Brand pages, social extensions and a trusted verification process are all features in-house marketers should immediately engage with to increase their Google+ counts and brand profiles.

Similar to other AdWords extensions, like Product or Sitelink extensions, Social Extensions are appended to the Campaign level and associate an AdWords campaign with a Google+ page. While there isn’t any indication that the outward display of the ad will change much, the +1 tally for the ad will update to reflect the Google+ page counts and vice versa.

The main advantage for in-house marketers implementing the new Social Extension is to boost their +1 counts all around, AdWords ads and Google+ pages will receive boosts from each other’s increasing +1’s. All AdWords ads display +1 buttons, a Social Extension does not impact that feature, it merely aggregates the +1 counts.

Whether a higher +1 count has a positive impact on AdWords ad click-through rates is yet to be determined, but certainly having a higher +1 number enabled by the Social Extension link to a Google+ page could not hurt.

Unlike other extensions, Social Extensions have no additional links or ad display features, the impact is only on the count near the +1 button that already displays on all AdWords ads. One could imagine a link to the Google+ page could appear in the future.

Most brands will want to undergo the Google+ verification process. A checkmark next to the Google+ page name indicates that Google has verified the authenticity of ownership of the page. Kudos go to Google for immediately getting on the authentication process and making it relatively painless for brands to undertake.

Hopefully, many squatting or misrepresentation issues will be avoided.

Google is proactively reaching out to brands to verify via email, and also provides a process for brands to report offending pages via the “Impersonation” option in the “Report this profile” function on every Google+ page.

There is no doubt a nice advantage to quicker navigation to a brand’s Google+ page when someone is searching for it. However, with search suggestions (which already display Direct Connect suggestions), and Google’s desire to increase visibility of Google+ pages, brand name searches could easily be hijacked to Google+ pages versus the brand’s actual website.

Navigational brand searches are a huge volume of queries, and an easy way for Google+ to boost its traffic.

Perhaps a bigger question is that if Google thinks there is consumer value in a search shortcut for brands, how much value is really being added for consumers by directing to a Google+ page versus a brand’s website directly?

Ultimately, I would guess most consumers are looking to end up on a brand’s site versus a Google+ page.

At this time, there isn’t much a brand or marketer can do to influence a + search shortcut, Google will algorithmically determine them. There’s currently no information available about opting out of the direct connect shortcut. In-house marketers should monitor if their brand page receives a Direct Connect and what impact it has on brand related searches and site traffic. Potentially Google+ could become a larger referrer and brand search results less so.

The floodgates are open for in-house marketers to engage with Google+, and there’s no time like the present to take advantage of these new social features. Whether Google+ ultimately succeeds or fails time will tell.

However, nothing but a little time is lost by setting things up early, and a possible significant +1 count advantage is gained by building as soon as possible. In-house marketers, set up your brand’s Google+ page here today!

Here we are, at that time of the year when we look back and analyze how things went, decide what should be improved and hoping for the best in the following year. Looking back to 2011, from a professional perspective, I find it easy to say that this was a good year for cloud computing.

• I decided to begin with the news that, in my opinion, set the tone for the whole year: the Gartner study which proclaimed cloud computing as a Top Technology Priority for CIOs in 2011. This subject it’s further analyzed in one of my first articles:Why is Cloud Computing a Safe Bet for the Future?

• In 2011 the business benefits of a cloud computing model have been very well stated. A Cloud.com Survey revealed that hardware savings are the most popular reason for using cloud-based storage and using Platform-as-a Service. Also, 12% of IT professionals indicated their preference to run their infrastructure on public clouds. Here are some additional reads if you want to know more about cloud computing benefits: How Much You Can Save On Your Cloud Computing Implementation?, Cloud Computing: Business Model or Technology? and About Private or Shared Cloud and Everything in Between.

