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Internet Marketing & Consulting by Windy City Strategies, Chicago Illinois. A full service Internet Consulting company specializing in Pay Per Click Management, PPC, Website Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Local Business Listings, Shopping Portal Management, SEO, and Social Media Marketing, SMM.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Census Bureau Launches Map Powered By Google

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today the launch of a new online mapping tool that will detail how well communities responded to the 2000 Census in an effort to raise awareness for the upcoming 2010 Census, according to Web Pro News.

New visitors to the Google-based map can see the 2000 Census mail participation rates or states, countries and cities; as well as smaller areas titled, “census tracts.” Once the 2010 Census forms are in the mail mid-March, the online map will get an update that includes a tracking tool with daily updates of the 2010 Census mail participation rates. Users can then compare their 2010 Census progress using their 2000 Census rates.

"The future of your community starts with a look at its past," said Census Bureau Director Robert M. Groves.

"The 2000 Census map allows communities to see which areas need extra attention and reminders to improve mail participation. We will be challenging communities nationwide to take 10 minutes to fill out and mail back their 2010 Census forms next month."

According to the Census Bureau, for every one percent increase in mail response, taxpayers will save an estimated $85 million in federal funds. These funds will be used to send census workers to collect census response in person from households that don’t mail back the form.

As noted by the U.S. Constitution, the once-a-decade census must count every single person living in the U.S. The data will help figure out how more than $400 billion in federal funds are distributed to state, local and tribal governments every year. This is money that will go towards roads, hospitals, schools and social services.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:51 AM

Google Trounces Yahoo & Bing In Mobile Search Report

Even though Google is known for domination the search market, the company is no stranger to mobile either. New data from Opera shows that Google has a huge lead over its closers rival.

According to the most recent Opera State of the Mobile Report, Google’s search portal accounts "for more than 9% of all page views on the mobile Web."

Yahoo can only claim 4.3 percent of page views, which isn’t bad, just not good when compared to Google’s numbers.

To get Bing’s share, Opera had to consider an extra place to the right of the decimal point. The final number was 0.03 percent, which is one three-hundredth of Google’s share.

Don’t worry; Google hasn’t taken over the world, yet. Opera’s co-founder, Jon von Tetzchner, released a statement saying, "While Google performs well globally, we also see several local search engines, such as Yandex in Russia and Ukraine, and Baidu in China, have impressive results in their key markets."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:43 AM

Local Business Search as Q&A

ChaCha, a human-driven Q&A search service, launched new functions for local businesses this wee. Now users can get information for more than 15 million businesses in the U.S.

"Across all platforms - mobile (SMS), online and now Facebook - we are up to nearly 20 million unique users per month," a ChaCha representative told Web Pro News. "Our run rate over the past several months has [averaged] 15 million uniques per month. The user base is split almost half male, half female - with over 80% of users between ages 13 and 24. We also answer over 1 million questions per day, and over 400 million answers have been served."

With the number of ways to access local business information going up, it’s interesting to know what ChCha will bring to the table that can’t be found on other sources.

"Unique User benefits on ChaCha were the deeper questions, answers and info about the businesses, and in the future, the ability to get mobile coupons, join a businesses mobile lists, get discounts and more," she said. "These are the ChaCha value-adds over other sources, and features and content will continue to expand."

So far 2010 has been a big year for local search. Most of which came from search engine giant Google, which can make for some strong competition for anyone. Google started showing mobile users “nearby places,” which allows businesses to post announcements/coupons on their Places Pages, which will also show reviews from more sources, tailoring mobile search recommendations to location and even recommending competitors for local business searches.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:38 AM

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Google Calls Off Android Event In Beijing

More than month ago, Google delayed the launch of two Android phones in China. Now the company followed up with their decision to cancel an Android developer event in Beijing.

Note that Google’s claimed that no event was ever planned. According to corporate representatives, gatherings in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan are all that were scheduled to take place in Asia next week.

Both Reuters and the IDG News Services, however, have heard from sources that Google was in fact supposed to meet with developers in Beijing about the Nexus One and Android. Due to the ongoing dispute over hacking and censorship, the company called the event off.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:57 AM

Bizarre Ruling in Italy Threatens Social Media

A judge in Milan, Italy convicted three Google executives over a video that was uploaded to YouTube. This ruling can have major implications for social media. Uploaded in 2006, the video features a group of school kids bullying an autistic child. Google states that the company worked with Italian authorities to help ID the person that was responsible for uploading it and the other participants from the video were sentenced to community service.

Now, Google executives David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (3 out of 4 defendants) were convicted of “failure to comply with the Italian privacy code” and were found not guilty of criminal defamation.

"In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload," wrote Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel - Europe, Middle East and Africa on the Google Blog. "We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question."

"The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police," said Sucherman.

"To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video," he said. "They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed."

If a ruling like this again Google was something that would happen more often, how much would this affect the social media industry? Companies like Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc. won't be able to let their users upload content, which is what social media is all about. Without that, it wouldn’t even exist.

This is why Google is upset about the ruling against its executives, but calls it a "serious threat to the web."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:53 AM

Advocacy Group Asks DOJ To Probe Google Search Results

Consumer Watchdog called on the Justice Department in order to guarantee its ongoing antitrust probe of Google’s business practices, which includes an investigation into whether or not the company is manipulating its search results in favor of its own products.

The nonprofit advocacy group said they sent a letter to Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Division, once news broke that the European Commission received three complaints against Google alleging that the company manipulated search engine results in an anticompetitive way.

"We know and appreciate that your department is conducting an ongoing antitrust investigation of various business practices by Google, some of that related to the proposed Google Books settlement," wrote John M. Simpson, consumer advocate.

"Today I write to call upon you to ensure that included in that probe is consideration of how Google may use its search algorithms to manipulate Internet search results to favor its own products."

With around 70 percent of the search market in the U.S., Consumer Watchdog stated that Google is the most effective as the Internet's gatekeeper for majority of people. The group said that whether a website is ever visited can depend entirely on where it lands in Google search results.

"As part of your continued antitrust investigation we call on you to shine a light on Google's black box, and require it to explain what's behind search results," Simpson wrote.

"If, as it appears, Google is tweaking results to further its narrow agenda, this anticompetitive behavior must be stopped."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:47 AM

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Xerox Sues Google and Yahoo

It seems Google and Yahoo are getting sued quite a bit without having a good shot at winning. Now, both companies are facing an even bigger lawsuit, as Xerox, which has a market cap of $8 billion and a genuine legal team, is taking them to court.

Xerox is claiming that Google and Yahoo have “infringed” on two patents it holds. Susan Decker explained this morning that, "One patent, issued in 2004, is for a way to automatically generate a query based on keyword searches . . . . The second patent, issued in 2001, is for a way of updating pages based on user reviews."

Xerox wants to be compensated for Google and Yahoo’s alleged infringement and wants to bar them from using the tech again without its consent.

It’s no surprise to hear that Google and Yahoo aren’t liable to hand over money to Xerox. One of Google’s lawyers already described the claims as being “without merit,” and Carol Bartz isn’t going to back down without a fight.

So, this can turn into an ugly legal battle and AdSense, AdWords, Google Maps, Google Video, YouTube, the Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo Search Marketing, Yahoo Shopping, and the Y!Q Contextual Search tool might be affected by the outcome.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:35 AM

Google Upgrades Ad-Serving Product for Publishers

Google announced a new DoubleClick for Publishers. This service is known as the “next generation of ad serving technology for publishers.

