Google has announced the launch of Google Apps Premier Edition, a set of essential business software tools that sees the search giant take on Microsoft in a key market area.

The new service costs $50 per employee account per year and includes telephone technical support, 10 gigabytes of storage per user and a service delivery guarantee of 99.9% up time.

Google Apps Premier Edition, as the name would suggest, is a paid version of Google Apps,a service introduced six months ago as a free service that offers gmail, Google calender, Google Talk and Google Documents and Spreadsheets, but set to the business’ physical domain (name.com).

According to a Reuters report, more than 100,000 small businesses use the existing free Google Apps service and hundreds of universities around the world are using a free version of the service that is free of ads.

“We have a volume goal … for millions and millions of users,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in an interview. While big-business buying cycles will take time, he cautioned, “we have lots of indications of very large deals.”

Schmidt challenged Microsoft’s competing product Microsoft Live stating “We can offer a more functional product for a lower price”.

 

Update: further (later :-) ) coverage at CNet, TechCrunch, NY Times and Information Week.

Tags: Google, Google Apps

Originally posted on February 22, 2007 @ 1:12 am

SEO Book author and well known SEO blogger Aaron Wall writes at SEOBook.com that he’s seeing changes in Google including large authority sites being demoted in favor of smaller niche players. He notes in the post that he’s note sure if it’s correct to call it an algorithm update, but certainly something seems to be going on.

Are any 901am readers seeing anything in their SERP’s? sites down or up in a big way? let us know.

Originally posted on February 22, 2007 @ 2:32 am

Google has shut down a “controversial” blog hosted at Blogger following complaints from the New Zealand Government after a post stating that New Zealand Parliamentarian Sue Bradford, who is pushing for a legal ban on smacking children, would be a “worthy candidate for NZ’s first political assassination”.

The blog, CYFS Watch (link to Google Cache, where the site is still available) worked as a protest point against the New Zealand Child, Youth and Family Service, part of the New Zealand Minister for Social Development and directly responsible for child welfare, including removing children from abusive and neglectful homes. The site had been subject to complaints previously following posts calling on names and home addresses to be posts of CYFS case workers, and discussion on those very people, for example a post describing a case worker as “a nasty person” (ed note, this is New Zealand, even the insults are polite).

Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand told The Age that the weblog was not shut down due to the death threat but due to repeated violations of Blogger rules.

“In our terms of service we reserve the right to shut down blogs that have repeat violations, and here we had a repeat violation issue…We really try to remove as little content as possible. We don’t want to be a mediator of content and we believe blogs are a platform for free expression and we do everything we can to work with bloggers to keep the content up,” she said.

Update NZ Police are now wishing to speak with the blogger behind the blog. This part is mildly amusing:

A spokesperson said the way in which the threat was worded did not appear to constitute a criminal offence.
Police would however like to identify the blog site author to find out his or her intentions

Yeh, they’re going to fess up to wanting to kill a Member of Parliament…not.

Originally posted on February 21, 2007 @ 6:23 pm