The concept that light carries momentum and can exert a mechanical force first originated with Kepler and Newton. With the advent of the laser in 1960’s, it became possible to manipulate micron-scale dielectric particles using optical “tweezers” as pioneered by Art Ashkin and colleagues. This led to the use of laser beams for the trapping and manipulation of gas-phase atoms, ultimately resulting in the demonstration of atomic Bose-Einstein Condensates. More recently, it has been realized that laser light, with its very low intrinsic noise, may be used as an effective method of cooling the motion of a macroscopic mechanical resonant element, with hopes of reaching effective temperatures suitable for measuring inherently quantum mechanical behavior. With this recent development, interest in the field of cavity-optomechanics has been piqued, with myriad of different materials, devices, and techniques currently being explored. In this talk I will present some of the on-going work at Caltech to create nano-mechanical structures strongly coupled to internally guided light beams through the gradient optical force. These structures can have a motional mass and coupling length many orders of magnitude smaller than in Fabry-Perot or whispering-gallery resonators which rely on the scattering radiation pressure force. This leads to, among other things, an “optical rigidity” many times that of the intrinsic material, optically-controlled mixing and renormalization of mechanical modes, and the efficient optical generation and detection of phonons at multi-GHz frequencies. In addition to presenting measurements of several different device configurations, I will also discuss some of their potential application areas, including optical communications, sensing, precision measurement, and quantum photonic circuits.