Google Cloud Print: Printing was never such simple

Google Cloud Print makes printing more intuitive, accessible and useful, by allowing you to print to your printers from Google Cloud Print enabled apps on any computer or smart phone. To connect your printer to Google Cloud Print, you will need to install the latest beta version of Google Chrome on a Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7 computer that's connected to your printer. Once installed, enable the Google Cloud Print connector in Google Chrome.

Google Cloud Print is a web service offered by Google. Users associate printers with their Google Account via the service. Printers are treated in much the same way as documents are in Google Docs. Therefore, it is very easy to share printers with your coworkers, friends, and family anywhere in the world. No need for complex network setups to make print sharing work! In addition to associating printers with a user's Google Account, the capabilities of each particular printer model are stored so they can be shown to the user to select appropriate options when submitting a print job. Once the service receives a print job, it sends it to the printer. It also receives regular updates on the status of the print job which it makes available to the app.

For your printer to be connected to the Google Cloud, you must be logged into your Windows user account. Just as when your printer is offline, if you are using the Google Chrome proxy and your Windows user account is logged off, jobs will be saved and fetched normally when you log back in. You can connect any number of printers that you like to a device running the Google Cloud Print proxy in Google Chrome. For now, due to technical limitations, google recommend that users activate the proxy on no more than three devices for a given Google Account.

Managing Supply Chain process using Cloud Computing

We are living through the exciting times in information technology. A wave of information explosion and the corresponding need to process it efficiently and effectively is placing relentless demands on IT. To handle this wave, the concept of cloud comes. Cloud Computing is the main buzzword now days. Many big IT leaders such as Amazon (EC2), Google (Google Apps), Microsoft (Azure), Salesforce and many more have embraced the concept of delivering software over the Internet, as it can mean lower costs and less maintenance for those who use the applications. IBM announced its Blue Cloud initiative, offering a package of hardware and software to allow its customers to create their own internal clouds. The company had already partnered with Google to provide cloud solutions for six American universities and hopes to grow the program to allow more universities and corporate and government entities to join in. Many companies are offering hardware designed to operate on cloud networks, including Hewlett Packard, Dell and Clear Cube. And according to industry analysts, Cloud Computing is here to stay:

• By 2012, net new IT growth in spending will be $30.8 billion, 25% of which will be IT Cloud Services.
• Cloud services will be essential tools for addressing the biggest business demands of IT: speed, cost, scale, rich variety of solutions.
• Of the companies using cloud computing services to enable accessibility from anywhere; 83% are specifically using cloud computing services for software as a service.

Cloud is getting used in many of the areas where there is need to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Enterprise centric systems are one of the best example areas which are leveraging a cloud computing environment of shared infrastructure and platform for global collaboration, companies can take advantage of seamless end-to-end business processes, cross-community visibility, and lower costs to support these advanced capabilities to better meet their supply chain community’s ever more demanding business requirements.

A lot of effort and money has been expended especially into the traditional enterprise-centric systems and also most of the bandwidth of the IT staff is consumed by the run-and-maintain aspects. Another drawback of the traditional SCM systems is the wastage of lot of resources and money spent by companies for whole year, making sure their servers can handle peak loads during the holiday season. So what happens after the holidays have passed and the server loads slow down? Most companies will still be running and maintaining all this equipment until next Holiday season. It’s not uncommon for most companies to be running their servers at just 20% capacity most of the year and while there is a lot of capital and resources being used, they are providing no economic or environmental benefit at all. To avoid the wastage of 80% of servers computation power most of the year, cloud computing can be utilized to form the SCM cloud that will deliver the supply chain solutions as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). SaaS in an on-demand paradigm of IT solutions delivery that allows for trial before usage, pay for what you use, and rapid value with minimal IT hassles.

