Google Apps For Business To Go Paid From May 10 In India

Google Apps for Business, the browser-based office suite that revolutionised the way start-ups and SMBs use e-mail and productivity applications at work, will soon go paid for any business with more than 10 users in India. Google Apps offers online solutions for e-mail, document editing, spread sheets and calendar management and collaboration with Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs and Sites. These web-based tools are hosted by Google itself and help streamline setup, minimise maintenance and reduce IT costs. Google claims that over three million businesses run Google Apps today.
Earlier, Google Apps for Business offered business users 100 e-mail IDs for free. Now, business users signing up for Google Apps for the first time after May 10, 2011 will be asked to use the paid Google Apps product if they have more than 10 e-mail accounts.
The website has not yet announced the change, but an e-mail message sent by the Google Apps Team reads: “We recently announced upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for Google Apps. As of May 10, any organisation that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users.”
Existing businesses will be able to continue to use Google Apps without being charged. Think of it as a bonus for adopting the cloud service first.
Globally, Google Apps for Business announced that it was going paid in 2009. It charged an annual fee of $50 per user, according to this pricing chart.
How does Google Apps differ from Google Apps for Business? While the former is a free service that allows anyone to activate up to 50 accounts and offers messaging apps, customised e-mail accounts for domains, Google Calendar and mobile access to the services, Google Apps for Business offers an additional set of security and support services.
Features such as Google Video for Business and Google Groups for Business are offered on Google Apps for Business. It also provides 25 GB e-mail storage per user, as well as enhanced support and security features. For example, with more administrator controls, you can enforce SSL, which means when you connect to your e-mail and data which are hosted online, the connection is always secure and hackers or IP thieves will not be able to access and steal company information. Various banks currently use SSL to secure online banking transactions.
By setting the required custom password strength, you will be able to ensure that employees’ e-mail inboxes are protected against information theft.
Google also offers 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee and 24/7 support, besides interoperability for Blackberry and Microsoft Outlook users.
A direct competitor to Google Apps for Business is Microsoft’s Office 365 and the tech giant had recently  launched a public beta in India. Office 365 is Microsoft’s online productivity suite, which combines Office Web Apps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online into a cloud service.
Office 365 is a paid service for an average of Rs 270 per user, per month, starting at Rs 90 per user, per month for instant messaging and presence applications. And more than 150,000 organisations have signed up to test it so far, the company has revealed.

Facebook, Google mull Skype deals: sources

Facebook and Google are separately considering a tie-up with Skype after the web video conferencing service delayed its initial public offering, two sources with direct knowledge of the discussions said.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has taken part in internal discussions about buying Skype, according to one of the sources. Another source said Facebook had reached out to the Luxembourg-based company about forming a joint venture.

Google has also held early talks for a joint venture with Skype, the second source said.

A Skype deal could be valued at $US3 billion to $US4 billion, the first source said. Skype's IPO is expected to raise about $US1 billion, several other sources said.

The discussions are in early stages, and it is not clear which option the companies favour, the first two sources said.

Although an IPO is still in the cards for the second half of 2011, Skype remains in discussions with other companies, two of the sources said. If it goes through, a Skype IPO would be one of the most hotly anticipated debuts by a US technology company this year.

Securing Skype as a partner would expand Facebook's user base, help it grow in international markets where Skype is popular, and give its half-billion users another reason to remain active and connected to its online community.

Analysts say a tie-up between Facebook and Skype would make more sense than one with Google, which already has a similar service - Google Voice.

Skype and Google declined to comment. Facebook was not immediately available to comment. The information is not public and the sources declined to be named.

Good timing

With a partnership, Facebook can tack another service onto its ever-expanding menu - a crucial feature given that many mobile devices, including tablets, now come equipped with front-facing cameras.

"This is very synergistic," said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research. "It puts Facebook two steps ahead of Google because of the number of Skype users."

"In your social network, you will now have another very compelling service - Skype," he added.

Last year, Skype had about 124 million connected users every month by the end of June. But 8.1 million were paying customers, using Skype to make calls to traditional phones at discounted rates.

Analysts have said that while Skype's growth has been impressive, investors would be cautious about its prospects for revenue growth due to the size of its base of nonpaying customers.

The company was founded in 2003. eBay bought it in 2005 for $US3.1 billion.

In 2009, eBay sold a majority stake in Skype to an investor group that included Silver Lake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz for $US1.9 billion in cash and a $US125 million note. eBay retained about a third of the company.

Handicaping the IPO

Last August, Skype filed a registration statement to go public. The October appointment of a new chief executive, Tony Bates, a former senior vice president of Cisco Systems, put the eagerly anticipated IPO on hold until the second half of 2011.

But rivals including Apple and Google have marched into Skype's territory, undercutting the value of the pioneer service.

Now, Skype might again change hands.

Although Facebook and Skype would benefit from each other's large community of users, neither has proven revenue models, said a separate source familiar with the companies.

