In late October, Google UK’s YouTube channel posted an amazing video that brings back Google’s past 11 years to life with some really cool animation. The video mentions some of the most interesting events from Google’s history. “From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Google Wave, StreetView and Chrome.”

This video is definitely worth checking out!

The Google Story

For RSS Readers: (Watch it Here)

Now they did leave out a number of Google Products for obvious reasons – they wanted to keep the video short and sweet. (current length is 2 minute and 16 seconds).

But I’m really surprised that they have missed out a ‘biggy’ – Can you guess which one I’m talking about?

Google is slowly trying to tap into the online commerce market by launching yet another product for this specific niche (after Google Checkout) – Google Commerce Search.

So If you’re running your own online shop, this brand new Google Commerce Search may be worth looking at. Google describes this as a “search solution designed specifically with online retail enterprises in mind.”

You can easily upload your product data at the Google Merchant Center, and go on to customize your site’s search engine. Google’s admin console lets you “manage product promotions, upload synonym dictionaries” and control various search options. Unlike many other Google products, this service isn’t free. You will be invoiced based on the amount of items in your data, as well as the number of searches performed every year. But I noticed that they stated somewhere on their website that pricing starts from $50,000/year. So this solution is definitely not ‘cheap’ for small-medium sized eCommerce stores.

Google promises to integrate Google Commerce Search with other Google products like Google Analytics and Google Product Search. Using Commerce, retailers can measure clicks, conversion rates, number of transactions, average order value and other data via Google Analytics. And e-commerce vendors can provide a single feed of products and catalogue items that will power Commerce and indexing of their products on Google Product Search. Product Search (formerly Froogle) will blend shopping results within Google’s existing web search.

Google writes:

Google Commerce Search is hosted in the cloud, meaning it lives online, so e-commerce sites can get up and running quickly. Using a cloud search tool will also help site owners meet the rise in demand from the holiday rush without having to devote extra time or resources to worrying about their capacity or infrastructure. Online retailers are free to focus on their business, while Google focuses on search, and shoppers can find what they need faster.

Check out the introduction video of Google’s Commerce Search from Youtube:

If you work with multiple Google acocunts to Track many different Google Analytics profiles then you already know that its a very clumbesom process. Signing in and out of various Google accounts multiple times in a day can be a real pain if you are dealing with a lot of websites of your own or of your clients.

Trakken, a company from Germany has recently released a free desktop app called Trakkboard that uses the Google Analytics API to pull data from different analytics accounts. Trakkboard lets you access multiple Google analytics account simultaneously and also compare data from each of your profiles without being logged in to Google Analytics.

How to Steup Trakkboard?

Installing & using Trakkboard is fairly simple. Just head over to – http://www.trakkboard.com and enter your email address to request a your free ‘license key’. By requesting the license key, you basically accept their general T&C and get authorized to use Trakkboard. Once you receive your key, you can straight away download the Adobe AIR based app – Trakkboard.

After the installation, you will get the chance to enter your Google acocunt details. Once everything is set select Google Analytics Accounts and profiles, then choose from any of the preset report widgets (visitors/page views/source/bounce rate etc.). Your report widget will then appear on the dashboard. Simply repeat the process with other Google Analytics Accounts, Profiles, and Widgets – to build your customized analytics dashboard in a matter of minutes.

What’s very interesting about each of the different report widgets are that they can be configured to automatically pull new data from the API at a fixed interval, for example, every hour. This dramatically reduces the time it takes to see top level metrics across all your accounts.

Trakkboard Features

• Compare data of different google accounts, websites and profiles without permanently changing sites at Google Analytics.
• Opportunity to compile individually and from different portals and websites all the key performance indicators which are of a certain importance for you on just one dashboard.
• Add up to two Google Account Email addresses
• Open Tabs inside the application that will let you create as many dashboards as you want and you can arrange the data individually
• Follow current developments on your desktop or you can lock certain data from changes to have them available at all times
• Switch between the display formats, change time spans or rearrange data with one click of a button

Google welcomes innovative app developers to come up with new ways of using the Google Analytics platform. If any of you have developed a useful tool that uses the Google Analytics API, you can send a email to the analytics team to be featured in the Analytics Blog.

It has quickly become a commonplace that the internet has made the world much smaller than it ever was. Friends, family, and businesses based thousands of miles across the globe are just seconds away through email, facebook, or skype, just to name a few of the many examples of online communication. However, international businesses, large or small, still need to appeal to a distinct regional or national base to be successful. Globalization and the internet have not – yet – made the world completely homogenous. Linguistic, cultural, and economic differences exist between regions in a country and between countries in a continent, let alone between continents in the world. For example, there is the distinction between amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, selling different products at different prices. There are also major variants such as the French amazon.fr and German amazon.de, appealing to a wide linguistic and cultural consumer base distinctly different from, but using the same familiar template as, the company’s English language versions.

