Technology

Google is revamping its consumer storage plans today by adding a new $2.99/month tier for 200 GB of storage and dropping the price of its 2 TB plan from $19.99/month to $9.99/month (and dropping the $9.99/month 1 TB plan). Italso rebranding these storage plans (but not Google Drive itself) as &Google One.&

Going forward, you&ll also be able to share your storage quota with up to five family members.

That by itself would be interesting, given how easy it is to max out 100 GB with 4K videos and high-res images these days, but there is one other feature here that explains the new brand name: free one-tap access to Google Experts for help with any Google consumer product and service.

That access to live experts — not some barely functional AI chatbot — comes with every Google One plan, including the $1.99/month 100 GB plan. In the U.S., these experts will be available 24/7 over chat, email and phone. In other countries, this lineup of support options may vary, but the company tells me that its objective is &to provide users with great one-tap support and constantly improve it over time.&

Google already offered 24/7 support for paying business users with a G Suite account, but this is the first time it actively offers live support for consumers.

Itworth stressing that the existing free quota of 15 GB will remain.

In addition to access to experts, the company also promises to provide subscribers with other benefits. Google Onedirector Larissa Fontaine told me that those could include discounts on hotels you find in Google Search, preferred rates for other Google services or credits on Google Play. &We hope to build those out over time,& she noted.

Brandon Badger, Googlegroup product manager for Google One, told me the team looked at how people use the storage plan. Users now have more devices, shoot more 4K video and share those files with more family members, who in turn also have more devices. &We are looking with this plan to accommodate that,& he said.

In addition, Fontaine noted that users with paid storage accounts also tend to be heavy Google users in general, so combining storage and support seemed logical.

Sadly, this isn&t an immediate change. Over the course of the next few months, Google will upgrade all existing storage plans to Google One accounts, starting in the U.S., with a global rollout following after that. Google also tells me that it will roll out a new Android app to help users manage their plan (not their files).

While the focus of todayannouncement is on storage, ithard not to look at this new offering in the context of the additional support and other bonus features that Google promises. Google One is clearly about more than simply a better storage plan offering. Instead, it feels like the beginning of a new, more ambitious offering that could be expanded to include other services over time. Maybe a single subscription to all Google consumer services, including Drive, YouTube Red and Play Music (or whatever becomes of that) Despite its name, Google One is currently only one of many subscription services the company offers, after all.

A new tool by researchers at the School of Science at IUPUI and Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands can predict your hair, skin, and eye color from your DNA data. The system, which is essentially a web app that can accept DNA sequences, compares known color phenotypes to known data and tells you the probabilities of each color.

The app, called HIrisPlex-S, can tell colors from even small amounts of DNA like that left at a crime scene.

&We have previously provided law enforcement and anthropologists with DNA tools for eye color and for combined eye and hair color, but skin color has been more difficult,& said forensic geneticist Susan Walsh from IUPUI. &Importantly, we are directly predicting actual skin color divided into five subtypes — very pale, pale, intermediate, dark and dark to black & using DNA markers from the genes that determine an individualskin coloration. This is not the same as identifying genetic ancestry. You might say itmore similar to specifying a paint color in a hardware store rather than denoting race or ethnicity. If anyone asks an eyewitness what they saw, the majority of time they mention hair color and skin color. What we are doing is using genetics to take an objective look at what they saw.&

You can actually try the web app here but be warned: itnot exactly the most user friendly app on the web. It requires you to know specific alleles for your test subject or upload a set of alleles in a csv file. It is, however, free and looks like it could wildly useful in law enforcement and figuring out what your hair color was before you dyed it purple.

&With our new HIrisPlex-S system, for the first time, forensic geneticists and genetic anthropologists are able to simultaneously generate eye, hair and skin color information from a DNA sample, including DNA of the low quality and quantity often found in forensic casework and anthropological studies,& said Manfred Kayser of Erasmus MC.

When Amazon introduced AWS Lambda in 2015, the notion of serverless computing was relatively unknown. It enables developers to deliver software without having to manage a server to do it. Instead, Amazon manages it all and the underlying infrastructure only comes into play when an event triggers a requirement. Today, the company released an app in the iOS App Store called AWS IoT 1-Clickto bring that notion a step further.

The 1-click part of the name may be a bit optimistic, but the app is designed to give developers even quicker access to Lambda event triggers. These are designed specifically for simple single-purpose devices like a badge reader or a button. When you press the button, you could be connected to customer service or maintenance or whatever makes sense for the given scenario.

One particularly good example from Amazon is the Dash Button. These are simple buttons that users push to reorder goods like laundry detergent or toilet paper. Pushing the button connects to the device to the internet via the home or businessWiFi and sends a signal to the vendor to order the product in the pre-configured amount. AWS IoT 1-Click extends this capability to any developers, so long as it is on a supported device.

To use the new feature, you need to enter your existing account information. You configure your WiFi and you can choose from a pre-configured list of devices and Lambda functions for the given device. Supported devices in this early release include AWS IoT Enterprise Button, a commercialized version of the Dash button and the AT-T LTE-M Button.

Once you select a device, you define the project to trigger a Lambda function, or send an SMS or email, as you prefer. Choose Lambda for an event trigger, then touch Next to move to the configuration screen where you configure the trigger action. For instance, if pushing the button triggers a call to IT from the conference room, the trigger would send a page to IT that there was a call for help in the given conference room.

Finally, choose the appropriate Lambda function, which should work correctly based on your configuration information.

All of this obviously requires more than one click and probably involves some testing and reconfiguring to make sure you&ve entered everything correctly, but the idea of having an app to create simple Lambda functions could help people with non-programming background configure buttons with simple functions with some training on the configuration process.

Itworth noting that the service is still in Preview, so you can download the app today, but you have to apply to participate at this time.