A ‘Chromebook’ is the name given to a new type of laptop produced by Google which looks much like any other laptop, except that they are powered by Google’s own Chrome Operating System. These Acer and Samsung machines are geared towards being used exclusively on the web and therefore have no desktop or file system or any of the normal stuff you expect from a computer as instead the entire machine is basically designed as a web surfing machine.
This means that for starters it is very quick to turn on (about 8 seconds apparently), all your emails, documents, photos and videos etc. are all stored and can be used online, doesn’t need to be updated or patched as this happens automatically and it comes with an unlimited hard drive (i.e. the entire internet). You can find new apps and games using Chrome store just like you do with Chrome currently and as everything is stored online, if you accidently drop your ‘Chromebook’ in a shark tank you can just pick up a new Chromebook, log on and pick up where you left off.
So what does this mean for your online business?
More Customers!
If these take off then they will make it a great deal easier and cheaper for many more people to get online and have the opportunity to have dealings with your business and hopefully, your payment service provider. What ‘Chromebooks’ and their inevitable copycat devices will have in common is that they don’t need to come loaded with large hard drives or require a slew of program software and anti-virus to work. As everything is done online the machines will be quite simple and therefore much cheaper. Cheaper and easier to get online + more and more services available online = good for your business = more payment processing and more profit.
Nothing Immediately
What Google certainly appreciates is that this is a big step forward and may take a bit of time for lots of people to adopt. The advantages are clear but what will stop people from jumping on board straight away is the psychological awkwardness people will feel about saving all their data online, not having a desktop to work from or those friendly icons looking back at you (even though they are normally hidden by a browser). Also, many are fearful that uploading all your data to the cloud places a lot of faith in Google in terms of data security.
Only time will tell how successful this new way of computing will be in the long run. Would you be happy using a Chromebook?
In a bold move, Google has decided to sue the US Government because they feel they were unfairly excluded from a $58m contract to over haul their email systems. The law suit says that Google feels the terms of the contract make it impossible for them to offer their products; despite the fact it was told there would be “full and open competition “ and its ‘Google Apps’ could provide an equal if not better service. Google was supposedly told that only Microsoft’s business software could be used. Google had produced a special version of its apps for government systems to address all the security issues, but the Department for the Interior claimed the product did not comply with their security requirements.
When you are building a business online there are many factors which you need to consider before you rush into things. First you need to ensure you have your business goals in line with the rest of your service mediums as well as sorting out a 
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world and has a near monopoly over the billions of searches made through search engines every day. This gives them rather a lot of power over the internet. Luckily for us, Google is quite nice and has the philosophy “Don’t Be Evil” which means that they have your best interests at heart.
Google’s new way of presenting search results has caused a bit of stir in all areas of online business and web marketing around the globe. Their new ‘faster’ system gives you search engine results as you type. So when you are looking for ‘cheese’ for example – as soon as you type ‘c’ you will start receiving results, then when you type ‘h’ you get more results and so on. Basically Google are trying to predict your search term before you have finished typing it. Sounds good? But what effect will this have on your online business?
When it comes it familiarising yourself with the Google Analytics system there are a lot of areas that require looking into to give you a reasonably concise overview. Among the most important areas to familiarise yourself with are the monitoring of visitor data and creating and tracking goals within your sites account. This requires quite a bit of time to be put aside in order to really get a feel for the system. However, once you have this under your belt you can make the next vital step in analysing and utilising the data that analytics gathers for your site in order to really begin optimising your site for success.
The team at Google Analytics offers a variety of features and usefully are regularly updating them and introducing new ones. Analytics users are constantly asking Google to provide certain features that would be of use and there are a few suggestions which crop up more often than others. Fortunately, Google do listen and the users get their hands on something that can really enhance their use of analytics and benefit their business.
As we are all very well aware, Google Analytics can provide unrivalled insight into the inner workings of your website. Several of our previous articles have discussed how it can be used to optimise site content and ecommerce systems to improve sales as well as using the visitor features to tailor your site for your user-base. These articles have shown the usefulness of Analytics and how the data can be displayed in varying formats to assist in its analysis. Without these features the analytics data is a complex array of almost indiscernible data. This is where the 
