Vinny Lingham’s Blog

Google just announced the launch of Google Apps – a direct attack on Microsoft’s multi billion dollar Office Suite – although right now, they are just rolling out basic applications.  The idea is that they will private label their suite of applications to make it seamless for companies to use and brand as their own.  This is another step further into the Web Applications space.  I’m positive that Google will launch an operating system (for free) at some point in time.

This is a big surprise, in some ways, but due to the fact that Google is so efficient at monetizing international inventory (where the other’s are not), eBay has partnered with Google on this front.  This is an interesting move, and may squash rumours of an impending Yahoo/eBay merger.  I cannot see the logic in this, except for revenues that eBay needs from advertising – because Google is becoming more and more of an eBay competitor.  Time wil tell…

I found a great browser comparison study at Extreme Tech. For comparison, this blog has about 2,000 unique daily readers, and fully one half of them use a Mozilla based browser – which emphasizes how important it is to ensure that your website is cross-browser compatible.

Ok, how do I know this? Well, if you search Google for “Yahoo Analytics“, you will find that this blog ranks at #3 on the SERP, due to a speculative post I made a while back. It has actually been there for quite some time now, however in the past week, it has been my highest referrer of traffic for all my search engine traffic! Anyways, it could be nothing, but this spike leads me to believe that something is up!

South Africa’s small, yet dynamic online marketing space got a bit closer!   We’ve just announced a partnership and strategic stakeholding in Quirk eMarketing.  Quirk has been in operation for the past 7 years,founded by Rob Stokes, and grown to a 30+ person operation with offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and London.  Rob is now based in London and runs the UK operation.  incuBeta and Quirk have been friends for the past 2 years, and we’ve finally decided to hold hands and tackle the global online marketing space together!  Quirk’s specialist focus is, amongst others, SEO & Email Marketing, and they have a great breadth of services which we are looking forward to tap into.

The two companies will operate independently, but collaborate on projects and clients where appropriate and share skills and expertise.  The combined staff complement will be around about 85 people and we’ll be celebrating our deal tomorrow afternoon at an undisclosed ocean-view party venue – I’ll post some pics this weekend!