Recently, one of my colleagues was trying to set up an ad campaign for a client when he got stuck with a peculiar problem of domain name being longer than 35 characters.  The ad was getting disapproved by AdWords system, so he filled up an exception request explaining the scenario.  Within few hours, he received a response from Google saying that he should use URL of the home page instead of other pages for ads.  Needless to say that it was an automated response because it was clearly mentioned that the domain name itself was longer than 35 characters.  He again filled up the exception request and clearly mentioned that he is trying to use the home page URL only.  The AdWords customer support again responded with the same canned answer.

Tired of trying the exception request procedure he sought help from an AdWords Customer Support agent on a chat.  If you wish to have some fun, just read the chat transcript:

Damn it, they don’t even have any standard turnaround time for customer requests and this is the case of a user who is willing to pay Google.  Amazingly, Google also sent a feedback form after this chat session which mentioned that they use it for improving the service.  I am sure that either nobody fills that form or it just goes into a database with no one looking at it ever.  May be Google is trying to run some algorithms to understand the text and keywords stored in that database

Google needs to work upon improving their customer support system if they want to compete in the business software and applications market.  I have always been an ardent user of Google products and services but it is just their ignorant approach towards customer support which puts me off.

Have you ever had an experience of contacting Google customer support?  I know there will not be many people but those who have had this opportunity, please share your experience.

Both Ben and Jerry have had an association with ice cream during their study days as they worked as ice cream truck driver and ice cream scooper respectively.  However, they shifted to other areas of work after their education only to meet later and deciding to go for an ice cream business.  The idea of ice cream business was not by choice but because of the fact that the equipments for making bagels were very expensive and at that time, unaffordable for them.  Both of them took a correspondence course in ice cream making for $5 each from the Penn State University.  Finally in 1978, The first Ben and Jerry’s store opened up in a Burlington’s abandoned gas station which they got renovated.  The business touched $4.4. million in sales within 6 years and in 2000 the company finally got acquired by Unilever for $326 million.

Some of the take aways and tips for budding entrepreneurs from Ben and Jerry’s story are:

1. Be Creative: Ben and Jerry’s didn’t go after making usual flavors and rather brought into the market, the flavors which people never expected and creative names they never heard of.  Apart from the products, their way of marketing the products was also creative with the use of “Cowmobile” to tour the entire United States and distributing free scoops.

2. Be Socially Responsible: Ben & Jerry’s always tried to connect with the community and be environment friendly company.  The establishment of Ben & Jerry’s Foundation for funding community projects, paying Vermont’s dairy farmers a premium of half a million dollars to offset losses due to volatile prices, using recycled material to build an ice cream shop etc. are some of the examples of social responsibility demonstrated by Ben & Jerry’s.

3. Have Fun: Business doesn’t need to be serious all the time.  Celebrate each and every event, holiday, festivals etc. along with the employees and if possible, involve your customers.  This is what Ben & Jerry’s did; never lost an opportunity to connect with your employees and customers.

Launch Splash has some handy features to manage the new launches like the ability to post Announcements which can be subscribed to by the visitors through launch page’s RSS feed.  You can also have the visitor’s submit their email addresses which you can later use to communicate with them.  Launch Splash also has in-built visitor tracking system which shows the number of people who visited the site.  It also allows for adding Google Analytics code to your launch page if you wish to have detailed statistics about your visitors.  You can even use your own stylesheet to reflect your logo and other design elements on the page.

The basic subscription is free and allows for creating launch pages for 2 domain names using the available templates.  The paid subscriptions which range from $5 to $25 allows for more creating launch pages for more domain names and also offer premium templates.

Free iTunes Downloads: This blog keeps track of free music downloads available at the iTunes Store and provides a link to download individual songs.  Apart from music downloads, the blog also tracks free video downloads available on iTunes Store. 

iT’S Free Downloads: The site is much like the one mentioned above.  It keeps track of all free downloads available at international iTunes Stores.  They also provide a widget for your MySpace profile, a Facebook application and a iGoogle Gadget which shows the latest free downloads available on various iTunes stores.

