Google announced their much-anticipated web services product - now known to be called Google App Engine - at a press conference/party earlier today. TechCrunch, as always, has the first details out the gate. The product will be formally announced at 9:30 PM PST.

Web development geeks (and I’m not one) will have a greater appreciation for the finer points, but the short story is that Google App Engine is very similar to Amazon’s S3 offering - disk space, database services, and bandwidth, available on an as-you-need it, highly scalable basis.

Amazon’s S3 has become popular with certain types of developers, and probably won’t lose any business to Google’s product at this point. However, Google App Engine is free during the beta period, which has a few limitations, as reported by TC:

• Only the first 10,000 signups will be activated
• 500MB storage
• 10GB bandwidth
• 200,000,000 megacycles/day of CPU time
• The only supported language, for now, is Python

The Python thing is weird, but it’s what Google uses, and they’ll add support for more languages over time. If a developer is looking to deploy and app they’ve already written, I assume Amazon Web Services will be the way to go for a while, but Google App Engine may be good for developers writing new Python-based apps - especially, as this TC commenter points out, they want to get bought out by Google.

The amazing Seattle startup Jott.com, which lets you leave a voicemail message via phone and transcribes it for you, has rapidly been adding support for the top web2.0 productivity applications over the last few months.

It’s now possible to have your memo sent to Remember the Milk, Twitter, Jaiku, Vitalist, Blogger, WordPress, and now Google Calendar, and tons of other services. Awesome.

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While some of these are merely fun, the ability use your voice to add reminders to Google Calendar and Remember the Milk is downright killer. I’ve been using Twitter to send to-dos to my Remember the Milk account, but when driving, this is dangerous. I know talking on the phone isn’t all that great either, but driving time is thinking time for me, so Jott is very handy and much safer.

Check out Jott’s free public beta, and see also 1-800-GOOG-411 for another cool voice/web2.0 service.

Amazon has announced their slick new reading device Kindle, which will let you buy and download books to read on its e-paper screen.

I was pretty impressed with the specs, but I think $400 - not including any books - is way too steep, and that the next-gen model might be worth considering more seriously.

Amazon is obviously treating Kindle as a catalyst for further revenue from e-book sales. They’re also betting that people will see the device itself as a must-have. There are two problems with this ambitious approach, though:

1. If people are going to buy Kindle in order to gain access to content, the price of the device itself should not be prohibitive.

The Wii comes to mind - with the Wii, you get access to Nintendo’s reasonably priced back catalogue of games going back to NES and TurboGrafx 16. These games are reasonably cheap (as is Kindle content), and the system is not prohibitively expensive (unlike Kindle, which is more than the Wii despite being a far simpler device).

2. If the device is to be seen as a game-changer, a killer device, and thus worth $400, it has to be nothing short of awesome, out of the box.

This means it has to transform the content people already own, rather than requiring them to buy more stuff before doing anything. The iPod caught on so quickly because people had been accumulating MP3s for years. If you had to throw down four bills for an iPod, then shell out another three grand to fill it up, it wouldn’t have become the ubiquitous, must-have device it is.

Since Kindle, unlike the Wii and the iPod, lacks both of these potential paths to greatness, I have to predict that it’ll become a cool toy for wealthy, early-adopter geeks, but won’t catch on in the mainstream.

This is a major blunder on Amazon’s part, because they could have addressed these shortcomings in several ways.

First, they could offer free e-books to Kindle owners who’ve already purchased dead tree editions of the same titles from Amazon. Since I’ve been ordering from Amazon for nearly a decade, this would be no small incentive (especially since I’ve come nowhere close to reading all of the books I’ve purchased). Just as the iPod works with people’s existing MP3 collections, Kindle should add some value to people’s existing library of books (at least the ones they’ve purchased from Amazon).

Second, they could include free e-books in the purchase price of Kindle, or perhaps spread out the cost of the device through a one-year subscription, which would include book credits each month, the way Audible does. I’d be much more likely to pay $100 upfront and $30 a month for a year if I got a few books up front, a few books a month, and didn’t have to come up with $400 just to get started.

Third, they could add value to existing content (the way the iPod made MP3s portable) by supporting PDFs and other formats people already own content in (though Kindle does have some support for .txt files, as well as free Wikipedia access).

Because Amazon has failed to give Kindle these advantages, I predict that it will be seen as a good first step, but ultimately flop. It sold out, to the early adopters, in the first few hours, but I don’t think it’ll go much further, at least not without significant changes in pricing or content support.

I got the strangest message today, a day after placing an order for a flash drive (this one, in case you care) on Amazon.com:

Hello from Amazon.com.

