Posted by Andrew Jessett, IT manager at Xero

Editors note: It’s been just over a year since we launched Chromebox for meetings, and to celebrate the milestone we’re sharing stories about our customers and their approaches to business, culture and productivity that are bringing them success. In today’s post, online accounting software provider Xero tells how it manages to keep its startup-like efficiency, innovation and feel while expanding globally. To learn more about Chromebox for meetings, join us online at Chrome Live on April 22 and see how companies scale face-to-face meetings across the globe.

Xero was started by several developers nine years ago in an apartment above a coffee shop in Wellington, New Zealand. Today, we have more than 1,000 employees in 15 cities across the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand and provide online accounting software to more than 400,000 global customers. With more than 200 percent five-year average sales growth as of June 2014, our biggest challenge now is managing the fast-paced growth while maintaining our nimble, tech-forward startup culture.

We like to keep work in small groups and move quickly. Our teams work closely on projects even when they’re located in different offices around the world. And since we like to stay on the cutting edge of technology, we’re using Google Apps, which allows us to stay coordinated and productive.

Our pain point in IT was finding a way for teams in different cities and offices to meet and collaborate at the same time. We used a variety of video conferencing technologies, including PCs, HDMI/VGA and projectors. They were difficult to set up, meetings were delayed and productivity suffered. As we continued to grow, this struggle intensified, and we realized that we needed to find a solution fast. We needed to streamline our meeting room setups and get the most out of Hangouts. When we heard about Chromebox for meetings, we jumped at the chance to try it out.

We started with six Chromebox for meetings units. Today, we have nearly a hundred. They’re in every meeting room. We use them for room-to-room conferencing and all hands meetings. The global team uses them to connect every two weeks and the CEO addresses the entire company via Hangout on Air.

Chromebox for meetings allow us to keep things simple. There’s very little infrastructure or wireless connections needed on our side, so no cables necessary. Setup is fast and the integration with Gmail makes joining Hangouts as easy as clicking a button. It’s easy to share documents and work on them together. Then there’s the cost savings. Instead of spending between $40,000 and $60,000 on a video conferencing system, we spent one-tenth of that on a Chromebox and a display.

We may be a larger company now, but we still want to move and act quickly. No matter how large we become, our values align with those of fresh innovative companies that respond rapidly to market demand, customer needs and competition. Thanks to Chromebox for meetings, we can keep the startup feel and agility while growing at breakneck speed.

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Cross-posted from the Google Geo Developers blog

Our digital lives are increasingly connected. We research on our laptops, look up directions on our phones and even navigate with our watches. And by creating maps unique to each user and offering features such as saved places, Google Maps has been making it easier to continue these tasks as we move from device to device.

However, although maps embedded from Google Maps are now built uniquely for every Google user, most of the now two million active sites and apps using the Maps APIs are still islands. When I look for a place to eat on Zagat, I can’t see how far away it is from work. When I look at a travel map in the New York Times, I can’t save those places in order to navigate to them later.

Today we’re taking a step towards connecting these two million sites and apps by introducing a signed-in JavaScript Maps API experience and a feature called attributed save. To help illustrate, we’ve partnered with the New York Times to bring this experience to their 36 hours travel column.

A connected JavaScript Maps API

When you add &signed_in=true to the Google Maps JavaScript API source url, your end users will have the option to sign into the map with their Google account. When they do so, your users will receive a map built for them, in the context of your app. Their saved places — including home and work addresses (if set by the end user) as well as other relevant places — will appear automatically on their map, providing a layer of context that anchors your content and makes it stand out even more.

Attributed save

Once users are signed into the Google Maps in your app, we can together create an integrated experience between your map content and Google Maps. With attributed save, signed-in users can save places from your app to be accessed later, with attribution and linkbacks, on Google Maps for the web, Android and iOS.

What’s more, you can also enable deep links into your mobile applications. For instance, users can save a place from your desktop app (such as Zagat.com), open up the place on Google Maps on their Android device, and deep link directly into your Android app.

