Selling Enterprise Solutions to the US Federal Government

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thanks for dropping by! 🙂

 

Lately we've seen the job postings for various verticals from travel to automotive and TV to telecom, but now Google is on the lookout for sales engineers and representatives plus someone to head their Washington-based, Federal Sales Team which is part of Google Enterprise. So what's Google selling the Feds? Apparently, the ideal person for the post of Federal Sales Team lead, is expected to "deliver the same technology that powers Google's award-winning search engine to leading corporations and government agencies". And where exactly would this tech be used, well it's been hinted that deployment would take place at corporate intranets, extranets, and public websites. Sounds interesting…

After having a quick glance at what sales engineers and representatives on the Federal Sales Team were required to do, I've figured out that, Google Earth Enterprise (GEarth) and the Google Search Appliance (GSA) will be the focus products targeted at governmental agencies by Google. But it would be an understatement to say that, Google is trying to entice potential clients in the federal government with just GEarth and the GSA. I don't think so, I believe there's more to this (OneBox may have something to do with this) than what's up at the jobs page on Google because for starters, the think tanks at Google's Federal Sales unit have already identified an interested buyer and possibly an existing customer — the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

 

And there's some major bucks to be made since Google is looking at about $30K to 100K as a result of the sales of these enterprise solutions, some of which might still be in development, others at the pre-launch phase or as active releases.

 

Google Local Renamed Back to Google Maps

Our pals at Google have renamed Google Local back to Google Maps. Seems like this change happened late yesterday because on April 19th, a day earlier, Google's cache
shows that the domain – local.google.com still showed 'Local' among the top tabs of the search engine, local.google.com had the Google Local logo as well.

However, late last night (US time) and early today morning (03GMT), when I typed in local.google.com I was shown the Google Maps logo instead along with 'Maps' in place of the 'Local' tab.
A few months ago,Google renamed Maps to Local — asof April 14th, Google's cached showed maps.google.com as Local, and now they've switched it around. I guess they've done this so that their geo-coding & mapping features could be rightly called as Google Maps, and their Local Business Center, which is an addon facility to Maps, would sound best as Google Local.

Selected Participants Invited to Test drive AdWords Editor

Google just began offering their AdWords Editor in beta, to selected advertisers.

From the AdWords Editor website:

AdWords Editor currently is available only to a limited number of advertisers. If you aren't a beta participant, please be assured that we're working to release AdWords Editor to a larger number of advertisers in the near future. 
According to the description on Google AdWords Editor website, the AdWords Editor is a downloadable account management application for one's computer and is designed especially for large AdWords accounts where it allows one to make changes to their account with greater ease and flexibility. "Download your campaigns, make bulk or individual edits offline, then upload your changes to your AdWords account".

6.5MB in size and downloadable in 30 seconds over a broadband connection, AdWords Editor works the same way as GTalk does when it comes to updates, which is done automatically. As of now, the AdWords Editor has only been tested on the Home and Pro editions for Windows 2000 and Windows XP, however, Google says that the application is designed for cross-platform functionality and they're working on expanding functionality to Mac & Linux!

Some Interesting Patents Won Today by Google’s Rivals …

Let's start off with Yahoo who was granted the patent — Systems and methods for implementing person-to-person money exchange. Filed in 2000, the patent is described in it's abstract as:

 Systems and methods for effecting online financial transactions between individuals or between individuals and entities such as banks, merchants and other companies. Each user accesses a fund exchange server to establish an online account, which is used to transfer funds to and from other entities' online accounts. To fund an online account, funds can be transferred to the online account from a credit card account or from another online account.  

To me, this sounds somewhat simillar to Google Wallet, GPurchases, GBuy, etc.  or atleast something along those lines 😉