Thursday, November 11, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Original Skateboards on building a brand and increasing sales in tandem

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 04:37 AM PST

Inside AdWords: Original Skateboards on building a brand and increasing sales in tandem

Editors note: Today's guest blogger is Scott Imbrie, CEO and Co-Founder of Original Skateboards. His passion is longboarding, a popular form of skateboarding that blends elements of surfing and snowboarding. Scott started Original in 2002 with his brother, Brad. The brothers began selling longboards shortly after Scott's 20th birthday, when Brad was just 17. Original distributes its products in most surf, skate, and snowboard shops on the East Coast of the United States and in many other areas around the world.

My brother Brad and I started Original in 2002. We both loved board sports and saw longboarding as our ideal next adventure. At the time, it was almost entirely unknown. We wanted to build longboards and trucks that would allow descents of the steepest paved roads in the world. We also wanted to travel to those locations to prove it could be done. YouTube and Google AdWords have helped us to achieve those goals.

Since March 2005, we have been using Google AdWords for online search advertising. In conjunction with positive organic rankings, search placement (even on terms where our organic rankings are top 5) has helped us ensure brand presence for our primary keywords; it has also established us as a leading brand in our industry. Building on this strong search marketing foundation, we expanded our AdWords efforts to the Google Display Network. The Display Network consistently contributes additional conversions and expands market awareness of our brand.

In our experience, Display Network site visitors interact more often with our Brand Channel. Despite having an immediate conversion rate lower than search based visitors, they are more likely to share their experience socially. By providing these more active customers sharable content, such as YouTube videos, we make the most of our Display Network clicks.

That being said, YouTube is much more than a simple way to allow our customers to share our videos. YouTube helps us find customers globally through video. We now have more than 105,000 YouTube subscribers, and our business has grown by a factor of 10 since we aired the first video.

For more information on how Google AdWords and YouTube have helped us grow a successful small business based on global reach, strong branding, and consistent sales conversions, head on over to the YouTube Blog.

Posted  by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/11/original-skateboards-on-building-brand.html

[G] Introducing the Japan and Asia-Pacific Conversion Room

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 04:37 AM PST

Inside AdWords: Introducing the Japan and Asia-Pacific Conversion Room

Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Search Funnels, and AdWords Conversion Tracking - these are some of our favorite tools for measuring and optimizing conversions on websites. These tools help you maximize your return on investment whether your site exists to share information, generate leads, or make sales.

We recently started the Japan and Asia-Pacific (JAPAC) Conversion Room and Blog. Over the last two years we've seen a tremendous uptake of Google's conversion products in this region, celebrated many success stories with users, and witnessed the development of local expertise. The JAPAC Conversion Room aims to inspire JAPAC (and global) online marketers to maximize conversions through sharing success stories and expert tips from this region.

If you're drawn to digital marketing, optimizing for conversions, and have an interest in the Japan and Asia-Pacific region, then head on over to the site and subscribe to get all of the latest articles.


Post Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/11/introducing-japan-and-asia-pacific.html

[G] A brand-new interface for AdSense

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 03:57 AM PST

Official Google Blog: A brand-new interface for AdSense

If you're an online publisher running a website that relies on ad revenues—whether it's a blog or an entertainment website—it can sometimes be complex to get started and to find new ways to make more money from your ads.

As I've previously written, we're committed to helping online publishers—large and small—"find the advertising gold hidden within their sites," so they can fund their websites and online content. At the core of these efforts—as it has been for more than seven years—is AdSense, which now has more than 2 million publishers in more than 200 countries who use it to fund great online businesses.

Over the last few years, we've invested significantly in improving AdSense so that it provides the best solution to help all publishers make the most money possible from online advertising. We've added a range of new ad formats (including video and rich media), improved our publisher filters, enabled better targeting that drives higher returns (like remarketing and above-the-fold targeting) and introduced increased competition for publishers' ad space by bringing in additional advertisers and certified ad networks.

To continue helping our publishers, today we're excited to be rolling out a completely new AdSense interface to all of our AdSense publishers, globally, in more than 30 languages and in each of the 200+ countries where AdSense is available. The AdSense interface is how publishers set up, manage, optimize and see reports on the ads on their sites.