"For the past few years, we've been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both," says Vice President of Product Management Neal Mohan. "For major online publishers — including social networks and online communities, entertainment sites, e-commerce sites and news sites — managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content."

The new release will include a new interface, which will save users time and lessen the amount of errors and provide more detailed reporting. Google says it has "sophisticated algorithms" that will automatically improve ad performance and delivery.

DoubleClick for Publishers will also include a new public API that allows publishers to build and integrate their own applications with this service. They could also integrate third party applications create for the service into their own.

DoubleClick for Publishers will be available in two versions, one for large publishers and another for small businesses. The later is free and a lot easier.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:32 AM

Google's DoubleClick Gets a New Look

Google announced the new release of DoubleClick for publishers, which will be available in two versions (for large and small publishers). The new release also comes with a new logo makeover for the program.

"To reflect our continued investment in DoubleClick's products, as well as the central role of DoubleClick's technology products within Google's display advertising business, we're also today unveiling some changes to the DoubleClick logos — including typeset changes, incorporating a new 'by Google' theme and retiring the 'DART' brand," explains Vice President of Product Management Neal Mohan.

"This is the next generation of Google Ad Manager, bringing many requested features such as a new web services API, an improved user interface, and new reporting capabilities," says Google Ad Manager Product Manager Alex Vogenthaler. "We will be upgrading all Google Ad Manager accounts to DFP Small Business automatically. GAM users will see the new DFP Small Business name and logo within the product and related resources upon completion of the upgrade. Usernames, passwords, ad delivery data and account data will be unaffected by this change. New customers signing up for Google Ad Manager today will automatically be upgraded on the same schedule as current Ad Manager publishers."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:28 AM

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Google Earth Comes to Android

Google launched its Google Earth for Android, which is only available for the Nexus One. Google calls it the “fastest mobile version of Google Earth yet.”

"As with other versions of Google Earth, you can also browse photos, places, and local businesses, whether it is in your local community or on the far side of the globe," says Product Manager Peter Birch. "Click on an icon to see photos, videos, and read about prominent places in the world. You can easily customize your version of Google Earth to display the layers that most interest you."

Google Earth for Android takes advantage of voice recognition that "responds to your every command," according to Google. "With Google Earth for Android, we have brought together the convenience of Google Search by voice with the power of Google Local Search to make it easier than ever to navigate the globe and find whatever you are looking for," says Birch.

Google Earth will be available in the Android Market for devices that have Android 2.1 or higher.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 10:26 AM

comScore Launches Platform To Help Publishers Optimize Ads

comScore announced today that the comScore Audience Advantage is now available. It’s being described as a "digital audience optimization platform" that lets publishers provide advertisers and media planners with the ability to reach their most valuable audiences.

"Audience Advantage offers significant value creation for the online advertising ecosystem that benefits all stakeholders," said Erin Hunter, comScore executive vice president.

"Publishers will be able to demonstrate higher value in the campaigns they deliver, thereby justifying higher CPMs, while advertisers will be able to minimize wasted impressions and reduce the total cost of advertising outlays. It is truly a win-win for the digital advertising industry."

comScore’s tool can determine a predictive score for various audience segments. Publishers can take this score to anonymously identify and deliver to advertisers "look alike" audiences from the behavior they observe among their own site visitors.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 10:23 AM

Google Writes the Buzz Handbook 5 Tips at a Time

Since the launch of Google Buzz, Google has been offering tips for using Buzz more effectively. Last week, five tips were offered:
1. Format your posts
2. View a summary of you own Buzz activity
3. Use an @reply to send a post directly to someone's inbox
4. Try keyboard shortcuts to fly through buzz
5. Mute posts so they don't get sent to your inbox.

Today, five more tips were offered:

1. Post by Email
2. Prevent your boring chat status messages from being posted to Buzz
3. Look for the yellow line to see what's new.
4. Link to a post
5. Follow the Buzz team in Google Buzz.

Google probably could do more in promoting the usage of Buzz and get people more interested. These tips were offered in hopes of doing just that, but how many Gmail users actually keep up with the blog where the tips were posted? Google Buzz is an entirely different product, yet doesn’t have its own blog?

Google has positive hopes for Buzz and it appears that the industry is taking an interested to it.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 10:20 AM

Monday, February 22, 2010

Google Expands Maps Into Much More of Africa

Google is expanding Google Maps into 30 African countries where it wasn’t available before.

"One of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about at Google is how we can make the world's information more accessible and useful to people all over the globe," Google says. "This includes providing rich local geographic data because, after all, a huge number of search queries have a geographic component. Our efforts to start putting Africa on a map kicked off back in 2009 when we announced the launch of Google Maps for Kenya. Not long afterwords, we announced that users across 45 African countries could build and edit maps in Map Maker. Most recently, we launched Google Maps for South Africa."

Google Maps launched domains for 30 more countries, this means not just scenery and roads for these countries, but also local business listings. Doing so can drive a lot of business to brick and mortars. Search engines have almost replaced print yellow pages for a lot people, and businesses in these countries should feel the effects of that as the listings grow.

Google is encouraging users in the new countries to get involved and help them make the maps better. "You know your local area better than we do, which is why Map Maker is on offer. With Map Maker, any user can create or edit map data, ranging from schools to local businesses, national parks to taxi stops. If you know your local area, or you've seen something that's missing, take up the opportunity to get mapping! As we've pointed out before, maps are also invaluable for governments, NGOs, universities and entrepreneurs, who can visualize, plan and market the areas and projects that they work on."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:16 AM

Update: Google's Annual Revenue at $497 Million

Update: Ben Edelman left a comment on Web Pro News where he wrote, "Surely it's not Google's fault that some people misspell. But our study [shows] that typosquatters register more domains targeting companies in sectors with high PPC prices. That tells us that PPC funding is *causing* and *exacerbating* typosquatting. Without PPC payments, there would be fewer typosquatting registrations -- much less reason for squatters to register these domains. Google's payments put the system in motion; squatters register domains exactly in anticipation of getting paid by Google. Google knows where it's showing ads. (Example: Google shows Expedia ads if you misspell Expedia, but Travelocity ads if you misspell Travelocity!) So it's natural to look to Google for resolution of these problems."

Original Blog: Many people hate typos and find them annoying. I can be one of those people. Seriously, it only takes one second to hit the backspace key and fix the typo. With Google, however, typos can mean big business as Benjamin Edelman and Tyler Moore have estimated that typos make the search engine giant $497 million per year.

Edelman and Moore both wrote a paper titled, "Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders." In a blog post summarizing it, they stated a few sets of data and wrote, "According to our analysis, 57% of typo sites include Google pay-per-click ads."

Then they took a comment about the effect of Google’s connection: "Combining our observations with financial reports and others' estimates, we conclude that Google's revenue from typosquatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year."

Google's is most likely the only search engine they point a finger at, since not nearly as many ads from Yahoo and Microsoft appear on typosquatting sites.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:12 AM

Links Not Always the Best Indicator of Relevance

Google’s Matt Cutts posted a YouTube video where he talks about creating tags and categories on blogs for SEO purposes. He pretty much states that this isn’t needed.

"Google is pretty good at saying, 'You know what? The first time you say a phrase, it's interesting, and the second time you say a phrase, it's still a little bit useful,'" said Cutts. "After a while, we sort of realized, 'okay, you've said that phrase, you don't have to keep repeating it 8, 9, 10 different times.' So there are certainly some blogs (including some really popular blogs) who have like an entire paragraph full of tags. And they have clearly spent a lot of time, almost as many, you know, minutes writing tags out as they have the actual content of the post. And I always laugh at that because it's not really that needed."

