Posted by Madhav Bhagat, Software Engineer, Classroom

(Cross-posted on Google for Education Blog)

Primary school students in rural Australia are using Google Classroom to collaborate with astronauts on the Space Station. A school without any IT support in Mexico was able to go paperless with Classroom. And in the United Kingdom, a Holton, Oxfordshire school is exploring local historical villages and writing reports using Google Apps and Classroom.

These examples represent just a few stories from the more than 40 million students, teachers and administrators around the world who are using Google Apps for Education. Classroom launched this summer to make Google Apps for Education even simpler — saving teachers time and making it easier to collaborate with students. And today, we’re launching 5 improvements to Classroom, focusing on things educators and students around the world told us were most important to them:

Invite students more easily with Groups
If you already have a Google Group set up for your class, you can now use that group to invite students to Classroom. And if your school uses tools like School Directory Sync, your Google Apps administrator can sync your school’s class rosters from your student information system (SIS) into Google Groups, helping you use these groups to set up a class in seconds.

Teachers can create classes using existing groups

Mark assignments as “done”
Not all assignments require students to submit work online — like reading a chapter or conducting an experiment — so we’ve added the ability for students to simply mark assignments as "done" if there's nothing to turn in. We’ve also given the Assignments page a refresh, to make it easier for students to keep track of upcoming work.

Students can mark assignments as "done" if there isn't anything to turn in

Greater teacher controls
We’re also giving teachers greater control over their class stream. Teachers can now set permissions for whether or not their class can post or comment in the stream, they can mute individual students from posting or commenting and can even view previously deleted items in the stream.

Export all grades
Teachers will now have the ability to download grades for all assignments at once, making it easier to export assignments to any gradebook.

Sort by first or last name
And now teachers can also choose to sort students by first or last name, depending on their needs.

We hope that these updates make Classroom even more efficient and effective to use with your students. We'll be making regular updates throughout the year, so keep submitting feedback and stay tuned.

Posted by James Stuart, Office Manager, Blue Carrot Catering

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is James Stuart, Office Manager for Blue Carrot Catering, a catering company in Wellington, New Zealand.

One of the key ingredients to a successful event is that your food and drink are served on time (nothing fizzles out a cocktail party like an empty glass!). At Blue Carrot Catering, our job is to not only make mouth-watering food for all occasions, but to make sure that it gets to people where and when they need it. We’re one of the biggest corporate catering companies in Wellington, making 60 deliveries each day to everything from weddings and birthday parties (and occasionally serving canapes at the zoo). Getting all these tasty treats laid out on trestle tables and perched on cake stands around the city not takes both a team expert chefs and a team of Greg Murphys.

Until recently though, we relied on a manual, time-consuming and inefficient means of getting food delivered to the right place at the right time. We used to give each of our drivers a piece of paper at the beginning of the day with a schedule and list of drop-off locations. This became quite a hassle if anything changed along the way. If a client’s address was different to the one listed, the delivery time or order changed, or the driver got stuck in traffic, we’d have to jump on the blower and let the customer or driver know what was going on. It was inefficient, to say the least, and made it hard to give customers exact arrival times for their food.

To help us get a more accurate picture of where drivers are and make it easier to update information about deliveries on the fly, we started using Google Maps Coordinate. Maps Coordinate helps us manage our drivers and the way we schedule deliveries by plotting drivers on a map and making it easy to update jobs and see driver locations in real time.

Now, instead of having a piece of paper with a list of the day’s deliveries, drivers have everything they need on their handset — from the route for their deliveries plotted out on a map, to a list of the day’s jobs. If a delivery address changes we can update drivers automatically, and if a customer calls to see where their delivery is, we can jump online and see exactly where it is and let them know if the driver is two blocks down the road, or two kilometres away stuck in a traffic jam. Maps Coordinate also integrates with our email and calendar system, Google Apps so we can plan and manage things like menus and rosters in a more integrated way.

At Blue Carrot we pride ourselves on attention to detail and this includes being able to offer punctual and reliable deliveries. Since making the move to Maps Coordinate over a year ago we’ve not only been able to give our customers more accurate estimations of our delivery times, but we’ve been able to track the status of all our orders and benchmark our delivery times so our overall service is now better.