With this new interface, AdSense is even easier to use, and we're also providing publishers with all the tools they need to manage and increase their advertising revenue. We used lots of direct feedback from our publishers to make this overhaul. If you're an online publisher, it helps you in three main ways:
  • More insights. We've built in simple, graphical reporting and more options for you to easily slice and dice your data, so you can see at a glance what ads are working and which are not, and adjust your strategies accordingly.
  • More control. We've made our ad controls richer and simpler to use, so you can better control which ads and advertisers you want to appear on your sites.
  • More efficiency. It's now much easier to quickly see earnings and payment information, to run reports, to find relevant features and help, and to make account changes. Our engineers have spent countless hours making sure that the interface is stable and blazing fast. We've also spent many hours in our usability labs with publishers, focused on making the interface easy to learn and use for all types of publishers.
Since we started trialling this new interface, many of our early testers have commented on the power of the reporting tools. They've been able to quickly analyze data and identify new trends that help them maximize their online ad revenues through AdSense.

The new interface is just the latest milestone in our efforts to help you make more money from all your online content. We look forward to hearing from as many publishers as possible, to learn what you like about this interface and where we can continue to improve.

To learn more, read our post on the Inside AdSense blog or visit google.com/ads/newadsense.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack, Director, Product Management
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/brand-new-interface-for-adsense.html

[G] Voice Search in underrepresented languages

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 03:57 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Voice Search in underrepresented languages

(Cross-posted from the Google Research Blog)

Welkom*!

Today we're introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages.

We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines. Underrepresented languages have also often received little attention from the speech research community. Their phonetics, grammar, acoustics, etc., haven't been extensively studied, making the development of ASR (automatic speech recognition) voice search systems challenging.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.

We also think it's important that researchers in these countries take a leading role in advancing the state of the art in their own languages. To this end, we've collaborated with the Multilingual Speech Technology group at South Africa's North-West University led by Prof. Ettiene Barnard (also of the Meraka Research Institute), an authority in speech technology for South African languages. Our development effort was spearheaded by Charl van Heerden, a South African intern and a student of Prof. Barnard. With the help of Prof. Barnard's team, we collected acoustic data in the three languages, developed lexicons and grammars, and Charl and others used those to develop the three Voice Search systems. A team of language specialists traveled to several cities collecting audio samples from hundreds of speakers in multiple acoustic conditions such as street noise, background speech, etc. Speakers were asked to read typical search queries into an Android app specifically designed for audio data collection.

For Zulu, we faced the additional challenge of few text sources on the web. We often analyze the search queries from local versions of Google to build our lexicons and language models. However, for Zulu there weren't enough queries to build a useful language model. Furthermore, since it has few online data sources, native speakers have learned to use a mix of Zulu and English when searching for information on the web. So for our Zulu Voice Search product, we had to build a truly hybrid recognizer, allowing free mixture of both languages. Our phonetic inventory covers both English and Zulu and our grammars allow natural switching from Zulu to English, emulating speaker behavior.

This is our first release of Voice Search in a native African language, and we hope that it won't be the last. We'll continue to work on technology for languages that have until now received little attention from the speech recognition community.

Salani kahle!**

* "Welcome" in Afrikaans
** "Stay well" in Zulu

Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Staff Research Scientist and Johan Schalkwyk, Senior Staff Engineer
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/voice-search-in-underrepresented.html

[G] App Tuesday: Eight new apps for your business

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 03:57 AM PST

Official Google Blog: App Tuesday: Eight new apps for your business

The Google Apps Marketplace helps your business discover and deploy the right web-apps that integrate with Google Apps, reduce IT costs, and eliminate redundant log-ins and data entry. Every App Tuesday, we welcome even more apps that expand the range of solutions available to businesses.

Today, eight more apps join the Apps Marketplace, all with single sign-on convenience and hassle-free access through the universal navigation bar. Most apps have even deeper integrations—read below to learn more.


Embed this presentation on your own site to spread the word about our newest apps

Read more about the apps launching this App Tuesday on the Google Enterprise blog, or go shop the Google Apps Marketplace to find the perfect solutions to help you move further into the cloud.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Associate Product Marketing Manger, Google Apps Marketplace
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/app-tuesday-eight-new-apps-for-your.html

[G] Beyond Instant results: Instant Previews

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 03:57 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Beyond Instant results: Instant Previews

With Google Instant you get results as fast as you type, but your search doesn't stop there. Once you get results back, you choose a site to visit based on the information in each result—like the title, a snippet of text and the URL. Over time we've made steady improvements to our search results and snippets to help you pick a great page. Now we're making a leap to image-based snapshots—a new kind of visual search result we call "Instant Previews" which makes it even faster to choose the right result.

Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who've recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing. Here's a video showing Instant Previews in action:



In our testing, we've found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. The previews provide new ways to evaluate search results, making you more likely to find what you're looking for on the pages you visit. Here are some of the things you can do to get the most out of Instant Previews:
  • Quickly compare results - A visual comparison of search results helps you pick the one that's right for you. Quickly flip through previews to see which page looks best.
  • Pinpoint relevant content - Text call outs, in orange, will sometimes highlight where your search terms appear on the webpage so you can evaluate if it's what you're looking for.
  • Interact with the results page - Page previews let you see the layout of a webpage before clicking the search result. Looking for a chart, picture, map or list? See if you can spot one in the preview.
Instant Previews can be helpful for many kinds of tasks. For example, say you looked at a page before and need to find it again—with a preview, you can tell if any of the results look familiar. Or perhaps you're looking for an official website—look for a logo and formal style and you'll probably be able to identify it. Or maybe you're looking for a how-to guide—it's easy to spot a page with clear illustrations and step-by-step instructions.

We realized early on that this kind of experience would only make sense if it was lightning fast. Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many websites take four or five seconds to load. With Instant Previews, we match your query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each webpage, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search—usually in under one-tenth of a second. Once you click the magnifying glass, we load previews for the other results in the background so you can flip through them without waiting.

Well, I think that's enough of a preview—soon you can try out the real thing for yourself! The new feature is rolling out now and should be available in more than 40 languages in the next few days.

Update 6:50AM: We removed the YouTube video to update it. We'll be back shortly.
Update 4:35PM: Added updated YouTube video. Thanks for your patience!

Posted by Raj Krishnan, Product Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/beyond-instant-results-instant-previews.html

[G] Voice Search in Underrepresented Languages

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 10:02 PM PST

Official Google Research Blog: Voice Search in Underrepresented Languages

Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Staff Research Scientist and Johan Schalkwyk, Senior Staff Engineer

Welkom*!

Today we're introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages.

We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines. Underrepresented languages have also often received little attention from the speech research community. Their phonetics, grammar, acoustics, etc., haven't been extensively studied, making the development of ASR (automatic speech recognition) voice search systems challenging.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.

We also think it's important that researchers in these countries take a leading role in advancing the state of the art in their own languages. To this end, we've collaborated with the Multilingual Speech Technology group at South Africa's North-West University led by Prof. Ettiene Barnard (also of the Meraka Research Institute), an authority in speech technology for South African languages. Our development effort was spearheaded by Charl van Heerden, a South African intern and a student of Prof. Barnard. With the help of Prof. Barnard's team, we collected acoustic data in the three languages, developed lexicons and grammars, and Charl and others used those to develop the three Voice Search systems. A team of language specialists traveled to several cities collecting audio samples from hundreds of speakers in multiple acoustic conditions such as street noise, background speech, etc. Speakers were asked to read typical search queries into an Android app specifically designed for audio data collection.

For Zulu, we faced the additional challenge of few text sources on the web. We often analyze the search queries from local versions of Google to build our lexicons and language models. However, for Zulu there weren't enough queries to build a useful language model. Furthermore, since it has few online data sources, native speakers have learned to use a mix of Zulu and English when searching for information on the web. So for our Zulu Voice Search product, we had to build a truly hybrid recognizer, allowing free mixture of both languages. Our phonetic inventory covers both English and Zulu and our grammars allow natural switching from Zulu to English, emulating speaker behavior.

This is our first release of Voice Search in a native African language, and we hope that it won't be the last. We'll continue to work on technology for languages that have until now received little attention from the speech recognition community.

Salani kahle!**

* "Welcome" in Afrikaans
** "Stay well" in Zulu
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/11/voice-search-in-underrepresented.html

[G] Give YouTube Topics on Search a whirl

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 06:25 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Give YouTube Topics on Search a whirl

We know that sometimes people come to YouTube looking for a specific video, but at other times, they have only a rough idea of the kind of videos they want. We've been there too, and have been thinking for a while about this challenge of searching when you don't yet know exactly what you're looking for.

Here's a glimpse inside how we are approaching this challenge:



In coming up with a solution, we wanted to help you specify your search even if you started with something as vague as "funny". We also wanted to surface varied sets of videos and make it easy for you to explore them further.

To that end, we have a prototype we'd like you to try out. It's called "YouTube Topics on Search" and you can get to it from TestTube. Here's a video showing you how it works:



Put simply, we try to identify topics on YouTube and associate videos with them. We use many different sources to find these topics, including frequently used uploader keywords, common search queries, playlist names, and even sources outside of YouTube such as Wikipedia articles.