He also said that most of the time, tags are words that are already in the post and the tags aren’t necessary.

Google is about giving users the most relevant results to get the best user experience. These types of results aren’t always featured near the top of results, which is considered as an area where Google isn’t really delivering the best results.

Links are only one of the many factors Google takes into consideration for its rankings; the ranks are one of the biggest. The tag pages will show you that links aren’t always the best indicator of relevance.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:07 AM

Friday, February 19, 2010

Yahoo on Search and Advertising Post Microsoft Deal

Now that Yahoo and Microsoft have received DoJ and EU approval on their search and advertising deal, Yahoo is discussing what the deal means for its search engine and its advertisers. The two companies have a Search Alliance page set up that gives insight about what to expect.

Once the Search Alliance is implemented, both companies will continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences. Yahoo and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments.

For advertisers, Yahoo says they will reach more customers, save time and effort and benefit from "rapid innovation." According to Yahoo, the "alliance" will help advertisers reach up to 150 million searchers and get about 62% more search volume. There’s been a lot of talk about what will happen to Yahoo Search BOSS and SearchMonkey after the new deal takes effect.

"With the implementation of the search alliance, the BOSS team is excited to examine the Microsoft web, image, and video search technologies in more detail," says Yahoo's Ashim Chhabra. "Yahoo may continue to offer the BOSS service, which would integrate some Yahoo services and content with algorithmic results provided by Microsoft. The team is exploring what a future offering could consist of, with some services powered by Microsoft and unique content provided by Yahoo. As we finalize details for any changes to the BOSS service, we will give developers plenty of notice."

"Also, prior to the announcement of the Yahoo and Microsoft search alliance, we shared our intention to explore a fee-based structure for BOSS," Chhabra adds. "We continue to explore an appropriate revenue model as we work to define the future of BOSS in the context of our new search alliance. We know BOSS is important to your business, and any conclusions on strategic direction and roadmap for the service will be shared with developers as soon as possible."

Both companies sharing ideas about how to "advance" SearchMonkey. The companies saying “advance” must man that it will still have a place in Yahoo's search strategy.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:23 AM

Introducing the Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance

Yahoo and Microsoft received regulatory clearance to form a search alliance. This is a major and exciting milestone and the first step in their combined effort to help you reach even more customers with greater ease and efficiency.

What's to come?
No immediate changes will be made to your Yahoo Search Marketing account. Both companies are committed to making it a seamless and beneficial transition for you as much as possible. Their goal is the best quality transition of advertisers and partners in the U.S. before the 2010 holiday season. Though you might have to wait until 2011 if they decide that this will be more effective. You will get more information three months in advance about what to expect.

How the Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance Will Benefit You
Once implemented, the Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance will enable you to:

Reach more customers
  • Reach up to 150 million searchers and get approximately 62 percent more search volume than on Yahoo alone through the new and unified search marketplace combining the Yahoo and Microsoft networks.
  • To help drive future growth in search volume, Yahoo will continue to significantly enhance the search experience on its leading web properties
Save valuable time and effort
  • Just log into one place, Microsoft's adCenter, to manage campaigns for greater efficiency and a better ROI.
  • With just one buy you can reach other users on Yahoo and Microsoft sites, as well as other premium partner sites.
Benefit from rapid innovation
  • Yahoo will deliver new features and innovations to the world's favorite online destinations, content and web products used by hundreds of millions of consumers to connect to the people and things that matter to them most.
  • Microsoft will innovate the underlying technologies that drive high quality algorithmic and paid search results.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:17 AM

Sony Ericsson CEO Admits Nexus One Snub

The CEO of Sony Ericsson raised a few eyebrows when he admitted that his company declined the opportunity to manufacture the Nexus One.

Google translated Sydsvenskan.se’s comments for those who don’t speak Swedish. It implies that the CEO felt that the Sony Ericsson didn’t need Google’s help.

"It would be in itself an alternative way out to the market, but we'd rather by their own efforts on the important U.S. market," Nordberg supposedly said. Meanwhile, the title of the whole Sydsvenskan.se article is translated as "Sony Ericsson refused to build the Google Phone."

This could be a sign that Android doesn’t have as big as an appeal as people thought it did. Maybe Google is trying to convince corporations of the operating systems worth before the company can woo the consumers on a bigger scale.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:10 AM

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Firefox Mobile For Android Due Out This Year

Android users can expect a new way to get around the Web should debut this year. Jay Sullivan, Vice President of Mobile at Mozilla, has indicated that Firefox Mobile for Android will be available sometime this year.

The nonexistence of this product might have troubled some fans of Mozilla and Google fans were not happy about the product not existing just yet and it’s not secret that these two companies have been growing apart since Chrome came out and Mozilla’s director of community development endorsed Bing over Google.

Sullivan, who's worked at Mozilla for about two and a half years, told Gareth Beavers that the big challenge with Firefox Mobile for Android was the rift between C and C++ code and Java.

He seems pretty happy about Android and about what Mozilla has in the works. "It's a modern OS, and it's a great fit with us," Sullivan said. "It's the type of platform that has a high affinity with the early adopter, and it's seen a lot of uptake."

Expect to see Firefox Mobile for Android "late this year."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:11 AM

Monitoring Your Reputation Through Google Buzz

Google Buzz is the newbie in social media, but like a lot of the social networking Web sites, it’s been around for a while now. Just like these sites, Google Buzz is critical to reputation management.

In an interview with Web Pro News, Google’s Rick Klau said that Buzz’s monitoring is “definitely” just important as important as monitoring another critical component of reputation management, Google Blog Search. "As a product manager on Blogger, I regularly monitor Twitter and Buzz in addition to blog comments to look for users having problems or sharing interesting ideas," he tells us. "It's important to go where the users are - otherwise you'll miss out on conversations that are happening, and miss the opportunity to help solve a problem, learn about an issue that needs attention, or share a tip that deserves a broader audience."

"The real-time nature of tools like Buzz, along with the ease with which users can share and redistribute info, makes the amplification of information even more powerful than it was before," adds Klau. "News has the opportunity to spread virally, very quickly."

"That's great if it's good news, but potentially damaging if it's bad news," he says. "That's why it's so important to both look for conversations happening about topics that matter to you, and to engage where appropriate. When users know you're listening, and in a position to help, they can go from angry to appreciative pretty quickly."

Are you using Google Buzz as part of your reputation management strategy?

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:08 AM

Google's Annual Revenue at $497 Million

Many people hate typos and find them annoying. I can be one of those people. Seriously, it only takes one second to hit the backspace key and fix the typo. With Google, however, typos can mean big business as Benjamin Edelman and Tyler Moore have estimated that typos make the search engine giant $497 million per year.

Edelman and Moore both wrote a paper titled, "Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders." In a blog post summarizing it, they stated a few sets of data and wrote, "According to our analysis, 57% of typo sites include Google pay-per-click ads."

Then they took a comment about the effect of Google’s connection: "Combining our observations with financial reports and others' estimates, we conclude that Google's revenue from typosquatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year."

Google's is most likely the only search engine they point a finger at, since not nearly as many ads from Yahoo and Microsoft appear on typosquatting sites.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:04 AM

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Google Adds Real-Time Results From MySpace

Google and MySpace are going to plunge into real-time. Google implemented the MySpace Real-Time Search API, which means that searchers can find all kinds of content shortly after it was created on the social networking site.

