So, what did Google just do with its introduction of “Gears?”

Setup its suite of office applications to go offline. Oh, and everyone else’s too.

Zojo? ConceptShare? Zimbra?

All will be able to go offline soon if their developers adopt Google’s Gears.

UPDATE: David Berlind at ZDNet has the best insight I’ve seen posted so far about Gears and has a podcast/interview with Linus Upson, director of engineering at Google

Right now I’m using my computer while not connected to the Internet. I’m typing in Windows Live Writer’s window and I’m surfing Google Reader while unconnected.

Some things that work better? Google Reader doesn’t hesitate or “stutter” every 20 posts like it does when it’s online. Some things that don’t work as well? It doesn’t download images so posts have grey boxes in them.

I just reconnected and it instantly shared all the items I had maked as shared.

Nice implementation and works simply and easily. I’ll definitely be using this on my next plane ride.

I wish it ALWAYS worked in offline mode, though. Why do I need to click a button to resubscribe? The Gears team told me this is a choice the developer will need to make.

Oh, while offline, if I reloaded my browser, or accidentally closed it, it goes back to my Reader automatically. That’s nice.

Look for more offline applications to come from Google soon. They don’t have any to announce yet, but said they are working on their Docs and Spreadsheets.

What really just happened? The Web got a little further away from Microsoft’s platforms and Google revealed a little more about its platform dreams.

What do you think? Are you looking forward to developing an app using Gears?

Right now in Sydney, Australia, the first of 10 Google Developer days are starting up and the audience there is hearing about several new initiatives. The most important of which is “Google Gears,” an open source project that will bring offline capabilities to Web Applications — aimed at developers. More on that in a second.

Also being announced today (and tomorrow here in San Jose) at Google’s Developer Day:

1. A new version of Google Reader (shipping this afternoon) that is built with Gears that will enable that reader to work offline. To make use of the new offline capabilities you’ll need to load the Google Gears plugin first (also available now).
2. A new mashup editor that is aimed at developers familiar with HTML and JavaScript. The Google Mashup Editor offers a simpler way to deploy AJAX user interface components atop existing feeds and Google Web Services. This competes pretty headon with Microsoft’s PopFly that was shipped about a week ago. Unfortunately this is going to be a limited beta, so you’ll have to sign up for it and wait.
3. Google Web Toolkit has passed a million users and they just shipped a new version of that.

Regarding Gears. It works on Macs, Windows, Linux on IE, Firefox, Opera. Enables versioned offline storage. Extension to HTML/JavaScript. UPDATE: Opera support isn’t finished yet and Safari support is coming “later.”

They are showing me a demo of the new Google Reader using the new Gears plugin. After you load the Gears plugin you get a new icon at the top of your Reader window which enables offline capabilities of Google Reader. They showed how Google Reader then downloaded 2,000 feed items. They took the browser offline and it continued to work great.

Codename of Gears was “Scour.” The team made fun of their code name saying that the world had “Ajax” and now it needed to “Scour.”

Gears is a 700kb install. Gears consists of three modules that developers can talk to via an API (details will online at the gears.google.com site). The three modules consist of:

1. A Local server. An object that your app can talk to and get stuff (images, JS files, HTML, etc). Atomic updates.
2. A data store. SQL light. You can talk to that via SQL. It’s like a cookie on steroids that you can talk to via SQL so developers can store data offline and talk to that store.
3. A worker pool that’s designed for background tasks. Keeps track of offline and online and helps sync and keep your apps “snappy” no matter what state your connection is in.
What won’t Gears be good for? Something like Google Search. Why? Because that assumes you want to search all the items on the Web. It’s better for Web developers who are building apps that have a specific amount of data to interact with.

Gears supports using Adobe’s Apollo and Flash and should support other technologies including Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Gears will be submitted to a standards organization eventually, they said, but want to make sure the technology is rock solid first.

More on this from TechCrunch’s Nick Gonzalez, and from Artur Bergman on O’Reilly’s Radar site who are sitting a few feet from me.

The detail in this post came from Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Jeff Huber, among other people from Google in the room — I’ll try to get more names shortly.

Microsoft just released a new version of its Windows Live Writer — an offline blog editing tool. I’ve been using it all morning and it’s pretty damn nice.

Unfortunately I’m at Google where they’ll be launching news of their own in about an hour. See ya then!

Microsoft also just released new version of Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Messenger too.

Fortune Magazine says that AppleTV is a dud.

Apple hits back and says they are bringing YouTube to Apple TV.

UPDATE: Engadget’s Ryan Block covers Steve Jobs’ announcement at the D Conference. Jobs says that Apple TV is “a hobby.” But says lots of other things too.

How did Fortune disparage it? By calling it “Zune like.” Ouch!

Personally Fortune is right, but doesn’t quite expose the elephant standing in the middle of the room.

The elephant in the room? Simple: Apple could have really taken over the HDTV world and held it for decades. Instead it has left the door open to its competitors.

Microsoft loves competitors like Apple who leave doors open.

What am I talking about?

Do we have a wide-screen iPod yet? One that matches the form factor of my 60-inch HDTV? No. Microsoft executives say that a wide-screen, 16:9 form factor, Zune is on the way this fall.

Do we have a 16:9 1080-full-res MacBookPro out yet? No. Dell has one. So does Acer. Just look for an WUXGA screen. But Apple hasn’t shipped one of those yet in a laptop.

Do we have HDTV iTunes yet? No. But ABC.com is giving us HDTV Lost. Stage6.divx.com has tons of close-to-HDTV content. Joost is going to bring us close-to-HDTV content. Where’s Apple?

