Two weeks ago, Google Analytics launched real-time stats. This feature is not enabled for everyone yet, but you can request an invitation using this form. After receiving the invitation, you need to switch to the new Analytics interface, select a site, go to the “Home” tab and click “Real-Time (Beta) / Overview”.

I must say that this feature is addictive because it shows a lot of information about your site in real-time. You can find the number of active visitors, the number of pageviews, the top referrals and the top active pages. There’s also a map that highlights the cities where your visitors are coming from. And all this information is updated so frequently that it’s difficult to keep up with the ever changing stats.

Google Analytics is great for the intuitive reports and the advanced filters that help you understand traffic fluctuations, but a lot of people will use the service more often because of the real-time stats. They’re constantly changing, they’re mesmerizing and empowering.

7 Google Features Only Available in Google Chrome

Google Chrome is at the forefront of the new technologies and Google services are the first to use them. Here are some examples of features only available in Google Chrome:

1. Native printing in Google Docs. You no longer have to download PDF files and use Adobe Reader or a similar PDF reader to print documents. Google implemented a W3C working draft from 2006.

2. Uploading folders in Google Docs. While you can install a Java applet in other browsers to upload folders, Chrome is the only browser that supports this feature natively.

3. Voice Input in Google Translate. The latest Chrome version supports the HTML Speech API, which provides speech recognition and input to web pages. The first Google service that supports this feature is Google Translate, but it’s also tested for Google Web Search. Instead of typing your query or the text you want to translate, you can speak into your computer’s microphone.

4 & 5. Desktop notifications in Gmail and Google Calendar. It’s a really useful feature that replaces the annoying pop-up notification in Google Calendar and shows an unobtrusive notification when you receive a new message.

6. Open PDF attachments in Gmail using the built-in PDF reader, instead of Google Docs Viewer. It’s not clear why Google doesn’t detect Adobe Reader’s plug-in to use a more full-featured PDF reader.

7. Drag and drop Gmail attachments to your desktop. Instead of clicking the “download” link, you can drag the file icon to your desktop.

VMware is launching an open platform today called Cloud Foundry that provides developers with a choice of frameworks., app services and the flexibility to run on multiple cloud environments.

Developers may launch the platform as a private, public or hybrid cloud environment. It can run inside the enterprise as virtual infrastructure, on a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services EC2 or as a hybrid cloud solution.

The future of the cloud is one about the predominance of platforms. We’re seeing that reality emerge with this news from VMware. It also points to the increasing importance in providing developers a way to build apps without the usual hassles that come with getting them launched by the IT department.

We have been highlighting this issue in the past few weeks in posts about companies such as SaaSGrid, which offers an internal platform for developers. Developers are increasingly adopting Agile methodologies, which is iterative in its approach. Agile requires updates that would normally take weeks to get approved by IT. Setting up a virtual infrastructure like CloudFoundry provides a secure place where developers can do test and development.

Mozy Gets into the Game

Cloud Foundry will be run by the Mozy team, which is moving from EMC and wil be part of VMware. VMware executives explained in an interview yesterday that the Mozy team has the experience of developing a backup service.

Support for Frameworks and Application Services

Cloud Foundry also offers a choice of clouds, frameworks and application services.
According to a draft blog post by VMware CTO Steve Herrod,the platform supports Spring, Grails, Node.js and Ruby on Rails with work already underway for other frameworks. It will be open to multiple services, provided by VMware or other vendors or communities.

Initially VMware will provide basic services such as a relational database, but the choice will broaden quickly. He wites that other initial choices are MySQL, Redis
and MongoDB. RabbitMQ will soon follow.

Cloud Foundry will be available as a public cloud service at CloudFoundry.com and as software that can be run according to the developer’s choice.

Cloud Choice

Cloud Foundry can be used on public or private clouds. It runs on top of
vSphere and vCloud infrastructure but VMware says it can also run on top of other infrastructure clouds. At its launch today, RightScale is showing how Cloud Foundry can run on top of AWS. Its open architecture means that it can run on infrastructure technologies like Eucalyptus or OpenStack.

It also has a software component. Herrod:

We’ve even shrunk the cloud down to sit on a developer’s laptop. With the “Micro Cloud”, we have a version of Cloud Foundry that runs in a single virtual machine.This gives allows developers to build and test their applications on their own machine, with the confidence that their production environment is symmetrical to the development environment. The Micro Cloud configuration of Cloud Foundry will be available later this quarter from CloudFoundry.com.

CloudFoundry.org

CloudFoundry.org is the community open-source project for the platform environment The code has has been uploaded to GitHub. It is available under the Apache 2 license It will be governed like Spring, which has its roots as an open source project.

Summary

Cloud Foundry plays on the number of acquisitions that VMware has made in the past few years. Spring has been a jewel for VMware but now the other parts are falling into place. RabbitMQ and Gemstone are just two examples. The open play is a smart one. And the flexibility of the platform is key to its success.

Cloud Foundry will without a doubt pose a real challenge to Google App Engine and other platforms such as Heroku and evenWindows Azure. But this is a competitive space with new startups such as DotCloud offering a similar flexibility.

Is VMware now becoming an open-source company? It has the dominance in the virtualization market. Now may be the time it leverages that strength to provide an open environment that gives it leverage across the entire market.

The infographic looks at the cloud according to four strata:

• Communications and Social Applications
• Software as a Service
• Platform as a Service
• Infrastructure as a Service