“A year and a half ago, we released completely new document, spreadsheet and drawing editors. Google Docs has been picking up speed ever since with more than 60 new features and millions of new users,” says software engineer Steven Saviano on the official Google Blog. “Today we’re rounding out the suite by previewing a new version of presentations with faster collaboration and more features.”

“Presentations are made to be shared—whether it’s presenting your thesis to your professors or inspiring colleagues at a conference,” he adds. “And the best presentations are made together, collaborating with others to build a compelling story that captivates your audience.”

With the new version, presentations can be created by more than one person simultaneously, and you can see exactly what others are working on with “presence markers”. Teams can edit simultaneously, and there is a revision history feature so you can see who made changes or revert to earlier versions. There is also a built-in chat feature. Are we seeing some Google Wave creep in here?

Google says it’s gradually rolling out the new version of Presentations, but you can use it now if you go to Document Settings, click the editing tab, and check the box next to “Create new presentations using the latest version of the presentation editor.”

Google says you’ll need a “modern browser” if you want to be able to edit with the new version.

Google also says more collaboration features are on the way.

The company recently opened its Product Ideas page, as a tool to gather feedback from users about what they’d like to see next in Google Docs. Google got 4,000 people to participate and submit about 2,000 ideas, and these are apparently the ones they decided were most important to get out sooner rather than later.

“There were many other great ideas – from making Google Docs available as attachments in Gmail to allowing the use of Google Fonts across all Google Docs tools,” wrote Google Docs community manager Teresa Wu on the Google Docs blog. “While we can’t get started on these requests just yet, we’ll be sure to keep them in mind for future improvements.”

You can see all of the Google Docs ideas here. The page utilized Google Moderator, so you can see the ones that were voted up the most in order. It looks like the most popular idea was allowing the use of all Google fonts across all the Google Docs tools. Second was seamless integration between Google Docs tools: such as inserting part of a spreadsheet into a document, then the header/footer stuff. Those 3 priority features were all in the top six though.

This is another example of Google communicating with users to help improve its products – something the company has been doing a whole lot of with and on Google+. We talked about that here, looking at how open Google has been about potential new features for Google+.

Although these fears were successfully addressed in 2007, that doesn’t stop these reports from popping up four years later. The rebuttal in question:

“Every day, employers lose money by paying people to take smoking breaks, go to the bathroom, refill coffee mugs and make small talk around the water cooler,” [John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc,] said. “Most employers understand that not every minute of every workday is dedicated to work. In fact, in today’s 24-7 global economy, it is likely that work bleeds into our personal lives. As a trade-off, employers should expect and allow workers’ personal lives to seep into the workplace.”

Nevertheless, if the bean counters are to be believed, the Les Paul Google Doodle was responsible for $268 million of lost productivity.

Theoretically, anyway.

The method with which the $270 million price tag was reached is as follows:

The Les Paul Google Doodle was on the homepage for two full days, and RescueTime analytics showed users spent an average of 26 seconds more on the Google homepage than normal during that period.

If you do the math (740 million x 2 x 26 seconds), that means 10.7 million man hours were spent playing with the Les Paul Google Doodle. ExtremeTech estimated the average Google user earns $25 per hour, which would mean the interactive guitar cost companies $268 million worldwide in lost productivity.

Again, this is taking into account that every second of every work day is used to further the profits of your employer, something the previous block of quoted text addressed, along with other productivity myth-busting responses.

However, when you consider all the creative things you can do with Google’s latest batch of doodles, especially with the Les Paul logo, maybe these productivity reports aren’t so far-fetched after all. When you also consider the Les Paul doodle — which will be available at Google as long as the Internet exists, apparently — allows would-be guitarists to save their work, you realize some folks probably spent a little bit of time trying to perfect whatever song they were attempting to play.

Furthermore, a quick YouTube search of “les paul doodle” shows a nice amount of uploads, and when you apply the “uploaded today” filter, you see these submissions are still rolling in. The question is, were these done by people who impact the productivity bottom line or people who have a lot of spare time on their hands?

Anyway, how about a song?

The apps have been redesigned for the touch interface of iOS (which will be getting an upgrade of its own next month). Each of the apps runs $9.99 (though existing iWork for iPad users can upgrade for free).

“Now you can use Keynote, Pages and Numbers on iPhone and iPod touch to create amazing presentations, documents and spreadsheets right in the palm of your hand,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The incredible Retina display, revolutionary Multi-Touch interface and our powerful software make it easy to create, edit, organize and share all of your documents from iPhone 4 or iPod touch.”

