Google Inc. hopes to increase its standing among developers with new contributions that take aim at two of the hottest trends in the industry.  The gesture that should make the search giant the most fans in the community is the introduction of an onramp initiative that offers startups a massive $100,000 worth of credit to redeem against cloud services and round-the-clock support to go along.

Google technical infrastructure head Urs Hölzle debuted the program at the company’s entrepreneur summit in Dublin today, less than three months after it treated every attendee at its flagship I/O Conference to a $500 infrastructure-as-service voucher.  Both giveaways serve the purpose of driving exposure for Google Compute Engine (GCE), but the new  Cloud Platform for Startups initiative takes the charitable publicity campaign to a whole new level.

The company plans to make the cloud credit available through more than 50 incubators and other partners around the world,  a number that is expected to increase, wrote GCE developer relations head Julie Pearl on a blog,  The program is accepting early-stage teams that have not yet turned five and that make less than $500,000 in annual revenues, Pearl went on to write. There is apparently no limitation on how much capital a participating firm can have in the bank.

The only catch is that the $100,000 credit is valid for just one year, after which participants will have to pay for the cloud resources they consume just like everybody else. That serves as an incentive for startups to be mindful of profitability, which the venture capital firms participating in the program no doubt appreciate. Google could use the graphical polling service it just obtained through the acquisition of Polar Inc. to find out.

The launch of Cloud Platform for Startups comes hot on the heels of another contribution the search giant is making to the community in the form of CasualImpact, an open-source package that measures correlations between actions and outcomes. The module implements a Bayesian algorithm to estimate the impact of one event on another in the absence of a control sample, a capability that can be useful in analyzing advertising impact, for example.

CasualImpact is meant to let analysts avoid having to reinvent the wheel and instead focus their time on more productive endeavors. The release marks the latest in Google’s efforts to take on a bigger role in the developer scene, following three months after the launch of Kubernetes, an open-source edition of the Omega system that powers the search giant’s data centers. It’s all fine-tuned to the needs of advertisers, which Google no double hopes many of the startups it’s incubating will become.

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