International tourists find the Polish seaside through Google AdWords

Sebastian Hejnowski’s parents built the Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast in 2002 to share Poland’s beauty with weary travelers. Located in Miedzyzdroje, a city on the coast of Polish island Wolin, Villa Zdroj is one of the island’s first modern bed and breakfasts.

Sebastian’s parents handle reservations, property development and sometimes breakfast. Sebastian runs the advertising efforts for his parents’ Villa, including Google AdWords. “When we first started our AdWords campaigns, we focused on Poland but we soon realized that there was increasing interest from our neighboring countries,” says Sebastian. When he noticed an upward trend in drop-in visitors from other countries, he decided to launch campaigns across Poland’s borders as well.

Villa Zdroj - courtesy of Marcin Matecki Photography

According to Sebastian, the variety of outdoor activities combined with the relatively inexpensive cost of Polish tourism make Wolin a vacation paradise for Germans and Scandinavians. “Germans and Scandinavians were coming to Miedzyzdroje, but mostly staying in expensive five-star hotels,” says Sebastian. “B&B’s were never an option since they didn’t know where to find them.” So Sebastian made Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden his first international targets. The strategy proved correct: “We were one of the first Polish B&B’s to create a website in English. When we targeted an AdWords campaign to these people, they started calling and booking reservations.”

As time went on, Sebastian noticed that Poland had become more and more accessible to Europeans due to an increase in flights to the area. To capitalize on this trend, Sebastian expanded his AdWords campaigns even beyond bordering countries. “With time we extended the campaign to the Great Britain and the Netherlands.” says Sebastian. “Europeans tend to explore new places and travel extensively.”

Sebastian with his family - courtesy of Marcin Matecki Photography

Today, foreigners account for more than half of Villa Zdroj’s guests. And Sebastian estimates that up to 60% of those international guests book Villa Zdroj because they found his AdWords ads.

Thanks to his effective targeting, Sebastian now sells out all of the villa’s rooms during peak summer travel season. He adjusts his ad campaigns to reflect availability: “In summer, we track vacancies and adjust our campaigns accordingly. We pause the campaigns if we’re booked a few weeks out.”

In 2012, Poland will host the Euro Cup and Sebastian’s dad is already getting ready for an influx of visitors. “My father is considering buying a big projector so everyone can watch the games together in the communal room,” says Sebastian. “We’re already excited to share the Polish seaside with more out of town visitors!”

Learn more about Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast and Sebastian’s successes online in this short video (it's in Polish, but you can view captions).

Posted by Piotr Zalewski, Communications Associate, Poland

Now available with Google Apps: Google SketchUp & 3D Warehouse

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently 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 SketchUp & 3D Warehouse
3D can be a great tool for solving all kinds of problems, like redesigning an office space or envisioning the neighborhood around the new office park in Shanghai. However, the software to generate 3D models and images has traditionally been prohibitively expensive or too difficult for non-professionals to learn. Enter: Google SketchUp.

We like to say that SketchUp is “3D for everyone.” By stripping out the technical hurdles that make traditional 3D software difficult to learn in favor of a simple, intuitive interface, most users are up and modeling in less than 10 minutes. We also made SketchUp free and as a result, we’ve found that people are using SketchUp in all sorts of creative ways to solve everyday problems and make their jobs easier.

Store owners are using SketchUp to visualize ways to maximize foot traffic in their stores. Facility managers are using SketchUp to redesign the office space to accommodate more desks. Event planners are using SketchUp to figure out how to set up their booth for their next event.


But building models in SketchUp is just scratching the surface. You can also use Google 3D Warehouse, which is a searchable repository of hundreds of thousands of 3D models, to discover existing 3D elements and share those that you create. Seamless auto-complete integration with your existing contacts in Google Apps makes it effortless to share models and collaborate with colleagues. To give you more control over the content you create, 3D Warehouse also allows you to set sharing permissions so you can manage who has viewing and editing access to your models.


Learn more and get started
The web sharing functionality of Google 3D Warehouse 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) and you can get started by downloading the Google SketchUp application. 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 answers to specific questions about Google SketchUp and Google 3D Warehouse you can view our Help Center or get the latest news, tips, and tricks on the SketchUp Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google SketchUp or 3D Warehouse 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 Gopal Shah, Google SketchUp Team

Note: Google SketchUp & 3D Warehouse may not be available in all areas.

