Marketing Pilgrim

Google can’t seem to get out of its own way recently with tools and offerings that help people live life or deal with what it throws at you. Their efforts to aid the folks impacted by the natural disasters in Japan was the right thing to do and they did it.

Now Google has expanded a program introduced late last year, which ties emergency phone numbers to searches. For instance, if someone was searching for information about a poison the number for poison control would show up at the top of the search. Very useful indeed.

Now they are going the next step and have introduced a click to call option for mobile searchers. Below is a picture of the feature from a search in Spain from the Google Mobile Blog. I use this only because it’s ridiculously hard to get a screenshot from Android. Oh well.

Google is getting into the spirit of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament’s March Madness with some neat stuff. First they have created a 3D tour of the facilities that will be home to the games that will make many people ignore their jobs, will increase sports related searches on Google and will generate millions of dollars in illegal gambling. Sweet! Errr, Sweet Sixteen!

Here’s the video from the Google Lat Long blog

There is also a pretty nifty map with a rather difficult Hotpot Challenge game (at least it was difficult for me).

Twitter has posted some numbers on their blog with the intent of making the world (and particularly those at SXSW I suppose) go “Ooooo! ahhhhh!” here are the highlights

Regarding the number of accounts:

• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

Regarding the number of tweets

• 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.

Imagine yourself wandering along through the internet jungle, minding your own business, checking out the virtual flora and fauna and wham — you discover a gem hidden amongst all the clutter.

Exciting, isn’t it? StumbleUpon thinks so and that’s why they’re about to release their latest advertising arena which they call Paid Discovery. Now, when you think about it, Paid Discovery is kind of an oxymoron. The word “discovery” implies that you found it accidentally and yet “paid” implies that someone put it there on purpose. Still, that’s the concept behind the new service that could be quite advantageous for creative marketers.

Aol has provided stock to Twitter founder Biz Stone to be an adviser to the company. Here is the press release as provided by Business Insider.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, is joining The Huffington Post Media Group and AOL as Strategic Impact Adviser. Said Mr. Stone: “The definition of success is changing as we begin to understand the value of helping others. Arianna and Tim share my vision for aligning corporate resources toward meaningful change,” said Biz Stone. “My goal in partnering with AOL and The Huffington Post Media Group is ambitious but vitally important. Together we will rally companies to think about new ways of doing business, share best practices, and strive for positive impact at all levels — from global to local.”

Groupon is certainly a phenomenon but with more and more reports of disgruntled users of the service feeling they have been ‘oversold’ is the service really all its valuation has it cracked up to be?

Fast Company is reporting of a bit of a dust up between a well-known Silcon Valley entrepreneur and Groupon during a SXSW panel.

Sunday’s Groupon panel on theFast Company and PepsiCo stage took an unexpected turn when Travis Kalanick, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur who runs online car service Uber, spoke frankly about his negative experiences as a client of Groupon–and several Groupon staffers in the audience took issue with the story he told.