Google today has announced the roll out of a much anticipated feature for the online Google Docs – bringing them offline. Starting today a select group of individuals that have Google Gears will be able to save their online Google documents and have them available offline as well.

The online Google tools currently provide a great convenience with things like Gmail, calendars and online documents with centrally located storage that can be accessed from almost any browser with an internet connection. One of the downsides is that as soon as the internet connection is lost, so are the documents, email, etc. With this new feature, the documents will still be available through the browser when the internet connection is lost and it will continue to save changes, syncing up with the online storage the next time a connection is available.

Google late yesterday revealed it is working on what could easily be considered a competitor to the popular open-ended online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Google’s new offering is being called knol and it’s currently in closed beta testing.

knol, as Google describes it, means “unit of knowledge.” The idea behind knol is to let “people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.” Google said a knol on a particular topic is “meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.” This seems to imply that when one searches on a particular topic the “knol” for that will appear as the first search result, though Google states it will “rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.”

iPhone owners can now take advantage of Google applications online through a new, easier to use interface that integrates the different tools into a single interface. The new interface is available for iPhone users through the Safari web browser and will come up automatically when they visit Google’s home page.

From the newly integrated page users can navigate quickly to applications including Search, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Docs, GOOG-411, SMS, News, Photos, Blogger, and Notebook. According to Google the pages will download to the iPhone faster than before and comparable to using them on a desktop computer. This interface was made specifically for the iPhone but Google says that they will be “optimizing” its applications for use on other popular mobile devices as well in the future.

Today Google launched a new beta application that is a small twist on Google Mobile Maps called Google Maps with My Location. The new service runs on Java and is designed for use in mobile devices that may or may not have GPS capabilities to help map the current location of the mobile user.

When launching the new location service application, it can use the phones GPS if available to find your location and mark it on the map with a solid blue dot. If GPS is not available on the mobile device or its maybe being used in a location that cannot receive the GPS signal the service will use the information of the cellular tower that the phone is connected in order to find the general location of the user.

Google has recently made an announcement that they will be making their way into your mobile devices and while your out driving around, starting next month you may start seeing Google Maps at your local gas station.

The internet search giant is expected to make an announcement tomorrow that they will be working with Gilbarco Veeder-Root, a gas pump maker based in Greensboro, N.C., to provide pumps at gas stations that have an internet connection and have interactive maps from Google on them. The maps will allow motorists using the pumps to scroll through a list of local landmarks and print out directions to them, all the while holding up the guy behind them a little longer while they fiddle with the new feature.

This morning Google had a phone open phone conference and made the much anticipated announcement that they along with 33 other companies are starting the Open Handset Alliance. The first and main project of the newly formed alliance is called Android, an open development platform for mobile handsets. The ultimate goal for Google with this is to overall make a better, more usable phone with more features where consumers will benefit, and of course to show advertisements on it where Google will also benefit.

Eric Schmidt was present on the call leading things off, with a number of other captains of industry including Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm, Peter Chou from HTC and Ed Zander from Motorola. The members of the Open Handset Alliance include some big names like Google, HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sprint, T-Mobile, eBay, Intel, NVIDIA and many others. Some notable big names we’re not seeing on the member list are Microsoft, Apple, AT&T and Verizon.

Google has plans to announce the highly rumored “Google Phone” today which is likely going to be an open platform, Linux-based operation system that runs on mobile phones and is catered to Google applications rather than being an actual specific handset. The latest list of speculated partners for providing the phone include Sprint, Motorola, Samsung and NTT DoCoMo although these are just rumored partners as everyone involved with the deal has kept very quiet about it at Google’s request. Verizon and AT&T have both had talks with Google but reportedly are still leery of the Google-centric plans.

The new Google Phone system is expected to be Linux based with the open source Java development platform laid on top with tools that Google would “give away” to developers to allow them to openly create applications to run on the G-Phone’s platform. The phone has is also being rumored to provide internet access at speeds as fast as you might find on your home computer, but all navigation would be through Google, of course.

Only on Thursday Google had made the announcement about its new OpenSocial platform and already news in cropping up of developers taking advantage of this open, common platform. In their announcement we knew there were going to be a number of social networking sites that were already onboard with the new API’s, including Salesforce.com, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, and of course Google’s Orkut but we weren’t expecting the giants like MySpace or Facebook.

As it turned out MySpace actually is going to take advantage of OpenSocial along with Bebo, another large social networking site. The one clearly left out of this picture was Facebook, in which this launch echoed a mighty blow to with many of the more significant social network sites in the world taking part in a common platform without them. According to Wired, Facebook representatives maintained that they had “still not been briefed on OpenSocial” despite Google stating that they had, and Facebook employees showing up at Google’s developer sandbox event.

