INFORMATION NOW

Today we’re introducing two new ways for apps to build even richer integrations with Drive: app data folders and custom properties.

In order to run smoothly, your app may depend on data it stores in Drive. But occasionally, users may accidentally move or delete the very file or folder your app needs to function. The app data folder is a special folder in Drive that can only be accessed by your app. The app folder’s content is hidden from the user and from other apps, making it ideal for storing configuration files, app state data, or any other files that the user should not modify.

Although users cannot see individual files in the app data folder, they are able to see how much app data your app is using and clear that data in the Manage Apps dialog.

Apps can also now add custom properties to any Drive file. The new properties collection gives your app the power to create searchable fields that are private to your app or shared across apps. For example, a classroom app could keep track of the grade for a document or a project management app could keep track of the current status of a document going through a review process.

To learn more check out the technical documentation for both app data folders and custom properties, and if you have questions don’t hesitate to post on StackOverflow.

Nicolas Garnier Google+ | Twitter Nicolas Garnier joined Google’s Developer Relations in 2008 and lives in Zurich. He is a Developer Advocate for Google Drive and Google Apps. Nicolas is also the lead engineer for the OAuth 2.0 Playground.

The Freemium business model is normal for consumer applications, but can it work for enterprise software? Freemium usually means a free service with an "up sell" to paid premium subscriptions. Examples include Skype, LinkedIn, Flickr, Ancestry.com, Typepad, Dropbox, and many others. Freemium differs from Free Trial in that a free trial is the fully functional product but only for a limited time. Freemium is always free, but you can purchase additional features or service for a premium price.

Freemium business models usually involve a Free service, sometimes time limited or feature limited, supported by advertising. The ads rarely cover costs. The goal is to convert these free users to paid subscriptions. Most consumer services start with a $10 per user per month subscription and scale up to $20 or $50 per month based on a small, medium, large usage scale.

Enterprise software is also using the Freemium model, sometimes with higher prices commensurate with the power and functionality of the product. They all have slightly different measurements and cut-off points, but most have some notion of small, medium, large.

Most companies see a 1.5% to 5% conversion rates, with most of them averaging around 3%. That doesnt sound like much but they are reaching tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of users...sometimes millions.

Here is some math. 100,000 free users convert to 3,000 paid users. If they pay $50 per user per month, that is $150K a month or $1.8M per year. That is an excellent revenue stream for small startups that typically have 3 to 5 employees. And, it is an annuity stream that continues to grow every year. By the 3rd or 4th year these small companies can be generating $5M to $10M a year, still with less than 10 employees. Most of these small companies dont take Venture Capital so they own the whole company. It is a pretty good cash flow business.

Recently at Google IO I moderated an all-star panel of VCs on the subject of Freemium in the enterprise.
Making Freemium work - converting free users to paying customers - Venture Capitalists, Brad Feld (Foundry Group), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC), Matt Holleran (Emergence Capital) and Joe Kraus (Google Ventures) discussed strategies for building free products that can be upgraded to paid versions.

Some key points from the panel;

• Your initial thoughts about how much customers will pay, and how much they will pay, is probably wrong
• Start collecting usage statistics from day one, even if you dont have time to analyze them. These stats will help you understand which features customers really use, and what they are likely to pay for.
• Customers tend to optimize for "least surprise" so they tend to purchase a service level one above what they think they will need. Think cell phone pricing models.
• Gmail Enterprise is a good example of an enterprise Freemium product based on usage limits. The first 50 users are free, but convert to paid subscription over that.
• Freemium works best where there is a "network effect" or where more free users contributing content or data makes the service more valuable.
• Put your business model in beta at the same time you put your product in beta. Test several business model scenarios to see what works best.
• Consumers dont pay for additional features, turning off advertisements, analytics, etc...but businesses may be very happy to pay for these things
• Google Apps Marketplace is a great channel to get your product to Google Apps business customers.

Watch the video for more details and insight. This group of VCs has built lots of companies based on the Freemium business model. They have some great insights.

