Google has launched a new consumer service offering up to 16TB (terabytes) of storage for photos and other online content.

Dubbed Google Drive, the service goes head to head with rival cloud services such as Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive.

It offers 5GB (gigabytes) of storage for free. People pay on a rising scale for more space.

Google is preparing to open an online store that will sell tablets directly to consumers, according to reports.

The store will sell Google-branded tablets as well as models made by Samsung and Asus, claims the Wall Street Journal.

It is being widely seen as an attempt to win back market share from Apple, which dominates the tablet sector.

Blogger sites can now be blocked on a "per country" basis after a change to its web address system.

Google will now be able to block access in individual countries following a legal removal request.

The new system means blocking will not require restricting world-wide access to a blog.

The changes apply in Australia, New Zealand and India, but the BBC understands Google plans to roll it out globally.

The news follows Twitter's announcement that it could selectively block tweets on a country-by-country basis - news that attracted criticism from free speech campaigners.

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1. You need a productivity solution that’s easy to deploy and doesn’t require the ongoing maintenance of desktop software.

Google Apps runs in the cloud using nothing but the web, so there’s no hardware upgrades, software patches or maintenance required. Because Google manage all of the hardware and software in their datacenters, all your employees need is a web browser to communicate and work together in the cloud. In addition, they have a dedicated team of engineers whose sole goal is to help you get your data in and out of our products for free. This makes it easy to both move onto Apps, and leave if you ever change your mind down the road.