New Google devices have been seeing more than their fair share of creative promotions, including the infamous Google Nexus S space voyage. However, the search engine giant doesn’t seem content to keep its unique promotions to hardware only. Its Google Apps suite, the set of productivity utilities (Docs, Calendar, etc.) available for both personal and business use is getting a recent push. As part of that push, Google is showcasing how the Apps served as a resource in a record-setting arctic voyage.
It’s all shown off in a video from the Google Apps team that details a video project that teamed a crew of arctic explorers with the film company Traffic Konzept. The goal was to circumnavigate the globe using the shortest route possible around the arctic — a feat that used to be impossible. There are two main passages, and one or the other has always been blocked by ice in the past. Now, due to global warming, that’s changed. According to the team of arctic explorers, the objective wasn’t just to set a record, but to help generate attention to the global warming issue and its actual impact on the environment.
Thanks to a satellite up-link powered by a generator connected to the wind vane of this 31-foot trimaran, the crew was able to collaborate with their creative team and share blog posts, media content, and more on the web. The medium they chose for all this was the Google Apps suite. The team was able to effectively collaborate on the web, scheduling with Google Calendar, posting content on a Google Site, communicating via Gmail, sharing text documents in Google Docs, and more.
“Once you get to having your information in the cloud like that,” said Len Dickter, Creative Director of Traffic Konzept, “everything else just becomes old-fashioned. You really don’t want to do it any way else.”
