This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog.

Cloud computing is secure, simple, keeps you productive and saves you money. But the cloud can also save energy. A recent report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix estimates that cloud computing has the potential to reduce global carbon emissions by millions of metric tons. And Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford who has led several studies on data center energy use, has written that for many enterprises, the cloud “is significantly more energy efficient than using in-house data centres.”

Because we’re committed to sustainability, we sharpened our pencils and looked at our own services to see how they stack up against the alternatives.

We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for more than 4 million businesses. The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient than running in-house email. This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilisation rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.
An illustration of inefficient server utilisation by smaller companies compared to efficient utilisation in the cloud.

If you’re more of a romantic than a businessperson, think of it this way: It takes more energy to send a message in a bottle than it does to use Gmail for a year, as long as you count the energy used to make the bottle and the wine you drank.


We ran a similar calculation for YouTube and the results are even more striking: the servers needed to play one minute of YouTube consume about 0.0002 kWh of energy. To put that in perspective, it takes about eight seconds for the human body to burn off that same amount. You’d have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD.

In calculating these numbers, we included the energy used by all the Google infrastructure supporting Gmail and YouTube. Of course, your own laptop or phone also consumes energy while you’re accessing Google, so it’s important to choose an efficient model.

There’s still a lot to learn about the global impacts of cloud computing, but one thing we can say with certainty: bit for bit, email for email, and video for video, it’s more efficient in the cloud.

Posted by David Jacobowitz, Program Manager, Green Engineering and Operations

This is a cross-post from the Gmail blog

The great thing about web apps is that you can access all of your information on the go, and we’ve introduced ways to use Google Apps on a variety of devices like mobile phones and tablets. But it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally find yourself in situations when you don’t have an Internet connection, like planes, trains and carpools. When we announced Chromebooks at Google I/O 2011, we talked about bringing offline access to our web apps, and now we’re taking our first steps in that direction. Gmail offline will be available today, and offline for Google Calendar and Google Docs will be rolling out over the next week, starting today.

Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app that’s intended for situations when you need to read, respond to, organise and archive email without an internet connection. This HTML5-powered app is based on the Gmail web app for tablets, which was built to function with or without web access. After you install the Gmail Offline app from the Chrome Web Store, you can continue using Gmail when you lose your connection by clicking the Gmail Offline icon on Chrome’s “new tab” page.


Google Calendar and Google Docs let you seamlessly transition between on- and offline modes. When you’re offline in Google Calendar, you can view events from your calendars and RSVP to appointments. With Google Docs you can view documents and spreadsheets when you don’t have a connection. Offline editing isn’t ready yet, but we know it’s important to many of you, and we’re working hard to make it a reality. To get started using Google Calendar or Google Docs offline, just click the gear icon at the top right corner of the web app and select the option for offline access.

IT administrators can deploy Chrome Web Store apps to users en masse by setting up organisational policies for Chrome.

Today’s world doesn’t slow down when you’re offline and it’s a great feeling to be productive from anywhere, on any device, at any time. We’re pushing the boundaries of modern browsers to make this possible, and while we hope that many users will already find today’s offline functionality useful, this is only the beginning. Support for offline document editing and customising the amount of email to be synchronised will be coming in the future. We also look forward to making offline access more widely available when other browsers support advanced functionality (like background pages).

Posted by Benoît de Boursetty, Product Manager

Today we're launching a new feature that lets you have free, high-quality voice and video chats with friends and family anywhere in Australia or overseas. Gmail voice and video chat takes place all without leaving the browser -- no more switching to another window or running another program.

Sometimes there's no substitute for speaking to and seeing someone, and in tighter economic times, an online video or voice chat is a cost-effective option. If a smiley face and a 'lol' aren't getting your message across, with a simple click you can now share your real meaning face-to-face over a video connection.



All that's needed is a webcam and small browser plugin, and you can start video chatting with your friends, family, and colleagues in Gmail. If you don't have a webcam, you can simply chat by voice.

To get started, visit this site.

Posted by Ashley Gorringe, Product Marketing Manager

Posted by Julian Sonego, Consumer Marketing Manager

Last month, we invited you to join the Gmail collaborative video, pull out your video cameras and help us imagine how an email message travels around the world.

Two Rubik's cubes, a few jaunts in a bottle, beautiful sand animation, and one dog's trip to the Southernmost point of the continental US later, we'd received more than 1,100 fantastic clips from Gmail fans from more than 65 countries.

We're delighted to have received 4 clips from Australia and 2 from New Zealand.

It was impossible to fit all of the great submissions into one cut, but after hours of fun watching jugglers, firemen, camel-riders, and original animation, the edited highlights were spliced together into this video and the Google Maps API was used to put together a map showing where many of the clips came from.

You can see the final video and the Aussie /Kiwi contributions here.




A big thank you to everyone who participated!

Posted by Christine Knight, Creative Maximiser

New starters at Google invariably find themselves surrounded by new terms, acronyms and ways of conducting business – including using instant messenger as a regular form of communication. We favour using our own IM applications – Google Talk and Gmail Chat – over email to quickly “ping” each other work-related messages and questions. As well as being a fast and instant way to connect and get a reply, it helps bridge the gap between international offices.


With many Australian businesses using IM as a standard form of work communication, a whole range of new etiquette issues have arisen! (I find email etiquette easy to navigate in comparison to good IM manners).

Besides the easy-to-do accidental IM-ing disasters (“I pinged the wrong person!” is a common moan heard around the office), the instant, casual nature of instant messaging applications has brought with it a minefield of questions as to IM etiquette.

Straight from the Australian Googlers’ mouths, here are a few tips you also might find useful from our office IM experiences.

1. The “I’m busy” sign. It generally means that the person is busy. Don’t IM them to say “I know you're busy, but...”.

2. Having a long/personal/meaningful message in the status bar. Remember that your co-workers will all see it. You might be the biggest Grey’s Anatomy fan in the country, but having “McDreamy Is Mine” as your IM status might not go down so well with your boss.

3. If you’re out of office, set your status to reflect your location. Those five seconds will be well spent when it means you won’t get co-workers bugging you to attend training in the Sydney office – when you’re actually in London that week.

4. Setting the status to "I'm so incredibly busy don't even think about IMing me". If you're really that busy, you should probably sign out!

5. Take advantage of the great features like the ability to set a “nickname” or “alias” instead of using the user’s actual email address. For example, your friend’s name/alias is “K007kid”, you can just make it display as "Steve" on your end and stop those “who on earth is that again?” moments.

6. It’s great to get instant attention and feedback from colleagues when matters are urgent, especially when dealing with colleagues in other countries and time zones. But if it’s going to require you writing an essay, put it in an email.

7. Begin your chat with “Do you have minute?” or, “Need to ask you a quick question”, rather than diving straight into the topic. Think of it like having a conversation with someone in person. If you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t say it over IM.

8. IMing complicated questions to the person who sits behind you. Come on now. It’s not that hard to just turn around.

To finish up, here is a heart-warming story of how one Googler used IM to (accidentally) find love. Remember it next time you ping the wrong person and wish there was a “Ctrl Z” function for IM. You never know where that random ping may lead!

“My would-be fiancé had started working in my office a few days before, and I'd added her as an IM contact. One day I sent a “funny” IM to an old friend, with an alphabetically similar name. I realised quickly that I'd sent it to her, and rereading it, I realised that it was something that really shouldn't be said to someone you've just met. It was pretty horrible. Unexpectedly, however, it ended up breaking the ice. That was four years ago, and we get married next September.”

See more at the Google Talk blog.