SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

Techcrunch are reporting that Google is looking to acquire San Francisco based DocVerse for around $25 million.

If you’ve not heard of DocVerse before, it’s an interesting looking plug-in for Microsoft Word, Power Point and Excel, which allows real-time collaboration of office documents.  

What’s strange about this deal is that Google already supports similar technology within Google Docs?   Why would it want to extend this to Microsoft Office – especially when the upcoming Office 2010 version will also support this?   Google also recently bought Appjet, supplier of another collaboration tool called EtherPad which they’re now working to integrate into Google Wave, however this has since been released as open source.

The deal must be a particularly bitter one for Microsoft, as the two founders of DocVerse – Shan Sinha and Alex deNeui are both ex-Microsoft employees, having worked on SQL and Sharepoint.

Looks like both Microsoft and Google can see the benefit in online office collaboration and are rushing to be the first to corner the market.

Who will win?   Only time will tell….

Posted in Google | No Comments »
Tags: Google

Today Google have released another Labs product called “Browsersize”.   What Browsersize does is gives you an overlay on your site which shows what percentage of visitors can see areas of your page.

The idea is that screen resolution isn’t the only factor which determines the viewable area – as the browser window could be smaller than other windows.

Research from Google has provided the data to produce this overlay which shows what your visitors are going to see.

They give Google Earth as an example of a site where moving a button up by 100 pixels reached a far greater audience and resulted in a 10% increase in conversions!

Google Browsersize

Google’s Announcement

Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Tags: Google, SEO

Here’s an interesting way to use bit.ly to analyse click through traffic for posts on sites you don’t own!

I just read an interesting article on SEOMoz about SEO trends for 2010. I thought I’d tweet this on twitter as I thought it’d be of interest to the twitter.com/scotiasystems followers.

Signed in to bit.ly – I went to create a link to the post, and noticed the following metric:

The interesting thing to note here is the figure of “373″.   This is the total number of clicks going through the bit.ly service to the post on SEOMoz!

So I thought I’d try the same with some other posts on SEOMoz :

Here you can see that the other post has had 780 click thoroughs so far.

This could certainly be an interesting way to analyze articles on other sites to gauge the interest and click through statistics.

Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Tags: Bit.ly, SEO, twitter