Amitive is the first Supply Chain Management software solution to fully embrace and leverage cloud computing. Amitive enables a community of business partners to work together seamlessly on a real time, common platform and make smarter decisions faster with clear lines of cross-community visibility. Business intelligence developer PivotLink and visual order management provider OrderMotion also announced a new SaaS solution designed to provide retailers with on-demand sales and order management analysis. Its objective is to let businesses monitor and manage marketing, merchandising and operations by providing secure, collaborative real-time reports on each stage of the order life cycle.

Let’s discuss in somewhat more detail that how the SCM services are provided through Cloud infrastructure. The figure shows the basic SCM Cloud Architecture [Source: SupplyChainBrain]. Through this architecture, all the complexities of getting the SCM services are hidden to normal user. Let’s take an example, earlier retailers have to go through a laborious and time-consuming way of finding a suitable application that can place, manage and fulfil orders. They need to choose a product after evaluating many of the available solutions and accommodate technology constraints that come with it. Then the complete go live process involving setup, configure, deploy, and testing is done. Only the retailers who have the scope of huge investments can only afford such process. But using the SCM cloud, all this process is hidden from the retailers using abstraction layer. They are provided with the services that they want without taking into consideration the lengthy process to Go-Live. Another benefit of SCM cloud will be that now the small enterprises can also afford these costly processes at economical price. An SCM cloud enables small businesses to have a dedicated Sterling 8.0 instance for order management even when they neither have an IT department nor can lease a space in a data center.

Thus Cloud Computing solves a huge problem in capital inefficiency and helps companies save energy and the environment, by allowing companies to easily scale up IT resources when demand is high and scale down when activity slows. SCM cloud also helps in supporting the green initiative of saving the environment.

Google Labs- URL Shrinker

Search engine giant Google has announced the availability of an API for URL shortening, the goo.gl API in Google Code Labs. The new service enables users to takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends.

Users can shorten and expand URLs using the API, as well as fetch history and analytics. One could use these features for a wide variety of applications, enabling behaviors ranging from auto-shortening within Twitter or Google Buzz clients to running regular jobs that monitor usage statistics and traffic patterns.

Application developers can check the goo.gl API documentation at Google Code Labs.

2011 will be the year of Super Phones

At CES, Nvidia have come up with a term "SuperPhone" other than smartphone to distinguish these new classes of devices. Nvidia has declared that their Tegra 2 processor is a 'superphone' maker. Today’s devices running processors around the 1GHz level are capable of HD 720p encode and decode of video and render graphics. Super Phones on other hand will look virtually identical to smart phones, but are characterized by their Tegra 2 CPUs, will be fully capable of 1080p encode & decode of HD video, capture 1080p video and capable of achieving console level 3D graphics with 4G connectivity, and plethora of output ports, including HDMI. The Tegra 2 claims to be the first ever mobile dual-core CPU for speedier web browsing, enhanced performance and better response time.

The LG Optimus 2X’s is the first of the phones which will use the Tegra 2 processor from Nvidia. Its major specs cover a 4” WVGA screen, 8GB onboard, 1080p MPEG-4 and H.264 playback as also recording and HDMI mirroring. An 8MP camera sits on the phone’s back panel and 1.3MP front-facing camera.

Amidst these handhelds, Motorola Atrix seems to be the most fascinating . Remember the Redfly, a small, red, super-thin dummy laptop that hooked up to your phone to give it a large screen and keyboard (and nothing else)? Well this is that, but done in a way that makes a lot more sense. It has 13-inch phone charger and super phone dock that also sports its own LED screen, full-sized keyboard, and Webtop App, which acts as sort of a super-light, wrap-around OS. When connected, the phone automatically goes into a sort of "computer mode" and runs a desktop operating system interface, along with complete versions of Firefox, Adobe Flash, etc. You'll be able to download PC applications just like your normal computer. The only real difference is everything is being powered by, and saved to, the Atrix. You can even run virtualized desktop client apps through it. In other words, you may never need a real desktop or laptop for your office again.