When you search -- for example, let's say for "obama" -- we suggest other related topics tied to videos that you might want to explore, such as "michelle obama" or "john mccain." You can click to get to videos on these topics or you can find videos that contain both topics by clicking on the (+) next to the topic. This is handy for refining. For instance, try searching for "turkey" and you'll see "thanksgiving" as a refinement option further down the page. We hope topics become a fun way to explore new and interesting corners of YouTube's video universe.

To start you exploring, we've planted topic "Easter eggs," which we challenge you to find. Here are a couple of hints relating to just some of the topics out there:
For more clues to other topic Easter eggs and for other questions you have, read this article in the Help Center.

Give Topics on Search a test drive and let us know what you think in the YouTube forum.

Palash Nandy, Software Engineer, recently discovered "cheese rolling."
Elizabeth Windram, UX Designer, recently discovered "big wave surfing"


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/C73NtuW2c_I/give-youtube-topics-on-search-whirl.html

[G] Stats Production Issue

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 05:40 PM PST

The FeedBurner Status Blog: Stats Production Issue

Issue: The daily stats production pipeline for data representing Nov. 8, 2010 has been experiencing difficulties and is behind schedule. We are currently working to resolve the problem

Update (4:57pm PST 8-Nov):The stats issue has been resolved and the production rollups completed.
URL: http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2010/11/stats-production-issue.html

[G] Great Scott! Over 35 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute to YouTube

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 04:13 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Great Scott! Over 35 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute to YouTube

Remember in March when we shared with you that more than 24 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute? Well, you continue to amaze us: you've increased the amount of video uploaded to YouTube to 35 hours per minute. That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day. If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week. Another way to think about it is: if three of the major US networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn't have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.





As you can see from the above chart, the number of uploads to YouTube have more than doubled in the last two years. How come? Here are some of the factors contributing to the growth:

  • The time limit for videos uploaded by users increased by 50% from 10 to 15 minutes.

  • The upload file size increased over the last few years by more than 10x to 2GB via our standard uploader.

  • Mobile phones have improved dramatically in how quickly and easily they upload videos to YouTube.

  • More companies integrating our APIs to support upload from outside of YouTube.com (Activision's Call of Duty Black Ops. as one very cool example where you can record and share video footage from within the game).

So, what happens in 35 hours? Here are just some of the things that can happen in that time frame:

  • A team can set the record for the longest soccer (eh hem... futbol) match in history.

  • Someone can drive non-stop from YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, CA to Chicago, IL.

  • You could fly over half-way around the world in a balloon.

Clearly, you are able to tackle some of our most daunting challenges. So it is with that in mind that we throw down another heavy gauntlet: upload 48 hours of video every minute. That's right: two full days and 100% growth of what we achieved back in March of 2010.



Hunter Walk, Director of product management, recently watched "FD Sonoma: Tilt-Shift Formula Drift"


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/PcMlTItI2W0/great-scott-over-35-hours-of-video.html

[G] How much is faster collaboration worth to businesses?

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 02:13 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: How much is faster collaboration worth to businesses?

Over the last few years, saving money on an email solution has been the most common driver for companies switching from legacy on-premises systems to Google Apps. But customers aren't just using Google Apps for email. They're also adopting innovative teamwork tools like web-based documents, spreadsheets, presentations and project sites, and we now know the value of improved productivity by "going Google" is actually even larger than the substantial cost savings.

To quantify the complete value of Google Apps including collaboration and productivity benefits, we enlisted the help of Forrester Consulting to measure the "Total Economic Impact" that a typical company can expect over three years, moving from legacy on-premises infrastructure to Google's web-based solution. After dozens of in-depth customer and stakeholder interviews and hundreds of survey responses from IT administrators and end-users, we're excited to share the research results, and we invite you to download and share Forrester's report.

The key findings of Forrester's analysis bring the benefits of Google Apps into sharp focus. The following results are what a typical large customer with 18,000 employees and several offices around the world can experience by making the switch.
  • Over 300% ROI
    The return on investment of switching to Google Apps is 391%. (307% after adjusting for risk.) In plain English, for every dollar spent on Google Apps, the system pays back the initial investment and more than three more dollars in additional business value.

  • Dramatically improved productivity
    The value of improved productivity from Google Apps is even greater than costs saved by making the switch. Features like fast email search, integrated IM, message threading, great spam filtering, collaborative sites and real-time, multi-person collaboration in documents, spreadsheets and presentations all contribute to the productivity improvements quantified by Forrester.

