Customize your Gmail

Gmail has some under development features that you can add to your Gmail account. They are hidden under the Labs tab in Settings:

Mark as Read Button:
Tired of spending all that effort to click on the more actions menu every time you want to mark messages as read without reading them? Now just enable this lab and that is just a button click away!

Multiple Inboxes:
Add extra lists of emails in your inbox to see even more important email at once. The new lists of threads can be labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want, configurable under Settings.

How to use Multiple Inboxes?

If you forward all your work or school email to Gmail, you can use Multiple Inboxes to see your two accounts separately within the same browser window. Here's how:
1. Turn on Multiple Inboxes from the Labs tab under Settings.
2. Set up a filter to auto-archive all mail sent to your work or school address.
3. Customize one of your multiple inboxes to show mail sent to your other address. To do this, go to the Multiple Inboxes tab under Settings and set up one of the panes to search for mail sent to your other address.

The State of Twitter in Canada

Twitter Blog: For Whom The Bell Texts
Today Twitter has fully activated the two-way SMS service for Canadian Twitter-ers who are also customers of Bell Mobility. If you're a Bell Mobility customer, you can update Twitter via SMS and receive updates from Twitter via SMS. There are no limits and no added fees (beyond your normal texting plan). If you haven't already, you can activate your phone to Twitter over SMS.

Rogers to follow suit?

Update: Feb 24, 2009
CBCNews.ca is reporting that Bell is charging users 15 cents for each Twitter message they send or receive, even if they have an unlimited text messaging plan.

This contradicts Twitter's own announcement on Friday which said:

There are no limits and no added fees (beyond your normal texting plan).

Update: Mar 1, 2009
Okay, Twitter and Bell will end this saga once and for all. No charges!

Track Telephone Leads with Google Analytics

Google Analytics allow you to track Telephone Leads & Live Chat with two integration. The first one is offline phone tracking, which is tracking Calls to Unique Sales Phone Numbers. The second one is tracking live chat with customers.

Tracking Calls to Unique Sales Phone Numbers
Mongoose Metrics supplies toll free numbers in bulk for extremely cheap in case you'd like to use unique phone numbers to track campaigns or even different product orders. Even better though, Mongoose has created a way to track these offline phone calls within Google Analytics. You can see the phone number called, as well as the duration and date of the call. You can also integrate this with an email alerts system for sales management.

The service works by provisioning a trackable number and assigning that number to a hidden web page on your site containing your Google Analytics tracking code. When a phone call to the tracking number is connected, the technology will place a web browser visit to your hidden tracking web page and in this way insert the phone call event back into your Google Analytics account. Each phone call generates a unique visit which is clearly labeled inside of Analytics.

Tracking live chat with customers
LivePerson allows you to interact with your customers live via chat to offer real-time assistance and advice while a user is engaged with your website, a highly valuable service for helping customers, and also for learning about what their intention is. They created a robust integration with Google Analytics that is definitely worth a look. The integration shows you conversions after chat, and populates chat analytics data into a number of other reports, including

• Map Overlay Report which displays volume and quality metrics of live chat interactions by geographic region
• Search Engines Report: Reveals the sources and keywords that drive interactive chats (and resulting conversions)
• Reverse Goal Path Report: Lists the navigation paths that lead to the most chats

Edit Google Docs spreadsheets from your cell phone

Google just launched new capabilities to Google Docs for your cell phone that allow you to edit a Google spreadsheet. You can add new rows, edit existing cells, sort by columns, and filter by terms, pretty much all the basic things.

To check out these new features, go to m.google.com/docs in your mobile browser and log in.

Source: Official Google Mobile Blog: Edit Google Docs spreadsheets from your phone

Free Online Storage Space

Backup your valuable files and data on the Internet where they are safe and easily accessed. With a free online storage service, you can access your files from any computer with an Internet connection.

There are a few things to consider before you sign up:

• Ease of Use
• Reliability
  
• Storage Space/Max file sizes
• Speed
  
• Monthly transfer limit
• Security

Mozy (5 stars)

• 2GB Free space
• Allows upload/download multiple files at the same time
• Multi-level Security with SSL Encryption
• Fast connection

Adrive (5 stars)

• 50GB Free space, 2GB file size limits
• Allows upload/download multiple files at the same time
• Multi-level Security with SSL Encryption

idrive (5 stars)

• 2GB Free space
• No limit on the upload/download size
• Allows upload/download multiple files at the same time
• Multi-level Security with SSL Encryption
• Fast connection

Box.net (4.5 stars)

• 1GB Free space
• Doesn't allow upload/download multiple files at the same time (in free version)
• Multi-level Security with SSL Encryption
• Fast connection

ElephantDrive (4.5 stars)

• 1GB Free space
• Multi-level Security with SSL Encryption
• Fast connection

esnips (4.5 stars)

• 5GB Free space
• Allows upload/download multiple files at the same time