Controlling Throttle Rates with Guava’s RateLimiter

final RateLimiter driveApiRateLimiter = RateLimiter.create(QUOTA_RATE_PER_SECOND);

public Result performDriveApiCall(driveApiRateLimiter, otherParams){
        driveApiRateLimiter.acquire(); // blocks according to rate
        // make API call...

Reducing Impact of Network Traffic Issues Through Configured Backoffs

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 60, 60, 60

ExponentialBackOff backoff = new ExponentialBackOff.Builder()
    .setInitialIntervalMillis(ONE_SECOND)
    .setMultiplier(2.0)
    .setMaxIntervalMillis(ONE_MINUTE)
    .setMaxElapsedTimeMillis(FIVE_MINUTES)
    .build();

1.04, 1.9, 4.23, 7.8, etc.

.98, 2.04, 4.1, 8.15, etc.

builder.setRandomizationFactor(RANDOMIZATION_FACTOR);

private HttpBackOffUnsuccessfulResponseHandler handler = new HttpBackOffUnsuccessfulResponseHandler(backoff);

public void initialize(HttpRequest request){ 
    request.setUnsuccessfulResponseHandler(handler);
}

Final Thoughts

• Backupify protects your Google Apps data through secure, automatic, daily backup allowing IT users to easily search and restore files with advanced administrative features, safeguarding your business from data loss caused by user errors, malicious deletions, hackers, and app errors. (website, blogpost)
• BetterCloud, through their flagship cloud management and security tool, FlashPanel, has enhanced their offering through the Audit API to provide additional controls and insight. (website, blogpost)
• CloudLock, who provides a pure-cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution for SaaS applications, has released a new version of CloudLock for Google Drive, leveraging the new Google Drive audit APIs, to enable large organizations to extend their enterprise security controls to the cloud. (website, blogpost)
• SkyHigh for Google Drive delivers Data Loss Prevention (DLP), mobile-to-cloud support, application auditing, data discovery, and anomaly detection without changing the Google Drive experience users love. (website, blogpost)

Weve just announced Google Docs and Sheets add-ons — new tools created by developers like you that give Google users even more features in their documents and spreadsheets. Joining the launch are more than 60 add-ons that partners have built using Apps Script. Now, were opening up the platform in a developer-preview phase. If you have a cool idea for Docs and Sheets users, wed love to publish your code in the add-on store and get it in front of millions of users.

To browse through add-ons for Docs and Sheets, select Get add-ons in the Add-ons menu of any document or spreadsheet. (Add-ons for spreadsheets are only available in the new Google Sheets).

Under the hood

Docs and Sheets add-ons are powered by Google Apps Script, a server-side JavaScript platform that requires zero setup. Even though add-ons are in developer preview right now, the tools and APIs are available to everyone. The only restriction is on final publication to the store.

Once you have a great working prototype in Docs or Sheets, please apply to publish. Scripts that are distributed as add-ons gain a host of benefits:

• Better discovery: Apps Script has long been popular among programmers and other power users, but difficult for non-technical users to find and install. Add-ons let you distribute your code through a polished storefront—as well as direct links and even Google search results.
• Sharing: When two people collaborate on a document and one of them uses an add-on, it appears in the Add-ons menu for both to see. Similarly, once you get an add-on from the store, it appears in the menu in every document you create or open, although your collaborators will only see it in documents where you use it. For more info on this sharing model, see the guide to the add-on authorization lifecycle.
• Automatic updates: When you republish an add-on, the update pushes out automatically to all your users. Theres no more hounding people to switch to the latest version.
• Share functionality without sharing code: Unlike regular Apps Script projects, add-ons dont expose your source code for all to see. Thats reassuring both to less-technical users and to the keepers of your codebases secrets.
• Enterprise features: If your company has its own Google Apps domain, you can publish add-ons restricted just to your employees. This private distribution channel is a great way for organizations that run on Google Apps to solve their own unique problems.

Beautiful, professional appearance

Thanks to hard work from our developer partners, the add-ons in the store look and feel just like native features of Google Docs and Sheets. Were providing a couple of new resources to help all developers achieve the same visual quality: a CSS package that applies standard Google styling to typography, buttons, and other form elements, and a UI style guide that provides great guidance on designing a Googley user experience.

