In addition to rolling out a new two-step verification process to enhance security across Google Apps accounts, Google announced this morning that it will be bringing mobile editing capabilities to Google Docs on the iPad and Android.

Soon, users will be able to collaborate and co-edit documents and files from a range of devices.

Currently, third-party apps like QuickOffice let you edit your Google Docs files. This works really well, especially on the iPad, but for many users a native Google Docs editing component will be greatly appreciated.

Both of these moves signify that Google is working towards becoming a bigger player in the cloud services space that is currently occupied by companies like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Box.net and SharePoint online.

Would you consider moving your business away from Outlook/SharePoint and onto Google Apps? Let us know.

Square is a mobile credit card transaction application founded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. The app became available for the iPad about one month ago, and now it’s also available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices.

The app is free, but in order to work, you need a small credit card reader that connects to the iPhone via the 2.5mm headphone jack. The app looks beautiful and has lots of nifty features, such as SMS receipts, the ability to track of your sales online, as well as tip and tax calculation. However, in its current iteration it also has certain drawbacks; for example, you cannot delete or refund transactions.

Without the card reader, the app has been useless thus far. This, however, is about to change. As Jack Dorsey writes on the Square blog: “Today, in addition to releasing clients for the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Android devices, we are opening up our first cut at activating card processing and pricing, and sending out our first production batch of free card readers. All represent just the beginning of what Square is striving to become: a simple payment utility for everyone.”

It is however still too early to judge the success of Square. As Dorsey himself admits, opening a merchant account to accept payment cards proved to be a difficult task and the app development has taken much longer than expected. When or if all obstacles are overcome, there’s still the question of whether people will actually use the application.

You can download the app for free from the iTunes store [iTunes link].

As part of my ongoing Online Strategy Roundtables, I met yesterday with four new entrepreneurs, all at the early stage of validating who their customers are and building their businesses. Entrepreneurs who are just starting out need to ask themselves some hard questions in order to develop a crisp go to market strategy. I pulled together a list of such questions that you can find here and in my Positioning book to help you “Clarify Your Story”.

Up first was Martin Calle and his company OraQuel. Martin worked for years on product development for companies like Procter & Gamble and FritoLay, but eventually wanted to create a product that would be his own.

i>Guest author Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative. /p>

After researching what type a product would be best to get behind, Martin came across research showing a strong correlation between gum disease and heart disease, and came up with a heart-smart oral care product. Since large retailer stores won’t work with a “little guy” in this category, he has started to approach social media groups like mommy bloggers and TwitterMoms to try to build up a grassroots following. I believe Martin’s product does answer a real need, but he has positioned this as a product just for kids. I think he will get better pickup if he positions this as a product for the entire family – a much larger segment of the market. Martin will need to do some controlled experiments to validate whether or not my hunch is correct, and then move forward with his social media PR campaign.

Nick Quay presented for BluNami, a mobile marketing company that has developed a technology to help clients connect to Bluetooth users in a certain proximity. Nick and his team have been working with a wide variety of clients looking to use their technology a many different ways, from a city using it to make emergency announcements to restaurants offering deals to lure in customers.

(As soon as I hear anyone is trying to work with a government entity, especially a startup venture, I immediately want them to stop wasting their time there. Unless they are paying you upfront as some type of consulting situation, most startups need their cash flow and can not sustain the government’s slow 12-24 month sales cycles.)

Like many entrepreneurs with a versatile technology, Nick is trying to do too many things right now – the old “spray and pray.” While there may be many different segments interested in the product, each requires a unique go-to-market strategy. The best way to scale this business is to figure out what is the best value proposition and the easiest segment to sell to, and then focus time and energy on that while continuing to bootstrap your way to profitability. Later there may be time and money for exploring other avenues.

Frederic Guitton gave a nice presentation for ActivSalesAgent, a business that combines its software with call centers as a way to help convert visitors on client websites into better qualified sales leads. This business is further down the road of validation than the others, and is profitable. As I questioned him about price point, Frederic was ready with metrics to show that what they are doing is indeed working.

We discussed how using solid statistical information along with references from early customers is the best was to convert potential customers into clients – and those reference accounts do not need to be the biggest clients. Small business references work just as well. That’s how Salesforce.com did it. I think this business has legs, but urged Frederic to be open to doing some type of offshore chat centers down the road because I think reducing costs will become a bigger issue as this business continues to scale.

Then Linda Muncy, who is just starting out, presented her business idea. She is hired to provide photo-related entertainment at events. Guests are creatively photographed and given the image in some form as a giveaway. She has started reproducing the images onsite on a material similar to Skinit so guests can attach the image to their handhelds, laptops, etc. She would like to develop a product kit so other event planners can do this as well. Linda has yet to truly validate her product and service. I always tell entrepreneurs to validate your idea before building any product. I think Linda will be amazed by what she learns after calling 100 event planners to get their feedback. This may only be a small business, but that is perfectly okay – as long as it is profitable.

These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs.

In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures.

