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Google launches a premium Analytics platform

A lot of small businesses use Google Analytics because it’s free and easy to use. However, as your business grows, GAP_logoyou might soon require more advanced functionality and more dedicated customer support. This is something that you wouldn't likely get from a free tool.

Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Google Analytics Premium in response to this challenge. 

“We learned from some of our largest customers that they have some specific needs that the current version of Google Analytics can't meet in their entirety. Today we're addressing these needs by announcing a new option built for our largest customers,” says Enrique Munoz Torres, Product Manager, Google Analytics.

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Get your business online with the help of Google-powered events

If your business doesn't have an online presence, it needs one.

The Canada Get Your Business Online Roadshow can help. A cross-country touring of Google-sponsored events, Get Your Business Online is focused on one self-explanitory goal: bringing as many Canadian companies into the digitial age as possible.

Canadian consumers love to research products and services online. In fact, they are among the most connected globally. Join RBC Royal Bank and Google as we present the GYBO Roadshow for a discussion of how consumer behaviour has changed forever and what you can do to take advantage of those changes.

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Twitter: 'We Are Not a Social Network'

Michael Abbot, the vice president of engineering at Twitter, spoke at the Mobilize Conference in San Francisco today.

Michael discussed Twitter and mobile, such as how the startup platform is adapting to evolving technologies, namely smartpones and tablets. Twitter is not underestimating the mobile revolution, he said, noting that 45% of tweets now come from mobile devices.

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Vancouver's Tiny Speck launches Glitch, executing on Stewart Butterfield's decade-old vision

UPDATE 2: Glitch is live.

 

 UPDATE: The game goes live at 10am.

Vancouver-based Tiny Speck  has officially launched Glitch, the materialization of Stewart Butterfield's gaming vision.

Glitch is an side-scrolling MMO described as a "cooperative exercise in world building." In Glitch you can start a business or even a religion, grow trees, or pet animals. It's about gathering resources and learning skills to be creative in how you build a better world for everyone.

The game's idea has been around since 2002, but it couldn't raise funding. So instead, Stewart and his partner Caterina Fake founded Flickr, which subsequently sold to Yahoo for roughly $28 million.

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MIXX Canada: The Ever Changing Innovative, Optimized and Animated Display Ad

While Techvibes reported that the IAB recently released a report that mobile advertising was growing four times faster than online advertising, I had a chance to take in the conference they ran in conjunction with the report, MIXX Canada.

Terence Kawaja, the CEO of Luma Partners, perhaps best known for his Mad Avenue Blues video that has garnered over 170,000 YouTube views said that advertising was at a critical inflection point. 

He made the interesting point that rather than fragmentation being the problem, it was rather duplication as intermediaries lease and buy advertising products from a plethora of service providers.

An increasing number of solutions online are geared towards bypassing intermediaries- allowing for corporate and consumer marketers to believe that they no longer need the intermediary, but usually these solutions are geared towards filling one aspect of the marketing mix when the reality is that most marketers need a diversified media plan in place to best dynamically reach the target market. 

Kawaja said that perhaps advertising needed an operating system.

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Google+ cracks 40 million users; membership up 30% since going public

Unofficial Google+ statistian Paul Allen, who has been tracking the social network's numbers since its inception, has suggested that Google+ is now at about 43 million users, marking an impressive 30% growth spurt since the software company's social platform went public.

Google+ became public on September 20th and saw an immediate spike in user signups. Paul believes there were roughly 29 million users on September 9, a number that swelled to 38 million last Thursday morning, just two days after the public launch.

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Google+ goes public and adds slew of new features

Google+ has scrapped the invite system and is now open to everyone.

It remains in beta but anyone can sign up for the social network. In a blog post Google talks about making 91 improvements to Google+ in 90 days and the 100th improvement is going public, with 92 to 99 also being released today.

New features include "Hangouts on your phone," which Apple users will find reminiscent of FaceTime with a group-friendly focus.

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RIM Clings to Seven Percent Smartphone Lead as 1.3 Million Canadians Scan QR Codes in June 2011

comScore announced last week at the Canadian Wireless Trade Show that smartphone penetration was at 36% in Canada by the end of June 2011, up from the 33% Techvibes last reported. 

RIM's market share dropped to 38%, down four percent, with Apple holding steady at 31% and a surging Android increased by seven percentage points to 19%. Symbian still owns 6% of the market while Microsoft fell to 3%.  

The 56% growth for Google's Android also saw HTC take 76% of the Android market.

Android is growing the most in Atlantic Canada and Quebec also saw a 37% jump in smartphone penetration, but the two regions still are far behind the national average at 30% and 27% penetration respectively.

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Google buys 1,000 IBM patents to build war chest

Google has purchased 1,023 patents from International Business Machines, it's been revealed.

Following its $12-billion acquisition of Motorola, which added more than 20,000 patents to the software company's portfolio, Google turned to IBM to continue bolstering its arsenal.

Patent infringements have become a deadly method of combat in the mobile space in recent years. Understandably, Google is thickening its shield as the bloodshed heats up.