Google Apps is a “software as service” option for small (and large) businesses. My favorite feature is a paid version of Gmail. It’s worth the $50 per year I’m spending to use it. (I don’t really use the other features, except for the calendar.)

You may wonder, especially during these interesting economic times, why I would want to pay for something that I could get for free…

Simple. Because you can’t brand typical Gmail. Sure, you can “sort of” brand it by placing your business name before the @gmail part and you can set it up to “send on behalf of” your business email, but it’s still got the stigma of a freebie account. It makes you look like you are less than serious about your business.

I only wish the cool Glabs stuff available for Gmail would be made available on a quicker schedule for Google Apps. That’s a bit bothersome.

You get much MUCH more space with a Google Apps account. Google Apps offers 25 gigs for a paid account, whereas Gmail only offers 5 gigs.You can easily upload all your email accounts to this one place, and enjoy the benefits of an archive of all emails from all time.

The apps version allows you to change the CNAME records on your hosting account so you can send from Gmail and “originates” from your website domain. Not an simple automatic setup, but once you do the steps, it’s bulletproof.

The joys of Gmail are many. It’s got a kickin’ search feature (you would expect no less from Google, right?).

You may, like me, be one of those “nested folders” people with your email. That’s “old-school” once you have Gmail or Google apps. With creative use of tags and the search, there’s no need… in fact now WAY… to use folders anymore. That may rock your email world for the first few days, but you quickly begin to wonder why in the HECK you had all those folders within folders and how you ever found anything that way.

I keep a backup of my mail on my computer by using the download feature (without removing the items from the Google server) into my resident mail program. I don’t send and receive from that resident program, but I know that I have a backup of all my mail, should something unforseen happen. Within just a few minutes I could re-upload it all.

I like web apps, but I’d not want to rely on them without a personal backup. I’m just too paranoid for that.

My iPhone is set up to fetch my email and I can send and receive with ease, while on the go. I use Google Apps mail as my primary contact management database too and pull down a copy in vcard format once a month as a backup.

The nice thing about using Google Apps is that you end up with a branded email that isn’t tied to a particular host, a particular computer or a particular operating system. Universal email is now on tap from anywhere! And when you work remotely, that’s really nice. It’s good to be mobile and flexible. Once you have a connection to the Internet — ANY connection to the Internet — you have access to your email and your contacts.

I’ve tried, tested and used a plethora of email programs, services and software over the years. I can’t imagine changing to anything else. Google apps mail trumps the competition. It’s just too convenient, mobile friendly, and too easy to search to have any real competition right now!

(Photo courtesy of seabreeze)

I wanted to be sure I could take my calendar information with me on my iPhone. Since I’m not a Microsoft Outlook user anymore, I had to find another way to sync up my information.

Recently, the latest calendar plug-in for Thunderbird (Lightning) was released and after the upgrade, I also added this Thunderbird plugin to allow bi-directional updates to Google Calendar directly from my Lightning calendar. (more…)

Ok, the new hasn’t worn off. In fact, the more I work with it, the more I love it. I’m working to find the online, web-based apps that will make it my tiny palm-sized dream machine. I’ve always hesitated to rely on web-based versions of my core work programs, but I’m now seeing how nicely these web-based programs mesh with use of the iPhone.

I’m sure I’ll be mentioning what I find and offering reviews on what works well over the next days, weeks, and possibly even months. But, for now, here are a few impressions and some finds from my play-time this weekend with my new iPhone:

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Ever wonder how secure your online information with various companies may be? This month a report from Privacy International stated that Google’s privacy policies were suspect. What has followed? Accusations of a smear campaign by Google toward Privacy International and several other unseemly accusations.

Google was not the only company reviewed. Other companies included Amazon, AOL, Apple, BBC, Bebo, eBay, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Last.fm, LinkeIn, LiveJournal, Microsoft, MySpace, Orkut, Reunion.com, Skype, Wikipedia, Windows Live Space, Xanga, Yahoo!, and YouTube. (more…)

Recently, Forbes released an article about a company offering “reputation defense” on Google, the world’s most popular search engine.

By carefully promoting positive PR on Google via SEO techniques to minimize the impact of negative Internet blogs, reviews and articles, this company accentuates the positive (to quote a favorite Disney song.) Is this the latest business model? Protection from online publication (Google-Bombing-style) and negative pieces on the first page of Google? Hmmmm.

I’ll bet that Bush’s PR guy would have been happy to pay the $10K price tag for this service last year. (The company, Reputation Defender, also offers reputation monitoring services for a much more reasonable monthly rate.)

It continues to be a brave new world (tomorrow) for service businesses that we don’t even know that we need (today) resulting from the impact of online activity (yesterday).

Ok, maybe I’m a little slower than others, but I’ve not tripped across any posts about the new dynamic Google themes for my Google Personalized home page. It’s available in the upper right hand corner of your screen and is flagged “new” — which is why I noticed it this morning.

The design (I picked the beach one, since I’m still missing my sunrises every morning) actually changes during the course of the day, based on where you are. So, at night it’s dark, during the morning it’s a morning view. You may pick from a handful of themes (and I’m hoping more are coming soon).

It’s a small thing, but quite cool, so I thought I’d share.