If you are an entrepreneur working on an idea or an early stage business, I am also very interested in hearing what you are looking for from 1M/1M. Please weigh in here. We are crowdsourcing the design of 1M/1M, and requests that have come up include Receivables Financing as a way to bridge to a validated business without giving up precious equity, I would love to hear your thoughts.

i>You can find the recording of this roundtable session here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here./p>

em>Photo by Svilen Milev./p>

Bill Flitter is an experienced entrepreneur and expert in online advertising. His newest venture, Dlvr.it, helps publishers easily syndicate, measure and increase the reach of their content.

We have all heard that “content is king” – Sumner Redstone deemed it so, then Rupert Murdoch upped the ante, calling it “emperor.” But how do we make sure content is delivered to the right places, at the right times? How can we measure the effectiveness of this content and its distribution?

The model for publishers is changing due to today’s social media growth and the reliance on “stream consumption.” Audience attention is increasingly fragmented and traditional ways to reach them with content and advertising are becoming less effective. Brands must transcend many different platforms to remain relevant. Some numbers on this:

• Time spent with social networking has surpassed time spent with e-mail (Nielsen).
• Time spent on social networks and blogging sites is growing at over three times that of the overall Internet (Nielsen).
• 7 out of 10 Americans consume content via the “stream” or news-feed style communications (Pew Internet).

These indicators point to the future of a “siteless” web – a consumer-centric online economy where audiences decide when and where they will receive content, with less emphasis on single destinations. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a website, but rather that content needs to be distributed across many websites, platforms, social networks, new devices, and so on.

Today, content producers have a lot more to keep up with if they want to stay relevant. There are social media purists who believe automating the delivery of content to social networks is taboo. But if you manually post a headline and link to your content on each of your social networks, is it really that different from automating the process?

We’re all short on time, and there is nothing wrong with creating some efficiencies. But you do need to be smart about it, and make sure you’re adding value. Here are a few tips that can help you do it.

Measure

This is the most important thing you can do to make sure you are reaching your audience. You cannot improve what you do not measure. The goal is to know and understand when your users are the most engaged with your content.

• Learn what content they like on each social destination. Track the engagement around the same piece of content on each social destination. What works on Twitter won’t necessarily work on LinkedIn. One approach is to think about your social audience as a focus group. Their level of engagement with each headline will help you determine what they like. Learn from that, use that data to create more of the same, and tailor your website and other streams.
• Study what the right flow of content is. What is too much, what is not enough? This is likely very different on each social network.
• Track your reach. How many followers, friends and contacts do you have? How do they grow or shrink when you tailor your content and its flow? Your audience will dissipate if you are not adding value or you are drowning them.

Find Your Digital Center

What is the one tool that you are comfortable using to create content on a constant basis? This could be Flickr for pictures, Twitter for status updates, or a blog. Whatever it is, make it your central command. You shouldn’t feel overwhelmed about creating totally different content on each social network. Pick one and focus on that.

Distribute

Once you have identified your digital center, connect it to all your other social networks. Think of your digital center as the hub and the other networks as the spokes of a wheel. The idea is to create the content once. In today’s world of the siteless web, your customers are choosing their own digital centers, and chances are, they’re not the same as yours. You need spokes to make sure you’re reaching everyone you need to and, more importantly, everyone who wants information from you. And, since we’re all short on time, making this process automated and intelligent is key. Here’s how you can do this:

• Filter: The expectations on each social network are different. Understand your audiences on each and tailor your content accordingly. Twitter has a different vocabulary (hashtags, RT) than Facebook. Your readers on Facebook may find it odd to see a hashtag in their stream.
• Control the flow: If you are creating multiple pieces of content per day, it is important to not send it out all at once. The half-life of a piece of content in social media is measured in hours. Things are flowing through your audience’s stream all day long. To keep their attention and increase the opportunity for them to see your content, regulate the flow, just like a dam. Hold some things back. Track the time of day you are seeing the most engagement and adjust your flow accordingly.
• Customize: With the amount of content your audience is seeing in a day, yours may go unnoticed as they scan their stream. The headline is now more than ever, the most important sentence you write. Add in some branding elements — it doesn’t need to be over the top. Just let your audience know where it is coming from, especially if you are cross-posting.

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Grow

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Here are some tips on how to grow your audience:

• Use Hashtags: If you are posting to Twitter, add a hashtag to improve your SEO value.
• Strong Headlines: Spend extra time writing great headlines. Pack them full of topical words that search engines will find (but don’t overdo it).
• Recycle: With the amount of content flowing in the stream, something is bound to go unnoticed. Send out your most popular content again. Add a label to it, like “Most Popular Today.” It may attract someone new.
• Paid Distribution: If your budget permits, take your most popular content and syndicate it outside your personal networks through paid promotion.
• Widgets: Widgets are an easy way to display popular content across different sites and remind your audience which social networks you participate in.
• E-mail: Don’t forget about e-mail. Some people still prefer to get messages that way. >

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Conclusion

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Why is it so crucial to find services that enable and support this siteless strategy? For publishers and bloggers it’s simple: The fastest wins. In a world where the half-life of a story is 50 minutes, real-time updates enable you to start that clock as fast as possible after publishing your story. If you and your competitor hit the publish button at the exact same time, and your feed is push-enabled and theirs isn’t, your readers see the story first. You’ve just won by getting traffic to your site where you can monetize those visitors.