Every aspect of a business’s online promotional material, from websites to banner ads to e-newsletters, needs to be designed with the target audience in mind. To discover the specific qualities of that audience, a business needs to research what the audience has already shown an interest in – what other websites are being accessed? What do they offer? How can your own business improve and offer content and products more specifically tailored to that market? Put simply, what does the target audience want to know and how can you deliver that information? With international markets, this is particularly tricky as there is myriad of cultural and linguistic intricacies that must be faced. In the European Union (EU) there are 23 official languages spoken in the 27 member states. Although English is the most widely spoken, German has the most native speakers in the EU with almost 20%, followed closely by English, Italian and French.

Understanding the nuances within languages is crucial to the translation/localisation process too. For example, the differences between French and German are obvious, even to mono-linguists. But the differences between French in France and French in Switzerland or Belgium aren’t that obvious. In France, déjeuner means ‘lunch’, but in Switzerland and Belgium it means ‘breakfast’. Additionally, dîner is ‘evening meal’ in France, but in Swiss and Belgian French the word is souper. Similarly, Swiss German often uses a different grammatical gender to that used in Germany (e.g. ‘das E-Mail’ instead of ‘die E-Mail’). Assuming you intend to adopt a fully localised marketing strategy, what are the practicalities involved in launching an international advertising campaign? Well, there are many similarities to that of a domestic campaign.

Online marketing is becoming the basis of many company’s promotional activities, moving away from traditional print promotion. The European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) recently conducted research revealing that 70% of advertisers were intending to increase their spending in online marketing in 2009, a figure that is likely to increase year by year. The internet has developed in a way which makes targeting local and individual interests a far more precise and successful practice than traditional forms of advertising. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) means that a business can know the exact interests of a customer and can target individuals with specific and relevant advertising. Advertising on individual websites also makes targeting particular interests simple – it is clear, for example, what kind of products a visitor to a canoeing and kayaking website is interested in.

Directing internet users to your own site is key too, and becomes easier because of the many tools available on the net. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a method that many businesses use to push their name to the top of Google’s search results; EIAA’s research also indicated that 64% of advertisers were going to increase their use of SEO in 2009.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising also helps lead potential customers to your site and the beauty of PPC is that you can set how much you spend on each month in advance…it can be as little as £5 if you want. This lets you test the water to see how effective it will be – if it brings in customer then you can increase your spend, if not then you can investigate other means.

RSS feeds, which alert existing customers to updates on a website, are a useful way of keeping customers loyal to your business. A surprisingly low percentage of web users take advantage of RSS feeds – just 11% – but these users are the most internet savvy and the most likely to buy products online. Having a customer base continually returning to a site makes the site more popular; these users are also the ones most likely to recommend a site to friends.

As its name indicates, the whole point of the internet is interconnectivity. It enables a business to reach an individual customer directly and personally and, likewise, for that same individual customer to find the business that best suits his or her needs. A business needs to access and appeal to those customers by researching the specific interests of each target audience. It is a conversation between business and customer conducted from one side of the world to the other; as ever, the customer usually relies on a business to start the conversation.

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This is a Guest Post by Alexandru Rotaru of Lingo24.

Lingo24 is a global translation services provider that also specialises in website localisation. It has over 100 employees based in the UK, Panama, Romania, China and New Zealand, and a network of 4,000 translators. Its projected turnover for 2009 is £3.7m.

If you have been using internet for a while then its very likely that you use quite a number of Google services. For instance, my net life is purely surrounded by Google – starting from my email (Gmail), IM (Google Talk), documents (Google Docs), search (Google Serch), photos (Picasa), Feeds (Google Reader), Calendar (Google Calendar), Online Payments (Google Checkout) – everything is just Google. Since everything in Google is sort of “inter connected”, it’s really scary to think of how much Google knows about each of us.

Google Dashboard, is a new portal which sort of tells you all that Google knows about you. It lists down all the Google services that you are a part of and includes details of your last actions. For instance, it shows you the last search you performed on all the different Google search engines (web, maps, video etc) by pulling the data directly from Google’s Web History. Other google services that are listed on the dashboard currently are: Gmail, Alerts, Picasa, Blogger, Calendar, docs and many more.

Google is yet to disclose the specifics of the Dashboard and what else they are planning to offer there. But they do have a video up which sort of explains the dashboard briefly. Have a look:

Microsoft has recently revamped their old school MSN portal and gave it a very clean and sleek look. I must say that it does look a lot like Yahoo because of the way the site has been structured and also the blend of social features (twitter, facebook & email) right at the homepage.