We are writing about the order you placed on October 30 2007

(Order# xxx-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxx). The item(s) listed below will actually

ship sooner than we originally expected:

“SanDisk 4 GB Cruzer Micro USB Flash Drive with U3 (SDCZ6-4096-

A10RB)” [Electronics]

Estimated arrival date: 11/02/2007

I’m not sure why they have notifications like this, unless perhaps they got complaints from geeks who were taking days off or working from home to wait for their packages. Early is good. Maybe they’re just bragging.

In case you’d forgotten how awesome Gmail is, or were somehow not aware of what it can do for you, the Free Geek has posted a list of built-ins, Firefox extensions, desktop/mobile tools, and Greasemonkey scripts you can use to make Gmail work even better for you.

As hundreds of thousands of people buy the iPhone and delight in its fabulous user interface, I predict that the following will happen:

• People will be disappointed with the network speed, as some have already reported
• People will love the UI and will show it off to friends. Some of them will drop their $600 gadget while showing it off. Big + shiny = easy to drop.
• Some people will think it’s made of iridium and not get a case. They will end up with a scratched iPhone.

  

• People will get irritated that other devices don’t have such good UIs. Enrollment in college courses focusing on user interface design will soar.
• Supply will remain strong, though some areas will sell out.
• People will gradually start to realize that half a dozen websites have iPhone-disassesmbly photosets, so they’ll stop trying to be the first to destroy theirs.
• Someone will figure out how to unlock it, so you don’t have to use AT&T
• The hundreds of auctions on eBay for the iPhone (currently ranging from $850 to $2,500 for the 8GB model) will result in a lot of people getting ripped off, just as we saw with the PS3 and Wii. eBay will start requiring the username to be written on a sheet of paper and included in the auction photos, but it’ll be a bit too late.
• eBay will have to shut down a lot of ridiculous iPhone auctions, like this one for $21,000,000 (which isn’t really fraudulent, since you can use the “make an offer” feature to pay a less-absurd-but-still-crazy price, but people will put in bogus bids).
• The torrent of ridiculous iPhone accessories will last until at least Christmas
• The next iPhone will be even better, and people who wait for the 2nd iteration will not be sorry that they did.

Other iPhone predictions as people take them home and start using them?

Prose from the Pros

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Those who rode Seattle’s Metro bus service about two years ago might recall being very excited about the Google Maps / King County Transit mashup BusMonster, which showed bus schedules and traffic data (thanks to the UW) on a fully functional Google map.

BusMonster was far more usable than Metro’s own Trip Planner site for planning a route, but it broke when Google made changes to the map code, which BusMonster didn’t keep up with. The map tiles no longer display on BusMonster, making it unusable.

Fortunately, Google has added Metro’s bus information to Seattle-area Gmaps in an even better format. Check out this map of the downtown core, and click on a bus stop to see what buses stop there, and arrival times of the next few buses.

Regular Google Maps are also now displaying simple wireframes for downtown buildings, and more of the buildings have labels - for example, the Bank of America Tower (but curiously, not the county courthouse, nor the $1 billion central library, which doesn’t even have a wireframe to show its Rem Koolhaas-designed outline).

Google is doing a lot to get more local. I noticed on my phone yesterday that you can set Google Mobile to only display local businesses in search results (enable More Options, then back to search). This feature is so useful that I hardly ever use the phone book any more. If I need to order a dumptruck full of gravel (which I’ve done three times lately - don’t ask), I can use my phone to google “gravel 98144″ and get these results, including the phone number of the place I’m thinking of. Not bad.

What would you like to see in Google’s local offerings? What’s available in your area? I’m a bit jealous that the Bay Area got street view maps first, but I know Seattle is still ahead of the curve in the local data Google makes available.

I’m using Google Calendar to send me text message notifications of recurring events, which I don’t want to clog up my Airset calendar. Google has built some amazing features into the calendar app, and is giving Airset a run for its money.

While this isn’t a feature I plan to use right now, I found out today that you can txt Google and get a text message back showing you your next appointments:

to receive calendar information, just send a text message containing one of the following commands to the shortcode “48368″ (GVENT):

• Send “next” to get a notification regarding your next scheduled event.
• Send “day” to get a notification containing all of your scheduled events for the present day.
• Send “nday” to get a notification containing all of your events for the following day.

You can do tons more stuff with Google via SMS, though the above GVENT trick isn’t listed. You can even try the various features in their interface, so you’re not paying for actual messages while you try out the service. It’s of course free from Google, but may incur usage charges from your wireless carrier.