at Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, announced a new addition to Google Docs and Spreadsheets: Presentations, a Web based alternative to MS PowerPoint. According to Google’s blog the new service will be based on the technology developed by Tonic System, a company Google acquired.
The launch date of Presentations is set for the summer and at Web 2.0, Eric Schmidt used a beta version of this new app to present his slides.
Even Google Presentations may be considered a direct competitor of MS Powerpoint, Eric Schmidt said the two products are not competing.
Erich Schmidt didn’t provide any details about Presentations or its capabilities, but product manager Rajen Sheth said for AP that users would be able to store documents online and let anyone with a free Google account view the slides.
In February, Google Apps has taken the step forward from a non-commercial application, geared towards individual users, to a business software package: Google Apps Premier Edition, which is being offered primarily to small and medium businesses for an annual fee of $50. Google Apps has been available as a free service since August 2006. It includes the large storage-capacity service Gmail (where you can store not only emails, but chat history and even files from your desktop, with the help of a Mozilla plug-in), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Talk, which is an instant messaging and voice-over-IP application, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain.
Google Apps Premier Edition offers over its free precursor 10 GBs of storage per user, APIs for business integration, 99.9 % uptime, 24x7 support for critical issues, advertising is optional, and the cost is $50 per user account per year.