What on earth is google drive I hear you cry?

Well read on and I will tell you.

You may have heard the rumours about Aliens coming to earth and Google Drive floating around recently. Well it turns out, one of the two actually does exist – Introducing Google Drive!

Google drive is basically a cloud-based storage solution called Google Drive which has just been made availble to the US on Android devices, Macs and desktop PC’s. Google Drive is very similar to Apple’s iCloud service and enables you to store your files on a remote server.

The main advantage of this system is that if you misplace your mobile your data is both safe and secure and obviously you can use your memory for other things. Whats even more significant is having a central location to store files which can be accessed from anywhere without having to transfer them between each device. Infact, Google Drive takes this one step further because its got Google Docs built-in to it, which means multiple people can access edit and work on files at one time. This also ensures people are always working on the latest version of the files.

I think this will really help search marketing agencies too.

You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond. If you cant tell yet, Im a big fan already of drive and of this kind of organization (Plus im a woman so this is right up my street!)

Heres what you can do with Google Drive

Create and collaborate.
Google Docs is built right into Google Drive which is fantastic as this means you can work with others in ‘real time’ on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items. Simples.

Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go)
All your stuff is literally right… there! You can access your stuff from anywhere””on the web, From any device. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. Google are working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. (Hmm this is the only complaint I have about google drive so far!)

Search everything
Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner etc. This is a really handy feature I think, also Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology (clever cloggs) For example, you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. Google also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your holiday/conference/night out etc into Drive, you can later search for ‘egypt 2012’ and photos of its sandy beaches should pop up. Pretty Impressive huh?

Google are rolling out Drive to other markets and i doubt it will be long before we see it here in the UK. Ill keep you all updated 🙂

We are thinking about using this feature in our office as its such an easy system to use when it becomes available over here, and lets face it we just love google and pretty much everything they do

Are you loving the sound of drive yet? Will you use it? Let us know your feedback/thoughts!

Heres a video about Google Drive

Over and Out

Heather (@eldertown)