• From the same Cloud.com survey, in 2011 Chief Technical Officers indicated scalability (71%) as the most popular reason for adopting cloud computing, followed by elasticity (61%), or the need to adjust to fluctuations in resource demands (61%). In my article Evolution and Revolution with Cisco Data Centre Fabric. Í have talked about how Cisco rose to these challenges.

• This year, cloud computing technology offered us a sneak peak at the changes it produces for the IT world. Software development in Cloud is making the platforms more customizable, the need for IT support staff is reduced and new skills and specialties are in high demand. One of the highpoints of the year was the Chromebook being released in May 2011, the first computer that operates entirely in the cloud.

• The fears concerning security issues were the biggest challenge in 2011, especially because of the lack of trust companies have on an organization hosting their data. But I believe, this obstacle will be overcome and little by little, we will see IT professionals becoming more trustful concerning outsourcing data as they gain knowledge about cloud computing technology. The proof? Even if the biggest management challenge for cloud computing users was security (36%), most IT professionals prefer to deploy their infrastructure using virtualization (77%).

• Last, but not least, in 2011, a very important benefit of cloud computing began to get noticed. In a world that should be more eco-friendly, cloud computing proves great green credentials. So besides asking about financial advantages, we should also ask Why is Cloud Computing Green?

Email isn’t just about the client software—it’s not just Gmail’s web interface vs. Outlook’s desktop software—it’s also about the servers supporting that client software, and that’s where Gmail truly shines.

CIO Magazine reported on a study by Forrester Research at the beginning of last year (2009) noting the differences in costs:

For typical information workers, Forrester estimates that it costs a company $25.18 per user per month for an on-premise e-mail system, including the hardware, labor and other costs associated with managing e-mail in-house. Alternatively, for companies using Google’s fully Web-based Gmail, it costs a mere $8.47. Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft’s version of a fully cloud-based e-mail, isn’t quite as cheap as Gmail but rings in at $20.32 per user per month.

The cost calculations in the Forrester study were based on examining 53 enterprise-sized companies, that means BIG organizations. According to Jason Hiner of TechRepublic.com the cost difference to an organization of 100 people is even more staggering:

Google charges its Premium customers $50 per user per year. Even hosted Exchange plans cost about $500 per month plus about $6 per user per month. For a smaller company with just 100 users that would make the cost of Google Apps Premium $5,000/year vs. $13,200/year for the hosted Exchange solution. And an in-house Exchange solution will typically have a total cost of ownership (TCO) that is even higher than the hosted solution.

For non-profits the savings is even larger as Google offers a non-profit rate of a mere $30 per user per year. And for those small businesses content to make due without the larger mailboxes (you’ll have to settle for only 7GB), enterprise options, and support guarantees that come with Google Apps Enterprise Edition, the Standard Edition’s cost of $0—that’s zilch, zero, nada—is unbeatable.

One of the biggest, if not the biggest reason that organizations aren’t switching to Gmail is the reluctance to train employees who have grown used to Outlook to use Gmail. Those of us used to using Gmail and its incredible interface could simply dismiss this as a silly reason to continue paying through the nose for email, but organizational fallout over a software switch is a real thing to consider and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

Thankfully, using Google Apps as an alternative to running costly Exchange servers doesn’t mean that users have to immediately abandon their beloved Outlook. Gmail supports both IMAP and POP3 mail protocols, so that Outlook can continue to be used as an email client. This way, organizations can slowly introduce Gmail’s other features to users, perhaps by making the web interface the only way to access email on a non-work machine, like how many companies currently use Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access solution.

Roche has had two different email and calendaring platforms for the past two and a half years, a situation that has created “interoperability issues” that have harmed collaboration, according to a blog post from Roche’s CFO and CIO Dr. Alan Hippe.

This will be the second-largest Google Apps deployment to date, after the also recently announced plan by Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya to roll out the Google suite to its 110,000 employees globally.

Roche expects that the cloud-based model of Apps will improve collaboration among employees as well as reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining software and hardware on the company’s premises.

