Google is churning out the code as usual:

Contacts Data API

Google keeps a common contact list in your Gmail account which is shared with Google Reader and Google Calendar. They are now making this available so that any developer can access this data programmatically. This includes read, create, edit and delete functionality. Potential uses for this are:

• Sync tool for your Address Book or Outlook Contacts
• Tool that adds all your LinkedIn contacts to your Gmail
• Use Gmail as a cheap database and store survey or competition entry form contact data into a Gmail account
• Using this plus the existing Google Calendar API, you could potentially build quite a powerful but cheap event registration solution

I would like to have all my contacts in Gmail, I have never bothered to do a manual import but if it was synched up with my main contact list, I would be happy.

Google Gears Mobile

Google Gears is a framework released by Google last year that will allow you to build web applications that run offline then synch back up with the web server as soon as you are online again. This is the really the last frontier in web application development, as we have never been able to get around the issue of requiring connectivity back to the server for the app to work. Google Gears Mobile is a port for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile 5 and 6.

Whilst this means a limited amount of handsets could actually use an application that you developed using Google Gears Mobile, this is undoubtedly going to ported to other mobile operating systems in the future.

In theory, mobile handsets shouldn’t be offline, but Gears Mobile will allow you to run an app when you in Flight Mode on a plane, or when the coverage is very poor. Even you are fully connected, Gears Mobile allows the developer to take advantage of the local data cache to improve performance and get around potential latency issues on a slow data network.

Here is a video on Google Gears Mobile if you would like to know more, or check out the blog:

What ideas do you have for how these new tools could be used?