eBlox e-commerce blog

A few years ago, I introduced the readers of this column to cloud-based computer services like Salesforce.com, Google Apps and others. These services take something that you typically do with an application on your computer – e.g. word processing with Microsoft Word – and transform it into a service that you can use with any web browser connected to the internet.

In some cases, these services are more or less equivalent to their desktop counterpart and, in many cases, they go beyond them. Salesforce.com, for instance, has grown far beyond what is available in desktop customer relationship management applications like ACT! In other cases, the cloud software is a much simpler version of its shrink-wrapped competitors. While Google Docs will handle your short documents and basic spreadsheets with ease, you probably don’t want to build your 500-page textbook with it. (more…)

PPAI announced today that eBlox designed and developed sites Advalite and 3M Promotional Markets won Silver and Gold Web Awards. Advalite took Silver in the Technical Innovations/E-commerce category, and 3M Promotional Markets was awarded the gold in the Marketing/Branding category.

We’re very proud of both sites (and many others!) and are happy to see storeBlox-driven sites take these big honors from the premier association for the promotional products industry. Both sites are products of much sweat, hard work and intensive collaboration with the clients.

Both sites showcase the extensive customization capabilities of storeBlox, as well as a wide variety of custom-developed distributor tools that enable both suppliers’ customers to market, sell and purchase their products easily.

Please check them out at advalite.com and promote.3m.com. You can view the Web Awards winners here.

It looks like Google is changing the way they measure ad quality again. TechCrunch reports that Google will be factoring in ad position when measuring quality score, effectively removing whatever boost is provided by higher ad positions.

Google will also be making it easier for ads to appear above the search results – because a certain level of quality is required for an ad to appear on the top, the higher quality rankings from the first change result in more ads that meet the quality guidelines to appear above the search results. Result? More money for Google, of course, because more ads appear on top, which should result in more clicks.

Full story here. Google’s complete explanation of ad ranking can be found here. Here is Google’s AdWords blog post on the change.

One of my favorite “hybrid” web services, Jott, has come out of beta. This is good and bad news – good because the service is very mature and stable, bad because you now have to start paying (just a little bit) for it. For those of you who haven’t tried Jott, it’s essentially a speech-to-text service that allows you to call in notes, messages, to-dos and reminders to a phone number. Jott then transcribes the voice message and sends it to you (or a variety of other services, like your online calendar). It’s a great service when you can’t type a message – for instance, when you’re driving – and the transcriptions are almost always accurate. I use it almost every day, and I recommend you try it out if you spend any substantial time thinking away from a keyboard.