Archive for the ‘Offline’ Category
- In: California | Company | dead | Fremont | Google | GrandCentral | Offline | Phone | united states
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GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. Calls will not go through.
We’ve noted problems with the service in the past, but never a general outage. The site is down. The service is down. Everything appears to be offline.
If you want to be a phone company, and get your users to rely on you to manage all of your incoming calls, this simply cannot happen. There are undoubtedly going to be a lot of very upset homeless people this morning, as well as GrandCentral’s other users.
GrandCentral’s blog is offline as well. If Google wants users to take the service seriously in the future, they should make some kind of announcement on their main blog letting users know what happened and when they can expect the service to be back.
Update: service is back online sometime before noon PST. Still no word from them on the cause of the outage.
Update 2: Cofounder Craig Walker posts the following on the GrandCentral blog:
I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.
Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. – Craig Walker
| Website: | grandcentral.com |
| Location: | Fremont, California, United States |
| Founded: | April 1, 2006 |
| Acquired: | July 1, 2007 by Google |
The basic idea around GrandCentral is one phone number for all your phones, for life. As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is… Learn More
- In: Functionality | Geared | Google Docs | Offline
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Starting Monday, Google announced the offline access for Google Docs will be possible through Google Gears, still in beta version, an open source browser extension that provides offline functionality for Web applications. With Google Docs and Google Gears, users can now access their desktop apps without any inconvenient, such as the lack of an Internet connection.
In May last year, Google launched Google Gears as “an important step in the evolution of web applications,” making data availability problems when there’s no Internet connection an issue of the past. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, said last year that Google Gears is “tackling a key limitation of the browser” and improves user experience in the “cloud.”
This year, Google wants to give users the chance to take the cloud with them anywhere, with an all-time accessibility: “With Google Docs offline (powered by Google Gears), I can take my little piece of the cloud with me wherever I go,” said Philip Tucker, Software Engineer for Google Docs, in the company’s blog.
All the user’s documents will be synced once the Gears extension is installed, and even if they don’t have an Internet connection, they will still be able to open and edit their documents. “When I lose my connection, I sacrifice some features, but I can still access my documents. Everything I need is saved locally,” said Tucker in the blog.
Google Gears currently offers support for Windows Vista Internet Explorer and Firefox, Windows XP Internet Explorer and Firefox, Mac OS/X Firefox and Linux Firefox. Everything will work through the web browser when offline, and once the Internet connection restored, the documents will sync with the server.
“It’s all pretty seamless,” said Tucker, as the user no longer needs to remember to save docs when leaving for a trip or save changes when internet connection is restored. “With the extra peace of mind, I can more fully rely on this tool for my important documents,” he added in the blog. For the time being, offline access in only available in English.
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