Now available with Google Apps: Google Reader

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: Yesterday we launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.


Welcome to Google Reader
We all have favorite websites. The ones that we keep returning to day after day – or even several times a day – to check for new content. Whether you follow company press coverage on a set of news websites, track industry-related developments through trade journals, or follow what people are saying about your organization in the blogosphere, you can now do all of this in one place using Google Reader.

Now available with Google Apps accounts, Google Reader is a web-based content aggregator that allows you to pull updates from your favorite websites together in one place. By subscribing to a site's RSS or Atom feed in Reader, you’re automatically notified when that website posts new content. Instead of checking many sites repeatedly for updates, Google Reader brings your favorite web content to you!



Google Reader also makes it easy to share relevant articles with colleagues at your organization using Google Apps. Reader is integrated with your existing contacts list so address auto-complete works seamlessly. For example, if you see an article in your Reader feed about new tax incentives for your industry, you can easily share this with a coworker responsible for financial planning or with an entire distribution list you have created, right from the Google Reader.


For those of you always on the move, Google Reader also makes it easy and convenient to follow the stream of updates from your favorite websites on your mobile device, automatically synced through your Google Apps account.

Learn more and get started
Google Reader can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information about Google Reader you can take a look at our Help Center pages or follow the latest news and get tips and tricks from the Google Reader Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Reader at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager, Google Reader

Note: Google Reader may not be available in all areas.

Great tech support and good karma found with Google AdWords online

When Uday Challu noticed a growing dissatisfaction with avenues for technical support, he was inspired to create a better way for people to get help with their tech troubles. So in 2007 he founded iYogi.com, India’s first direct-to-consumer remote technical support company. Founded on a belief in good karma, iYogi aims to mitigate frustrations with technical products and services by delivering a high-quality customer service experience.

iYogi Founder Uday Challu

iYogi provides round-the-clock, 24-hours service on a wide variety of technical products and issues, in Australia, Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Uday uses Google AdWords to reach these international customers.

Uday says he saw search and, in particular, AdWords as a way to reach customers in need of technical support. He says, “iYogi services are currently available in multiple geographies and advertising with AdWords seemed like the most obvious way to reach customers who were turning to the Internet to find and fix their problems.”

With the intent of starting small and building to scale, Uday targeted his first campaigns to the U.S. only. Using location and language targeting, iYogi launched a U.S.-only campaign with general keywords related to customer support, and honed his campaign over time. “We gathered lots of intelligence from the Search Query Report, which helped us identify other keywords people in the U.S. were searching for,” says iYogi Vice President of Online Marketing K.R. Sreejith. “We also tested new ad texts and customized these ad texts to highlight popular keywords.”

Then, using lessons from his experiences in targeting the U.S., Uday expanded into the Canadian market. He found his experience in the U.S. helpful for the Canadian campaign, but didn’t see similarly high volume. After examining the global competitive landscape, he decided to expand to Australia and the U.K.

“We quickly learned that ads in the U.K., for example, had to be different than ads in the U.S.,” says Sreejith. “Using the Search Query Report, we noticed that the popularity of certain keywords was different in the U.K. and that there are differences in the spelling of these terms. We also learned from our sales teams that U.K. customers spend more time on the phone than do U.S. customers. So, we edited our ad texts and landing pages to reflect these different keywords and values.”

Today, iYogi is one of the fastest growing remote tech support provider in the world. As Uday continues to expand his business internationally, he’ll continue to use insights gained from his ad campaigns and to provide the rest of the world with similarly karmic technical support experiences!

Posted by Anand Devsharma, Team Manager, India

European Ben

We had Ben Bernanke here in Europe spreading his message. Not much effect on the markets. The Chinese announcing some policy change created a little blip while Ben was talking. Trichet showed what a big fan of Ben he is. Rome and fiddles come to mind. You can read the text of his speech here.

I did some trades in my old market, the German Bund (I traded it when LIFFE owned it). Not so many trades but the net was quite green.

It's Thursday

Today was biz as usual (BAU). Most of my efforts were in the Euro, as has been the case lately. It was a strange kind of day in both the ES and the Euro. Some say it was because of the GM IPO. I don't know, but it felt a bit off. Maybe it was just me.

The good news of the day is that the new beds are being delivered to the farm in a week. I can hardly wait.

The Euro was good to us again today. This volatility is providing many more opportunities than ever.

Biztree's Google AdWords Success Story

Here on the Small Business Blog, we occasionally share the successes of our customers by letting them tell their story in their own voice. Today, we’re happy to feature Jonathan Defoy and Bruno Goulet, founders of Biztree, who have found success using AdWords.

Biztree’s relationship with Google started in early 2003. We had just taken a loan of $25,000 to invest in advertising and we spread it across seven channels including affiliate programs, mass email, forum advertising, content and search advertising. After 30 days we lost all our money in all channels – except one. The small investment we made in Google search returned almost three times our investment!

