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Google to get aggressive with Apps suite

Google plans to aggressively add new applications and capabilities to its Web-hosted Apps software suite for businesses and will likely leave the price unchanged as it builds out the service, a company official said Tuesday.

The comments signal a move that will likely heat up the competitive fire between Google and Microsoft in the market for office productivity, communication, and collaboration software.

[ News feature: Can Google Apps move up market? ]

Google, a recent entrant to this market, has opted to provide its suite via a SaaS (software-as-a-service) model, a newly popular approach in which vendors host the software and data, and deliver it to customers via the Internet.

Microsoft, a longtime player with its ubiquitous Office suite and Outlook/Exchange messaging and collaboration platform, is starting to react to this trend, although its software is still primarily designed to be installed on customers’ own servers.

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Currently, Google offers a free, ad-supported Apps version designed for individuals and very small businesses, and a fee-based version called Premier that is aimed at companies of all sizes and costs $50 per user per year. That is considered an aggressive price versus the cost of comparable Microsoft software.

Although the individual and business versions share the same core applications, such as Gmail, word processor, calendar, spreadsheet and presentation programs, Apps Premier has a variety of IT management tools as well as APIs for integration with other software.

“Our intention is to really put more value at that price point and offer some amazing proposition to companies,” said Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise unit, at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum.

While not ruling out adding other pricing tiers for certain technology, Girouard stressed that the current strategy is focused on increasing the user base by making the suite more attractive without increasing its cost.

“We expect to hold the price point and add more and more value at that price point,” he said. “We want to have commercial relationships with lots of companies, and it matters more that we have that than exactly how much dollar per user we’re getting.”

“We can certainly hold that price point. We can continue to put more capabilities there. The cost of an additional application to us is tiny, it’s hardly material. There are certainly types of applications that we could add that would add cost and we would price appropriately, but I don’t expect the price to climb. That wouldn’t be my expectation,” he added.

Girouard didn’t provide any specifics about the types of applications or new features Google is planning to add to Apps.

More than 500,000 businesses and universities have signed up for the free and fee-based versions of Google Apps, resulting in about 10 million active users of the suite, Girouard said.

Apps Premier customers don’t generally object to the suite’s subscription price, he said, adding that their most common concerns before adopting it are about the security of hosting the software and data outside their premises, and about Google’s future plans for the product.

He said Google isn’t trying to provide all the features in, say, Microsoft Office, in which applications are generally considered to be richer in functionality. Instead, Google focuses on what it thinks Apps can do better, like simplifying collaboration and sharing in workgroups. As hosted software, Apps is designed with collaboration in mind.

“I’d like all the holes [in the feature set] to be filled, but I’ll say generally we’re not in the model of trying to replicate the products that work really well for what they do,” he said.

For example, Google’s spreadsheet application today isn’t designed to win over financial analysts who spend a lot of time building very complicated models in Microsoft Excel.

“Excel is very good at that. [But] there’s a million things you can use our spreadsheet product for that we think we’re much better than Excel at,” he said. “If you’re looking for feature parity, you’ll probably never see that.”

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Morgan Freeman recovering after surgery

MEMPHIS, Tennessee (AP) — Morgan Freeman is doing well after surgery to reconnect nerves and repair damage to his left arm and hand after rescuers used a jaws-of-life machine to free him and a passenger from the wreckage of his car, his publicist said Tuesday.

Freeman, 71, and Demaris Meyer, 48, of Memphis, Tennessee, were taken to the Regional Medical Center in Memphis following the Sunday night accident on a dark stretch of rural Mississippi Delta highway in Tallahatchie County.

State troopers said the car careened off the highway and flipped end-over-end before landing upright in a ditch.

The surgery Monday night lasted approximately four and a half hours including recovery and he is in good spirits and was visiting family members this morning, Donna Lee, the Oscar-winning actor’s publicist, said in a statement.

He was walking this A.M., and is looking forward to his release as soon as possible, Lee said.

Freeman was airlifted about 90 miles to the Regional Medical Center where he was treated for a broken arm, broken elbow and shoulder damage, Lee said. Watch witness describe wreck

Bill Rogers, a retired police officer, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he witnessed the accident near the small town of Charleston, not far from where Freeman owns a home with his wife.

Rogers said Freeman complained of pain from injuries before being loaded onto a medical helicopter, but was more concerned about the people around him than himself.

Mr. Freeman thought he may have gone to sleep but he wasn’t sure, Rogers said. He didn’t know what happened.

