Paul Wille Consulting, Inc

When I went into business for myself last year, I decided up front that I would make a concerted point to only use software and equipment that was easy to use and maintain. I also decided that my clients should never be exposed to technological issues on my side, whether that be email, phones, calendar scheduling, or simply inefficient technological infrastructures.

This meant (happily) ditching Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Word, Visio and even Windows. I bought my first mac at that time, loaded it up with Apple iWork ’08 (now using 09) and software from the OmniGroup, and was off and running. As the year progressed, I bought an iPhone, and ultimately an iMac for my office with a little more horsepower.

Once you introduce a second computer into your normal working environment, synchronizing files, address books, emails, etc. become a huge problem. Add to that a phone as well, and there’s little chance you’ll ever be totally synchronized. When you’re self-employed, time is money, and you simply do not have time to deal with these issues.

Introducing MobileMe

(image courtesy of Apple, Inc.)

Now before you laugh, MobileMe is actually a slick service and works great for consultants like myself. And although many individuals find the MobileMe service too expensive ($99/yr) and/or limiting compared to other services, I like that it simply works. MobileMe has been out for some time, I’m new to it. MobileMe, once set up synchronizes everything behind the scenes between any participating computers and phones that you set up, including:

• Address Book – Addresses, emails and phone numbers are always the same
• Calendars – always have your calendar up to date, no matter where you are
• Email Accounts and Signatures
• Saved Passwords (Keychain Access) – ever try to access a password protected system from a computer where your password isn’t saved, and you don’t remember what your password was? No more with MobileMe.
• Apple Dashboard Widgets
• Notes
• Computer Preferences – each computer looks and behaves the same, all the time.

This alone is great, but a few more features make MobileMe really worth it:

• iDisk (disk storage in the “cloud”) – online storage of files, photos, videos, etc.
• Back To My Mac – ability to connect to a remote computer (i.e. home office computer) from any remote location.

Back To My Mac is everything that Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) is supposed to be, but isn’t. From any remote location, I can access shared files and folders on my iMac, access the actual screen (via Screen Sharing), as though I were on my home network. Best of all, its fast and super easy to set up – turn on “Back to my Mac” in the MobileMe settings, and turn on File Sharing and Screen Sharing under your Sharing settings:

(image courtesy of Apple, Inc.)
Geek Note: For those who are interested in the technical details, your router must support UPnP. If it does, it will automatically configure itself to allow remote connections.

Once its set up, you can access your home computer remotely within any Finder window:

(image courtesy of Apple, Inc.)

Now I can get to any of my files, anytime, using MobileMe’s iDisk. All my contacts are always synchronized between my computers and phone (without ever plugging my iPhone into the computer).

Best of all, no matter where I’m at I’m able to run my business efficiently. In the event an unfortunate computer failure happens, my files are all backed up and I’m able to get up and running in no time. My clients never see any technology hiccups. The time to set all this up? Negligible. The return? Endless, in my opinion.

Wow. Over the past 3 years I loved watching anxiously as Google made multiple strategic acquisitions (like Writely, Jot, and Tonic Systems), and was impressed with each, but not as impressed as when they tied them together into Google Docs and Google Sites. And it hasn’t stopped there…Google Gadgets that can be embedded and customized into your Google Spreadsheets give data visualization unlike anything else.
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Anna Patterson (an “inventor” of search algorithms) developed her own search engine in 2004, which was so impressive that Google bought it up to upgrade elements of their own search. Today, she launched another project dubbed “Cuil” (pronounced “cool”). And this time she says Cuil isn’t for sale.

There are plenty of news stories about this search engine, so I’m going to focus on a few key elements that I think are worth a look at:

1. More robust approach to relevancy

Unlike other major search engines that use quality and quantity of web links within content, Cuil actually drills down into the pages they link to and analyzes the content of that page for relevancy. Seems simple enough, and certainly a good idea to get past ridiculous SEO link tactics used these days. I appreciate this – its aggrevating reading a page with unnecessary links within a paragraph. I also suspect (although I haven’t verified) that if this is perfected it will easily contend the more traditional approach.

2. “Article”-based search results

Rather than a list of text-only links, photos and paragraph snippets of content are returned as part of the search results. When interacting with a search engine, most results returned do not contain enough information to qualify the result in the user’s mind. Cuil does a nicer job of this, although it does mean more reading for the user.

3. Dynamic Faceted Searching

Faceted searching is the concept of narrowing search results based on multiple “facets” or aspects of your search results. For instance, if I search for “Portland, Oregon”, a few facets that I could narrow my results by would include “Neighborhoods in Portland”, “Municipal Parks in Portland”, etc. Faceted searching has been around for a few years in mainstream merchandising websites, but its just appearing in search engines (Ask.com is using this in a more simplified form). This is probably the best part of this engine in my opinion. And even though it could still use some refinement, the first view of it is good.

4. Privacy

Cuil promises to not store search history by user, and believes that this will attract users to their search engine too. Although I appreciate this, I don’t think there will be many people coming to Cuil simply because of this.

So where is this thing going? Well with $33 million in VC, I think Cuil will be an interesting story to watch. But even if Anna says Cuil isn’t for sale, what’s the likelihood of it becoming mainstream? I do enjoy routing for the underdog, but in this space its hard to not be very doubtful.

If nothing else, its another clever idea to diversify the search landscape. And for that, I appreciate Anna’s concept and the $33 million backing her.

A couple nights ago I had a conversation with Stephen Landau of Substance, and he shared with me a very cool tool that inspired me to write this post for you.

