For one, Google’s Data Highlighter now supports eight types of structured data, including: events, products, local businesses, articles, software applications, movies, restaurants, and TV episodes.

“With Data Highlighter, webmasters don’t even need to change their site’s HTML,” explains product manager Justin Boyan. “Instead, they can just point and click with their mouse to ‘tag’ the key fields on a few sample pages of their site. Google learns the pattern of the fields and applies it to similar pages on the site, so all their information can be understood.”

More on Data Highlighter here.

The other tool is the Structured Data Markup Helper.

“As with Data Highlighter, one simply points and clicks on a sample web page to indicate its key data fields,” says Boyan. “Structured Data Markup Helper then shows exactly what microdata annotations to add to the page’s HTML code. We hope this helps give HTML authors a running start with adding structured data to their sites, in turn making search results more meaningful.”

These tools should help webmasters stay current with the evolution of Google into products like Knowledge Graph and Google Now, while also potentially improving these Google offerings themselves.

“When Google understands a website’s content in a structured way, we can present that content more accurately and more attractively in search,” says Boyan “For example, our algorithms can enhance search results with ‘rich snippets’ when we understand that a page contains an event, recipe, product, review, or similar. We can also feature a page’s data as part of answers in search from the Knowledge Graph or in Google Now cards, helping you find the right information at just the right time.”

You might also be interested in this recent Google talk about integrating Google’s Knowledge Graph data into your own apps.

“Behind every successful AdWords campaign are well planned out keywords and ad groups,” says AdWords product manager Deepti Bhatnagar. “In the past, you may have relied on tools like the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator to identify new keywords and ad groups, get traffic estimates, and choose competitive bids and budgets. Over time however, we’ve heard from you that having two tools for search campaign building was cumbersome.”

“We’re constantly working to simplify the process of building campaigns, and today we’re happy to announce the launch of a new tool, Keyword Planner, which combines the functionality of the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into a smooth, integrated workflow,” says Bhatnagar. “You can use Keyword Planner to find new keyword and ad group ideas, get performance estimates for them to find the bid and budget that are right for you, and then add them to your campaigns.”

The tool also comes with some new features, including the ability to find new keyword and ad group ideas by “multiplying” keywords (combining two or more lists to generate new keywords. It will now let you target individual cities and regions within a country.

It also lets you add keyword and group ideas to a “plan,” which Google describes as a shopping cart of ideas that you can add to a current or new campaign.

For more on plans and on the tool in general, read this.

The Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator will be sunsetting in about sixty days.

This new free tool does the math by multiplying customer leads sent from Yelp each month by the business’s average revenue per customer lead,” explains Yelp in a blog post. We’ve also included the average spend per customer for each business category for reference, based on the BCG study.”

“We think this new tool will be helpful to business owners for two reasons,” the company adds. “First, it helps quantify the revenue opportunity Yelp is already sending to each business. Second, it establishes a revenue baseline for prospective advertisers, from which they can later evaluate the impact of their investment in Yelp Ads.”

Business owners can use the tool when they log in to Yelp.

This isn’t the only new calculation tool out there available for businesses. Google just launched one too. This one helps you calculate the value of mobile for both online and offline conversions.

The page has a calculator, which helps businesses consider online and offline conversions by rethinking conversion paths. The calculator lets you enter data manually or upload your Google Click Type report.

“We live in a world of constant connectivity, where mobility is bridging the digital and physical worlds,” says Johanna Werther, Head of Google’s Mobile Ads Marketing. “With smartphones in hand, people are taking a variety of online and offline actions, like calling a business, downloading an app, looking for directions to a store, or starting research that leads to a purchase on another device. We’re working hard to account for these new paths to purchase in AdWords, like the recent addition of calls as conversions to AdWords reporting. Still, with more work to be done to improve measurement tools, most marketers still account only for sales happening on a mobile site and aren’t seeing the full picture.”

“This new consumer behavior is now the norm, with a recent study showing that nearly three of ten mobile searches result in visiting a store, calling a business, or making a purchase online,” adds Werther. “Some smart marketers are already investing in understanding how mobile drives sales through these new customer paths. For example, adidas, in partnership with their agency iProspect, felt that mobile was converting in ways beyond their mobile website, so they created a simple yet powerful attribution model to understand how mobile is driving customers into stores. As a result, adidas found that each click on their store locator button was worth $3.20, which has changed the way they view their digital investment.”

You can look at that case study here, if you like.

In addition to the calculator, the Full Value of Mobile site includes videos that illustrate mobile conversion paths, case studies, which highlight proven mobile strategies, and tips for measurement. Google says the step-by-step wizard for uploading data with the calculator amounts to about a thirty-minute process.

As sites like CHOW, Food 52, and even All Recipes as well as apps like Epicurious continue to replace traditional recipe books for many home cooks, sticky, contaminated iPads and other touchscreen devices become more and more of a problem.

For $7, you can avoid most of this hassle. Meet the ispoon kitchen stylus, a wooden spoon that doubles as a stylus for your in-kitchen touchscreen-using needs.

