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.

But one major weak point for Google has been out of Google’s hands, and that is the web browser. With each new launch of a Google product, there is an increasing dependency on the web browser’s JavaScript interpreter and runtime. Today’s browsers use a JavaScript engine that simply is not capable of compiling, debugging and running JavaScript code quickly. Whats more is that browsers today only allow one JavaScript “process” to run at a time. While this may be a bit on the technical side, it basically means that browsers are simply unable to run today’s web applications like Google Docs and Google Sites efficiently.

Announcing Google Chrome. A web browser built by Google, designed specifically for web applications. Targeting especially the JavaScript engine that is their achilles heel today, Google Chrome is very fast, able to run multiple requests/processes at once, and best of all, open source.

Only a few screenshots exist right now, including the following, courtesy of CNET.

Today (September 2, 2008), at 11am PDT, Google will be holding a press conference to announce Google Chrome officially, and open it for download. I’ll be providing a first review of it as soon as its available here. Stay tuned, and definitely check it out when its available.

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.

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

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

Its very similar online. Users do not come to a site and immediately complete the intended transaction right away, nor in the same prescribed manner each time. No, upon coming to your site they will interact in the manner they choose, not you. This is engagement. And as trust is built between person and brand, the interest (and hopefully engagement) increases.

I’m working with one of my clients to make a significant shift in their view and measurement of their online audience. Rather than just tracking the progress of a user coming to the site and proceeding through the prescribed checkout process, we are looking at how users choose to engage with their brand. They may look at one or multiple products. They may read more about how its made. They may share that information with others. They might interact with multiple forms of media that further highlight that product and its background. We hope they read customer reviews or even sign up for our email list, but that is really their choice. But in the end, its the user who chooses the path, process and how they eventually get to a point of trust and interest to purchase.

When a digital brand understands how users engage with them, they can learn to better communicate with them. Marketing in the digital space is not about bludgeoning a user over the head to buy, buy buy! Its an opportunity to converse, to dialog, to share, and to engage. And when we learn how users respond to that better, we too can learn how to better converse and engage.

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.

Mo wrote a post about it on his travel blog…you can read it here. As Mo pointed out, the biggest difference of this site is the “web 2.0 inspired” approach, especially their navigation (which is based on tag clouds). Here’s a screenshot of the main navigation:

This is most interesting to me is that they do not “prescribe” a navigation path for users by determining the site’s architecture and navigation. Rather they rely on what they term as “editor’s picks” (content chosen by VisitFlorida) and what users search for on the website. And although there is general industry concern about the usability of tag clouds with consumers, the folks at VisitFlorida found through user testing that with some label changes and a very effective search interface, they actually respond very well to it.

The site features all of the things that a Web/Travel 2.0 site should have:

• User-submitted photos and videos
• User-submitted trips
• User Reviews
• 10 “Florida Experts” who are contributing content regularly for the website
• Content tagging

Its the content tagging that powers the site search, and ultimately the tag cloud as well. I absolutely love how outright they have been with their use of Web 2.0-based content and tools.

The downside of this site though is the lack of good editorial content and rich imagery. Its almost as though the site relies far too much on user-generated content, and not enough on solid editorial or factual content. Nonetheless, way to go Florida for being daring enough to do this.

Don’t forget to read Mo’s interview with Florida’s CA Clark and his thoughts on the site too.
http://traveltrendreport.blogspot.com/2007/12/case-study-conversation-with.html

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.

But first, I’m going to back up to our first leisure stop of our trip in Chicago, where we visited Nick’s Pizza in between flights. Nick’s Pizza is not your ordinary pizza place. With only two physical restaurants and after being in business for less than 10 years, Nick’s Pizza is one of those places where every employee absolutely loves to work there. And it shows. Their culture is one of pride, empowerment in helping make the company great, and one of giving generously back to the community. Just outside their entrance is this sign:

The strangest part is that this place turns out upwards of 3,000 pizzas every Friday night. And every person who works there will tell you how much they love it. These people are the culture of Nick’s, but that came first from Nick himself, who created a place that carried meaning for anyone who worked there. That meaning is one of making a difference. Every night, all the employees give feedback about what went well and what can be improved for the next night. And that difference has made over $9 million in sales per year. And as a company, their culture is one of pride for their work and the experience they provide to every Nick’s customer. (for more on their incredible story, read their Newsweek story from 2005.)

When we arrived in India after 27 hours of actual travel. After a few hours sleep, we met our good friends at ISHIR. Here, over just the first day we learned something very incredible about the Indian people. They value strong work ethic and strong personal relationships beyond anything you can imagine. Their desire to do well by others coupled with an intense drive for excellence in work makes for a very productive, emerging country. So productive that in New Delhi alone there are over 2,000 IT/technology-based outsourcing companies. 40% of Microsoft’s employees worldwide work in India. Cisco and IBM have over 70,000 employees each, and that is not uncommon.

Beyond just their work, they are amazing people as well. People who have strong family values, strong relationships with one another, and a strong sense of community. Even in a hierarchical society, those who do well financially are only concerned with meeting their basic financial needs. Beyond that, they contribute their time, energy and money to others less fortunate.

Indian people who are more well off not only own cars, they hire personal drivers. The roads here are the craziest experience you’ll ever see:

So far, we’ve been both rear ended in traffic and have seen a guy on a scooter get broadsided by a car. He wasn’t hurt, nor were we in our accident since nobody travels faster than 20 mph. But its still a harrowing experience. Traffic is like absolute chaos, but there is an order to it that is indescribable. And I’m happy to be in the back seat looking out than in the driver’s seat.

So much to say, so much to explain, but nothing in words can describe what its like to actually be here. And more than anything, we are seeing that culture is the embodiment of the collective values of people, whether that is a company, a country, or even just a few people making pizzas. What culture does your company promote?

For more pictures from our trip, visit http://picasaweb.google.com/TeamOpus/IndiaDay1