Google Data » Jay Garg https://googledata.org Everything Google: News, Products, Services, Content, Culture Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:09:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.7.5 Introducing Jargon-Bot for Google Apps: translating business jargon into plain English https://googledata.org/uncategorized/introducing-jargon-bot-for-google-apps-translating-business-jargon-into-plain-english/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=introducing-jargon-bot-for-google-apps-translating-business-jargon-into-plain-english https://googledata.org/uncategorized/introducing-jargon-bot-for-google-apps-translating-business-jargon-into-plain-english/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:01:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=5e2900be5371ddeab01139fa3c2d91f0
Think back to your first day of work. Do you remember that blank look of sheer confusion you had throughout the day? Your coworker approached, “Hi! Great to meet you, welcome aboard! Can you calendar me in for a 1:1 to talk about our c-level action plan for the all hands?” That’s when you learned it only got worse if you smiled in acknowledgement. Even after you’ve been at a company for years, business jargon continues to invade your day and ruin productivity. When your boss asks, “Can we take a step back for a second?” what he really means is, “Wow, you have completely gone in the wrong direction.” These kind of interactions are not only annoying, but studies from the Foundation of Office Language show that such interactions also significantly reduce productivity and morale amongst employees.

Our engineers have worked tirelessly for the past two years to fight this epidemic that has plagued efficiency in the business world. Today, we are launching a new alpha feature in Google Apps for Business, Jargon-Bot. Jargon-Bot will automatically detect business jargon or business speak and provide you with real-time translation in plain English. Yes, simple, plain English. Jargon-Bot has been integrated across the entire suite of Google Apps so that next time you are on an IM chat with your manager, it will help you recognize and say no to unrealistic expectations. When you receive an e-mail from your supplier, Jargon-Bot won’t let you get ripped off by demystifying the fine print. And even when you’re on a Google+ Hangout with your accounting team, jargon-bot will be by your side, so you don’t break your e-reader when you have to help “close the books.”



We’ve been alpha testing Jargon-Bot internally for the past 6 months, and the results have been dramatic: a 10X increase in employee productivity, a 35.4% increase in worker productivity, and IM conversations that are 90% shorter. Best of all, meetings which are normally an hour long, now average just 17 minutes because people actually understand each other.

Turn on Jargon-Bot today and avoid making a fool of yourself.

P.S. Happy April Fool's Day
]]> https://googledata.org/uncategorized/introducing-jargon-bot-for-google-apps-translating-business-jargon-into-plain-english/feed/ 0 A Silicon Valley Story: VigLink has gone Google https://googledata.org/uncategorized/a-silicon-valley-story-viglink-has-gone-google/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-silicon-valley-story-viglink-has-gone-google https://googledata.org/uncategorized/a-silicon-valley-story-viglink-has-gone-google/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:41:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=6af7c168528b6560cb02c9920aaa8729
Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Arentzoff, VP of Marketing at VigLink. VigLink helps site owners monetize their online content by tagging outbound links so publishers get paid when readers make purchases. New links are also weaved into content by recognizing when web page content references products and merchants. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

From the beginning, we understood the value of cloud computing for a small business. Two years ago our founder, a former Microsoft employee, chose to start VigLink with Google Apps. He felt this was an easy decision for two key reasons: first, Google Apps was built from the ground up to be a cloud solution with real-time, multi-user features; second, our business is running about 75% Apple computers and 25% PCs, so we needed a solution that would support both platforms equally. With Google Apps, we didn’t have to download any new software or buy new hardware. The tools just worked through the power of the web, no matter what devices we were using.

Google Apps was not only cost-effective for a startup, but it also equipped us with the tools we needed to communicate and work together, no matter where we were. We have nineteen employees and offices in both San Francisco and Indiana, and with Google Apps, we’re able to connect all our employees and seamlessly communicate despite the distance between us.