  • Break-even under 7 months
    The break-even payback period of switching to Google Apps is very short – faster than seven months. After the investment quickly pays for itself, the productivity gains from Google Apps continue to grow year after year.

  • NPV over $10,000,000
    The risk-adjusted Net Present Value (NPV) of switching to Google Apps is over $10,000,000 for the typical large business. Productivity gains contribute over $7,000,000 to this amount.
Of course, both Google and Forrester strongly advise readers to conduct their own impact analysis when evaluating Google Apps, but this research solidifies what the Google Apps team has been hearing loud and clear from customers about the business benefits they've experienced. If you're already using Google Apps, we'd love to hear your story too, and maybe even feature your organization in the future.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-much-is-faster-collaboration-worth.html

[G] Update to Google Maps in Europe, Africa, Australia and New Zealand

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 02:13 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Update to Google Maps in Europe, Africa, Australia and New Zealand

Today we announced changes to the data that powers Google Maps features like the map tiles, geocoding, and driving directions. These changes can be seen in many countries in Europe, Africa and the Pacific:

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Liechtenstein
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
South Africa
Switzerland

The new base maps will have greater features such as expanded geocoding coverage, more detailed water bodies, university campuses, zipcode and postal code coverage – all leading to better, more accurate maps for your employees and customers. Along with this update we've launched the popular "Report a Problem" feature in these countries (as we've had in the U.S. and Canada), enabling you to tell us about errors and changes directly for faster Maps updates. It's highly recommended that you re-geocode all of your data to take advantage of the new updated data.

Learn more about the Google Maps API Premier at google.com/enterprise/maps.

Posted by Natasha Wyatt, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/11/update-to-google-maps-in-europe-africa.html

[G] More than 2,000 solution providers embrace Google’s cloud channel model

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 02:13 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: More than 2,000 solution providers embrace Google's cloud channel model

Shortly after launching Google Apps for business customers in 2007, we began to hear that IT solution providers were recommending Google Apps to their customers as a new option for messaging and collaboration tools. At the time, we didn't have formal support for solution providers, and their only incentive was to act in the best interests of their customers.

During those early days of Google Apps, we spent valuable time gathering feedback from these leading-edge solution providers and learning how best to create an official reseller program for Google Apps that worked for solution providers' business models. As a result, when we launched the Google Apps Authorized Reseller program in early 2009, we focused the program on providing resellers the best of both worlds - an innovative web-based messaging and collaboration suite for their customers and a reseller program that allowed them to retain and enhance their customer relationships.

An Apps ecosystem milestone

Over the past 8 months we've doubled the number of resellers in our Google Apps Authorized Reseller program, and now have over 2,000 authorized resellers worldwide. And our unique qualification process continues to ensure that new resellers understand both the business value and technical aspects of the offering.

During the past year we've highlighted a number of customer success stories where resellers such as Dito, LTech, Sheepdog, and Cloud Sherpas led complex customer deployments. These resellers, and many others, have put together growing businesses by focusing primarily on Google Apps and other cloud-based applications.

But that's not all. We've also gained awareness and adoption within mainstream IT channel communities. This includes value added resellers, managed service providers, web developers, web hosting companies, Internet service providers, and system integrators, all of whom have established businesses with existing client bases and have expanded their business by offering Google Apps.

Going mainstream

Like the early adopters in 2007, these solution providers are foremost focused on doing the right thing for their customers. But they're also taking advantage of the primary design point of our reseller program - allowing the reseller to manage the billing and support relationship and be the primary point of contact with the customer. We've recognized from the start of our program that providing resellers with control over billing and pricing, and allowing them into the primary flow of account provisioning, support, and messaging, is critical for them to effectively support their customers and make money.

We've seen strong adoption among managed service providers (MSPs) who tend to foster long-term, trusted customer relationships, understand recurring revenue models, focus on service offerings, and have fixed fee service contracts which are a great fit for reliable and predictable products like Google Apps.

Agosto is an example of an early MSP that has seamlessly rolled Google Apps into their full IT support helpdesk offering. They've been able to cross-sell their offerings in both directions, including converting customers of their Google Apps implementation service into full IT service clients. Even more powerfully, they've been able to enhance their long running client relationships by re-engaging them with relevant new opportunities to use collaboration capabilities in Google Sites, Video, and forms in Google Docs.