Enabling attributed save is easy — just specify your app name, a link and a place search string or place ID when creating a marker and info window. Or use our SaveWidget to enable attributed save in your own custom info window.

In addition, we’re also launching attributed save across all embedded maps today. Attribution and linkback parameter will be inferred automatically from the domain and referrer of the host site, so if you’re using our embedded maps, you don’t need to do anything! If you’re using the Google Maps Embed API, you may customize the source and link back parameters yourself.

One final point: we’ve stated in the past that the JavaScript Maps API is cookieless if loaded from maps.googleapis.com. As of today, to enable the signed in maps experience on sites across the web, the signed-in version of the JavaScript Maps API now does rely on cookies to detect the end user’s signed-in state. Please review our documentation for further details.

That’s all for now. Go try it out. And remember, no map is an island, entire of itself...

Posted by Ken Hoetmer, Product Manager, Google Maps APIs

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to check whether your phone is connected to the Internet, use the following code:

ConnectivityManager con=(ConnectivityManager)getSystemService(Activity.CONNECTIVITY_SERVICE);
 boolean wifi=con.getNetworkInfo(ConnectivityManager.TYPE_WIFI).isConnectedOrConnecting();
 boolean internet=con.getNetworkInfo(ConnectivityManager.TYPE_MOBILE).isConnectedOrConnecting();

these lines check for internet connection whether it is through WiFi or Mobile Internet.

you need to add the following permission to the AndroidManifest.xml file

<uses-permission android_name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE" />

Another method is what our freind Kevin mentioned in the comments, is to check if a certain website is reachable or not like this:

public static boolean isOnline() {
try {
InetAddress.getByName("google.ca").isReachable(3);
return true;
} catch (UnknownHostException e){
return false;
} catch (IOException e){
return false;
}
}

we check if a site is reachable within a certain timeout or not.

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Posted by Gayathri Rajan & Ryan Cairns

Earlier this year at Google I/O, we previewed Brillo and Weave, our complete solution for building connected devices. Since May, we’ve opened up the Brillo operating system (OS) and Weave communication platform to early access partners. Today, we’re extending this to the broader developer community as part of our invite program. Read on to find out how you can receive an invitation.

Brillo brings the simplicity and speed of software development to hardware by offering you a lightweight embedded OS based on Android, core services, a developer kit, and a developer console. You can choose from a variety of hardware capabilities and customization options, quickly move from prototype to production, and manage at scale with over the air (OTA) updates, metrics, and crash reporting.

Watch this video to learn more about Brillo:

Once you’ve built your connected device, you’ll need to find a way for it to communicate with other devices and allow users to interact with it. That’s where Weave comes in. With Weave, you can build interoperable communications directly into your devices. Weave provides a messaging service that enables phones and devices to talk to each other locally and remotely through the cloud. The Weave cloud server handles remote communication and access to your web-connected device, safely and at scale. With Weave you also get a set of services to securely set up the device and provide controlled access. Additionally, Weave works seamlessly with, and is actually built right into, Brillo; but, you can also use Weave libraries with your existing Linux-based OS.

Check out this video we created to help you understand the power of Weave:

Weave comes with a mobile SDK for both iOS and Android, so that you can build apps to control and enhance the connected device experience for mobile users. If you’re an app developer interested in extending the reach of your apps to the physical world of devices, you can use Weave mobile and web APIs to control multiple Weave devices across brands in a single app.

Both Brillo and Weave are open, extensible, and secure by default to support a variety of devices and use cases. Brillo and Weave provide the platform, tools and services, so you can do what you do best: build great device and app experiences.

In addition to the Brillo and Weave platforms, we’re also unveiling our Weave compatibility program to ship certified Weave-branded devices as well as a hardware program for silicon vendors to build and sell Brillo-compliant hardware.

If you’d like to be part of our developer invite program, visit our website and request an invite. We’ll send you more details as well as access to our code, documentation and developer console. We look forward to making the Internet of Things better, together!

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