“Employees will be able to access their email and documents from any web-enabled device, without using remote access systems such as VPN. This will make it easier for employees to work from home or on the go and it will reduce the strain on our IT support teams,” Hippe wrote.

So how do you get it? We’ve packaged it for Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 package and for Fedora 13, i386 and x86_64.

Debian
# 1. Add this line to your list of repositories by
# editing your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free

# 2. If you want to verify the downloaded packages,
# you will need to add our public key
sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 4E9CFF4E

# 3. Run apt-get update
sudo apt-get update

# 4. Install spotify!
sudo apt-get install spotify-client-qt

If you’re worried about this, you’re not alone. Just as companies realized, circa 1996, that they needed to create a website to remain relevant to consumers, history is repeating itself in mobile. By 2013, more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online, according to Gartner. In mid-2011, we also reached the point at which consumers were spending more time on their mobile devices than on their PCs.

In such an environment, a site designed to be viewed on a desktop PC comes across as woefully lacking. Say you’re accessing such a site from the Safari browser on your iPhone. The first thing you’re likely to notice is that it takes a relatively long time to load. The second thing is that the type on the page is pretty small. It might take a lot of zooming and pinching to navigate the site as well. If you have Flash on your site, it’s not going to come across at all on an iPhone.

At that point, your potential customer may start looking around. According to a recent survey from Compuware, 40% of users have turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience.

Yet currently, most businesses haven’t optimized their sites for mobile. Jesse Haines, group marketing manager for Google Mobile Ads, says the company canvassed its large advertisers early in 2011 and found only 21% have launched a mobile site.

If you’re among the other 79% or so, take heart. Optimizing your site for mobile or creating a mobile site from scratch isn’t a big deal.

In part, that’s because Google has stepped in. The company is eager to expand its online advertising empire further into mobile. With an eye towards “growing the mobile ecosystem” as Haines puts it, Google last monthlaunched GoMo, an initiative that aims to help businesses go mobile.

Google’s howtogomo.com is a clearinghouse of information on the topic and even includes a feature that lets you see how your site looks on a mobile device.

For those looking for a quick fix, Google provides a list of companies that will build your mobile site for you, and you can specify what you want to spend. Haines says that you can get up and running for as little as $100 a year.

Dennis Mink, VP of marketing at DudaMobile, one of the vendors Google lists on GoMo, says he thinks the average price for a decent mobile site is more like $200 to $500. If you’re comfortable with website design, though, DudaMobile offers DIY tools as well, which are just $9 a month. While the company’s web-based software is free, the fee goes toward hosting and site analytics. (Yes, if you’re running a mobile site, you have to pay two hosting fees — one for your traditional website and one for mobile.)

One recent DudaMobile customer is TriStar Automotive, a Santa Rosa, Calif., repair shop. Jim Dadaos, the owner of the shop, says his web developer told him a few months back that he needed to get a mobile site “because that’s where everything is going.” Dadaos’s developer contacted DudaMobile, which created the site “within a very short time” and it’s been up and running for six months. During that time Dadaos says he’s seen a 20% spike in business. “During these times, the auto repair business is sucking, so that’s significant,” he says.

Mink and Haines offer a few tips for building a good mobile website. One thing to consider is whether your site is what Haines calls “thumb-friendly.” What that means in practice is lots of big, fat buttons. Another thing to keep in mind is font size and navigation. The first should be fairly large, and the second should be fairly intuitive.

Haines says one site that renders especially well on mobile is 1-800 Flowers, which, as you see below, is both thumb-friendly and intuitive.

 

 

Another site Haines singles out is from PacSun, the teen-focused clothing brand:

 

 

Incidentally, if you’re considering a mobile app rather than a mobile website, Haines says to go for the website. “It really depends on the brand,” she says. “We think a mobile website is a must-have.” Haines says that for some brands, like news sites for instance, a mobile app makes sense, but otherwise, most users are going to look for you via their browser.

Mink agrees: “If you’re going to search for any type of business, you’re going to search the mobile web, not an app store,” he says. “People don’t look for apps that will give them information.”