Free-MP3s.eu:  This site allows you to search for free music downloads across 3 sites viz. iJigg, MP3 Realm and Esnips.  I suggest searching through MP3 Realm as it shows good number of results for available downloads.  iJigg also provides decent number of results but the links in search results from iJigg didn’t seem to work when I tried downloading.

The tech preview version’s new features cover almost all parts of blog writing i.e. text editing, video publishing, image editing and publishing and enhancements in the user interface.

I am listing the features one by one without categorizing them in various sections mentioned above as they are self explanatory:

1. Word Count: A very useful feature picked up from MS Word and meant for people who want to restrict them to a certain word limit.  Especially useful for professional writers who bill their clients on the basis of number of words written.  Like MS Word, you will find this feature in the “Tools” section of the top menu bar.

2. Auto Linking: Tired of linking certain words again and again; no worries because Live Writer now allows you to auto link the words that you choose.  You will have to make this setting once for every word and then Live Writer takes care of linking the word to the set URL.  To enable this feature for any word that you want auto-linked, just check “Automatically link to this term” while inserting a hyperlink.

3. Insert Videos From Soapbox: Now you can include videos from Soapbox in your blog post directly from within Live Writer.  You need to be a registered Soapbox user to use this functionality.

4. Image Editing: This area has got a lot of new features in this preview release.  You can now crop and tilt images, center align the image, create rounded corners, add reflection effect, and border to the image.

5. Category Search: This is for people who use lots of categories in their blogs; you can now search for categories while categorizing a post.  The search feature shows filtered results as you type the category name.

6. Tabs For Changing Views:  Live Writer now allows you to easily navigate between different views like “Preview” and “Source” view using the tabs given at the bottom of editing section.

You can download Windows Live Writer technical preview version here.

There is no dearth of visualizations for services like Digg, Twitter etc.  I wrote about Twittearth which not only visualizes Twitter updates on 3D earth but also has some utility as it shows the messages as well as lets you post your updates.  MSN Live Spaces Vision neither shows messages and nor lets you post them.  All you can do is view photos of the users with recent updates.

The contest named iFashion Photographer Hunt, is open to all fashion photography enthusiasts.  Under the contest, photographers will upload their portfolio on ibibo website which will then be rated jointly by the registered users of Ibibo and a panel from FTV.  The judging panel includes famous fashion photographer, Jatin Kampani.  At the end of the contest, five selected fashion photographers will get to click FTV models in an event which will also be shown on FTV later.

Ibibo, which calls itself a “talent incubator,” has been trying all sort of ideas to promote usage of its various services like photos, blogs, Q&A etc.  Previously Ibibo had launched a similar talent hunt contest to find best of Indian bloggers.  The contest itself was criticized across the blogging community for mass-plagiarism by the contest participants.

iPaper in itself was a great feature as it allowed for converting any document to be viewed in Flash.  With the additional of email service to iPaper, it has become all the more useful and has made document sharing much easier.

To use this service, which is available for free, all you need to do is add ipaper@scribd.com in the “CC” field of email while sending a document to any number of recipients.  After this, Scribd will separately email the document in iPaper version to everyone in the “To” field.

To use this service which is in beta currently, you need to log in to your YouTube account, select the desired video, and click on “Edit Annotations.”  This will allow you to add notes, speech bubbles and highlight boxes anywhere in the video as it plays.  Once you have added the annotations, just save and publish the video to share with other users.

The best part about these annotations is that any user who does not want to view them can turn them off while watching the video.  This can be done using the menu button on YouTube player.

Here is an example of annotated video:

The all new cloud hosted Google Site Search boasts of an enhanced index coverage, synonym recognition and ability to fine tune results on the basis of time and other factors.

The enhanced index coverage feature allows for better indexing of all the website pages including the ones which are updated frequently.  This ensures that all the pages are available for showing relevant results to the people who search the website.  These results can be further tuned to your choice by adding parameters specific to the documents and website pages.

The Site Search is available at a price starting from $100 annually which allows for upto 5000 pages to be indexed and 250,000 searches per year.  Here is a video which explains the new hosted Google Site Search.

You can find more details about Google Hosted Site Search here.