One of the Reasons I Day Trade Futures

I'm reading a great book by Michael Lewis - "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machines". This is the author who wrote another great financial industry book: "Liars Poker". You can get it as a download (my favorite way of reading now) too.

The Big Short tells the story of the sub-prime meltdown that started in 2007 (that sounds like a long time ago writing this). He describes the activities and conversations with some of the players, both those who were the causes of the mess and those who woke up early enough, hugely profiting by finding a way to short.

It seems you have to be an expert at everything nowadays.

This book gives the insider's view of what was happening, and is not only a great story but has hilarious anecdotes. I was literally rolling on the floor laughing.

I learned a long time ago that it was the insiders that made the money in stocks, and that's why I trade futures and not individual stocks.

Things have got to make sense. When you read this book you will hear about a lot of people just accepting what they were told. The heroes in the book, who profited by the events, were independent thinkers who looked behind the accepted views. This is an important part of trading - thinking. As discretionary traders, our job is to access the available information, process it and then draw a conclusion. If we do this well, we make money. If we do this well consistently then we make money consistently. One of the ways to give yourself this ability is to create a structure for your trading so that you have a checklist of to do's and boundaries that alert you to things happening and not happening. Traders are made, not born.

Mrs EL was surprised today. I went short into the number. I felt that everyone had to be long after the ADT number on Wednesday and the band was playing "Happy Days Are Here Again". It was a risk v reward trade. If the number was good then I wouldn't get killed, as there were lots of longs already, and if it was bad the there were plenty of trapped longs. The thing that capped it for me was that there was no real new buying during the European morning. And of course the technicals backed this up. The highs were rejected as you can see on both the bar chart and the Profile. So I went short just before the number, 25% position.

Now available with Google Apps: Google Translator Toolkit

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently 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 Translator Toolkit
As the world’s citizens come online, more and more businesses are seeing the value of offering their services in multiple languages. Translation, however, can be costly and time-consuming, making it hard for businesses to take the first step. Whether you have an in-house translator or are a small translation service yourself, we think you will be excited by the newest addition to Google Apps: Google Translator Toolkit.

Translator Toolkit is a web-based translation editor that makes it easier and faster for translators to translate documents, web pages, and other content into dozens of other languages. To begin, upload a document from your desktop or enter the URL of a website that you want to translate. Translator Toolkit will then automatically load the text and generate a machine translation.


Once the translated content appears in Translator Toolkit, a user can easily make changes directly to the text or use tools designed to help make the translation process easier – such as the ability to see previous translations provided by others or the ability to reference bilingual dictionaries. Using Translator Toolkit with your Google Apps account makes it easy to collaborate on translations with colleagues. Others you share translations with can access your document and contribute in real-time, much like collaboration works in Google Docs.



Many professionals, individuals, and institutions have already started using Translator Toolkit to help bring their content into other languages and reach new markets. For example, within Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org, the Health Speaks team uses Translator Toolkit to make public health education more widely accessible across languages. In the coming weeks we plan to translate critical public health information into Arabic, Hindi and Swahili – all with the help of Translator Toolkit.

Learn more and get started
Google Translator Toolkit 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.

You can learn more about Google Translator Toolkit in the Help Center or stay up-to-date on the latest launches on the Google Translate Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Translator Toolkit 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 Mike Galvez, Product Manager, Google Translator Toolkit

Note: Google Translator Toolkit may not be available in all areas.

Trading Price

When I first started trading, I was lucky enough to find the book by Edwards and Magee .There is a new edition which I haven't seen here. This is how I started in technical analysis. Later on, as I became more successful (it was really easy in those days), I hired a "chartist" who had big pieces of graph paper which he updated every day on the stocks I was interested in. That gave me the confidence in technical analysis.

In 1979/1980 I started using computers to draw charts- initially gold and then lots of other futures markets. That's where I found indicators, mainly the stochastic, which was developed by George Lane- a member of a group of technical analysts that I belonged to.

In talking to newer traders, one of the things that I notice is that as soon as they discover indicators they fall into the trap of trading the indicators rather than the price.