Just imagine: You grab a handful of ground beef and throw it in the skillet. You grab your wooden spoon to start breaking it up. Oh crap, how much cumin was I supposed to put in there? Now you can either wash your hands, or you can just flip over your spoon and tap your screen to find your answer. Hooray! No more E. coli on your iPad!

Sure, you could wash or wipe your hands between contacting your cooking ingredients and checking the recipe on your iPad. In this regard, this isn’t an essential product. But damnit, it’s cool and I want it.

[Umbra via Gizmodo]

IBM announced its Mobile Foundation, which is an effort geared toward helping enterprises capitalize on the entire mobile environment. As Paul Brunet, the Vice President of IBM Application and Integration Middleware, explained to WebProNews, this type of system is especially important given mobile’s dominance across the board. IBM studies show that the current $22 billion mobile market is expected to grow to $36 billion by 2015.

With this foundation, IBM focuses on the parts that enterprises concentrate on as well, which are scalability and security.

“There’s this middle ground of all the things that really make it scalable, reliable, secure… and that’s really what IBM is focused around in regards to delivering the mobile foundation,” said Brunet.

The mobile foundation is built on IBM’s acquisition of Worklight but expands it to include the company’s WebSphere Cast Iron capabilities. As a result, organizations have the ability to build and connect applications to the cloud or other internal apps. Furthermore, Brunet told us, they have a stronger control over the communication and ideas that go out through the apps and mobile devices.

IBM also announced new elements to its PureSystems family of expert integrated systems. According to Brunet, IBM is hoping to reduce the costs and complexities associated with IT and application development with this new offering.

“The family of PureSystems really looks at integrating the hardware through networking, through storage – all the way to the middleware to the integrated management,” he said.

At this point, many organizations are spending 70 percent or more on management and maintenance costs. Brunet told us that IBM is trying to change this trend by allowing businesses to get new services to their clients while also optimizing and driving greater efficiencies in their IT departments. The company has created “patterns of expertise” for streamlining these processes and is also enabling its clients to build their own patterns.

“Harnessing these patterns and making sure that a client… who might typically take anywhere from 3-4 weeks to deploy one of these environments… is really allowing them to do it in a number of hours,” explained Brunet.

Ultimately, he said that IBM wants to alleviate workloads in order for enterprises to focus on making their products and services better.

IBM’s new software systems are currently available.

Since these actions have become a very popular way of promoting content across the Internet, a Swedish based company that has put a unique spin on social sharing hopes to become the next big sharing mechanism. The service is called Flattr and is designed to help people share not only content, but also money.

Is there room for another social sharing button? Let us know.

Flattr is the world’s first micro-payment service and allows users to make monetary donations to their favorite bloggers and publishers. As Flattr’s CEO and Co-founder Linus Olsson explained to WebProNews, users set an amount for how much money they want to donate, and, at the end of the month, Flattr divides it evenly between all the content they’ve “flattr’d.”

Although it is often referred to as an “Internet tip jar,” Olsson told us that users don’t make any purchases. Instead, they simply make a donation if they like the content.

“We call it social donations, social micro-donations, or social micro-payments because you actually pay for content,” he said. “You have got the content already, but you want to pay for it.”

The content consists of anything from music to software to articles – whatever users think deserve a donation. Olsson said Flattr is “agnostic” to content as long as no laws are broken. Incidentally, Flattr was said to be used as a method of donating money to WikiLeaks after PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard cut off submissions to the site.

PayPal and other payment systems have been a standard up to this point, but Flattr believes its service is a better alternative for micro-donations. Olsson explained that, while PayPal is a great platform, its system is “too tedious” for small payments since it is based on purchases.

“A micro-payment service needs to be instantaneous and one-click and a no-brainer to use,” he said. “That is not PayPal.”

On the social side, Flattr is integrated into both Facebook and Twitter. Last week, the company also announced an Explore feature that allows users to follow content producers and fellow donators. Olsson told us that this feature was the first step toward a more social and personalized experience through Flattr.

“Donations and monetary payments toward content on the Web should be as social as the content itself,” he pointed out.

According to Olsson, Flattr is taking social sharing to an entirely different level. As a result, he thinks that Flattr will soon be listed with all the other social sharing buttons.

Would you be willing to “flattr” your favorite content? Could this change the way businesses are funded? Please share.

The sad part of this is that, according to Marc Gaffan, the Co-founder and VP of Marketing and Business Development for web security firm Incapsula, since these well-known companies are falling victim to attacks, it makes small to medium-sized businesses that much more susceptible to breaches. As he explained to us, hundreds and thousands of SMBs are attacked on a daily basis.

“You’re no longer too small to be a target,” he said.

“That’s the big change or the shift in the paradigm that we’ve seen over the last year,” he added.

What are you doing to make sure your site is protected? Let us know.

Incidentally, Incapsula released a report that found 51 percent of traffic to websites is non-human. While some of this non-human traffic may be from Google, Yahoo, and other credible sources, the report found that 31 percent of it could be harmful to businesses. In other words, this 31 percent of traffic could be hackers, scrapers, spammers, spies, and other unwanted visitors.