We use Gmail and Google Docs heavily in our business, and we also take advantage of embedded chat and other collaboration features that make it easy for us to work together. My marketing team uses Google Docs pretty extensively, especially when working on new articles and press releases. VigLink is a startup, so there are no regular hours. Google Apps provides us with a great way for people to interact at two in the morning during the nighttime marathons. Our employees also enjoy the advantages of some of the other cool features that come with Google Apps. They make their calls through Google Voice and receive voicemail transcripts in their inboxes, which are easy to read and easy to search. VigLink’s mission is to help site owners around the world monetize their online content, and Google Apps has been a key tool to our success.
]]> https://googledata.org/uncategorized/a-silicon-valley-story-viglink-has-gone-google/feed/ 0 A Silicon Valley Story: HeyZap has gone Google https://googledata.org/google-apps/a-silicon-valley-story-heyzap-has-gone-google/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-silicon-valley-story-heyzap-has-gone-google https://googledata.org/google-apps/a-silicon-valley-story-heyzap-has-gone-google/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:46:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=c6eb22d5d4818d58ef424f93b67e0ca7
Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of HeyZap. HeyZap is a social network for mobile gamers and a platform for mobile and online games. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Games are our business, but our business is certainly not a game. We take running our business seriously, and a key part of this is our IT. From day one, we set up our email on Gmail and have since been running our business on Google Apps. For a company of 18, working efficiently and communicating fluidly is extremely important. When it was just three of us, we used our personal Gmail accounts for work. Then as the company scaled, it became difficult to separate work from our personal lives. We moved to Google Apps where all our work information could be neatly kept under one company domain.

As we grew, we needed the ability to share and work together on documents. Google Docs provides the infrastructure to create and share documents through the cloud. Even better, the collaboration features let us work on the same docs together in real-time from anywhere. Sometimes we have up to 10 people working on a doc, an ability which has enabled us to be much more productive in our work.

For our 10 engineers, Google Docs has also served another purpose. Instead of a wiki, they use Google Docs to store technical materials for others to use. They take advantage of labels and folders to sort the information by topic. Wikis can be hard to maintain, but with Google Docs, it’s easy to create new documents and edit content. Our sales staff has also used Google spreadsheets to manage a lot of our client information and data.

Google Apps has been a powerful tool to help grow our business. As we focus more of our attention on the mobile space, where we already have a very successful app with over two million installs, I’m sure it will continue to enable our business and allow us to keep working quickly and efficiently, whether we’re at the office or on the go.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-apps/a-silicon-valley-story-heyzap-has-gone-google/feed/ 0 A Silicon Valley Story: JobFlo has gone Google https://googledata.org/google-apps/a-silicon-valley-story-jobflo-has-gone-google/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-silicon-valley-story-jobflo-has-gone-google https://googledata.org/google-apps/a-silicon-valley-story-jobflo-has-gone-google/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:44:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=3624f54a66c06d8dd711cc510e7ec7f7
Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Jim Ambras, founder and CEO of JobFlo (previously NotchUp). JobFlo helps small to medium-sized businesses recruit top talent through its free social-media recruiting platform. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

JobFlo came into existence to address a problem I’d dealt with for over 14 years—how to find and recruit top talent who may not be actively seeking a job. I wanted to provide employers with a creative new way to reach happily employed people without resorting to the same traditional recruiting methods. This desire has led us to provide employers with a free recruiting platform that taps into the power of social networking sites.

I started JobFlo three years ago knowing we would take full advantage of cloud computing technologies and not be tied to a traditional business model that required servers and lots of IT complexity. I knew our business model was viable and was more concerned with how to set up and run a streamlined, efficient company. Having served as Vice President of Engineering for a bunch of start-ups, I knew setting up an infrastructure for our business ourselves could be really difficult and time-consuming. In previous jobs, I would often spend my days engineering and my nights managing our IT. Starting my own company, my first rule of business was that any communication and collaboration solution we used would not rely on in-house servers.

And with that, all the problems I had had before went away. With Google Apps, IT was one less thing we had to worry about, and it just worked and worked well. We had high email quotas, great spam-filtering, and real-time collaboration. It was really important that we had a good infrastructure for collaboration. As a company with four employees all working from home, the ability to share and work together online was critical.