It's the price we trade, and we should use the indicators to make the unclear, clearer. The indicator should confirm what you are seeing in price. Failure to focus on the top part of the chart is a road to failure in discretionary trading.

Between Mr Trichet and the other news, we got a great 6E trade today. Watching price kept me in the trade. I did scale out at the first red candle. Price just kept making higher Highs and higher Lows.

Now available with Google Apps: YouTube

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently 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 YouTube
With more than 1 billion subscribers and 2 billion video views per day, YouTube is one of the top destinations for watching, uploading, and discussing video. Now, your company can benefit from the tools and scale provided by YouTube integrated with your users’ Google Apps accounts.

Many companies are already using YouTube in interesting ways to promote communication, both within the organization and to external audiences. Here are some examples:

• Build a public YouTube channel for your brand or product: You can maintain a public YouTube channel for your entire organization or for individual departments. For example, your marketing team can create a brand channel on YouTube to advertise your company to external customers. Take a look at HP's brand channel for a nice example of how a business can use YouTube to build a community around the exchange of product knowledge.


• Build an archive of all your company’s videos in one place: From training videos to strategy updates, you can centralize both externally-facing and internally-facing video in one video archive. YouTube’s sharing options let you choose whether you want your videos to be accessible publicly on YouTube or privately to people who you individually invite to watch, giving you control over your content.


• Build a channel to support your business processes: Customers and employees can stay up-to-date on new videos and channel activity by subscribing to the appropriate channels. Recent activity from those channels, such as new video content uploads, will then be delivered automatically to the subscriber’s homepage or to their email inbox, if they choose. For example, P&G maintains a hiring channel on YouTube targeting potential employees, so interested candidates can subscribe to the channel and ensure they don’t miss P&G’s latest hiring updates.

End users can also engage in conversations relating to the video content using the YouTube Moderator feature, which provides a forum for questions and answers directly in the video interface. This type of conversation can bring invaluable product or service feedback directly from customers to your organization.

YouTube provides a platform on which your organization can manage and archive video communications and control how those videos are shared both internally and externally. YouTube's features also allow for easy and intuitive uploading, viewing, collaboration, and conversation covering all of your organization’s video collateral. And now that YouTube is integrated with Google Apps, sharing content with colleagues and distribution lists is easy with contact list integration.

Learn more and get started
YouTube sign-in 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 the latest information on YouTube features and updates, check out the Official YouTube Channel and the YouTube Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using YouTube 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 Becky Chappell, YouTube Team

Note: YouTube may not be available in all areas.

Charts, Parameters and Methodology

I get lots of questions about chart set-ups.

I trade one chart with one periodicity (time frame) within a Market Profile context. I trade the order flow. I read the order flow using the elements that I have on my charts.

Each market has it's own fingerprint, just as each trader has their own in built rhythm. The idea is to match the two. Some of us need to slow things down and others need to speed things up.

The EL trading methodology comprises two types of trades: inside out and outside in. This represents trading with the trend when it is identifiable and fading the trend when the market becomes so overbought or so oversold that a change of trend is probable.

These are two distinct modes and require different considerations, very different context and a different mental preparation.

I use the different elements on my charts to provide the information that I process and come to a conclusion at the end of every bar. It is an ongoing process. Two of the elements I use are the 33 and 99 EMAs. The EMAs have parameters that are written in stone, no matter what periodicity I use, no matter what market I am looking at. They work best for me, ALWAYS.

I then have the other main tool for looking at momentum: the CCI. I use a fast CCI and a slow CCI, and I look at them both individually and then the relationship between the two. I can adjust the parameters of the CCIs to suit my requirements for information.

Then there are the range bars. In the ES I use both 1.25 and 1.50 depending on what I want to see.

This idea of magic numbers for parameters is a fiction, unless you are talking autotrading. As a discretionary trader, I am trading PRICE and I am using the indicators to help me see more clearly. Many people do not succeed because they trade indicators, not price. It would be like an F1 driver staring at his car's instruments/dashboard instead of the track. I am showing a Renko chart today so you can see what I am trying to say. It gets rid of the noise from the market and it does the job. I'm looking at order flow and as long as I can get the information and process it, I can trade effectively.