When we think of analytics, we typically think of the primary web analytics players (WebTrends, Omniture, Visual Sciences which is now Omniture, Google Analytics and Core Metrics). And while these tools are great as your baseline, there are a multitude of other tools that provide a unique perspective to traffic and user behavior on your website, and provide a vast array of data visualization options that are not inherent in mainstream analytics packages. What’s best is that these tools are either free or very inexpensive to use, so I thought I’d share them with you.

HitTail (www.hittail.com)
HitTail is a real-time keyword measurement tool that shows you what keywords are driving users to your website that very moment. What is nice about this is that you can see during what hours of the day certain keywords are driving the most traffic. The more powerful part of the tool though is a Keyword Suggestion tool, that gives recommendations on keywords for targeting purposes. The tool is intended for time-sensitive campaigns, but can be used for ongoing use on a regular site as well.

CrazyEgg (www.crazyegg.com)

CrazyEgg is a measurement tool that provides heatmap overlays on key pages of your website. If you’re unfamiliar with heatmaps with regards to web analytics, its a visual method for depicting popularity of clicks on a page. What’s more is that it can also provide an interesting overlay on a single page that visually ties referring sites, search terms, and other important metrics to specific clicks on that page. For instance, how many people came from a product review website, and what links did they click on?

Woopra (www.woopra.com)

This is the tool Stephen shared with me. Unlike most web analytics tools, this is a client-server application that provides real-time view into users and user behavior on your site. But Woopra takes it a few steps further, with the following:

• User tagging – identify particular users by name as they appear on your website (i.e. a logged in user, or perhaps logged in user commenting on your blog) and monitor them in real-time.
• Instant Messaging – Establish a chat or instant message conversation with a particular user, regardless of where they are on your site.
• Notifications – be notified as soon as a particular event happens on your site, such as a paritcular user logs in
• Open API – Does Woopra not do enough for you? Extend its capabilities with its powerful open API.

Now I’m sure some of you are thinking, “this is really big brother-like”. Well, its really in how you choose to implement it. I would use this tool as an opportunity to facilitate dialog with your audience…but let them know ahead of time that the chance to dialog is up to them, not you.

Best of all, Woopra is free (for now), and they are hoping to keep it that way.

Now, don’t go throwing your Omniture subscription out in favor of one of these tools. But look at how these tools in addition to your analytics package can help facilitate better information and education for you and your marketing team. And why not try one out? The only failure you face is not trying.

Thanks Stephen for the info on Woopra.

–Paul

Well, not really. I’m just moving my blog and RSS feed to the root of paulwille.com. I only mention this in case you subscribe to the feed from this site. You can now use the following:

www.paulwille.com – takes you to my blog

feeds.feedburner.com/paulwille – RSS feed for my blog

Hope this doesn’t cause too much interruption for you, and I look forward to sharing more thoughts and ideas with you, and continuing our conversation together.

–Paul

This April 7th, I’m going to be a panelist at the Oregon Governor’s Conference at the Expo Center in Portland, Oregon. The topic? Analytics. But its not about conversions, conversion funnels, and measuring intended “action” on a website. No, we are talking about something that has been on my mind for a bit actually…engagement metrics.
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Most people know that for the past 6 months or so, Google has slowed its releases of very cool, interesting tools, and have acquired a good number of companies (some that make sense, and some that don’t…yet). But not too many people have figured out what Google is doing with all these seemingly one-off tools. I think today though, it became very apparent.

16 months ago, Google bought a wiki company called Jotspot (if you’re unfamiliar with what a wiki is, take a look at this definition). Wikis have been appropriated in a number of ways to date (for instance, Wikipedia). And at a conceptual level, they’ve made a lot of sense – its a central place to consolidate documents and information, and allow multiple people to see it, edit it, and maintain it. There just haven’t been many good platforms for companies to easily take advantage of wikis.

Until now.

Today Google relaunched Jotspot as Google Sites (sites.google.com). Users of Google Apps for your domain are the immediate beneficiaries of Google Sites, and with a few clicks, can set it up as a service for their organization. I’ll be giving a full review of Google Sites once I have a chance to build it out a bit.

But at a fundamental level, Google has created a true collaboration platform. Now, these one-off tools are all part of a larger purpose: to create and share information in a decentralized manner.

Google Sites is intended to allow you to post and share documents, spreadsheets, videos, photos, and general information. It comes with a central file/document repository, and robust permissions and security. And, of course, every part of the wiki is searchable thanks to Google’s search algorithm.

More on this collaboration platform soon, once I can get into it and uncover the details of it. For now though, rest assured it will be easy and intutive, just like everything Google builds.

A good friend and colleague of mine (Mo from TravelOregon.com) in the Travel and Tourism industry notified me about the new VisitFlorida.com website today. Having worked on the TravelOregon.com website myself as well as a number of other travel-related websites, I have to say I’m pretty floored by the VisitFlorida folks for their extreme “web 2.0″ approach to their new site, even if I don’t personally agree it makes for the best user experience.

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Starwood recently launched their new Preferred Guest site. Note the usage of rich imagery as the backdrop for the whole site (in fact, refresh the page a few times, as there is different photos in the rotation). I’m a big fan of this for travel sites, as I mentioned in previous posts.

Simplified navigation options, simple calendar controls, great use of AJAX search for the destination search box too.

Nice work Starwood. Hope the rest of your brand sites are on their way to similar improvements.

Incredible!ndia. This is what you see superimposed atop a number of vibrant advertisements for the country of India, the moment you step foot into this country. I consider myself very fortunate to be able to be traveling to this amazing place for my job. And although I am just embarking on it, I have had a number of experiences that have really made me think about culture, and what that word really means.

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