While we started with Gmail and Google Docs, we have since included the use of many other tools such as Google Voice and apps from the Google Apps Marketplace. We have adopted tools such as FreshBooks for invoicing and MailChimp for email marketing. JobFlo is doing great, and we’ll be integrating even more of Google’s product suite into our business as we continue to grow.

]]> https://googledata.org/google-apps/a-silicon-valley-story-jobflo-has-gone-google/feed/ 0 Silicon Valley has gone Google https://googledata.org/uncategorized/silicon-valley-has-gone-google/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=silicon-valley-has-gone-google https://googledata.org/uncategorized/silicon-valley-has-gone-google/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:30:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=886c341387e6f885531a2a5a3ac267b7
When Business Insider recently released its 20 Silicon Valley Startups to Watch, we were curious how Google Apps ranked among these businesses’ IT solutions of choice. The answer turned out to be: really well. We found 97% of these companies from the last two years were running on Google Apps.

We built Google Apps to help businesses improve how they work together with the power of the web, so we were thrilled to learn that the hottest startups in a community as dynamic as Silicon Valley are running on Apps.


Of course, Silicon Valley isn’t the only tech hot spot. There are tons of cities booming with startups and other small and medium-sized businesses, and they all have one thing in common: whether in Boston, Chicago, Delhi, London or none of the above, they can benefit from taking a 100% web approach. With Google Apps you can focus on your business, not your IT.

Over the next few weeks, we’d like to introduce you to a few businesses that have gone Google in Silicon Valley. These are companies that believe in thinking big and growing fast, and they have adopted Google Apps to help them do both. Together they embody a lot of qualities that we think you’ll find interesting, and we hope you find their stories inspirational.
]]> https://googledata.org/uncategorized/silicon-valley-has-gone-google/feed/ 0 Going Google across the 50 States: Ohio technology firm starts trusting its email again https://googledata.org/google-apps/going-google-across-the-50-states-ohio-technology-firm-starts-trusting-its-email-again/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=going-google-across-the-50-states-ohio-technology-firm-starts-trusting-its-email-again https://googledata.org/google-apps/going-google-across-the-50-states-ohio-technology-firm-starts-trusting-its-email-again/#comments Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:33:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=95b7ea2d8a4886182a9e489672e5dc77 Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses are using Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Richard Hearn, CEO of Crown Partners, a digital sales and marketing technology firm in Ohio. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


At Crown Partners, we help businesses implement the newest ebusiness solutions to grow their revenue and help them get ahead of the competition. We support Fortune 500 and mid-market companies all over the country and in some cases globally, so access to our email, calendars and documents while out of the office or with clients is critical.

We had been using Microsoft® Exchange 2003 and Sharepoint 2007, but we ran out of Client Access Licenses. Microsoft would not let us buy more licenses on our current infrastructure and only allowed us to upgrade to 2010. So, we made the investment in new servers and software and took the upgrade plunge (which had its own challenges). Immediately after upgrading, we began to run into problems – meetings disappeared from calendars, data didn’t sync with smartphones, and we had a couple bad outages where employees couldn’t access email for over 24 hours. On a few occasions, we missed client meetings due to calendar issues and decided we needed to start considering alternatives.

From a cost perspective, we had already paid for the servers and licenses with Microsoft, but we decided to cut our losses. We had spent nearly $50,000 on something that just didn’t work.

We called Google, and two weeks later, we had 100 employees up and running on Google Apps. Moving our entire infrastructure was not a big deal. We started with the 30-day free trial, tested it out, and after only a few days simply deployed to the rest of our employees on our own. A one-person IT team was able to migrate the business over in less than a week. If I knew how easy it would be, I would have done it a long time ago.

With Google Apps’ record for reliability, I don’t have to worry about servers going down. I know that our data is backed up in the cloud. We have tons of people on the road every week, we have had laptops stolen or lost at airports, and it’s an added benefit knowing that there isn’t data on the actual laptops.