A representative from MySpace wrote in an email to Web Pro News, "Beginning today, when users perform a search on Google, publicly available MySpace stream updates will appear in Google's Real-Time search results. The results provide a live snapshot of what our users are thinking and doing as it relates to any given search topic, and results are ranked so that only the freshest and most relevant data appears."

This can be a smart move for both. Google and its users can now get access to more information, even as MySpace and its users gain additional exposure. Google provides its users with updates from both Twitter & MySpace, but Facebook hasn’t been brought into the fold.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:39 AM

Consumers More Likely To Pay For Professional Online Content

It’s no surprise to see that the majority of online consumers prefer free content, but some categories consumers wouldn’t mind paying for access, according to a new survey from Nielsen.

Nielsen asked more than 27,000 consumers across 52 countries what types of online content they would actually pay for. The survey states that people would most likely pay for content for movies, music, games and television shows. They would not pay for content on social networking Web sites, podcasts or consumer-generated videos and blogs.

Consumers pretty much agreed on the guidelines for content that they would pay for.
  • 78 percent said if they are already subscribed to a newspaper, magazine, radio or television service they should be able to use its online content for free.
  • At the same time, 71 percent of global consumers say online content of any kind will have to be considerably better than what is currently free before they will pay for it.
  • Nearly eight out of every ten won’t use a Web site that charges them, presuming they can find the same information for free.
  • As a group, they are ambivalent about whether the quality of online content would suffer if companies could not charge for it.
  • But they are far more united in their conviction that once they purchase content, it should be their copy to share with whomever they want to share it with.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:36 AM

Google Checkout Gift Messaging Gets Some Changes

Google Checkout’s Advanced Buyer Messaging (gift messages) feature is being taken out of beta. The feature, that was released more than a year ago, lets Google Checkout customers add gift messages, add more instructions and request gift receipts.

This new beta-less version will come with some changes. Google explained these changes by saying, "Based on user feedback, we have streamlined the number of tags making the feature more straightforward to use. We will support only the gift-message, include-gift-receipt and special-instructions tags going forward."

Users currently using the old tags will continue to do that, but Google wants users to switch to one of the supported tags. "If you haven't used the Advanced Buyer Functionality yet, we encourage you to explore how these features may be able to improve your customer experience," the company told users.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:34 AM

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Google Apps Heading To Yale?

One of America's oldest universities is turning to Google for new software, according to a new report. Yale is supposedly getting the entire Google Apps for Education shebang, including email, Google Calendar and Google Docs.

Google's promoted Apps for Education as a cutting-edge and user-friendly solution for a while now. Since Yale is known as a well-regarded school, this is great PR for the Ivy League school. Other universities might accept Yale's decision as a smart one and follow its lead.

Yale administrators wouldn’t just be doing Google a favor. David Tidmarsh of the Yale Daily News talked to members of the Student Technology Collaborative and confirmed that the switch to Google Apps would save the school a lot of computing resources when compared to the current system.

Be on the lookout for this rollout, which is set to happen shortly. Tidmarsh wrote, "The incoming class of 2014 will be the first to go directly to the new Google system, and current freshmen and sophomores will have to make the switch. Upperclassmen will have the option of keeping Horde, but the University plans to phase out Horde by spring of next year . . ."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:51 AM

Google Linked To Australian Data Center Plans

There’s been a rumor circulating the Internet that Google is building a data center in Australia. Although construction crews haven’t been mobilized just yet, there has been a sign that Google hasn’t given up on this idea just yet.

Deepak Ramanathan, thread of Google's enterprise marketing arm in the Asia-Pacific region, recently spoke at an event in Sydney. Renai LeMay reported that people representing several Australian corporations expressed an interest in Google Apps while there.

According to LeMay, Ramanathan responded by saying that "the search giant was not ruling out an Australian datacenter for services like Gmail, and that discussions were ongoing."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:46 AM

Use QR Code to Increase Traffic and Sales

Quick Response (QR) code is nothing new in the technology world. It’s been around for 16 years, but with the popularity of smartphones and their support of QR-code-reading apps, it’s making the use of codes more popular. It’s easy to get the attention of potential customers with a scannable link to your Web site or the latest promotion. This QR code makes smartphone users want the scan them.

There are different ways to use the QR codes to increase your sales.

  • Use them to drive traffic to your Web site. You can place a code in a print ad, on your signage, on your business card, etc. Pretty much any place where potential customers could see it, you can include it, and if you catch them in the right frame of mind, they may just scan it.
  • Use one as a call to action. Simply tell people to scan it and link it to a special offer. Maybe it links to a printable coupon. Maybe it links to a promotion code for a discount on their next purchase. They don't have to be in prin. You can use them on your Web site.
  • Get creative. Dana Oshiro at Mashable looked at 5 unique uses for QR codes a while back. One of them was self-branding through swag you pass out (hats, shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)

There are many different kinds of QR-Code reading apps. You can find a great list of them at Mobile-Barcodes.com. You’ll see that a lot of mobile devices that will support the technology. Also, there are several sites you can go to quickly and easily create a unique QR Code on the fly. If you search for "QR Code Generators" you will find a several of them.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:41 AM

Monday, February 15, 2010

Google: "Buzz Will Be Just Another Node"

Google made it perfectly clear when they announced that they were Google Buzz was as open as possible. Looking at the Google Buzz API page, you’ll notice the support for Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger are things that are "coming soon."

What this means is that Google is working hard to make Buzz content something that can be used in different ways, while letting as many services possible come into Buzz.

"The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle," says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. "The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, and the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format."

Google recently turned on WebFinger in Gmail (via RRW). WebFinger, which is described as being about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach metadata to them. According to the WebFinger page at Google Code, this includes:
  • Public profile data
  • Pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
  • A public key
  • Other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
  • A URL to an avatar
  • Profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
  • Whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it's NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
  • Public declaration that the email address doesn't have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.
WebFinger is enabled for all Gmail/Google Profiles with public profiles.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:10 AM

Quantcast Finds Chrome, Firefox Have Trouble At Home

It seems people are not enjoying Chrome. Which is strange because many people who live in the U.S., Mexico and Canada enjoy Internet Explorer. At least that’s what Quantcast date is implying.

Quantcast, which measure and profiles audiences all over the world for advertisers, has released their data concerning browsers' market shares. These stats addressed usage in seven different geographic regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and South America.

Surprisingly, Chrome is the least successful in North America. Firefox isn’t catching on either. It seems that in North America, Internet Explorer is the best stronghold.

According to Quantcast, Chrome does best in South America. Firefox’s largest market is in Europe and Internet Explorer is the smallest.

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote, "At the very least it means that we North Americans should remember where we stand in terms of online sophistication by our mainstream population, relative to some other places in the world."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:07 AM

EU To Approve Microsoft-Yahoo Deal

The proposed Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership could be approved shortly by a least one set of regulators. Reports are now showing that the European Commission will give it a green light in about a week.

Note that this isn’t a sure thing, according to an unnamed person at Reuters who is “familiar with the situation” said, "I expect clearance without any concessions next Friday."

Approval from European will represent a big win for Microsoft and Yahoo; since told that they couldn’t do business together in the European Union’s 27 member states can make this deal a bit more complicated.

This approval will be a special significance since the European Commission was hard on Microsoft in the past, fining it $1.4 billion on one occasion.