Posted by Steve Huffman, Co-founder and CTO of Hipmunk

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Huffman, Co-founder and CTO of Hipmunk, a San Francisco-based travel startup focused on taking the agony out of travel search. 

We started Hipmunk in 2010 with a simple notion: take the agony out of booking travel. We wanted to build a travel website that we would want to use. Based on our own travel experiences we knew that people want a faster, easier way to search and book travel. In our recent hotel search redesign, we incorporated Google Maps to enable our users to better identify and compare hotels located near the things they care about most.

Many of our users are tech-savvy travelers who appreciate the problem we’re trying to solve and understand what it takes on the back end to deliver a great product. Using Google Maps allows us to sort through and simplify complex travel data so we can present the factors that are most important to users in an easy-to-understand and visual way.

Travelers often want to stay close to family, a particular attraction, or even a business meeting location. That’s why 70 percent of Hipmunk visitors use maps when searching for a hotel. Our Heatmaps feature now relies on Google Maps data to highlight the areas with the highest concentration of food, nightlife, tourism, shopping, and “vice” (i.e., casinos, bars). By simply clicking Heatmaps and selecting a filter option, users can quickly and easily see which areas suit their travel style.

Since location is a top factor in deciding where to stay, another update we rolled out in the recent redesign is the ability to drop a pin near a specific point of interest. This allows users to locate a tourist attraction or relative’s home and then pick a place to stay in close proximity. Another feature that highlights the importance of location and proximity is our integration with Google Calendar. Users can even integrate their calendar so that they can easily see where their meeting or events are taking place so they can stay somewhere convenient nearby.

At Hipmunk, we consider an interactive and personalized map experience to be integral to a positive user experience. Thanks in part to Google Maps, our users avoid the agony of travel planning and spend less time planning so they can spend more time relaxing.

Posted by Saswat Panigrahi, Product Manager, Chrome for Work

Editor's note: To learn more about the new features and pricing options available with Chromebooks for Work, join our Chrome for Work product team for a Hangout on Air on Wednesday, October 29th.

After an office flood displaced 40 workers from a regional site, Just Eat, a UK-based online food ordering company, found a simple way to work through the disruption. The company delivered dozens of Chromebooks overnight to its headquarters and configured them by the time workers came in the next morning.

The story highlights some of the key reasons why a growing number of companies are adopting Chromebooks: they offer easy manageability and heightened security as well as speed and simplicity for IT and end users. Companies such as Woolworths, Auberge Resorts and Chapters Health have equipped their workers with devices in a matter of days thanks to Chromebooks’ simple cloud-based architecture.

Today, we’re taking a big step toward making it even easier for companies to select Chromebooks as their device of choice by announcing features specifically focused on improving identity, manageability, virtualization, performance and pricing:

Simplified and enhanced identity: Single sign-on, a popular customer request, lets you log in with the same credentials and identity provider that you use in the rest of your organization. This feature uses the universal SAML standard and works with most of the major identity providers including CA SiteMinder, Microsoft AD FS, Okta, Ping Identity, SecureAuth, and SimpleSAMLphp. We’re also adding multiple sign-in, which allows you to securely and quickly switch between work and personal accounts on your Chromebook.

Improved certificate management for wireless networks: Businesses, schools and government institutions can now easily provision Chromebooks with client certificates to access 802.1X EAP-TLS wireless networks and mutual TLS protected web resources. Using the Admin Console, IT admins can pre-configure their secure networks, push certificate management extensions and pre-select certificates to be used with certain websites and networks. Partners such as Aruba Networks, Cloudpath Networks and Aerohive Networks have already integrated this functionality.

Expanded Chrome management for any device: Getting new workers or contractors provisioned with web apps on Chrome is now easier than ever. With the Admin Console, IT administrators can push a list of bookmarks and many other settings to signed-in workers on all platforms including mobile devices.

Improved virtualization options: We’ve worked with virtualization partners like Citrix and VMware to expand the boundaries of what’s possible on Chromebooks. Recently, Citrix released a new Citrix Receiver optimized for Chromebooks, which provides more direct integration with Chromebooks and enables new features including seamless integration with Google Cloud Print; cut-and-paste between local and virtualized applications; better audio and video playback; improved license and application usage monitoring; and protection from end-to-end SSL connections.

