Google is giving a new voice to small businesses – using their existing phone numbers. The company announced recently that Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral), the telecommunications service developed by the company, now comes equipped with a new feature, one that could entice more small business owners to use it. While previously, Google Voice can only be used by getting a new Google number (a criticism on Google Voice, since not everyone wants to start over with a new number), now it is possible for users to sign up for the service with their own existing phone numbers. This new capability gives small business owners plenty of reasons to use Google Voice as a sort of online PBX (private bank exchange), and a free one at that. The voicemail feature, for example, lets Google Voice users access voicemail not just from their phones but also through a computer; messages are transcribed automatically into text and can be read on a Gmail-like – Read the full article
We’re moving beyond the tradition of consulting the yellow pages. With 80 percent of people turning to search engines to find local information, Google last week launched its Local Listing Ads service, which makes fixed-fee advertising placements available in Google’s local search results as well as in Google Maps. The new service demonstrates once again how the Internet – and Google in particular – is changing how local business listings are done – and searched. Available initially in San Diego and San Fransisco in limited beta, Local Listing Ads is different from Google AdWords in that it requires no creative or keyword management and no bidding. The monthly fee is flat, determined by Google with the goal of ensuring that businesses’ ads are seen by the highest number of people looking for relevant local information. Business owners who purchase the ad select the location and business category to ensure local targeting, and from there, Google takes care of the creating – Read the full article
Google Analytics, the free web analytics solution that generates detailed statistics and reports about visitors to a website, recently announced a set of powerful new features that build on last year’s enterprise-class launch. Google says that the features – which will gradually be incorporated into Google Analytics accounts over the coming weeks – focus on three key areas: Intelligence: Google has made significant changes that enable users to understand their data better. It has launched the first phase of an algorithm-driven engine – Analytics Intelligence – that provides users with automatic alerts whenever significant changes happen in their data patterns (metric or dimension). Moreover, users can customize these alerts, so that they can tell Google Analytics what to watch for. The automatically combed data saves users time and brings to light traffic insights that users may find most crucial. Powerful options: One previous limitation of Google Analytics involved collecting visitor information for websites browsed through mobile phones. This was due – Read the full article
As a small business we are always looking for ways to collaborate with our team, clients and other developers on open source project. Today Google unveiled its newest tool to its growing arsenal of web based tools. Some people are calling this the replacement of Gmail! We are looking forward to testing these new product once it is released to developers (which should be soon!) Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to – Read the full article
The new Search Start up company, Cuil, http://www.cuil.com/, is making news all over the place for claiming to have indexed three times as much of the Internet’s web pages as Google. There results are overly generic and sometimes were extremely unrelavant. And good luck getting a search that is more than two words long completed. A search for “elevateprinting.com” yielded a generic web portal first, “Mr. Lind’s Eath Science Page” second, and “Ms. Nyland’s Trimester Exam Review” third. (http://www.cuil.com/search?q=%22elevateprinting.com%22&sl=long) Surprising to see that elevateprinting.com, Google PR of 3, was no where to be found over three sites that it doesn’t appear Google cared to index. They also claim they need to run significantly fewer relative servers per query than Google. After getting the following error, maybe they should reconsider: No results because of high load… Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again. Overall it seems like they might have the right idea for – Read the full article
It is super easy and think about the last time you used a phone book? Well maybe you still like to use a phone book but personally I haven’t used one in at least 4 years. I like to search on Google, only about 10 times faster and usually more accurate. But you will find most of the content has been uploaded by the business themselves. Visit google local. You can add pictures, logo, hours of store etc. So next time someone is searching for your phone number on Google, you will come up first. It can also be beneficial to add your self in different “categories.” Then when your potential customer searches for your industry, for example – contractor in your zip code, you come up. Just another free service that you can use for your business. Add your today.
One of my favorite services that Google offers is google reader. This service basically organizes all your feeds in one place. So you can follow the blog at Crains Chicago Business and Search engine land for example. Blogs are a great way to select the content that you want to read and google uses this tool to keep you organized. The world continues to get flatter….
Google Analytics is the tracking software used to discover who is visiting your website. Google Analytics can tell you where the hits are coming from, how long they are on your site, what pages they visited and i think most important- how they got to your site. I can see who is linking to me from where. This service has an huge value, previously companies would charge thousands a year for this service that google now offers for free. So if you have a website this is a must have to learn more about your visitors.