We’ll just have to wait a week and see what decision is made.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:03 AM

Friday, February 12, 2010

New Chrome For Mac Beta Boasts Extensions

It seems that Chrome for MAC isn’t on the same level as the regular version of Chrome. This will make MAC fans feel neglected and Google can be missing out on a lot of potential users.

Google has fixed this issue and now there’s a new Chrome for MAC beta with extensions and some more upgrades was released. Bookmark sync is the newest feature to Chrome for MAC. This is beneficial for those who have more than one computer or work from home. It will be able to bookmark transfer involving Windows and Linux.

Software engineer Mark Mentovai wrote on the Google Chrome Blog, "We also added bookmark and cookie managers in a way that feels completely at home on the Mac. For technically-oriented users, our new Task Manager will help you keep tabs on all of your tabs."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:48 AM

YAHOO! Mobile Blog Launches

YAHOO! might be doing much more for mobile before you know it. At least that’s what they’re telling people about its current cell phone-related efforts. The company launched the YAHOO! Mobile Blog this week to keep consumers up to date.

YAHOO!’s Vice President of Global Mobile Products, Irv Henderson, wrote an introductory blog post where he wrote that, "You can expect to learn about new product launches and enhancements, quick tips and tricks, our take on market trends, and predictions for where we see the market is heading."

He also gave us a little hint about what’s to come in 2010. "So what's to come in 2010? Three developments will play a key role in shaping the mobile industry: Powerful browsers, the OS as a launching pad, and local content."

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens with that. At least we can count on YAHOO! to blog about it.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:44 AM

Google's Newest Effort to Make the Web Faster

YouTube launched a "Speed Dashboard", which will make it easier to get speed information about videos. The “Dashboard,” which will be available to users will offer “granular insight into what your YouTube video speed looks like,” according to YouTube’s Chris Dale.

"We think it's pretty cool and all part of our goal to make the web a faster place," he adds.

This will affect your YouTube video speed, the speed of your Internet connection, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) your using and the distance to the video servers. Users will now be able to compare their video speed to other regions and different ISPs.

"We may also list the YouTube speeds for users in your neighborhood but with different ISPs," says YouTube. "The speed numbers are calculated by measuring the speed at which YouTube video is received by the browser. This is then averaged over the previous 30 days provided you've used the same browser during this time period."

Over the past year Google has been working on the speed. They’ve talked about making page speed the main factor in ranking search results. Google has provided webmasters with a lot of tools to help increase their own speeds.

The YouTube dashboard can be viewed here.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:40 AM

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Microsoft Makes Mobile Ad Targeting Easier

Microsoft has launched a full HTML device that’s targeted towards advertisers so they are able to easily target mobile display ads to all handsets that ca render full HTML sites. These devices include the iPhone, Android and full HTML browser Windows phones and Blackberry devices.

"Targeting full HTML mobile devices is appealing to advertisers for many reasons," says Raj Kapoor of the Microsoft Mobile Advertising team. "Some advertisers wish to reach this audience segment simply due to their increased consumption of mobile media products. Other advertisers wish to use full HTML targeting to target Rich Media ad campaigns to devices that support these advanced mobile ad units, or simply to drive consumers to a more engaging full HTML page designed for mobile screens."

"Still other advertisers wish to enter the mobile advertising space but have not yet optimized their website to render on feature phones or other less featured mobile browsers," he adds. "While these advertisers recognize that the ideal consumer experience is to create a dedicated mobile web site for all mobile users, including those with devices capable of displaying sites originally created for the PC web, full HTML device targeting allows them to easily extend their online campaigns into mobile and reach this engaged mobile audience by driving these sophisticated users to their online destinations."

Before, Advertisers had to keep an up-to-date list of every mobile device with a full HTML mobile browser and target each one individually. This new feature will reduce the headache associated with that.

The list of devices is continuing to grow quickly, especially as smartphone usage becomes broader. It’s important to advertisers that they reach as many devices as possible if they’re campaign is not targeted to just one of them.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:21 AM

Google's Display Ad Business Projected to Exceed $1 Billion

There’s a great chance that 2010 will be the year for display ad. They’re important every year, but Google has only been involved with that for a short while and it good be the year that Google’s display ad business tops $1 billion in sales, according to analysts’ projections.

Last summer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a comment saying that display ads would be Google’s next billion-dollar business. According to BusinessWeek, a Carclays Capital analyst stated that display ads is going to account for almost 4% of Google’s total sales in 2010. This is a 40% increase from their 2009 contribution.


This could be the year of the display ad. That's not to say that display ads aren't prevalent every year, but Google has only been involved with that for a little while, and if analysts' projections are accurate, this will be the year that Google's display ad business tops $1 billion in sales.

YouTube is currently the world’s most popular video site and between sales of video and banner ads, Google’s display revenue is expected to hit $700 million in revenue. With DoubleClick, Google can now handle the placement display of ads on Web sites. "Display is now a key business for us," says Susan Wojcicki, Google's vice-president of product management and one of the company's earliest employees.

Back in November, Google announced its acquisition of Teracent, a provider of "intelligent dynamic display advertising". It provides machine-learning algorithms, which can create customized display ads based on thousands of different creative elements.

"Teracent's technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors," Google said. "These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads."

Before that, Google introduced a tool that can measure the impact of display ad campaigns across Google Content Network called Campaign Insights. Google says it can give reliable data about how a campaign raised brand awareness. Google has also added new templates for advertisers to use when constructing their creative.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:17 AM

178 Million Americans Watched 33 Billion Online Videos in a Month

comScore just released data about December’s online video market in the U.S. According to the research firm, Americans reportedly watched 33.2 billion videos online during the month of December alone. 178 million people watched videos online.

Google sites were ranked at the top of a list by a huge margin, as usual. Hulu was next with about a 12 million video difference. Google sites take up almost 40% of the market share, with Hulu taking about 3%.

According to comScore, people watch about 187 videos per viewer, which usually makes about six a day.

"Google Sites attracted 135.8 million unique viewers during the month (97.5 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo Sites with 59.8 million viewers (9.0 videos per viewer) and Fox Interactive Media with 56.8 million viewers (9.7 videos per viewer)," comScore says. "The average Hulu viewer watched 22.9 videos during the month, representing another all-time high for the property."

According to the Web site, 86.5% of U.S. Internet users viewed online videos. 134.4 million people have watched over 13 billion videos on YouTube. 44.9 million have watched 423.3 million videos on MySpace. The average Hulu viewer watched 22.9 videos, which total 2.2 hours of videos per viewer. The average length of an online video was 4 minutes.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:11 AM

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Google May Invest In Chinese Media/Ad Firm

Less than a month ago, Google announced that it might shut down Google.cn and the China offices. The search engine giant might not give up on the country completely, but a new report is showing that it’s part of a group that’s trying to invest in a large Chinese media and advertising company.

According to George Chen and Melanie Lee, Disney is leading a consortium that will include Google, and said consortium wants to buy a 30 or 40 percent stake in Bus Media for about $100 million. Negotiations are supposed to be in progress right now.

This type of an investment can be really smart considering the notable entities like CCB International, China Renaissance Capital Investment, IDG and the Yangtze Fund have all put money behind Bus Media.

Bus Media is enjoying China’s government support, as it’s "the exclusive partner of state broadcaster CCTV and the official Xinhua news agency for in-bus media content and advertising."

