Productivity and business

Cloud Sherpas on acquisition-fueled growth spurt

Cloud Sherpas, a reseller specializing in helping customers adopt Google Apps, today announced its third acquisition in two months of like-minded businesses.

The company acquired WaveAdept, based in Wellington, New Zealand, for an undisclosed sum. Last month it acquired Beloit Solutions Group in Overland Park, Kansas, and Omnetic in San Francisco.

The company has dealt with more than 20,000 accounts and 3.5 million users in 110 countries moving to Google Apps.

Google Apps is a service combining Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and other online tools from the Net giant; customers can use their own domain names with … Read more

Google Docs bumps maximum file size to 10GB

Google Docs users can now upload and work with files and documents as large as 10 gigabytes.

In a Google+ post from yesterday, Google product manager Scott Johnston announced the latest enhancement that boosts the maximum Google Docs file size from 1 GB previously.

However, the increased file size will mainly benefit users with paid accounts.

People who use Google Docs for free are still limited to 1 GB of storage space in total for uploaded files, though documents created directly online don't count toward that quota. But users with paid accounts that range anywhere from $5 a year … Read more

Evernote raises $50M to help become your 'second brain'

The popular note-taking service Evernote today announced it has raised $50 million in a new round of funding by Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures to develop a growth and acquisition strategy.

"Even though we've built a profitable and successful business in the past three years, we still have a long way to go to achieve our goal of becoming everyone's second brain," Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote said in a statement.

Ken Gullicksen, vice president of corporate development of Evernote, will head the development and acquisition strategy.

Since the software company's inception, Evernote has grown … Read more

Google updates Google Docs for mobile screens

I wouldn't call myself a spreadsheet ninja, but I do use spreadsheets on a daily basis--and Google Docs, specifically--to track roommate bills, plan vacations and conferences, and keep tabs on work projects.

Today Google updated Google Docs for the mobile phone and tablet browser to make it easier for the tool's users to share multiple documents and sort spreadsheets, text docs, presentations, PDFs, and drawings you create online.

Log in from any mobile browser and you'll immediately see two drop-down categories on the navigation bar. One sorts documents by name, modification date, and the date you last … Read more

Sparked: Volunteer work, right in your cubicle

When Ronald McDonald House in Cincinnati needed a nine-page English document translated to Arabic, the children's advocacy organization turned to Sparked. Someone living in Jordan logged on and translated the prose in a few hours. Then someone from California confirmed the accuracy of the piece. Crowdsourcing skills and bite-size volunteering is what Sparked is all about.

Sparked connects corporate employees with nonprofits via the Internet, giving employees a way to volunteer right from their cubicles. Sparked co-founder Jacob Colker calls this micro-volunteering, a term he's trying to coin.

When I visited the small, barren Sparked office in San Francisco's hip SOMA neighborhood, Colker showed me the company's volunteering platform, which it licenses to major corporations. Employees from companies including new client LinkedIn or Google, Frog Design, Kraft, and SAP can sign in and volunteer during their lunch breaks--and people can focus on certain regions or specific issues. But the volunteer work is not limited to corporate partnerships. Individuals can also sign up at their leisure to help nonprofits with all things digital, from branding issues to blogging advice.

Originally, Colker thought people would volunteer their time while sitting on the bus or lounging by the pool. As it turns out, people out and about are probably not going to be able to help a nonprofit with a branding issue, Colker said. Instead, he maintains, people would much rather help others from their office, right at their desktop, during the free time they have between work-related tasks. The company started as The Extraordinaries in 2008 and within the past eight months rebranded itself to switch its mobile focus more to the Web. … Read more

Start-up called Hipster offers new recruits $10K, beer

I'm told that when you're attractive, it can go to your head.

You believe everyone is interested in you and it's therefore hard to decide who deserves more than a glance and a sneer from your perfect visage.

A start-up called Hipster has decided that it knows how to make attractive job seekers believe it should be their first and only date.

Unfortunately, we're only talking engineers here. So Hipster is offering some touchingly precise inducements to show its intentions are good: $10,000 and beer, for example. Yes, a year's supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

It doesn't stop there. Hipster's Web site adds that new recruits will get a bike, a pair of Buddy Holly glasses, a pair of authentic skinny jeans, a pinstriped bow tie, mustache-grooming services, and a pair of (worn, brown) boots.

Hipster is, so it says, "building a fun way to uncover the vast amount of information about real-world locations." Which sounds like a sort of local question and answer thingy on the go.

Doug Ludlow, one of the founders of Hipster, told the New York Times: "As you know, recruiting is insanely competitive right now, so we wanted to do something that would break through the noise, and get the attention of the people we're trying to reach."

Hipster is reportedly proud that this sort of incentivizing is far more effective than the hundreds of thousands the company would have to pay those slightly leechlike little middle people known as recruiters.… Read more

New LinkedIn button hooks up to job app tool

LinkedIn went public last month and watched its shares soar as high as $122.70 before settling down to $94.25 before the end of the trading day. In another possible cause for celebration, the company will be launching a new button that lets job seekers angle for new jobs straight from their LinkedIn profiles, according to GigaOM.

A Web site button may not sound like the most exciting product launch in the world, but a button can take a lot of hassle out of certain tasks. The "Apply with LinkedIn" button, as GigaOM is calling it, apparently removes quite a few steps from the usual job application process and justifies all that time you've spent fiddling with your profile.

According to an unnamed GigaOM source familiar with the upcoming feature, the button will appear next to a job description on an employer's page. The applicant will get an opportunity to tweak his or her profile before sending it along. Employers will get a chance to throw in some extra questions tailored for the position. This could lead to a surplus of ivory watermarked, 32-pound resume paper.

The job application tool will also pop up with a list of LinkedIn contacts that are associated with the potential employer. That gives you a chance to send that old colleague you worked with for a summer at Disneyland a heads-up that you're interested in his company. In a tight job market, every little bit helps.… Read more

Adios, offline Gmail on Chrome--for now

Google has shut down the ability to use Gmail with Chrome while not connected to the network, the last vestige of an older approach to offline Google Apps and Google Docs that the company is replacing.

To enable the offline feature, Google had been using a browser plug-in called Gears that could store data on a person's computer then sync with the Gmail server once a connection was re-established. Google phased out Gears, though, and yesterday was the last day offline Gmail worked with Chrome, which had Gears built in.

"As we move the Gmail Offline capability to … Read more

How Google Apps could boost Chromebook sales

Google faces plenty of skeptics when it comes to Chrome OS, the browser-based operating system it hopes will catalyze a Web app future.

But when it comes to selling the vision, the company also has a group of potentially influential allies that already have a foot in the door: partners making a business selling the Google Apps suite.

Google Apps is the suite of Gmail, calendar, word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation Web apps that Google sells in subscription form for $50 per user per year. And although Google Apps hasn't come close to pushing aside Microsoft Office, it does … Read more