The car was bent on the front as well as rear — I mean severely, Rogers said. It was so bad I couldn’t tell what it was.

The Mississippi Highway Patrol is still investigating the accident, Sgt. Ben Williams said Tuesday. Alcohol and drugs don’t appear to be a factor and no citations are likely to be filed, he said.

Hospital spokeswoman Kathy Stringer said Freeman remained in serious condition Tuesday. Meyer’s name wasn’t in the hospital registry, Stringer said. However, under medical privacy laws people can request that their names not be listed as patients at a hospital.

Williams said Meyer was in the Memphis hospital when the Highway Patrol checked Monday night and both she and Freeman were in good spirits. Gallery: The career of Morgan Freeman

Rogers said he was watching television about 11:15 and I heard a car sliding on the highway out in front of our house.

As I looked out the window, I saw it began to flip after it hit our next-door neighbor’s drive. It went end-over-end about twice and then it came back on its wheels in the ditch. It was a mess, he said.

found here.

‘Terror cleric’ wins U.S. extradition delay

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — Britain’s government has accepted an order by the European Court of Human Rights to delay the extradition of a radical Muslim preacher accused of helping to set up a terrorist training camp in the United States.

The court, which is based in Strasbourg, France, said it ruled Monday that Abu Hamza al-Masri should not be extradited to the United States before judges examined his case.

The British High Court ruled in June that al-Masri should be sent to the U.S., where he is accused of offenses including supporting al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The House of Lords, Britain’s highest court of appeal, upheld the ruling.

That prompted al-Masri to file an appeal with Europe’s highest human rights court, complaining that if extradited he could be exposed to torture or inhuman treatment in the United States.

The Strasbourg court said on Tuesday it had asked Britain not to extradite al-Masri — whose real name is Mustafa Kamal Mustafa — until it has given due consideration to the matter.

Britain’s Home Office said it would abide by the court’s request.

We understand that the European Court has today ordered that Abu Hamza’s extradition should be stayed while it considers his appeal against extradition to the U.S, the Home Office said in a statement.

The decision is a matter for the European Court. The UK cannot extradite Hamza while the court has ordered his extradition to be stayed.

In London, an e-mail seeking comment from Hamza’s London-based lawyer about the European ruling was not immediately returned.

U.S. officials allege al-Masri conspired to establish a training camp in Bly, Oregon, where followers received combat and weapons training for violent jihad — or holy war — in Afghanistan.

They also say he assisted extremists who kidnapped 16 foreign tourists in Yemen in 1998. Three British tourists and one Australian visitor were killed in a shootout between Yemeni security forces and the captors.

In addition, al-Masri is accused of facilitating terrorist training in Afghanistan.

A former imam at London’s Finsbury Park Mosque, al-Masri is one of Britain’s best-known Islamist radicals. The Egyptian-born preacher is blind in one eye and has hooks in place of the hands he says he lost fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Under his leadership, the Finsbury Park mosque became a magnet for extremists. Its worshippers included September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe bomber Richard Reid.

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Deadly earthquake hits China ahead of Games

(CNN) — A 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck China’s Sichuan province on Tuesday, killing at least one person and seriously wounding five others, a local emergency official told CNN.

The quake’s epicenter was located about 50 kilometers (30 miles) north-northwest of Guangyuan, near Sichuan’s border with neighboring Gansu province.

The Olympic torch was making its way through parts of Sichuan on Tuesday, three days before the Summer Games get underway in Beijing, some 1,200 kilometers (800 miles) away.

The earthquake occurred just before 6 p.m. local time, a few hours after the relay made its final stop in the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu.

found here.

Toxin in soil may mean no life on Mars

(CNN) — NASA’s Phoenix lander has discovered a toxic chemical in soil near Mars’ north pole, dimming hopes for finding life on the Red Planet, the probe’s operators said Monday.

The chemical, perchlorate, is an oxidant widely used in solid rocket fuel. Researchers are still puzzling over the results and checking to make sure the perchlorate wasn’t carried to Mars from Earth, the University of Arizona-based science team said.

While we have not completed our process on these soil samples, we have very interesting intermediate results, Peter Smith, the principal investigator for the project, said in a written statement.

Early readings from a device aboard Phoenix called the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA, suggested Earth-like soil, Smith said.

Further analysis has revealed un-Earthlike aspects of the soil chemistry, he said.

The Phoenix team has scheduled a teleconference for Tuesday to discuss the findings.

Oxidizing soil conditions also were found at the Viking 1 and 2 landing sites in the 1970s, leading most scientists to conclude that there could be no life there.

found here.