This brings us back to the sensitive issues of Google, China and censorship. Its unknown if this will change Google’s attitude of if the company as found solution that will complement its moral stand.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:05 AM

Google Rumored to Be Working on Apps Store

According Web Pro News and unnamed sources cited by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Google is planning to launch a store where it will sell online business software for use with its own Google Apps products. The Times cites "a person familiar with the project" and the Journal cites "people briefed by the company."

"These people said the store will sell business software designed by outside developers to integrate and add capabilities to Google Apps, such as enhanced security features or the ability to import contacts," the WSJ reports, later adding, "Google eventually plans to allow customers to purchase its partners' software through the site, taking a cut for itself and sharing some revenue with the developers, these people said. Google will allow users to quickly access their purchased applications through the menu at the top of their screens within Gmail or Google Docs, they said."

Both publications are referring to a statement made by Google where the company stated, "The Google Solutions Marketplace makes it easy for our customers to connect with an ecosystem of products and professional services. We're constantly working with our partners to deliver more solutions to businesses, but we have nothing to announce at this time."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:02 AM

Google Suggests Competitors for Local Business Searches

Google is offering suggestions for "nearby places you might like" on Google Maps when find a place you like and look it up. If you like a particular place, you could be presented with other places that’s within the same vicinity that Google thinks you may also like checking out.

"When you live in New York City, everyone has an opinion on where to eat," says Tammy Stern of the Google Maps team. "And usually, telling someone a place you love will lead to a long conversation of a string of other places you should try. For example, one of the more interesting restaurants I've eaten at in NYC was recommended to me by someone who knew I loved a different restaurant by the same owner. And, when I told a friend I was heading to the Lower East Side to get some yummy knishes for lunch, he told me to make sure I checked out the famous Guss' Pickles right around the corner and that I might consider picking up some smoked fish at Russ & Daughters down the street."

"You'll notice that we do not limit these suggestions to places sharing any specific characteristic; instead, we use a broad set of signals to come up with what are hopefully the most interesting suggestions," says Stern. "We're still working on refining these signals, so bear with us if your serendipitous discovery of a new place is even more unexpected than you'd anticipated."

This new feature has gotten positive and negative effects on local businesses. The bad part of the feature is that it could give customers ideas that could lead them to your competitor. On the other hand, you could be the competitor that’s getting new business and benefiting from this feature.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:59 AM

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Google Launches 2 New Mobile Features for Maps

Last week, Google introduced personalized suggestions for Google Maps. This allows users who save web history enabled to find places faster as Google makes suggestions based on past searches. Now they’ve launched the feature for Google Maps for Mobile on Android.

"If you often use both a computer and a mobile phone in your daily routine, it can seem like a hassle when they don't stay in sync," the Google Maps team says. "You might spend time on your computer looking for a great used bookstore, only to forget the name of the place when you are ready to get directions from your phone. Sure, you could print directions in advance, but we believe smartphones are 'smart' because they save you time."

On top of the personalized suggestions, Google introduced starring in Google Maps for Mobile and Android. This will let users save places to access later.

"So whether you're standing at Amoeba Music with your phone or making plans to go there on your computer, you can star it so it appears on the map next time you're on either device," the team says. "When viewing place details, just press the star icon next to the place name; these starred places are automatically synchronized between desktop and mobile, and can be accessed from both the 'More' menu on your phone and from the My Maps tab on your computer."

Google has also introduced a starring feature for Google News. This will give users another reason to have a Google account, which is probably Google’s motive for offering this feature.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 6:59 AM

Google Experiments with Different Google News Design

People noticed a new design for Google News, which is part of an experiment Google is currently running. An employee at Google posted a message in the Google News Help Forum:

At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. Right now, we are running a small test of a new Google News homepage design. More information about how Google runs experiments can be found here.

Like with any experiment, Feedback is wanted and Google is looking for feedback from consumer’s who have seen the new design. So let them know what you think about the redesign by clicking here.

Someone described the new design as “focusing on a single category of news at a time.” The user can click on a different category to view that. Unlike the current design where many categories are all on the home page and arranged based on the user’s preference. As of now, the feedback for those who have used the new Google News design has given positive feedback.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 6:54 AM

Cambodia Lambastes Google Over Border Portrayal The governments of France, Germany, and Italy are all a little upset with Google. China’s a bit upset

The governments of France, Germany, and Italy are all a little upset with Google. China’s a bit upset with the search engine giant as well. Because of the way Google has portrayed a dispute border, Cambodia’s angry as well.

According to Reuters, Secretary of State of Cambodia’s Council of ministers, Svay Sitha, wrote a letter to Google to make a complaint about its interpretation of the area where Cambodia and Thailand touch.

According to Reuters, Svay Sitha, the secretary of state of Cambodia's Council of Ministers, wrote a letter to Google complaining about its interpretation of the area where Cambodia and Thailand touch.

"(The map) is devoid of truth and reality, and professionally irresponsible, if not pretentious," Sitha said. "We therefore request that you withdraw the already disseminated, very wrong and not internationally recognized map and replace it.

It’s safe to say that Google won’t just swap in Cambodia's favorite map, because then Thailand would be upset. This isn’t Google’s first time that the company was in a border dispute.

A good guess would be that Google would come up with three maps. One will be for those in Cambodia, another for Thailand and the third for everyone else. The first two will show borders favoring their respective countries while the third is going to use dotted lines to illustrate the dispute.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 6:51 AM

Monday, February 8, 2010

Google Analyst: U.S. Internet Needs to Be Faster

Google has been a big advocate of a single Web, one that’s free of government censorship and barriers to information access. However, this is not the case anymore.

Governments from China to France have put different roadblocks in the information superhighway to serve their interests, filter speech or protect copyrights. The Internet connection hasn’t reached all corners of the world, not even all parts of the U.S.

CNN recently sat down with one of Google’s policy analysts, Derek Slater, to get more information on the split between Google’s idea of an all-access Web and the reality they’re facing today.

Slater declined to comment on Google’s negotiations with China. The search engine has threatened to pull out of the country after Gmail accounts of a few human rights activists were hacked into. Since the interview took place, it was reported that Google is working with the National Security Agency to prevent similar cyber attacks.

However, Slater did give his take about increasing sluggish Internet speeds and why the Web can really help peoples’ lives.

Read the edited transcript here.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 12:30 PM

Google Runs First Super Bowl Commercial

Millions watch the Super Bowl and millions of people pay close attention to the commercials that appear during the big football event. This year Google ran their first Super Bowl Commercial called “Parisian Love.” Did the commercial look familiar to you? Well, that’s because it was one of their “Search Stories” ad that was uploaded onto YouTube back in November.

Watch the video here.

With millions watching, Google ran their first Super Bowl Commercial entitled "Parisian Love". If it looks familiar, that's because it's one of their "Search Stories" ads, which was uploaded to YouTube back in November. You can check it out below...

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, tweeted yesterday..."Can't wait to watch the Super Bowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said "Hell has indeed frozen over.")"

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 10:06 AM

Introducing Click to Call Phone Numbers in Google AdWords on Mobile Devices

Google announced today stating users whose mobile devices have full Internet browsers can now see your business phone number and call directly from your ads.

The cost of a click to call your business is the same as the cost of a click to visit your Web site.

Opting Out
If you’re not interested in your ads showing a clickable business phone number on phones, just follow these steps.

Getting Started
Just two things need to be done in order to ensure the ads in your campaign will show your business phone number on mobile devices with full Internet browsers.

