Time Tested Google Docs Tips

Google Docs reminds me of the T-1000 from Terminator 2 — impossibly more sleek and efficient than its predecessor. I’ve owned my laptop for about a year and half now, and it hasn’t occurred to me once to acquire a software-based word processing program. When was the last time you got an email with a Word doc attachement to it? Nope. No way. Not now; not never. Beat up word processing software is like mangled Arnold at the end of T2.

Another likeness to the T-1000 is that Google Docs never, ever stops. Not only can you access it anywhere with an Internet connection at any time, but Google continuously iterates upon both its design and functionality. Grovo was, in fact, built with reliance on Google Apps and Google Docs, as many companies are. The ability to quickly and easily create, store, share, and collaborate upon documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more is paramount to just about any organization.

Here are some tips you may or may not know about Google Docs to augment our newly released course of video tutorial lessons on Google Docs Management. Continue reading →

The Expert Series: David Honig

Name: David Honig

Title: Data Driven Investments

Description: David Honig, a veteran VC who has made investments in companies like Aviary, UrbanDaddy and PhotoBucket, explains the value of data for a startup and its investors. Continue reading →

Klout for Chrome

Klout’s like the Moody’s of social media, taking into account the size of a person’s network, their content and other’s interaction with it, to provide a numerical measure of a user’s social influence; this measure is referred to as your Klout score.

And, just when we were all wondering if Klout scores would become the fodder of pick-up lines, both inside and out of the tech industry, Klout announced it had raised ~ $30 million in C round financing in the fall of 2011. Well, alright. If this information gets your goat a little, it’s only because you didn’t think of your own Klout score as the world over turns to social media. Continue reading →

Make Your Online Presence Work For You

Two things are apparent upon Googling “fired for Facebook post”:

1. The press, and most anyone reading it, have a field day with these stories.
2. What you publish via Facebook can, in fact, jeopardize your job.

Highlights from said search aren’t really worth iterating here. What is worth iterating upon is our video tutorial coverage to help you manage your online reputation.

Though some of us may prefer the “ignorance is bliss” quiet and solitude of the pre-Internet days from time to time, the World Wide Web isn’t going anywhere. And, as such, it may feel like you’re living two lives: one in the physical reality, and another online. It can feel pretty surreal from time to time — a social currency defined by Likes and retweets. Ours is an interesting time because the digital self of this online world only becomes more relevant as time passes. Continue reading →

Tip of the Week: Tab Search in Google Chrome

Google Chrome’s a heavy favorite around the Grovo office. It’s easy to begin to take some of it’s useful features for granted, such as the “omnibox,” defined by Google as the address bar that sits at the top of the browser window and doubles as a search box — an innovative minimalist feature for browser windows that, among other things, provides for a greater Web viewing window. One time-saving feature of the omibox is tab searching.

The Vimeo Widgets

Everyone loves a good widget, and the creative folks over at Vimeo are apparently no different. It all begins here.

 As you can see, you’re afforded two choices: Hubnut and Montage. Hubnut provides for consecutive viewing of your videos while Montage offers, well, a montage of your videos. If you’re using Vimeo to upload and host your videos but have your own separate or personal site, one of these widgets might be ideal for not only showing your work, but keeping it on one page. Vimeo widgets are customizable by source of videos, format, and design. Continue reading →

Elements of a Winning Promotion for Your Fan Page

Social media is a proven window to an engaged audience. How do you get there though? Wildfire published a very useful post on its blog nearly a year ago that covers building in extra social dimension into your Wildfire promotions. In summary, here are a few of Wildfire’s own tips paired with published case studies exhibiting the particulars of successful Wildfire promotions campaigns.

Encourage Users to Submit Content They Create Themselves

Beyond submitting your name and Facebook Like, creating a contest, according to Wildfire, is inherently more social if it asks people create and submit their original work. A terrific example of this is Electronic Arts’ Wildfire campaign to generate excitement for the release of their classic NBA Jam video game on the Nintendo Wii.

Continue reading →

Vimeo Supports Creative Commons Licensing

Vimeo has done a good job of carving out a niche for itself that values artisanship and craftsmanship in videography across its user-uploaded content. Unlike YouTube, Vimeo’s not really the place for a video of your kid super-glueing a telephone to his own face. Conversely, Vimeo is the place for a rare snow fall caught on film in Wellington, New Zealand, set (of course) to Claude Debussy’s own Clair de Lune.

Continue reading →

Focus Your Vimeo Video Search

Your basic search on Vimeo can be a tricky thing if you’re accustomed to searching for videos as through Google and/or YouTube.

Why? Because Vimeo defines relevancy in a search largely by play count, as oppose to, say, matching keywords to those found in a video’s title. Therefore, if you do a search for, let’s say, the term “jump,” then filter your results first by “Relevant” and then by “Plays,” you’ll find your results and their order to be nearly identical.

Continue reading →

Grovo Covers the New Vimeo

Back in late January Vimeo began rolling out its site-wide redesign; you can give it a whirl here. It is within the new Vimeo that we researched, wrote and recorded all of our new Vimeo courses. Alas, if you are looking for a primer on the new Vimeo, this would be a good place to start: grovo.com/vimeo.

The Expert Series: Allan Dalton

Name: Allan Dalton

Title: Transforming Real Estate

Description: Real estate veteran Allan Dalton talks about the transformative power of the Internet, and what this means for an industry that once relied on controlling information. Continue reading →

Social Media Marketing by Wildfire

Wildfire Interactive is the biggest social media marketing software company in the world. Less than three years from their summer 2009 launch, as they recently posted, the Palo Alto-based company has powered over 200,000 marketing campaigns world wide, some of which belonged to 30 of the top 50 global brands, including Facebook, Sony, AT&T, LiveNation, Victoria Secret, Pepsi, and more. Wildfire is also a two-time winner of the Facebook Fund, started by Facebook, Accel Partners, and Founders Fund. As with any wildly successful start-up, there are many factors that come into play when explaining their success; one important move by Wildfire was to manifest a scalable, templatized solution by which companies, both large and small, could create a customized social media marketing campaign. Continue reading →

How to Register as an Organ Donor on Facebook

Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg appeared on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” to announce that Facebook’s 900 million+ user base can register themselves as organ donors on the social network. Well done.

Here is some data from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services on the national candidate waiting list, organ donation and matching, and transplantation — updated at 5:40pm today: Continue reading →

Ge.tt Notified Part Deux

Exactly one week ago today I posted about Ge.tt’s crafty notifications — more a look at Ge.tt aesthete, which I dig a whole lot; this was a surface level post. I’m following up with y’all today for an “in-depth” look at what happens when you click the notification and select “See all notifications.”

What happens is you’re brought to “ge.tt/notifications” — a database of all your Ge.tt notifications that are filterable by Likes, social media posts, messages, and downloads. Ge.tt actually published some words about the updated notifications on its blog on 4/20.

Just wonderfully simply, utilitarian cloud storage and sharing, Ge.tt fills its niche very well.

Watch our video tutorials to learn how to use Ge.tt.

Automatic Message Translation in Gmail

We are seeing translation functionality being integrated more and more into our day-to-day online products. Google offers both on-site translation as well as Google Translate.

Continue reading →