This is a very smart move by Microsoft as MSN is the default home page for a lot of people and get tons of traffic (over 400 million/per month). By making this change in design & site structure Microsoft also hopes to drive more people to its search engine – bing!.

Microsoft vice president Erik Jorgensen recently said in an interview “A big part of my job is figuring out how I pull the Bing experience into MSN in a way that makes sense.”

One way of making money from a portal like MSN is to post features on the site that somehow ties in to the company’s search engine – Bing. The company has talked about ways it can present different features that push folks to Microsoft’s local, shopping, and travel search engines– which are among the most profitable parts of any search business. Erik said “To make that work, Microsoft needs to ensure that it is less visually jarring when one moves back and forth between MSN and Bing.”

Frankly I think this is a very good move by Microsoft as it can really help to increase their search market share. And if the portal can properly feature breaking news and daily columns on different subjects (like what yahoo does), it can truly become a success.

The new site design will be rolled out to all U.S. users starting in 2010. But you can preview it right now from- http://preview.msn.com/.

If you are too lazy to read your tweets, you might want a service like Twit Radio – Thats reads your tweet out loud. Currently the service only works with search thus you can search for a keyword or phrase and twitter radio will tune in to that channel and start reading out every tweet that comes along.

The site is very easy to you, there is a big search box right in the middle where you can put your search query, or select from the pre-programmed channels or trending topics, and start listening to tweets right away. I know this may sound a bit geeky at first, but just try it and I bet you will find it pretty hilarious.

Well frankly no ‘text-to-speech’ sounds perfect, because after all its a computer that tries to mimic a human’s voice and vocal pitch. But i guess for tweets its even worse because, people don’t use proper sentence structure and punctuation because of the 140 character limit. But they tried to make it less monotonous by mixing up the voice of different AI robot.

In their about page they writes:

At tweetrad.io our mission is to index all the world’s information; however, unlike google we plan to be really evil in the process. We’ve started by seeking out the most relevant scholarly data on the web. Naturally Twitter was where we looked first. Using our unpantentable Tweet-to-Speech™ technology, we’ve made it possible for billions of people to hear the “Pulse of the Planet” as never before.

Mashable has made a screencast of the service in action, have a look:

So what do you all think?

Not long ago, I wrote about how you can setup your own facebook username (a.k.a Vanity URL), so that your facebook profile URL is like – www.facebook.com/yourusername rather than the very long url that facebook provides by default.

Initially, Facebook mentioned that they won’t let anybody change their username once its already set. Thus everyone gets only one chance to make it right! But it looks like now its not the case anymore. If you are for some reason not happy with your current facebook username / Vanity URL — you now have an option to change your username!

How to Change My Facebook Username

Facebook has made it very easy to change your username. Simply login to your facebook account and go to your Facebook settings page. If you are already logged in clicking here will take you right there.

Once you are at your “Settings” page, you should see a new section called “username” displaying your current username and also a subsequent button called “change” to do the obvious!

If you were drunk while you have set your facebook username previously and regretted doing so; this is your chance to make things right again!

If you are a frequent traveler then you would appreciate this brand new feature of Yahoo image search that lets you refine your image search results by points of interest whenever you search for a particular travel destination or location.

For example, if you search for Rome, Yahoo Image search will automatically show up a special column containing categories of a whole bunch of ‘places’ from rome that you are likely to be interested in. Clicking on any of the categories will show an overlay of images so that you can virtually take a tour of the image results without leaving the original search results page.

To test it’s usefulness & accuracy, I searched for Kuala Lumpur, and Yahoo did manage to give me a pretty decent list of places that most tourists would like to go.

Try it and let me know what do you think about this cool new feature of Yahoo Image Search!

Your customer is always searching for you online, and even though you have your Pay Per Click Advertising campaign running – they may not find you! Google Inside Adwords blog has recently posted a video, highlighting some of the best practices of writing your Google Adwords Ad copy. [If you are viewing this via Email - click here to watch the video]

Write Better Pay-Per-Click Ads – Follow Google’s Guideline

• Use your keywords in the ad text as it will appear in bold when your potential customer performs a search using those keywords.
• Be specific when creating your ad. An Ad that is very general in nature is less likely to do well compared to an ad which is very specific.
• Include a Special Officer or Unique selling point in your ad copy. Example – 10% discount, Free home delivery etc.
• Include a call-to-action in your ad. Think about what would you want your customers to do after they see your ad and state that clearly in your ad copy. Example – Buy now while stock lasts!, Request a Free Quotation etc.
• Make your ad text inter capitalized. Capitalize the first letter of each word in your ad copy as it looks more professional and has more chances of being seen and clicked.
• Don’t take your customer to your home page once they click on your ad. Instead take them to a specific landing page that supports your ad copy and the product that you are selling.