Apple says the apps come with improved document management, with thumbnail images and “use of “intuitive” gestures, as well as easy sharing of presentations, documents, and spreadsheets without leaving the app.

With the Keynote app, users can play presentations in Full Screen view on the Retina display or connect to a projector or HDTV. There is also a separate Keynote remote app that lets your iPhone or ipod Touch control a presentation on any iOS device or Mac.

Pages also utilizes the Retina Display, and includes Smart Zoom, which lets the user zoom in to follow the cursor while editing, and zooms back out when done. The same goes for Numbers.

Each of the apps runs on iPad and iPad 2, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, and iPod touch (3rd & 4th generation). They’re $9.99 a piece, except for the Keynote remote app, which is only 99 cents.

Apple also announced today that Steve Jobs will be appearing at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, where Apple will reveal the next versions of Mac OS X, iOS, and new cloud services called iCloud.

As businesses lose billions of dollars in productivity while employees focus on the tournament games, one such business is not losing much of anything. In fact, in regards to ESPN, the exact opposite is true. According to MultichannelNews.com, the Worldwide Leader in Sports received a record number of tournament bracket entries for their 2011 Tournament Challenge, racking up almost 6 million (5.9) entries, which is an increase of 24 percent from 2010′s total.

The post goes on to reveal that, at its peak, ESPN was receiving 5180 bracket entries per minute, or 86 a second. Clearly, in March, the madness of college basketball rules — at least for the first weekend — and as a place to post your bracket entries, ESPN’s tournament challenge apparently does too. It’s also clear that any loss businesses incur due to March Madness-infused lower productivity is ESPN’s (and other bracket challenge services) gain.

Perhaps some revenue-sharing is in order.

As for ESPN’s service, there are, of course, some in-depth analytics available about which teams were picked to go the farthest. According to ESPN’s “Who Picked Whom” page, Ohio State, Kansas, Duke and Pitt are the top four teams in terms of appearing in the National Championship game:

Championship Game
Ohio State – 25.9%
Kansas – 23.7%
Duke – 16.0%
Pittsburgh – 6.2%

The lowest percentage, 0.0, belongs to a number of schools, including first-round upset winner Morehead State. The Eagles are among the 25 teams who, according to the ESPN entries, have a zero percent chance of winning the National Championship. I wonder if the Louisville Cardinals share that same sentiment concerning Kenneth Faried and the rest of his Eagles teammates?

Outside innovation is a systematic process for sourcing, evaluating, and driving ideas through to funding and measuring success but it starts with understanding your internal innovation process.

Innovation is an important topic for most companies, it is the essential source of new products, new markets, and even new business models. Outside innovation has been a topic that many companies have been exploring involving customers and partners in the innovation process and holds the promise of enormous returns for small investments. P&G has been a leader in open innovation and sources over 33% of it’s products from outside parties like educational institutions, customer communities, and the social web. Outside Innovation though is not easy and can only be a sustainable success when it works in concert with internal business processes and internal stakeholders.

Successful outside innovation then relies upon understanding your internal innovation process and ecosystem and then creating appropriate interfaces to outside parties. Understanding internal innovation itself can be a challenge as it is often a tacit process and a shared understanding amongst specific teams so it is useful to have a framework to use as a starting point. In this case the generic innovation process serves as a good starting point.

The generic innovation process:

• Fuzzy Front End
• Opportunity identification
• Problem Definition
• immersion in the problem and incubation
• Idea generation and exploring options
• prototyping solutions
• testing, measurement and iteration

When thinking about involving outside parties in these stages it is important to understand each require different kinds of thinking, behavior, motivation and measures of success. When externalizing this process through outside innovation participants are not under direct control and require intrinsic motivation to participate meaningfully in each stage. Companies that approach open innovation with a customer free-for-all are often flooded with unstructured ideas and feedback with weak ties to business goals. The goal of the outside innovation process is to provide a systematic way to help channel and motivate participation appropriately to support the goals of each stage of the process.

The open innovation process is continually iterative and helps identify successful participation at each stage by identifying particular individuals who are intrinsically motivated by specific stages of the process. This provides a framework for inviting users that enjoy and are particularly suited each kind of challenge or activity. This combined with appropriate internal participation will help create a direct connection between internal innovators work, business goals and external activity.

The starting point for formulating an open innovation process in your own organization is identifying the innovation leaders that already exist and identify your own internal innovation processes. This will form the foundation for understanding the existing internal innovation process which is the first step in being able to integrate outside innovation.

Originally published on Experience Curve

“The explosion of social technologies has changed the game for customer service,” said Alex Dayon, executive vice president of CRM at Salesforce. “Facebook and Twitter taught consumers to expect social customer service in real time.”