With all the travel our employees do, we need access to information wherever we are – real time. Our employees are starting to trust their emails and their calendars again, even on their mobile devices. Gmail is lightening fast and employees love it. The added benefit of Google Docs and other benefits from Google Apps put it over the top. The only thing I regret about moving to Google Apps is not doing it sooner.

Posted by Richard Hearn, CEO, Crown Partners
]]> https://googledata.org/google-apps/going-google-across-the-50-states-ohio-technology-firm-starts-trusting-its-email-again/feed/ 0 500 reasons to consider Google Apps https://googledata.org/uncategorized/500-reasons-to-consider-google-apps/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=500-reasons-to-consider-google-apps https://googledata.org/uncategorized/500-reasons-to-consider-google-apps/#comments Wed, 29 Jun 2011 23:55:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=5d57ae398bc23cfe562d051203f591ff
Monday we shared some thoughts on why you might consider going Google. Since some of you asked for more, we invited our customers and partners to help us. After all, who knows the reasons better than they do?

We were humbled by the speed and thoughtfulness with which hundreds of people responded. Within 24 hours, we received more than 500 reasons to consider Google Apps. Thank you!

Just for fun, we put all the answers into a word cloud to offer a glimpse at what’s most important to our customers. We were pleased to see alignment with the four categories we shared Monday: pure and proven cloud, designed for teams, productive anywhere, and simple and affordable. If you’re interested, you can see the full list of responses here.

Word cloud based on over 500 reasons provided by our customers and partners.

Over the course of the coming weeks we hope to share as many of these reasons as possible in a more digestible way. Feel free to share additional thoughts by completing this form.

Thanks again for all the kind words!
]]> https://googledata.org/uncategorized/500-reasons-to-consider-google-apps/feed/ 0 The State of Wyoming may be the first state to go Google, but Wyomingites across the state have already gone Google. https://googledata.org/google-apps/the-state-of-wyoming-may-be-the-first-state-to-go-google-but-wyomingites-across-the-state-have-already-gone-google/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-state-of-wyoming-may-be-the-first-state-to-go-google-but-wyomingites-across-the-state-have-already-gone-google https://googledata.org/google-apps/the-state-of-wyoming-may-be-the-first-state-to-go-google-but-wyomingites-across-the-state-have-already-gone-google/#comments Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:35:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=252752f6c18fc91d93ce164e1dfd0c57
Yesterday we announced that Wyoming became the first state to go Google. With the help of Google Apps implementation partner Tempus Nova, Wyoming moved 10,000 state employees to Google Apps in less than eight months, saving the state approximately $1 million a year. But, state employees aren’t the only ones in Wyoming using Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from other organizations in Wyoming that have gone Google.

Dubois Youth Activities - Dubois, WY
Dubois Youth Activities is a nonprofit that offers a variety of programs and activities for kids up to 18 years old. “We chose Google Apps because it was simple, and it made it easy to transfer job responsibilities from one employee to another. We also thought it would be easy to use for the parents and the teachers in our town. With Google Apps, we were able to create documents and surveys that all employees could easily access. We were also able to participate in conference calls and webinars together with Google Talk. I really love how user friendly it is.”
(Amanda Verheul, Manager)

Alpine Family Medical Clinic - Alpine, WY
Alpine Family Medical Clinic is a clinic of just 3 people, including a doctor, medical assistant, and office manager. “It was difficult to update and make changes to our lab forms, so we started using Google Apps. Now when parameters on our lab forms change, we can easily go into Google Docs and make changes. We can keep track of medication expiration dates, our inventory of crash-carts, and other types of equipment.”
(Wayne Noffsinger, Medical Assistant)

Tetra 4D - Cheyenne, WY
Tetra 4D helps support Adobe’s existing customers using 3D PDF technology, which allows 3D data to be converted into interactive PDF documents. “In 2010, Adobe asked us to form a new company that would be ready to take orders and provide customer service in less than four months. This never would have been possible without Google Apps. With Google Apps we were able to register our domain and set up email and a document management solution in a matter of minutes. Google Apps allowed us to launch our business quickly and begin taking orders from customers all over the world.”
(Greg Baker, General Manager)
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