Most businesses rely on their Google Analytics to find out where their traffic comes from. However, Gaffan said that businesses need to be aware that these other statistics exist as well that could hurt them and their customers.

Also, the question of, “Is all traffic good traffic?” becomes an issue since some of the traffic may be unwanted but not directly harmful. Gaffan compares this scenario to a person that comes into your backyard repeatedly but doesn’t bother anything. Since most people would be uncomfortable in such a situation, Gaffan believes businesses should have the same feeling in regards to their website.

He told us that businesses should put measures in place to prevent this unwanted traffic from coming to their site.

“They should have tools in place that would let the Googles and Bings and Yahoos and all the other legitimate services that need to access their website, access their website,” he said. “Anyone that has no legitimate business at their website, should be kept out.”

Incapsula takes security issues very seriously and tries to help businesses by providing a set of tools that helps with both direct and indirect breaches. The company enables businesses through its Bot Access Control capability to see and control whomever comes to their site.

Gaffan said the tools allow businesses to keep their websites clean of any harmful and potentially harmful visitors.

Incapsula also recently partnered with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) and security service providers in order to help online merchants. This is an important move for businesses because, if they don’t meet the PCI regulations, they could lose their ability to process credit card payments.

Gaffan believes this effort is another step in helping small to medium-sized businesses protect themselves and their customers.

The most recent American Express Global Customer Survey reports that 70 percent of Americans are willing to spend an average of 13 percent more with companies they believe provide the best service. Also, as many as 78 percent of consumers have actually stopped a transaction after experiencing bad customer service.

How much emphasis do you put on customer service? Let us know in the comments.

SaaS and mobile application company Tello has given consumers the ability to review businesses since its inception, but it is now also offering a service called Tello for Business that gives companies the opportunity to respond to these issues in real-time. Businesses get email or text notifications of the users’ feedback and can respond instantly to both positive and negative issues.

“We give them the opportunity at least to have a voice in the conversation as opposed to what you might see up on Twitter or Facebook or existing media platforms,” said Tello CEO Joe Beninato.

“It’s not just a blank comment form that you find on many websites today,” he went on to say. “It’s the ability for the business to get the feedback quickly and then actually respond to it.”

As he explained to WebProNews, the platform is designed for both large and small businesses and provides a set of dashboards of that allows businesses to see how they’re performing. The analytics, specifically, offer insights on the most recent ratings, employees, and internal data from the business as a corporation as well as from individual locations.

Beninato said such a tool is necessary for businesses as the emphasis on strong customer service is only growing. In the past, businesses could essentially hide behind a marketing page with approved testimonials. However, this is not the case anymore.

“Businesses are really waking up to the fact that… consumers can go online and pretty much say anything at anytime of day,” he said.

In terms of pricing, a basic form of Tello for Business is free for businesses with up to three locations. But, for businesses that want to use the messaging and analytics functions through four or more locations, the service is $99 per month for each location.

Beninato did point out that Tello is willing to work with large organizations to create customized packages to accommodate their needs.

In addition to Tello for Business, the company also announced that it has raised $2.7 million in funding. True Ventures and Bluepen Capital led the Series A round of financing.

Beninato told us the funding would be used to grow the company, and particularly, expand its engineering, design, and sales staff.

“It was really great today to start to see revenue come in,” he said. “It’s a big milestone for a company like ours to go from having built a product to now going to revenue, and then, hopefully, someday going to profitability.”

Could you see your business utilizing Tello’s new platform? Let us know.

According to Alex Bard, the Vice President and General Manager of Desk.com, Salesforce developed the platform because it recognizes the challenges businesses have with customer service.

What’s the biggest challenge your business faces over customer service? Please share.

As Bard explained, Salesforce talked with thousands of businesses about their customer service needs. What they found was that these businesses want a customer service platform that is social, mobile, and simple.

“In today’s world, really the driving factor is the customer, and the customer is now social… the customer is now mobile… and the customer is global,” he said.

Social has quickly become an important component to businesses because it is such an integral part of everyday life. Simply put, it creates an ideal channel for reaching masses of people. Companies such as Southwest Airlines and Budweiser recognize this and have utilized social channels to handle and defuse any damaging situations.

“That pressure is forcing big companies and small businesses to revisit their tools and process and, really, philosophy around customer support,” said Bard.

He went on to say that investing in social was just as important as investing in traditional methods.

The mobile capability that businesses need is also very important because customer service issues happen any time during the day or night.

“For these businesses, business doesn’t stop when you leave the office,” said Bard.

Therefore, businesses need to be able to address these issues no matter where they are.

To answer the simplicity factor, Bard said Desk.com can be set up very quickly and doesn’t need IT help.

“[Desk.com] helps you capture all your interactions across these channels – social and traditional – it’s got a mobile aspect that helps you carry your help desk with you no matter where you go… and finally, it literally takes just minutes to set up,” Bard summed up.

Desk.com is geared toward small and medium-size businesses and also provides overall management capabilities such as easy reporting. As for pricing, the first seat is free, but every subscription added after that is $49 per month.

Do you see Desk.com helping to meet your customer service needs? Let us know.