Tonight Google is planning to unveil OpenSocial, a new set of API‘s which make up a common programming platform specifically built to use on popular social networking sites. The development platform will allow application developers to create third party programs to run on these sites without them having to learn a new platform and rewrite their components for each one.

Not only will the new common platform work on Google’s own Orkut, but has also already seen support from as many as a dozen other popular companies and social networking sites including Oracle, Salesforce.com, Hi5, iLike, LinkedIn, Slide, Ning, Friendster and Plaxo. Flixster, iLike and RockYou already have developers in the onboard. The very popular Facebook, who recently accepted a bid to go with Microsoft over Google and who “opened up” its own platform for 3rd party widgets, is not in the list of sites supporting the API’s, and neither is MySpace.

In what is the most solid information we’ve seen so far amidst a slew of rumors surrounding Google and the potential of a Google Phone, today some reliable sources of Reuters and the WSJ have reported that Google is planning an announcement. Sources say that Google plans to unveil plans for their own mobile phone operation system in mid-November with possible plans to roll it out with an existing mobile phone carrier sometime next year.

For a number of months rumors ran that Google had plans of making its own mobile phone but later the information turned to Google just making mock-ups of mobile phones that would run a Google operating system for an example to carriers and manufacturers. The latest talks is that Google is looking for a carrier who will bring a mobile device to market with the Google OS on it, possibly offering the device or service for free or at a very low cost in turn for users putting up with advertisements on the phone.

Google announced today at Interop New York that Gmail will now support IMAP along with POP3 for synchronizing email across multiple mobile devices and computers. This new addition to the popular free email service allows users to download and organize emails on any one interface including online, through their mobile device or on their computer and instantly see the changes on the other interfaces.

IMAP is not a new technology but is new and a welcomed upgrade to Gmail. The IMAP support was presented by Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise who announced users could begin using IMAP immediately, however according to the Gmail site Google will be rolling this out to everyone over the next few days, so if you don’t see it right away it’s probably coming to your account soon. Google has a video that describes how to configure your Gmail account to turn enable IMAP and how to configure your iPhone with the service which is available after the jump.

Suppose you own a company that both Microsoft and Google want to own a part of. Who do you choose to do a deal with? Do you base your decision on which company you think will be the stronger in the future or just on who’s offering the most cash? This is the present dilemma that Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg is facing right now. Both Google and Microsoft are neck-and-neck with striking a deal that would see either one of the two online titans getting a 5-to-10 percent ownership with Facebook. The deal is expected to close sometime today or tomorrow.

The potential deal is likely to be huge for whomever gets it. Both Microsoft and Google are set up to capitalize on serving advertising to Facebook’s 34 million members. No one from either of the three companies is offering to comment about the deal but if the “The New York Times” is reporting that it exists, take it to the bank.

The internet giant is never content to sit back and let anyone else take a large piece of the pie. Hey, that’s how they got so rich! That’s why they are following Microsoft’s lead where health and medical records are concerned. They plan to roll out Google Health sometime early next year if they keep to their schedule.

It makes sense since users all begin at the Google page to search for health and medical information anyway. So they will be applying Google’s expertise in indexing, searching, and managing vast amounts of information to the idea. It also doesn’t hurt that they will have the health industry targeted with their Adwords program. If Google’s history has shown us anything, it should be a huge success and give the giant still more dominance in the industry.

Only yesterday we saw Google bring their YouTube online anti-piracy tool to beta to help combat the illegal posting of copyrighted videos. Today an announcement by a group of technology and media companies suddenly sheds some light on the significance of Google rolling out the service when they did.

A group consisting of Fox, CBS, NBC Universal, Walt Disney, MySpace, Viacom, and Microsoft (note the absence of Google) has announced a copyright protection agreement for rules that they feel a website should abide by when publishing potential copyrighted content. According to the Wall Street Journal, the principles of the agreement are to prevent the any copyright infringing content to be uploaded before it is accessible by the public.

While the YouTube Video Identification tool that Google announced yesterday …

Today Google has announced the beta launch of YouTube Video Identification, a new antipiracy tool that we heard about in July during a copyright infringement lawsuit with Viacom. The new system is a result of a number of angry video owners, Viacom being one of the angriest, complaining that YouTube was supporting users uploading and sharing illegally copied video content.

The new system will use a “fingerprinting” type of technology which provides a unique identification to each video. With Video Identification users will still be able to upload any videos they would like and have the instantly appear on the site as before, but once uploaded YouTube will then be comparing the uploaded content to legitimate videos provided by the owners. When matching videos are found the owner’s can choose to automatically have the video removed, promoted or in true Google form they can even take advantage of the uploaded content and monetize the video for copyright holders who chooses to license their videos.