I found an interesting blog-style website with the tagline “Tutorials, Tips and Advice for Google Users” which I found to be entertaining and worthy of investigation. It is a user’s-eye-view of all things Google all in one place! Visit the Google Resource for yourself, and let me know if you find it to be useful. I’ve bookmarked it to return to later and investigate a bit more… and a bit deeper.

Google has just announced that it will offer an online-based office suite to large businesses. The suite, in direct competition with Microsoft Office (during the current Vista push) will offer email, calendar management, spreadsheets and word processing tools for a competitive $50 per year per user — far below the current cost of maintaining the latest version of office.The current free version of Google Apps will be upgraded for the business users and will include full technical support, the promise of 99.9% uptime and larger email boxes (10 gigs!).

The timing of this roll out has been called “brutal” toward Microsoft, while the big boy MS is in the midst of convincing current clients to upgrade to Office 2007 (which carries a pricetag that begins at 239 for an upgrade/$399 for a full version of the standard and soars to $539 upgrade/$679 for office, according to the Microsoft site).

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You know, I love Google’s offerings. I use alot of them. I have a gmail account. I use Google Docs, analytics, customized search pages. Google IS my home page.

I’ve always felt that the sign of a good education was not what you know as much as how good you are at being able to “ferret out” any information you need on any topic. I thought this before the invention of Google, and I think that Google has enabled the masses to be more “educated” by my own definition.

Google is how I work and play without having to store an inordinate amount of detailed information in my head — I know how to find it… on Google. But there have been a few people (myself included) lately, that have become a bit concerned with the sheer mass of information Google now possesses about individuals.

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Most of you have probably heard of — even played with — the new Yahoo! Real Estate Search Tool, but I’d be willing to bet that very few of you have seen a “sneak peak” of the new Google Real Estate tool.

It’s still in what I’d call “pre-alpha” — although I have no idea what the Google developers are calling it — and has been discovered via the back end by some people so geeky they make me look chic!

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In my series on reviewing some of the coolest offerings of free online tools by the daddy search engine, Google… I just love SketchUp. It’s a CAD-style drawing device available online for download. The price is right, the features are cool and it’s like creating SIMS houses! If you want to check it out…

Visit http://sketchup.google.com and have some fun. Ever want that little cabin in the woods, want to design that cool loft apartment, how about creating your perfect office space? Here’s the tool!

technorati tags: CAD+Drawing, Online+Tools, Sketch+Up, Sketchup, Google, House+design

This last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with a peer using a new “beta” offering from Google. It’s called Google Docs and Spreadsheets and, I must say, it rocks!

How do I use it, and why do I recommend it for people who work remotely? Why is it a good fit for those who travel alot? Because it’s a web-based FREE way to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets and then download them in a multitude of file-type options… like .doc (MS Word format), PDF, .odt (Open office format), RTF (rich text format) or even HTML. You can export spreadsheets in .xls (Excel format), CSV, .ods (open office), PDF or HTML.

You can archive the files on your account, you can flag certain files, you can tell at a glance which (of the people you invited to view or edit your documents) made a change last. It’s like having a whiteboard, a word processor, an spreadsheet program, and a storage place online…. and *God Bless Google* it’s free!

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Hang onto your Page Rank and your search results as Big Daddy gives Google gazers big headaches. Google’s most recent update, dubbed “Big Daddy” has left the folks over at SearchEngineWatch.com complaining and comparing horror stories. And they are not alone…

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(… and request a “Full Monty” under the guise of protecting youth)

You gotta love it… the Bush administration is making another full frontal attack (pun intended) on American’s privacy — this time under the guise of protecting children from porn. The “federal government is trying to force Google to reveal all searches conducted in a one-week period, as well as records for 1 million Web addresses” according to an article released today by MediaPost.com.In a Search Engine Watch blog article, Google was the only one in the big four (AOL, Yahoo! and MSN) that said NO! The other search engines agreed to hand over the information. (more…)

Well, it’s finally started to happen. I’ve been telling my clients for many, MANY months to be more careful with their use of gratuitous links and spamming the search engines (in particular Google) through these methods. I’ve been expecting the blast to happen in the last three or four rounds of algorithm changes for Google, and I’m honestly disappointed that it hasn’t happened sooner. But, that tide is now turning, finally.

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Andriod, a secrecy-cloaked startup company headed by former Danger, Inc founder, was just purchased by Google, according to a report in Business Week Online.

The Android website, www.android.com, gives little information about the company, and consists of three maps with office locations and a hardhitting track of synthesized music for visitors. That’s it.

To read the whole story, visit the

Business Week article online.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what Goggle is up to next. I love Google.

Although many have lost the rosy view of Google since they became the leading SE online, I still can’t shake the feeling that this “superpower” in the world of the Internet will continue it’s historical pattern of cutting edge betas and expanding the way the masses use the information on the Internet — both wired and mobile!

Google has just released a mobile search for WAP (read that as “Treo Optimized”) websites. Now, it’s even easier to find the best possible sites for your Treo 650’s display.

These sites load faster and are usually easer to navigate with a stylus.

Google Blog tells the whole story. Check it out HERE.

Just last week, my blog was coming up on the first page of Google for, of all things, “mean things to say” as a search term… and even before I could determine if I was happy to be at number three on Google or merely alarmed to be “made famous” for that particular phrase… it was gone…Marketing on the web is always a challenge – ALWAYS. But the changes going on at the big boy search engines right now are making those of us who keep an eye on such things, nuts. NUTS I tell you! (more…)