Rich graphics experiences: Chromebooks are perfect for web applications and they can support rich graphics and powerful 3-D applications. Google recently teamed with Nvidia and VMware and announced at VMWorld technology to speed the delivery of graphics-heavy virtualized applications to Chromebooks, allowing you to seamlessly run 3-D modeling and simulation applications often associated with heavier hardware.

More flexibility on pricing: Starting today, customers can purchase all of these advanced features, management, and support through a new annual subscription option of $50 per device per year. This new pricing option is available first in the US and Canada, with more regions to follow. We’re also supporting licensing portability, which means if you lose or replace a Chromebook you can easily apply your existing license to a new device.

These new features and options reflect our commitment to making Chromebooks an everyday business tool that both IT admins and users can rely on over the years to come.

Posted by Tom Percival, CTO, graze

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to support their mission while growing at faster and faster speeds. Today, we hear from Tom Percival, CTO of graze, who chronicles a selection of technology milestones behind graze’s growth and explains the role Google Apps for Work is playing in their growth story.

graze is a snack company with a technology-centric culture. What started as an idea between friends in 2007 has spiralled into an international snack business, employing 350 staff and generating over £50m in annual revenues. Along the course of our healthy snacks revolution, we’ve learnt how smart technology decisions can often hold the keys to growth opportunities. I’m delighted to highlight several milestones where we drove some incredible growth through inventive technology decision making.

Muscle up new technology with robotics
In 2010, two years into our journey, graze began investing in infrastructure for it’s first fully-automated production line, for faster and larger production. We rallied our smartest brains to collaborate with the top engineering firms in the world to invent a giant robotic food weigher that could pack product 24 hours a day. Within a year, we’d increased production (and sales) so much that we’d outgrown our space and needed more room to both breath and grow. Now, we’re operating out of a new top-secret “mega-factory” in West London.

Personalisation is the key to our customer’s heart
graze snacks are personal: we love that customers can find the snacks they love, no matter the palate or diet. Serving personalised snack combinations is both challenging and rewarding: we rely heavily on our proprietary algorithm, DARWIN, to enable us to create 4 million box combinations from over 200 products, each individually composed. This data is driven by our intense attention to detail around customer feedback — over 300 million customer ratings — which ultimately feed into our database to make our graze machine even smarter.

Constraint can inspire invention
In 2013 we made the leap across the pond and launched the graze service in the United States. We built a powerful postal ‘brain’ to monitor deliveries there in order to efficiently route packages nationwide, which we tested by posting 10,000 cardboard rabbits and monitoring their progress across the U.S. in real-time. Within 24 hours we had a customer in every state and within 2 weeks - 20,000 customers nationwide. Our postal brain really captures how much we have a technology-first approach in our DNA.

48 hour turnarounds on new product inspiration
At the heart of our advantage over traditional FMCG companies is our ability to rapidly design and release a new product. Because of the close relationship we have with our consumers we get rapid and detailed feedback on the products that we send out. Custom built analytics tools allow us to easily and quickly spot trends that help us reformulate our range. The tight vertical integration we have achieved thanks to our custom built supply chain platform means that our manufacturing and logistics can react just as quickly. This means we can now conceive of, design, manufacture and release a new product within 48 hours. Our ability to react to customer feedback meant that within 6 months of launching the US we had localised 40% of our range. This is an agility that traditional food companies cannot achieve.

Transforming our teams with Google Apps for Work
Our priority has been to pick tools that can transform our business — and for this we rely on Google Apps for Work. Moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps for Work saved us 50% in IT costs alone. But beyond the financial savings, Gmail and Calendar connect our team and their applications under single-sign on, so we can stay on track and secure. By successfully migrating our platform to Google Apps for Work we’re noticing improved speed, easier unleashing good ideas and improvements in how we collaborate as a team. Combined, these improvements are helping our company to grow and to bring healthy snacks to customers in the UK and US.

Click to expand the full infographic below.

Posted by Brian Peterson and John Rector, co-founders, Switch Communications

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform blog)

Today’s guest bloggers are Brian Peterson and John Rector, co-founders of Switch Communications, a San Francisco-based voice communications startup.