- Classic – the default inbox style with messages ordered chronologically
- Priority Inbox – important and unread messages appear at the top, then starred messages, then everything else
- Important first – important mail at the top of the page, everything else below
- Unread first – unread mail at the top of the page, everything else below
- Starred first – starred messages at the top, everything else below

Here are the top 10 data protection and reliability advantages that we hear about most frequently from customers (in no particular order):

1. Powerful administration tools give you control of your data
When business data is stored in Google Apps, administrators have powerful tools to help them manage things like users, documents and services. Reports also provide visibility into how the applications are being used and what data is in them so that administrators have the control they need without having to maintain the infrastructure.

2. Pure and proven cloud architecture
Our datacenter server infrastructure is specifically designed and built for our applications and does not include unnecessary hardware or software code such as peripheral ports or device drivers. This reduces the number of potential vulnerabilities that could be targeted.

3. Patch management
Downloading, testing and deploying patches has become a significant pain for many IT departments. Google Apps reduces this pain because there are no servers for customers to patch. We manage the servers and take care of all updates.

4. Strong authentication
Google Apps includes 2-step verification for all user accounts – at no additional charge. Businesses and organizations can easily deploy an extra layer of protection for their user accounts using devices they already have. This makes strong authentication available to many organizations that did not have it before. Google Apps also integrates with existingSingle Sign On (SSO) mechanisms via open standards.

5. Disaster recovery
Google Apps offers robust disaster recovery capabilities which are commonly measured by Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO measures how long before users can access systems in the event of a failure and RPO measures how much of a gap there is in the data when it is restored. Google Apps is designed with RTO and RPO goals of zero. Emails, documents and data are saved every few seconds and replicated in multiple data centers. This means that if one of our data centers becomes unavailable, we seamlessly switch the user to another data center and because it has been replicated there is no loss of data and users can continue working uninterrupted.

6. Third party verifications
Google Apps and our data centers are SSAE 16 Type II audited and have achieved the U.S. Federal Government’s FISMA certification. SSAE 16 is an auditing standard where a third party auditor evaluates the controls in place for numerous areas including physical and logical security, privacy, incident response and more. The Federal Information Security Management Act or FISMA is the law defining security requirements that must be met by all US Federal government information systems. While FISMA certification is required for U.S. Government agencies, it is also a strong validation in the private sector of the technologies and processes we use to protect the data in Google Apps.

7. Information security expertise
We employ an information security team of over 250 people with a wealth of expertise not found in most organizations. Many have advanced degrees and are thought leaders in information security. The security team regularly publishes research and contributes open source tools to the security community. They monitor our global network of datacenters and applications 24x7x365.25 (they don’t rest on leap years).

8. Secure connections for users
We automatically encrypt browser sessions for Google Apps users without the need for VPN’s or other potentially costly and cumbersome infrastructure. This helps protect your data as it travels between users’ browsers and our data centers.

9. High availability
Google Apps has zero maintenance windows or planned downtime. While we offer a 99.9% uptime SLA, Gmail exceeded this guarantee in 2010 and achieved 99.984% uptime. We did this while delivering more than 30 new features and adding tens of millions of users. The status of Google Apps is visible to administrators and users on our publicly available statusdashboard.

10. Reduced risk of data breach
Google Apps allows users to work securely on their data wherever they are, using a wide range of devices. The data is stored centrally in Google’s cloud which greatly reduces the need for users to take their data with them using USB drives or similar devices, which can be easily lost or stolen. This can help reduce the risk of a data breach, something that is on the mind of many organizations these days.

Over three million businesses trust Google to protect the data they store in Google Apps and make it reliably accessible. Over the next few weeks we’re going to dive deeper into each one of these areas to provide more details why Google Apps customers trust us with their business data.