The product also has built-in social analytics. Companies can monitor and manage customer interactions across social channels with real-time reports and customizable dashboards. Salesforce says these things will help agents identify trends and alert managers of issues that are impacting the business.

The emerging tablet market should play into the always-on social customer interaction approach. Salesforce seems to be pretty hyped up for the iPad 2.

Service Cloud 3 is generally available today with Twitter support. Salesforce for Facebook is scheduled for the first quarter of fiscal year 2012. Radian6 for Salesforce is scheduled the third quarter of fiscal year 2012. Update: Radian6 product manager Ryan Strynatka says in the comments, “Radian6 for Salesforce – we are shooting for general availability by August (in time for Dreamforce) and will be including support for Facebook as well.”

For example, users can add new contact info that will default to "work" rather than "home" field types. Users can view contact details from the domain directory along with the contact details they added themselves. You can also add contacts from the domain directory to your "My Contacts" list with one click. 

There is a new group management feature that lets you add email addresses to groups, and pick from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis, and you can revert changes to you contacts for up to 30 days. 

Admins can enable new the new interface under "Service Settings" and "Contacts". That’s in the next-generation admin control panel. Google notes that it could take up to an hour for users to see the changes. 

Google outlines the differences between the current and the next-generation control panel here. 

Cloud Connect lets Office users automatically sync and backup their documents with Google Doc, so they’re always accessible on the web, and able to be shared with others. 

"Millions of businesses are experiencing radical productivity gains with web-powered tools, and today Google Apps collaboration is ready for every employee," says Google Apps product manager Shan Sinha. "We’re bringing multi-person, simultaneous editing to the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications that coworkers may still need from time to time. More people will be able to achieve a 100% web future entirely in Google Docs after learning the benefits of web-powered collaboration within traditional software."

"Google Cloud Connect vastly improves Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010, so companies can start using web-enabled teamwork tools without upgrading Microsoft Office or implementing SharePoint 2010," says Sinha.

As we discussed upon the original announcement, this is one of many steps Google is taking that could have a significant, if overlooked impact on the company’s overall strategy. The obvious impact is that it should get more people using Google Docs and more businesses using Google Apps. The idea is that for those who are just continuing to use Microsoft Office, Google is providing a way for them to get their feet wet with not only the cloud, but their version of it.  

With Microsoft being an important competitor to Google (the biggest competitor, according to Google itself, actually), Google needs more people using Google Apps for other reasons as well. Google recently announced the expansion of Google Apps to include most of its products – most of which you need a Google account to use. Many of these same products are also key in Google’s overall strategy for keeping user eyeballs online – a battle, which Facebook is winning, at least some of the time. 

Google has also introduced what it calls the " 90-Day Appsperience" program, which lets organizations access Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Cloud Connect for a flat fee for 90 days. More details about that here.

It opened with two bullet points in bold face on a highlighted background:

• Less business travel adversely impacts their business, say more than a third
• ‘Some companies are revisiting their policies’

Wow! Sounds pretty bad. Especially when combined with a lead-in sentence of “… But such penny pinching might have had unintended consequences, suggest results of a recent survey…”

However, when I read into the article, I found that things were not as glum as the sensational audience grabbers suggest. First of all, the survey showed that only 30 percent of the surveyed companies had cut back on business travel last year. That’s less than I would have thought. And of that 30 percent who said they reduced travel, only 37 percent of them said it negatively impacted their business.

So my interpretation is that almost two-thirds of the companies who have tried reducing business travel find that they are able to maintain or improve business results while saving costs, time, and employee inconvenience. Nice!

Deeper into the specifics, the article says that 42 percent of companies say they rely more on phone/web conferencing now to conduct business with clients. 31 percent of them say they get “just as much out of virtual meetings as face-to-face meetings.” Again, this is impressive. Virtual meetings are not and should not be replacements for every type of meeting need. But the fact that a third of respondents say they work just as well as F2F shows the huge current and potential benefits in virtual collaboration.

Oh, and that quoted fragment in the opening bullet points? Turns out the full quote is that some companies who have NOT yet reduced travel are revisiting their policies to “maximize the effectiveness of their business travel initiatives.” Sounds like there is a lot of room left for further reductions in travel, to be replaced by something just as effective (in some – not all – cases), but less costly and disruptive.

If I were writing this same article, I might headline it: “Survey: Cutting business travel shows great potential”

But that wouldn’t be as alarmist and wouldn’t fit in with the media’s fixation on playing to fear and doubt. Tsk.

Originally published at The Webinar Blog