When companies first started using business phones, work was a place you went; today, work is a thing you do, whether you’re at your desk or in transit. Yet the business phone hasn’t evolved to work the way that you do. With today’s mobile worker in mind, we created Switch.co, a business phone system built in the cloud, from the ground up. With Switch.co, you can receive calls on any device, whether it’s your desktop through the Chrome app, on mobile with the Android or iOS apps, or even your old desk phone (if you really, really want to). You can even switch seamlessly between devices, so if you start a call on your cell in your car, you can transfer it to your desk when you get into the office without having to hang up then dial back in.

On top of that, Switch.co is designed specifically for Google Apps for Work users: given its rich set of APIs, Google Apps is deeply integrated into the app, allowing users to view recent Gmail messages, see upcoming Calendar events, and access recently shared Docs while in the context of a conversation. You can even launch a Hangout directly from a call. We know Google Apps admins expect setup and management to be easy, so we’ve ensured you can get started with Switch.co over your lunch break.

We built Switch.co for Google Apps users because we’re such heavy Google users ourselves: Switch.co runs on Google App Engine and our team relies on Google Apps internally to keep business running smoothly and efficiently. Because many of our employees work remotely, it’s vital that we can access information at any time and on any device, then collaborate in real-time, no matter where we are. With single sign-on, we can access all the Google products we need with just one log-in; with Google Drive, we can store and share all of our files in one place; and with Google Sheets and Google Docs, we can work together on projects without worrying about out of date attachments.

Drive is particularly powerful in enabling our design and engineering teams to easily share and centralize the many assets required to take a idea from a concept to launch. We deal with a ton of huge files – hi-res graphics, professional grade videos, Adobe Illustrator files — and the ability to store and share them from Drive makes working together so much more seamless. Not only are these files too big for email, but they’d also otherwise splinter into countless versions distributed throughout our employees’ individual hard drives. Plus, the files are backed up by Google so we know they won’t get lost, and they’re centralized in one system, so we don’t have to worry about sensitive data leaving our company’s domain. And given that Google got its start as a search company, being able to search by document name or the copy within a file makes finding what you need easy and fast.

We rely on Google Sheets for our highly collaborative projects, like launch planning. Our entire calendar for the development and promotion of Switch.co, for example, was created and constantly updated in a Google spreadsheet. That way, our marketing and PR teams can access the latest version of the go-to-market plan whenever they need it.

We couldn’t have launched Switch.co without the power of Google Apps for Work enabling us to collaborate and work with the flexibility that a fast-paced startup needs. Google Apps for Work does for Switch Communications what Switch.co does for callers everywhere — it enables you to be agile, connected, and always on the go.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform blog)

Today at Atmosphere Live, I spoke about how Google is helping developers realize the promise of cloud computing by providing on-demand access to world-class technology at an affordable price.

We believe that compute — the core of any cloud workload — should be simple and fast to provision, scale without effort, and be priced in accordance with Moore’s Law. In March of this year we set a new standard for economics in the public cloud when we brought the price of core infrastructure, including compute & storage, in line with where it should be.

And, as predicted by Moore’s Law, we can now lower prices again. Effective immediately, we are cutting prices of Google Compute Engine by approximately 10% for all instance types in every region. These cuts are a result of increased efficiency in our data centers as well as falling hardware costs, allowing us to pass on lower prices to our customers.

Old and new prices for all our Compute Engine instance types

Using Compute Engine doesn’t just lower costs; it makes developers more productive, agile and efficient. Many development teams spend about 80% of time on what we call “fix and fiddle,” such as managing systems, fixing bugs and just keeping the lights on. Only 20% of time is spent how it should be — building new products or systems that will be platforms for growth.

With Compute Engine and the rest of Cloud Platform, it doesn’t have to be this way. A small company like Snapchat can reach a global audience with just a few people on their development and operations team. Workiva, which processes financial reports for 60% of the Fortune 500, can focus on solving the needs of their users rather than managing infrastructure. And, this past World Cup, Coca Cola and Cloud Platform partner CI&T built and ran the Happiness Flag campaign in just a few weeks with the help of Google Compute Engine. The campaign solicited over three million contributions from fans in more than 200 countries.

We've made a lot of progress in the past year and look forward to what's coming next. Tune in to Google Cloud Platform Live on November 4th to learn more about where we’re headed.