Googlefy Your Life: Mobile Information in the Cloud #mlearncon

I first met the presenter of this session, Michelle Lentz (@writetechnology), at DevLearn in 2009 and now again at mLearnCon, plus she has become a good friend in the Twittersphere. Michelle is a technology evangelist and she is a wealth of knowledge blogging on everything elearning, social media and technology related on one hand while maintaining a popular wine blog on the other.

This session was all about the pros/cons of Googlefying your life with Google apps. As with anything hosted in the cloud she covered privacy issues and security, plus support, mobile accessibility and all sorts of other insights in to how she uses the various apps. (Click here for the session description.)

In light of security, privacy and the reliancy on the Internet when you utilize Google Apps, Michelle talked about 'trust'. She has accepted that she's given up her privacy to use all the Google Apps she loves and said for her it's about trusting in the fact that 'my external hard drive may fail but Google Servers will not'. Here are some of the apps she mentioned in her session:

• Google Mobile Apps - great for voice search / localized search
• Google Goggles - search visually on Android, access to blog search and book search
• Google Docs - collaboration with many people and accessible from mobile
• Google Talk - on your iPhone
• Gmail - native app on Android or sets up as normal email on iPhone
• Reasons to go with Gmail: 7GB free storage, email labeling system, no permanent deleting
• Google Calendar -  run multiple calendars, share and color code, easy to add events
• Google Reader - has a mobile version
• Google Video for business
• Google Mobile
• Google Talk
• Google Translate - one of my personal favorites
• Google Earth
• Google Voice - direct all calls to one number (US only)
• Google Maps and Navigation

One good thing to know is that Google's privacy policy differs for every app so it's worth reading the fine print. She ended with a hilarious video parody from the Onion News Network which describes an 'opt-out' feature offered by Google:



@Schnicker