For Skype, the clock is ticking, as large social media and software companies pour into the public markets.

On Wednesday, shares of Renren, China's largest social networking company, surged nearly 57 percent in its first day of trade.

LinkedIn said on Wednesday it would list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The social networking site for professionals filed to raise up to $US175 million in an IPO expected later this year.

The flood of internet public offerings this year will give Skype backers a clearer sense of its prospects, another source said.

"When a company is not going public and it has been on file for a long time, one way or another something is going to happen," that source said.

Google Introduces Search Globe (3D visualization of searches with Search Globe)

  Google has launched a new experimental search tool. Called Search Globe, it will visualize people’s curiosity with pinpoints related to the volume of searches grouped by languages.

The Google Data Arts Team, who created Google Body, harnessed the modern browser’s ability to generate fast 3D imaging with WebGL to display a colorful globe that represents the day-to-day searches by people all over the world.

“The Search Globe visualizes searches from one day, and shows the language of the majority of queries in an area in different colors. You’ll see a bright landscape of queries across Europe, and parts of Asia for instance, but unfortunately we see many fewer searches from parts of the world lacking Internet access—and often electricity as well—like Africa,” explained Valdean Klump of the Google Data Arts Team in a blog post.

Search Globe is open source, and can be used here. Note that you will need a WebGL browser, such as the latest build of Chrome or Firefox 4, to use the tool properly. The 3D tool that navigates the human body is here.

As a side note, if you have problems getting the Search Globe to work, you may need to update your video drivers. This seems to be a common issue for some users.

Google’s Panda Update Cripples Open Publishing Competition

This is a guest post by HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson. Prior to founding HubPages, Edmondson was part of the executive team at MongoMusic, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, and held group management positions at MSN Entertainment over product management, quality management, operations, and business management.

Search engines are a critical part of the democratization of the Web and none is more important than Google. They provide the critical gateway to information in a meritocratic way that has traditionally rewarded usefulness and quality over name recognition of the content creator, valuing the utility to the searcher over all else.

In parallel, open publishing platforms have provided free tools for creating and sharing information with topical expertise and a voice to anyone on the Web. These platforms feed the search engines and, in return, the search engines have delivered steady audiences. This ecosystem has been lucrative for the search engines, an essential outlet for the information sharers, and a great way for the world to have access to a broad swathe of information, from the full range of political opinions to thousands of ways to barbecue a chicken.

Google’s recent “Panda” update intentionally upends this ecosystem; it doesn’t just lower the rankings of individual pages that the algorithm deems “low quality” (however that may be defined by Google) but, as Google has said publicly, “low-quality [page] content [on the domain] can impact an entire domain.” This means that high-quality content hosted on open publishing platforms like HubPages and YouTube can be negatively impacted in their search rankings simply by hosting contributions of various quality on a single site.

HubPages has seen a negative impact from this change, but so far YouTube has not (Search Metrics Winners). One presumes Google isn’t treating its own affiliated sites differently than any other site, but YouTube’s open publishing environment makes low-quality content as prevalent as on any other moderated open publishing platform. Google shows over 13 million indexed videos on YouTube for lose weight (known spammy area) and over 10 million for forex (another spammy area). Apparently, Google’s Panda update has been punitive only to platforms other than Google’s.

We certainly support and encourage changes to algorithms to provide the public with access to the best search results. We appreciate that open publishing platforms with a wide range of content quality also have a responsibility to moderate their content appropriately. While we understand the need for ordering search results, we also think it is a mistake to broadly impact an entire domain negatively where the content has been contributed by individual people. Bear in mind that a lot of the content on open
publishing platforms like HubPages and YouTube is great, and it is exactly what people are searching for on the Web.

We have reached out to Google seeking feedback and guidance about what elements of an open platform are being penalized by Panda. There has been little response to our inquiries, from questions about site architecture posted on the official Google forums, to personal emails sent to Matt Cutts, the head of web spam at Google.

We, as well as many other operators, are happy to engage in a dialogue with Google on what quality means and how to educate information sharers. It seems that publishing platforms that
are not operated by Google are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to guidance on how to adjust to this latest search algorithm update, as is exemplified by YouTube’s apparent immunity.

Before Panda, Google gave open platforms of all sizes many ways to separate high quality content from poor content without chilling an entire domain. In this respect, HubPages most closely resembles YouTube’s site structure. We send Google signals by how we program the site. For example, we let Google know what we think is the best content by giving that content more internal links from related pages. We also follow the sitemap protocol and give content a crawling priority. It seems these efforts are severely discounted after the Panda update since, despite their application, there is still a domain-wide devaluing being applied.

We are concerned that Google is targeting platforms other than its own and stifling competition by reducing viable platform choices simply by diminishing platforms’ ability to rank pages. Google is not being transparent about their new standards, which prevents platforms like ours from having access to a level playing field with Google’s own services. We want to comply with and exceed Google’s standards. Google has my contact information. Hope to hear from them soon.