Tungle syncs with your existing calendar. Supported calendars include:

• Outlook
• Google Calendar
• Entourage
• MobileMe (beta)
• Lotus Notes
• BlackBerry
• Windows Live
• Yahoo!
• Plancast
• TripIt
• Facebook

Syncing allows you to see your calendar events in Tungle, making it easier for you to propose meeting times.

When synced, Tungle will prevent double bookings for you by automatically updating your availability on your profile page, and dynamically updating meeting invitations as new events are added to your calendar. For example, if you send out a meeting invitation proposing multiple times, then add a new event to your calendar that overlaps your proposed times, Tungle will dynamically update your pending meeting invitation to remove the now-booked time slot, preventing you from being double booked.

NOTE: Your calendar is kept private. You will be able to see your meetings and details when you are signed into your account, but no one else will see them.

We are able to make a superior service for online meetings and keep it free through the help of the AnyMeeting user community. Our users are passionate about the AnyMeeting service and help build the community by spreading the word to their friends and colleagues. Our advertising revenue model keeps us in the black and allows us to add the cutting-edge features that our users want.

To stay informed about AnyMeeting, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also make frequent posts on our Web Conferencing Blog.

Full Featured and Free

Gmail: Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app based on the Gmail web app for tablets.
Calendar: When offline, you can view events and RSVP to appointments.
Docs: You can view documents and spreadsheets offline.

Editions included:
Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education

How to access what’s new:
Gmail: Install the Gmail offline app from the Chrome Web store. Administrators need to first allow access to the ‘Chrome Web Store’ service. IT administrators can deploy Chrome Web Store apps to users en masse by setting up organizational policies for Chrome.
Calendar and Docs: Click the gear icon at the top right corner of the web app and select the option for offline access.

First, let’s say you have a list of coworkers you think you’ll want to contact again in the future. Now, you can paste that list into the Add to group menu when viewing your “Coworkers” group to populate or extend it.

Second, we’ve added the ability to specify which one of your contact’s email addresses you want to use in a given group. So, for example, you can now use your friend’s personal address in your “Poker Buddies” group and that same friend’s work address in your “Coworkers” group.

Other Improvements to the Contacts Manager
New Contacts interface – This update brings many of the improvements seen in consumer Gmail, including the following additions for Enterprise:
- Add new contact information that will default to “Work” instead of “Home” field types.
- View domain directory contact details interwoven inline with any contact details you’ve added yourself.
- Add contacts from the domain directory to your “My Contacts” list in a single click.
- Manage groups more easily by quickly adding email addresses to groups, and picking from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis.
- Revert changes to your Contacts for up to 30 days in case you need to restore deleted or merged contacts, or undo an import.

- 21 more beautiful new email templates (9 of which are super for non-profits)
- Email Beamer: Send MailChimp campaigns from your mobile device or any email app (like Outlook, Gmail, etc) via private email address that we give each of your lists.
- Custom translations: Our international users can now translate their MailChimp forms any way they want.

(For Our Power Users & Nerds)
- HairBall is a desktop app we launched in August. It’s for users with very large lists who want to do complex segmentation (stuff that’s a little slow to do in a web app). Despite the funny name, it’s extremely fast and powerful. And we just added the ability to nest your segments. If you’re a power user, your head probably just exploded. Sincere apologies.

- OAuth2: Developers of apps that integrate with MailChimp can now use OAuth2, which eliminates the need to request sensitive account credentials. Hear that? Way off in the distance, security nerds are cheering.

- E-commerce store owners who use Shopify will love the new Chimpified plugin, because you can create campaigns with items from your store in just a few clicks (among other enhancements).

Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch recently took the stage at their annual MAX conference and explained the company’s Creative Cloud strategy. Part of that announcement is very big news for us: Typekit has been acquired by Adobe.

We are thrilled. There honestly is no better place for us to continue building our platform. But perhaps even more significantly, this represents a huge step forward in bringing fonts to the web.