Do we have an entertainment system that joins our computers and our big screens? Microsoft has Media Center and Xbox. Plus Xbox Live now joins gamers on PCs with those on Xbox. Why hasn’t Apple made a deal with Sony yet to bring PlayStation 3 to MacBookPros?

But, actually, the AppleTV +is+ going in the right direction. Apple should take over the HDTV market. The fact that it’s not is emboldening its competitors. It’s just that AppleTV’s reliance on HDTV, without having the other parts of the ecosystem in place, is exposing Apple’s weakness in dealing with HDTV.

That said, I love my AppleTV. If you actually get some high resolution stuff into iTunes it works really well. I watch tons of stuff on my AppleTV. It’s just that folks who have a big HDTV screen expect a lot more than Apple’s delivering currently.

I talked with Microsoft’s Surface computing team today. Here’s some more details I learned.

1. Price. Will cost $5,000 to $10,000 and only be available to commercial customers (hotels, casinos, etc). Price depends on number of units purchased.
2. Consumer availability? They are working on other surface computing products, but didn’t have anything to announce yet. There are a few roadblocks to getting one of these in your home. First, it’s expensive to build one because it needs holographic glass, an enclosure, a projector, two cameras, and a computer. Second, they still are working on software so that it actually does something beyond the whiz-bang demos they showed off this morning on stage.
3. Demos won’t all work the way it seems in the videos. The demos you are seeing of photos flying out of a digital camera when placed on the device? That requires that digital camera to be synced and “tagged” with a bar code. The table can see bar codes on things, but you’ve gotta stick a bar code on them first. My cell phone hasn’t been tagged. Neither has my digital camera. So, if I put them on the table they wouldn’t do anything.
4. Microsoft isn’t writing all the software. I asked whether we’d be able to play Blackjack on a table. They (the Microsoft team) couldn’t answer. That part of the functionality will be left to third-parties to write. So, a table that is in a Sheraton property might have completely different functionality than one somewhere else.
5. Can’t scan paper yet. Some of the scenarios I saw demoed included scanning of paper and documents. That isn’t yet included in the current version.
6. When will it be out? It should be installed at first customers by the end of the year. First public demos (other than at this week’s “D” conference) will be in June in New York at a Starwood property. I’ll try to get more info on that.

I’ll keep trying to get more answers and I encouraged the team to come over and answer the questions people left in my comments.

I’m talking with the Surface Computing team at Microsoft in the morning. Got any questions for them?

When I worked at Microsoft I remembered lots of people in the evangelism group worried that Linux was taking over the startup world in Silicon Valley. Heck, I was one of those people who noted that almost every startup was using LAMP instead of Windows.

There are very few opportunities to change the decisions of a startup in terms of the infrastructure that has been chosen.

What are they?

1) When a startup first germinates. Why? Cause that’s when an entrepreneur decides between Linux, Sun, or Microsoft backends. And on databases. MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.
2) When a startup hits a major resource snag. IE, a major server dies and needs to be replaced.

I can’t think of another time when a startup could be switched from one ecosystem to another. Do you?

So, why am I telling you this? Because Zooomr is in the second group. I just got off the phone with Kristopher Tate and they are really in dire need of new database machines to get their servers back up.

If I were working at Microsoft or at Sun I’d be flying a team to Zooomr to help them get back up and running. I’d also videotape everything, and make a big deal about how a startup survived due to these efforts.

It’s interesting. Lots of companies claim to care about startups. Here’s a chance to help one. And, even, get one to switch from LAMP to Windows or something else. Anyone in?

I’d be a bit bummed that the Microsoft Surface computing team chose to use Adobe Flash for its Web site.

Andy Wilson. Remember the guy I introduced you to at Microsoft Research?

Funny, he was at the Maker Faire last weekend talking to everyone and showing off his latest thing. He builds demos for Bill Gates and he was the one who first showed me the PlayTable. Now called “Surface Computing.”

He handed me a stack of glass chips. I put one down. It revealed a video playing on the surface. You can see the same demo now two years later. My demo was of a prototype at Microsoft’s TechFest conference which was for employees only.

Anyway, surface computing is real and is wild. I want one of these in my house, but it is too expensive. Anyway, here’s how it works:

1) It has a piece of holographic glass that can display images that a projector shoots at it.
2) It has a projector underneath.
3) It has two cameras, aimed at the glass which can triangulate on objects on it.
4) It has software, written in Windows Presentation Foundation, that take advantage of the new hardware.

So, how does it recognize the glass chips placed on top of it? Easy, each chip has an invisible bar code in infrared-reflecting ink. Your eye can’t see it. The cameras can.

The problem is the expense. It costs a few grand for the glass, another grand or two for the projector, $50 for each camera, and then you need a computer underneath.

Which is why they didn’t announce you can buy one of these for your house.

Other cons? This thing does a killer demo. But can it do much more than the demo videos show? I’m not yet sure. It’s the kind of thing that’s killer for the first couple of hours but that gets old fast if there aren’t a bunch of real-world applications that you can do on the thing.

I’m watching the videos and seeing a lot of those same kind of killer demos but not much that would make me spend $5,000 on one of these.

How about you?

One thing, though. I love Andy Wilson. He’s an amazing developer. To me it’s totally amazing that he was helping kids out at Maker Faire. I wanted to grab each one of them and say “do you have any idea who you are talking with?”

UPDATE: I just discovered that surface computing was being worked on for more than five years now and that it highlights one of several directions that were pursued within the Surface Computing team, under Eric Horvitz, at Microsoft.

Microsoft just announced Surface Computing at On10.net (I’m jealous of Larry) and surface.com. More later…

UPDATE 1: Popular Mechanics got an early look.