Google Apps: This is a set of online office productivity tools like email, chat, word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software. It runs great in Google’s browser (called Google Chrome), but is not to be confused with Google’s App Engine.

Google App Engine (GAE): This is a sandboxed hosted environment to run computer programs written in Python and Java. The sandbox disallows applications from accessing the server hardware directly and enables Google to marshall and proxy certain resource calls so that it can charge for utlisation of the infrastructure on which the application is hosted (CPU, disk, network bandwidth).

Google Web Toolkit (GWT): This is a Java-based API which allows you to create client-side AJAX-based software linked to server-side Java servlets using pure Java code. The server-side can be hosted as a Google App Engine, but need not be – it can be hosted on any web server running the Java Servlet API.

Google has done a good job of simplifying the software development and deployment process and using one or more of the development environments they provide makes it easy to write software and deploy it for the world to use. We are likely to see more offerings from Google in this product space as it moves into the operating system market and “dukes it out” with Microsoft in the years to come.

Google Goggles: An Android-based application, i.e. available on mobile phones only (at this time), which augments what the phone’s camera sees with Google search results. Effectively, you can use the phone’s camera to lookup information on Google’s search engine. For example, point the Android-phone to the Golden Gate Bridge and press search and Google Goggles will recognise what it is seeing through the camera and use that information to conduct a Google search – the result is information about the Golden Gate Bridge retrieved from Google’s search engine. Goggles will, in time, also enable visual language translation. Simply point the Android-phone’s camera to text written in say German and the Google Goggles will lookup the text, translate it and feed it back to you audibly or visually in English.