Not very long ago, web fonts were a curious and controversial debate. When the four of us founded this company, nobody knew if it would even work. We set up shop in a former morgue, sketched out a plan, and nervously published our first blog post. The response was immediate and not completely positive, but we’d fired the starter’s pistol. The race was on.

It seems odd to look back not even three years with a sense of nostalgia, but the environment in which we build the web has changed so much in so little time. At the end of 2008, HTML5 and CSS3 were becoming both viable and popular. Firefox, Safari, and Chrome were leapfrogging each other with amazing new capabilities, including the long-neglected @font-face spec. On the server side, a similarly important shift was happening: processing and storage could be rented by the hour and scaled at will. The so-called “cloud” was forming.

That was where we started. We asked ourselves what would happen at the intersection between web design and cloud computing. We quickly realized we could do two really interesting things. First, by serving hosted fonts, we could provide compatibility to all browsers and devices — both old and still to come — using the latest, most up-to-date best practices. Designers using our platform would no longer have to track browser hacks and bulletproof syntax. They could focus instead on creativity and expression.

Second, we could innovate on the business side as well. We could sell fonts as a service, and use a subscription model to eliminate Byzantine licensing and usage issues. We gave designers all-you-can-eat access to a library of font families, shared revenue with our partners, and carefully cultivated our business as it began to grow.

And grow it did. Few sites used web fonts when we got started; today, new sites seldom launch without them. Typekit now serves nearly three billion fonts per month on over one million different sites, including some of the most recognized brands on the web. We host the iconic typefaces of the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker, among others. We’re forging new ground with web-native companies like Zynga, Twitter, and the Gawker Network. And we’re making web fonts available to as broad an audience as possible, offering integration with platforms like About.me, WordPress.com , Posterous, and Behance. And that just scratches the surface: our blog is full of examples of the most innovative typography on the web today — all powered by Typekit.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without an amazing collection of typefaces, created by the most talented type designers in the world. They have gone out on the proverbial limb with us as we’ve repeatedly tried new things. For a craft that traces its roots back 600 years, reinventing itself at internet speed is significant.

If you’re one of our customers, this announcement means things will only get better. Typekit will remain a standalone product, as well as become a vital part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Our team will stay together, and we’re excited to start working on even easier ways to integrate web fonts into your workflow.

From the start, our vision has been to make the web more beautiful, readable, and fast. Joining Adobe will give us the opportunity to do that at an even larger scale. This news doesn’t mean we’ve crossed the finish line. Actually, we’ve really only just completed the first lap. The race to improve the web will only get faster. I hope you’re enjoying the ride.

Add un-billed time directly to any invoice.

When you create or edit an invoice, any un-billed time for your client can be added right there on the spot. This is great when you want to add some more hours to an existing invoice, or generate a super-quick invoice for your billable time. This works very similar to adding re-billable expenses to an invoice (another handy feature for getting the invoice out the door!)

In order to be able add your un-billed time, you need to be logging your billable hours in the Time Tracking tab.

Then, when you go to create or edit an invoice for a client with unbilled hours, you will be given two options for adding your billable time:

“Add all unbilled time” to quickly add all your unbilled hours for that client
“Choose time to add” to select a specific project(s), date range and a display options
With option two, the formatting choices are the same as when you generate an invoice from billable time in the Time Tracking tab.

Finally, just click “Add Time” and your invoice is ready to go so you can get paid!

Even though Oikarinen posted his note publically, Google isn’t making the service easy to find. Rather than including it on the interface that launches when user click the “Start a Hangout” tab on their Google+ home page, users need to navigate to Hangouts with extras (plus.google.com/hangouts/extras) to try the service.

Google introduced Hangouts with extras in September as something of a testing ground for the video conferencing feature. It’s an alternative offering where users can share notes and drawings using a sketchpad, as well as collaborate with Google Docs, the company’s online word processing application. Users can also screenshare in Hangouts with extras. Google may eventually integrate some of the features from Hangouts with extras into its more widely used Hangouts service.

A Google spokeswoman said the service has now rolled out to all Google+ users.