At that point we went back to the bank to borrow $100K hoping to replicate the results. After much fighting with investors, we finally received the funds and the same results were obtained again! To this day we continue to see similar results (2 to 3X returns) and know that we can count on Google as a reliable source of quality traffic.

Today, Business-in-a-Box is the leading legal and business document template software. It’s available in 8 different languages and has over 2 million users worldwide. We help small and medium businesses quickly produce all sorts of documents and with Google’s help, business people in over 200 countries are now able to create contracts, legal agreements, business plans, marketing plans, forms and financial spreadsheets, in a matter of minutes.

We owe a large part of our success to our relationship with Google where we’ve gone from spending $100K per year to well over $100K per month!

In our view, Google’s biggest strength lies in its ability to stay ahead of the competition by continually improving user experience and upgrading and fine-tuning its powerful technologies, as witnessed by constant additions to Google Analytics, AdWords Editor tool and Website Optimizer. The second thing we love most about Google is how it enables us to quickly test our marketing efforts, while generating near instant results.

A great deal of our success with Google comes not simply from its outstanding ad platform, but from its people. From the very start of our relationship, we’ve been dazzled by a customer service team that is not only great at resolving issues, but also at helping small businesses improve their advertising practices.

Posted by Jim Prosser, Small Business Blog Team

Ten times more applications for Google Apps customers

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog and the Google Enterprise Blog)

As customers begin to recognize large productivity gains with Gmail, Google Docs and the rest of Google Apps, they frequently ask when they’ll be able to use services like Google Voice, Reader, Blogger and AdWords with their Google Apps accounts. We’ve steadily added new functionality to Google Apps and recently added support for third-party apps, but we’re thrilled to swing the floodgates of new functionality wide open now. Starting today, customers worldwide can access a full spectrum of services from Google—including more than 60 productivity-boosting applications that extend far beyond any traditional software suite.

Coupled with the ability for administrators to provide different sets of applications to different groups of users, the possibilities for empowering workers in new ways are remarkable. For example, you could equip your marketing team with Picasa Web Albums so they can collect and share photos from customer appreciation events, and let that team publish your company’s blog with Blogger. Services like iGoogle and Alerts, on the other hand, may be broadly useful, and could be enabled for your whole organization.

Existing customers can transition at their own pace over the next couple months to the new infrastructure supporting these applications from the administrative control panel. New customers will automatically have the new infrastructure. The additional services are not covered by the Google Apps SLA or telephone support, but we’ll be watching for feedback how we can make these new applications even more useful.

In tandem with this big improvement, we’re also simplifying the names of the versions of Google Apps. Here’s how we now refer to our line-up:

• Google Apps is our free service geared towards families, entrepreneurs and other groups up to 50 users.
• Google Apps for Business offers 25GB of email storage per user, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, data migration capabilities, advanced management tools, telephone support, added security features and more, all for $50 per user per year.
• Google Apps for Government is FISMA certified and designed with local, state and federal agencies in mind.
• Google Apps for Education offers many benefits of Google Apps for Business, but at no cost to schools, universities and qualifying non-profits.

The team has worked hard to unlock all of this new functionality for our customers, and we think many of these new applications will become indispensable within your organization. To help get you started, each day the Google Enterprise Blog will profile how your organization could put a different application to use. The first post tomorrow will focus on Google Reader, so drop by again soon to follow the series.

Posted by Derek Parham, Lead Software Engineer, Google Apps

Autotrading or Discretionary

For me, the ultimate is using both auto trading and discretionary trading, but NOT in the same chart. I am a discretionary trader by DNA. I like the decision making process, the detective work to figure out what "they" are doing, and, of course, I can do better than my FloBot. Better means lower draw down and higher win rate - the heart of successful trading as far as I am concerned.

I have some markers on my discretionary charts to remind me of things. These are programmed in so they just appear at the right moment. I have been careful not to make these too exact, as I am fearful of becoming like one of Pavlov's dogs and just reacting to signals. I had an e-mail exchange about this with one of the guys from the seminar-he is a great thinker and I want him to stay that way. While reminders are good, reacting automatically to them is not, as you will just get an "average" performance. If that is what you want (and there is nothing wrong with that if it allows you to trade many markets at the same time) then by all means go to total algo trading. It will need more capital, but the computer won't tire and can do many things at the same time.

My solution is to trade discretionarily and have FloBot working away on her own.

Meanwhile, back at the market today, the Gap trade was on again. Today's trade again shows how important it is to get the Profile split done before I trade. The trade was pretty easy to execute once this was done. Yesterday's VAH was seen at 1177.50ish and that was my targeted sale point. All I then needed to do was let it play out and scale out on the way down. I was out of bullets when it hit yesterday's VAL at 1173.50. I didn't manage my hoped for 5 points, but it was not too shabby. Yesterday's building of the distribution, instead of further trending down, was my clue for today. The action in Asia and Europe confirmed the vision, so my expectations for the Gap trade were fairly set when the bell rang.