This morning at a special press event in Mountain View, Google announced Google Apps for Government, a new version of Google’s suite of cloud-based enterprise applications that have been hardened to meet the government’s more stringent security restrictions. Dave Girouard, Google’s President of Enterprise, kicked off the presentation with a few stats: every year, the federal government spends $76 billion on IT expen...

Sick of circling the city streets in your car, looking for a spot — any spot — that you can squeeze into? Google may have the answer, or at least the very beginnings of one, though it’s going to heavily rely on the good deeds of your peers to be a success. Meet Google Open Spot, the latest addition to Google Labs, which has just released a new application for Android phones. The service is really strai...

Editor’s note: Is the law of large numbers getting to Google? Innovation is hard, especially when a new idea needs to create billions of dollars in revenue for it to count. In the the following guest post, author and former venture capitalist Peter Sims talks about the challenges Google faces not to suffer the same fate as every other dominant tech company before it. Sims is co-author of True North:...

You can definitely call me an Apple fanboy: I’ve bought practically every device that Steve Jobs has made since 1985—when I got my first Macintosh. I own an Apple TV, several iPods, a Macbook Pro, a Macbook Air, an iMac, two iPhones, and two iPads (one was a gift). For various reasons, I need to use Microsoft Outlook and Windows, so I run these in a virtual machine on my Mac. But this fanboy is listing his iPads for...

An interesting post just went up on the Twitter Engineering blog. Usually, that blog contains posts that are more interesting to developers working on Twitter’s platform. And this post is that as well, but it also states two much larger things. First, Twitter won’t be using the Cassandra database system to store tweets. Second, Cassandra will be used for Twitter’s realtime analytics product. The...