Set up location extensions and add your business phone number. Customers will be able to click to call your business location nearest to them.

Check that you've chosen to show your ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers in your campaign settings.

Viewing Results
You can now review how many calls you receive from your ads at the campaign, ad group or keyword level within AdWords.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:32 AM

Google Lets AdSense Publishers Donate Earnings to Haiti Relief

Google has launched an AdSense feature that will allow AdSense publishers to donate their earnings to Haiti earthquake relief efforts.

"We're currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010," says Google's Elizabeth Ferdon. "To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the 'Payment History' page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your 'Advanced Reports' page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized."

Publishers can either donate a portion or all of their unpaid balances starting the end of January. "As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so even if you're donating, please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings," says Ferdon.

Google will not process donation requests from publishers whose request to donate more than their unpaid balance through January 31, or if they are subject to tax-withholding, their account has been disabled for invalid activity or other violations of terms and conditions, or if their accounts display the messages: "please submit your tax information", "please enter your PIN", or "please verify your phone number".

Partners in Health is the organization that will receive the donations. They will go to provide medical aid.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:29 AM

Friday, February 5, 2010

Clicker Partners With UCLA On Online Video Site

Clicker, the online video guide, announced it has partnered with UCLA on a new service that brings online entertainment and university video content to students via the school’s Web portal, MyUCLA.

This partnership is giving students access to content from sites and networks like ABC, MTV, PBS, Hulu and YouTube. The content will features TV shows, music videos, movies, web original and UCLA content like lectures and symposiums.

"College students are clearly some of the most avid consumers of online media," said Jim Lanzone, founder and CEO of Clicker.

"Our new service will give UCLA students a more effective way to find legal online entertainment, and a more efficient way to access UCLA's substantial body of original videos, together in one seamless experience. UCLA on Clicker will take the guesswork out of finding what is available to watch, where to watch it, and what's worth watching online."

Clicker said its co-branded version of its service combines its existing 600,000-episode catalog with original videos from UCLA. Also, UCLA on Clicker was developed and will be supported without student dollars. The site is available to UCLA students for free.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:08 AM

Gmail Search Becomes More Like Google Search

Last year, Google released a Gmail Labs feature that added a search box for regular Google Search within Gmail. The lab, which is called Google search, didn’t have all the features the real Google search does. They’ve taken the necessary steps to improve the feature’s capabilities in the following areas:

- Dictionary definitions

- Spelling corrections

- Calculations

- Local results

- Weather

- News

Users can now enter “define” and any word in the search box to get the definition. If something’s spelt wrong, it will ask if you meant to search for something else. Type in a math expression and get the calculation. Search for a specific place or for things near a certain place and get map results [Google said this feature will be available in a few weeks]. The more info link will take you to a place page.

You can type "weather" followed by your city and state or zip code and get local weather results not unlike what you would get in a regular Google search. If your query matches something in the news, you may get some news results.

The new features are available in all languages that Gmail supports. They have also added a search button to the toolbar when you compose a message. With this, you can select text, click the button, and it will search for that. If you don't select text, it will just bring up a search box.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:57 AM

Google Introduces Multi-Touch To Nexus One

No one’s surprised that when the Nexus One was released, it was compared to the iPhone, and the Android device came up short was the multi-touch. Now an over-the-air software update will let the Nexus One users to pinch and zoom all they want.

The pinch-to-zoom function will work when people are messing with the phone’s browser; it’s gallery or the Google Maps applications. This will be a good thing to those who though they’d be without this feature permanently. There’s a possibility that this update will get a few extra purchases as well.

The addition is not the end of the update either. "[W]e will provide a general fix to help improve 3G connectivity on some Nexus One phones," promised an official blog post. "Will now be available directly on your device by launching it from your All Apps menu. Just use your Nexus One camera to start searching the web,” was added.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:53 AM

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Old Version of AdWords API Nears Expiration Date

Update: Google is reminding users of the AdWords API that on April 22, most of the services related to v13 will be turned off. The company is telling users to switch to v200909 quickly to avoid any complications.

Google launched the newest version of the AdWords API v2009 beta. That would be version 200909. Google cites the following as the highlights of the new API:

- Asynchronous calls: Asynchronous calls lets you work with large sets of data faster and easier. Instead of waiting for the system to completely finish your request before you're able to make another one. Now you can make another call as soon as the API service confirms that it received your previous calls. You don't have to wait for your server to complete large requests anymore. V200909 will continue to support Synchronous methods as well.

- Keyword and placement ideas: With the new Targeting Idea Service, you can get keyword and placement ideas through the API, leveraging the functionality of the search-based keyword tool.

- Location Extensions preview: Limited location extensions functionality is now available as a preview of the full functionality in development.

These are just the highlights. Google has a complete list of all of the new features in its release notes. The company says that over the next few months, Google will continue to bring new features and additional AdWords functionality. These new features will include Report Service, Account Service and the ability to pre-check for errors.

"Given that v2009 introduces new concepts and features, we have extended the sunset period for deprecated services to 6 months," Google says. "If you haven't already begun migrating your systems to the v2009 API, we strongly encourage you to start right away."

V13 services Campaign Service, Ad Group Service, Criterion Service, Ad Service, Info Service, Keyword Tool Service, and Site Suggestion Service will sunset on April 22, 2010. Other v13 service sunset dates will be announced in due time.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:57 AM

Stanford Endorses Google Books Settlement

It’s been a long hard couple of months for members of the Google Books team. It started out to be what seemed like the whole world objected to their proposed scanning and sharing settlement. It turned out that Stanford is on Google’s side as a new deal was just announced.

Stanford and Google first sealed a book-related deal back in 2004. Now a post on the Google Public Policy Blog as stated, "Stanford University . . . has expanded our original partnership to take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States."

The post continued, "That means that if the settlement agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from Stanford's library."

This could be an important agreement. It’ll be interesting to see how the settlement agreement goes before we can be sure that the terms will stick.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:55 AM

Ad Networks See Increased Adoption

The majority (69%) of media planners and agencies now use online advertising networks as part of their digital ad buys. This represents a 24 percent increase in the past 18 months, according to Adify Media.

"Especially in light of the Dynamic Logic study that found that creative quality is 50 to 75 percent responsible for campaign success or failure, agencies must start evaluating the creative capabilities of networks," said Russ Fradin, president of Adify.

"As the industry looks for better ways to engage, not just reach, their audience, brands need to focus on compelling creative that builds an ongoing conversation with consumers and placing it where consumers spend time."

Other key findings from the survey include:

- More money is being allocated online each quarter:

- 56 percent of respondents' budgets were more than $500k in 2008.

- 73 percent were over $500k in 2009.

- In 2009, 37.9 percent of the respondents spend between $1-5 million per quarter on online advertising, 15.2 percent of respondents spend

- $5-20 million per quarter, and 5.9 percent spend more than $20 million

per quarter on online advertising.

Branding is a major focus for online ad campaigns:

- 83 percent of respondents allocate 50 percent or more of their budget to branding vs. direct response.

Awareness of vertical ad networks (VANs) continues to grow as a way to reach niche audiences:

- 72 percent are familiar with VANs versus 56 percent in 2008.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:51 AM

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Google Luring More Account Users with New News Feature?

Google News continues to become a much more personalized experience for users. In November, the company launched the Custom Sections Directory feature that will let users set up sections on topics of interest, which users can share with others.

Google has added the ability to star story clusters that interests each user. Use this feature, just like you would star message in Gmail or stories in Google reader.