We've also seen adoption among web development, design, and hosting companies, for whom providing an email service is often a necessary part of helping small businesses with their online presence. Companies like Vision Multimedia Technologies are able to remain focused on their primary business of web development by using Google Apps to reliably handle the customers' email, while also introducing the benefits of the rest of the Google Apps suite. And they've been able to offer consulting and web development services such as implementing portal and workflow solutions based on Google Sites to streamline content management for clients. All while providing the customer a simplified, single bill to pay.

Whether they've incorporated Google Apps into their existing business or they've built new businesses around it, a common denominator among our successful resellers is that they view bringing Google technology into their customer relationships as a way to strengthen and increase the strategic nature of these relationships.

While we are excited to have more than 2,000 resellers in our program, we anticipate further enhancing the program, the Google Apps suite, and the Google Apps Marketplace, to help our resellers grow their business with both new and existing customers.

If you're an IT solution provider, learn more and get started with our reseller program today. Or if your company is using Google Apps and you have a preferred solution provider that you'd like to see get additional training on Google Apps, send them this post and we'd be happy to work with them.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Apps Team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/11/more-than-2000-solution-providers.html

[G] Google Apps Marketplace welcomes 8 new integrated apps

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 02:13 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Apps Marketplace welcomes 8 new integrated apps

The Google Apps Marketplace helps businesses discover the best web-based business apps that integrate with Google Apps, helping employees to be more productive and reducing implementation costs. Every month on App Tuesday, we welcome even more apps that expand the range of solutions available to businesses.

As always, all Marketplace apps offer single sign-on convenience and hassle-free access through the universal navigation bar. Many go even further by integrating with your Gmail inbox, Google Contacts, Google Calendars and more to improve your productivity, read below to learn how.


Embed this and share the launch of our newest apps.

  • Outright - Accounting and Finance
    Outright simplifies the accounting process for your business by automating data entry, generating critical reports, and maximizing tax deductions.
    Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar, Gmail inbox
     
  • Connect2Field - Calendar and Scheduling
    With Connect2Field, service businesses can easily manage their workers by scheduling jobs, delivering real-time instructions, and capturing live data from the field.
    Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar, Google Contacts
     
  • Insightster - Idea Management
    Gather ideas from across your organization, collect feedback from the right people, and make informed decisions without the hassle of endless meetings.
    Integrations: Single sign-on, Gmail inbox, Google Calendar, Google Contacts
     
  • PromaSys Flo - Workflow Management
    Convert manual processes and paper trails to web-based workflows, allowing for improved tracking and auditing to reduce labor costs and standardize processes.
    Integrations: Single sign-on, Gmail inbox

  • Ming.ly - Professional Relationship Management
    A professional relationship management tool that  aggregates social networks, phone and SMS feeds to help manage all of your relationships in one place (chrome only).
    Integrations: Chrome extension, Google Contacts, Gmail inbox

  • Matchbook - Customer Relationship Management
    A system for teams to manage contacts and call lists for their clients that introduces a competitive element among sales teams to encourage optimal performance.
    Integrations: Single sign-on

  • A suite of admin tools that allows admins to populate Google Groups dynamically, assign admin tasks, filter access to contact information, and audit email usage.
    Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Contacts, Google Groups

  • SADA Site Copier - Google Sites Management
    Site Copier allows Google Sites owners and Google Apps admins to quickly and easily duplicate a Google Site from one domain to any Google Apps domain.
    Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Sites
Check out the Google Apps Marketplace to explore one of these new apps or try one of the other over 200 additional apps. If you've #gonegoogle and tried the #appsmarketplace, let other users know what you recommend via Twitter or submit your suggestions for additional apps.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps Marketplace
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/11/google-apps-marketplace-welcomes-8-new.html

[G] Tonight! Watch Bon Jovi perform their greatest hits, live from NYC

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 10:15 AM PST

YouTube Blog: Tonight! Watch Bon Jovi perform their greatest hits, live from NYC

Bon Jovi lived on a prayer: that you would determine the set list for their concert tonight. And you heeded that call: 1,494 of you submitted 1,733 questions and cast nearly 25,000 votes to determine what those songs would be. So tune in to www.youtube.com/bonjovi at 8 p.m. (ET) tonight to watch this legendary band perform for the world from the Best Buy Theater in Times Square, New York City.



If you can't make the show, it will replay twice every six hours over a 24-hour period so you'll have another chance to watch. Rock on!

Ali Sandler, Music Partnerships, recently watched "Baby Bob Marley."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/BFa3DFNUD54/tonight-watch-bon-jovi-perform-their.html
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)