A replacement for the script gallery

Add-ons are available in the new version of Google Sheets as a replacement for the older versions script gallery. If you have a popular script in the old gallery, nows a great time to upgrade it to newer technology.

We cant wait to see the new uses youll dream up for add-ons, and were looking forward to your feedback on Google+ and questions on Stack Overflow. Better yet, if youre free at noon Eastern time this Friday, join us live on YouTube for a special add-on-centric episode of Apps Unscripted.

Dan Lazin   profile | twitter Dan is a technical writer on the Developer Relations team for Google Apps Script. Before joining Google, he worked as video-game designer and newspaper reporter. He has bicycled through 17 countries.

Link to article and Kathy Jacobs home page
"One person who presents regularly always tries to fit ?25 pounds? into a 5 pound bag.? How do you prevent this from happening with your presentations? Kathy Jacobs suggest the following six tips (read the article for details):

• Figure out what the audience needs to know, not what you want to say
• Design from summary to detail
• Hide the details
• Create FAQ slides
• Nest information
• Tell them where to find more information"

Link to site
"wwwtools is designed to keep you informed and to save valuable time in tracking down information and resources on the World Wide Web. Each article is on a particular topic or issue related to Web-based teaching and learning. The articles take a skilled researcher between 10 and 20 hours to research and prepare. Many of the topics covered are suggested by our readers--if youre curious about a particular subject or issue send a "research" request to the contact below.Whenever a new article is added to the database you will be informed by email. You can opt-out of the email list at any time. Articles remain on this data base - however only paid or sponsored subscribers can view archived articles older than 3 months ."

Absolutely a great site for people involved in education. Teachers, students and e-learning researchers are going to love this site, which include all sorts of articles from digital libraries to music in education. However, accessing articles older than 3 months would require you to pay (stick to Latest Articles), but besides that it is a great site. This site needs to be bookmarked in your favorites, it is simply Yummi!

Link to article (By Chris Dede)
"Shifts in students? learning style will prompt a shift to active construction of knowledge through mediated immersion"
Rapid advances in information technology are reshaping the learning styles of many students in higher education...Over the next decade, three complementary interfaces to information technology will shape how people learn:

• The familiar world to the desktop interface, providing access to distant experts and archives and enabling collaborations, mentoring relationships, and virtual communities of practice. This interface is evolving through initiatives such as Internet2.
• Alice-in-Wonderland multiuser virtual environment (MUVE) interfaces, in which participants? avatars interact with computer-based agents and digital artifacts in virtual contexts. The initial stages of studies on shared virtual environments are characterized by advances in Internet games and work in virtual reality.
• Interfaces for ubiquitous computing, in which mobile wireless devices infuse virtual resources as we move through the real world. The early stages of augmented reality interfaces are characterized by research on the role of smart objects and intelligent contexts in learning and doing.

Based on mediated immersion, these emerging learning styles include:

• Fluency in multiple media and in simulation-based virtual settings Communal learning involving diverse, tacit, situated experience, with knowledge distributed across a community and a context as well as within an individual
• A balance among experiential learning, guided mentoring, and collective reflection
• Expression through nonlinear, associational webs of representations
• Co-design of learning experiences personalized to individual needs and preferences

Many faculty will find such a shift in instruction difficult, but through professional development they can accommodate neomillennial learning styles to continue teaching effectively as the nature of students evolves..."

Yes, this is another explosive article promoting multiuser virtual environments (MUVE) in education, which we should digest to the fullest. Utilizing MUVE can facilitate a more experiential, interactive, and dynamic e-learning environment, enabling us to interact and collectively learn and construct knowledge with people (avatars) or experts from every corner of the earth. For me, I would first like to discuss some issues with Chris Dede (author of this article) or his avatar, so I can learn from his research about MUVE (beyond this article). Then I will go after Bill Gates and ask him point-blank, "why dont you participate more in the open source evolution, and make your Microsoft Office products open source and free (at least to all schools, colleges, and universities around the world), etc.

Yes, I am already getting immersed! Lets research this area collectively and make Malaysian higher education truely immersive!