"When you star a story in Google News, it's one way to let us know that you're interested in that subject," says Google News software engineer Jude Brito. "When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information. You can also follow your 20 most recent starred stories in the 'Starred' section of Google News."

Users must be signed in to star a story cluster or access their list of starred stories. This is an interesting aspect of this feature.

Google News has been a site people could enjoy no whether or not they had a Google account. Now Google has another way to get the average non-Google-account-having user to sign up to Google, which will give them access to many other Google products. Once you get a Google account, it will make using Gmail, Google Dogs, Google Calendar, etc. more worthwhile.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:31 AM

Google Sets Record Straight on Page Speed as Ranking Factor

Sometime last year, Google’s Matt Cutts told Web Pro News that page speed is becoming a factor that Google will look at for ranking search results. This comment got a lot of attention because Google never took this into consideration for ranking Web sites in the past. This is because a lot of site owners don’t have fast sites and this can damage their search rankings.

Cutts never mentioned that page speed would be any more important of a ranking factor than anything else, which people over the Internet jumped to conclusions.

"No. Relevancy is the most important. If you have two sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks...everything else is the same), you'd probably prefer the one that's a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, and the most accurate search result that we can find. That's not going to change,” Cutts said in a video response.

"If you can speed your site up, it's really good for users, as well as potentially down the road, being good for search engines," he says. "So it's something that people within Google have thought about."

It’s interesting people would assume page speed is more important than relevance to Google because Cutts made a comment that page speed will be one of the many factors that Google will use. If that were the case, Google would be placing emphasis on page speed for a while now. However, it’s worth thinking about how big a factor page speed can play.

The important thing would be to make your Web site fast and user-friendly as much as possible. Google offers webmasters different tools to help make their sites faster. This is part of Google’s initiative to “make the web faster.”

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:27 AM

Chrome Wins Browser Speed Test

Google's Chrome browser didn't exist two years ago and now it’s considered as one of the best browser’s available. New test results are claiming that it beats all competitors by a large amount in terms of speed.

Google’s Chrome came out on top in a couple of categories, and according to Purdy's scoring system, won the comparison, with the developer version placing first and the stable version securing second.



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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:22 AM

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Customer Connections Now Important for Google Results

Google’s Social Search is not just an experiment, it’s now mainstream. People are already seeing different search results now that Google is plugging results based on the individual’s social circle into any given SERP. This is another way search engine optimization is changing and many businesses are looking to get some play in Google Search.

Google is thinking that if users connect to certain people, results from those will have relevance because you know and trust them. Google says, "You can improve social search results for your friends and contacts by linking to content you have created such as blogs, photos and videos on your Google profile."

"We've been having a lot of fun with Social Search. It's baby season here on our team — two of us just had little ones, and a third is on the way," the company says in the announcement. "We're all getting ready to be parents for the first time and we have lots of questions. So, what do we do? We search Google, of course! With Social Search, when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual websites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts. For example, if one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results. I could probably find other reviews, but my friend's blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author."

Appearing in social search results means:

1. Make sure you have all of your important links on your Google Profile.

2. Make as many connections as possible.

3. Encourage customers to follow you via social networks.

4. Participate in social media so people will engage with you.

5. Encourage sharing of content (there are plenty available social media buttons)

6. Include social network info on business cards/signage, etc.

7. Include social network info in your online advertising

8. There are probably many more worthwhile tips.

Google's social search doesn't end with just regular web search. They will add it to image search. A lot more features will be part of the social search as Google leaves that Beta tag on.

Google is making many moves during the last few years that it’s slowly turning into its own social network. Now that profiles have a direct impact on search results, how people view Google will change in a big way. Once people realize the social features being integrated into everyday searches, they’ll find themselves using Google as more of a social tool, as opposed to just a search tool.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:13 AM

Google Highlights Answers in Search Results

Google launched a new search feature called "answer highlighting," based on Google Squared. The new feature was announced at Google’s structured date project last year at the company’s Searchology event. The feature highlights answers to applicable searches within the search snippet.

So, if the query is “empire state height,” it’ll bold the actual answer for that, as well as the words used in the search.

"Most information on the web is unstructured. For example, blogs integrate paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don't follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their own formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is difficult for a computer to interpret, which means that we humans still have to do a fair amount of work to synthesize and understand information on the web," says Google. "Google Squared is one of our early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. We've been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called 'answer highlighting.'"

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:05 AM

Will Google Still Operate in China Without Search

Google may try to continue with operations in China, even if it shuts its search engine down due to censorship. Keep in mind, Google is more than just a search engine and censoring search results doesn’t always come into play in all the other aspects of its business.

According to the New York Times, Google will be talking with Chinese government officials soon, which will more than likely decide the fate of Google’s operations in the country.

"In most countries, Google draws the majority of its revenue from ads that appear on its search engine, but the No. 1 source of revenue in China comes from ads that Chinese companies place on Google’s sites in the United States," reports Miguel Helft with the Times. "A person knowledgeable about Google’s business in China said ads that run on a network of Chinese Web sites are the company’s second-largest source of revenue in the country. Google can retain both of those if it is allowed to keep a sales force and advertising network there."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:02 AM

Monday, February 1, 2010

Delicious Launches New Features, More on the Way

Delicious introduced some new features in the categories of bookmark display options, tag options and bookmark browsing.

A bookmark display option was combined in one spot to right of the tagbar and underneath the bookmark count. The new features include a privacy filter, a send recipients options and an “open bookmarks in” option. This will allow users to filter bookmarks by “only private” or “only public.”

Delicious moved the tag options out of the blue action box and into the sidebar where the tags are actually listed. The feature is the same, just in a different spot.

The new feature, “Browse these bookmarks” is in the form of a link in the action box that will allow users to open the first bookmark and display a small frame on the top of the page, where they can paginate through the bookmarks.

"We're still working on the feature and more functionality will be added over the coming months, but based on how useful we’ve found it, we wanted to give you a chance to start using it sooner rather than later," says Simon on the Delicious blog. "We'd love to get your feedback on this feature and suggestions for other features. We know what we want to add to it, but your responses will help us gauge what we should work on adding next."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:06 AM

Intel Shows Off Interesting Way to Access Content

Intel had a lot going on at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. They introduced a new family of Intel Core Processors and cool proof-of-concept device on display. They called it the Intel Infoscape.

With Infoscape, a giant display featuring cubes of information, users can walk up to it and access different types on content: Google News, Tweets, blogs, Flickr images, etc. Infoscape is designed to view different ways of presenting content in the future. This giant cube is powered by Intel’s Core 17 processor and crabs about 20,000 different content sources.

According to Intel, the device was created to see how people might access and organize their content down the road.

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:00 AM

Chrome OS Touch Rumors Restart

The new iPad seems to be dominating this week, but there’s still some excitement about Chrome OS responding to touch, as a Google employee set off the hubbub.


Here is the disclaimer: What was said today didn't come near a definite "yes, we're working on that." It might have just been a sort of spoken misstep, and the most promising-sounding part may have been a sign of optimism not meant to signify any definite product plans.

Senior Product Manager Anders Sandholm had an interesting response when asked about Chrome OS and touch. According to Dan Grabham, Sandholm looked at a PR rep and “chuckled nervously,” and said, "I can't . . . I mean . . . right now we are targeting netbooks, that's what we're focused on, but I expect it to work well . . . we expect it to target everything up to desktop computers."

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posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:51 AM

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