The acquisitive arm of Google reached out again today, and this time, grabbed DocVerse, a company that specializes in the real-time sharing and editing of documents.
Tags: deals, google docs, google-sites, Microsoft, microsoft office, purchase, suspended-new
Last year, Google’s Matt Cutts dropped the bomb (to put it in the exaggerated tone that many took the news in), that Google was considering taking site speed into consideration as one of many potential ranking factors for search results. Is your site’s performance up to snuff? Comment here . This of course freaked a lot of people out, but as Matt and Google as a whole has maintained, this would not trump relevance. It would be taken more into consideration when there are two sites of relatively equal relevance, but one site loads faster and delivers a better user experience. Matt reiterated this point in an interview we did with him this week at SMX . WebProNews also chatted with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer for Google at SMX, about website performance (speed), how that pertains to search rankings and the user experience, and some tips for making sure your site is up to speed, so to speak. Stream videos at Ustream As far as site speed as a ranking factor, Ohye pretty much makes the same point as Cutts, and it’s probably not going to be something where all of a sudden all of the faster sites are ranking better and the slower ones are doing worse. But it does enhance the user experience , and she refers to a study that found that an optimized site actually increased conversions by 16%. So if you’re not optimizing your site’s performance for Google, maybe that’s a good enough reason on its own. Watch the video to get some specific advice regarding some simple adjustments you can make to your site that can make a big difference. If you’re one of those freaking out about getting your site performance optimized, you may feel better after hearing what she has to say, and realize that it might not be as big a deal as you thought. By the way, Cutts also mentioned that the speed thing is completly independent of Caffeine. Do you think site performance is a manageable attribute of your search engine marketing strategy? Discuss here .
Tags: attribute, makes-the-same, News, People, performance speed, Review and Story, Search, search engine marketing
The Associated Press said today it is partnering with Livestream to launch AP Live “Oscars Red Carpet,” coverage. AP Live coverage of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards will feature social media elements, on-demand clips, photos and news. AP Live is available on a Facebook fan page and syndicated to AP publishers and other distribution channels, including AT&T Entertainment. On March 7, AP Global Entertainment Editor Alicia Quarles will be reporting live from the red carpet from 6, to 8 p.m. During the awards show and the after-parties, AP reporters will post updates to Twitter and Facebook. AP Live also allows users to embed video to their Facebook profiles or their blogs. After the Oscars, AP Live will continue to focus on entertainment, featuring daily and weekly celebrity interviews and other content such as movie previews and a look at upcoming summer blockbusters. “Through this strategic content and platform deal, we have launched the AP Live player which will feature year-round entertainment events coverage and daily live celebrity interviews,” said Livestream CEO Max Haot. “We look forward to supporting AP as they move forward to cultivate their events-based reporting for millions of fans across all screens and platforms.”
Tags: annual-academy, distribution, editor, editor-alicia, Facebook, from-the-red, Livestream, on-demand-clips, oscars, Review and Story, strategic, such-as-movie, Technology, upcoming-summer
Microsoft is rolling out the largest imagery update to Bing Maps to date, adding 6.7 million square kilometers of new imagery, a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. The update includes new aerial imagery for the Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and most places in the US where there is existing black and white imagery. “There is also a notable addition of Bird’s Eye Imagery for Sweden,” the rep says. Here’s a list as mentioned on the Bing Maps Blog : Aerial Australia
Tags: belgium, Bing, botswana, chris pendleton, Denmark, eye imagery, hungary, morocco, namibia, Norway, Review and Story, russian federation
A couple weeks ago, Google acquired reMail, a popular iPhone app, and pulled it from Apple’s App Store. Now, Google has made it open source. “After looking at a number of options to make reMail available in some form, we decided to open source the code, which is now available on Google Code as remail-iphone under the Apache 2.0 License,” Google Communications tells WebProNews. reMail was created by a Gabor Cselle, who used to work as a software engineer on Gmail. On the reMail blog, Cselle says, “As someone who is passionate about mobile email, my hope is that developers interested in making email-related apps can use reMail code as a starting point. Part of the reason email apps are hard is because you have to pay the tax of figuring out how to download email via IMAP, parse MIME messages, handle attachments, and store data. reMail has already solved these problems. If you have a great mobile email idea, I hope you will find reMail’s source code helpful in your quest.” Cselle has documented the source code so developers can quickly start on any ideas they have. “If you like reMail and want to improve it, I have also listed some potential projects with implementation tips,” he says. “Most of these projects are features that users have requested in the past. I encourage you to contribute improvements back to the project. I’ve also created the group remail-iphone on Google Groups, which is a great place to ask questions.” This page will tell you how to build using the code, let you see some project ideas, and show you how the datastore and UI work.
Tags: apache 2, code, couple weeks, datastore, google groups, open source, source