For brands, consumers tend to be more responsive to content marketing than other forms of online marketing. With content flowing freely on the siteless web, your fans will be more likely to share it. Good content reaching the right people in the right way builds loyal customers.

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More social media resources from Mashable:

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- HOW TO: Target Social Media Influencers to Boost Traffic and Sales
– 5 Ways to Reduce Social Media Distractions and Be More Productive
– 4 Steps for Managing Social Media Attention
– 4 Tips for Reducing Social Media Stress
– 5 Ways Facebook Changed Dating (For the Worse)

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AndrewJohnson

You know that a trend is ramping up when big companies begin to namecheck it. It’s happening now with the Internet of Things, a term for when real-world objects connect to the Internet. Senior executives from two major U.S. broadband and telecommunications companies – Verizon and AT&T; – plus the CTO of the world's biggest network systems provider Cisco, have recently discussed the Internet of Things.

As part of a patriotic statement about how the U.S. leads the world in Internet innovation, Verizon chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg said today that the "'Internet of Things' will infuse intelligence into all our systems and present us with a whole new way to run a home, an enterprise, a community or an economy."

Seidenberg said that "in a 4G world, wireless will connect everything" and that "there's really no limit to the number of connections that can be part of the mobile grid: vehicles, appliances, buildings, roads, medical monitors."

AT&T; have also been making noises about the Internet of Things. At the recent CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, AT&T; announced a partnership with a company called American Security Logistics (ASL), to "wirelessly connect a series of location based tracking devices that can be used to help keep tabs on an array of valuables – from people to pets to pallets." The first product will be a cargo shipping tracking and monitoring application. Other products in the pipeline include pet tracking, child safety and Alzheimer's patient monitoring.

Both Verizon and AT&T; are positioning their wireless networks as key parts of the emerging Internet of Things.

Cisco is another company getting in on the trend. At CTIA, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior said that by 2013, the number of devices connected to the Internet will reach 1 trillion – up from 500 million in 2007. According to Warrior, "we're heading into the Internet of Things."

Warrior sees high growth in the Internet of Things. "With more machine-to-machine connections and wireless sensors everywhere," she said, "the Internet is no longer just an information superhighway [but] a platform that will transform many industries."

These bigco utterings remind me of when the term ‘web 2.0′ first began to creep into corporate speak, about 2005. It’s still early days for the Internet of Things, but prepare yourself to hear a lot more of this new term.

ReadWriteWeb has been at the cutting edge of defining and explaining the nascent Internet of Things – see our extensive archives for more information. If you’re new to the topic, check out Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Internet of Things and Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009.

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Successful business people are always looking for their next rock star employee. The question is where do you find them? The good news is that the latest LinkedIn stats – 60 million professional profiles spanning 200 countries – would indicate this is a good place to look.

Many of us already have a LinkedIn account, and if you don’t, LinkedIn is free and easy to maneuver. The trick is incorporating some strategies (habits, if you will) into using LinkedIn.

Below are five easy things you can add to your LinkedIn strategy to give you greater exposure to top talent.

1. Build Connections

In the course of your daily business, you never know where your next sale is going to come from. The same can be true for recruiting. It’s important to connect and build relationships with a variety of different people. For example, my LinkedIn profile has connections from prior jobs, clients, and local entrepreneurs I do business with. It’s great when I can make introductions between people with varied needs.

2. Join Groups

In addition to being a part of groups for your personal and/or professional benefit, join a couple of groups that might help surface candidates. Let’s say you’re always looking for sales professionals. There’s a LinkedIn group – The Sales Association – that you might want to join as a way to connect with possible candidates. They have almost 20,000 members, are affiliated with a national association, and have a job posting system when you’re ready to let people know about your next opening.

3. Engage with Questions and Answers

Once you start connecting with groups, look for opportunities to engage with people in discussions. Notice people who share your culture and enter into a conversation with them. I belong to a group called Social Media in Organizations. This group offers multiple channels to talk about workplace social media – discussions, webinars, articles, a book club, etc.

4. Get (and Read) LinkedIn Updates

This is a quick and easy way to recognize people for promotions, awards, and accomplishments. People will remember you. Since much of your LinkedIn profile is static, this is a way to regularly let people know what you’re up to. I’ve seen some of my connections post in their status “Looking for a Senior Accountant. Got a lead? Let me know.”

5. Embrace Mobile

Keeping up with all of the information available can be a daunting task. That’s why I like the mobile version of LinkedIn for my phone. I can check updates while I’m waiting at appointments, so staying on top of the activity doesn’t have to be a time-consuming chore. LinkedIn offers versions for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Palm.

Over the years, LinkedIn has taken some hits for being nothing more than an online repository of names. But these days, more and more people are becoming reacquainted with it. Since most people have a presence on LinkedIn, it’s an obvious place to keep tabs on what’s happening in the marketplace. And as small business owners, you can easily leverage LinkedIn to find talent.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Growing Your Business: 5 Tips From the Founder of Foursquare
– 5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page
– Web Entrepreneurship: Does the City You Live in Matter?
– HOW TO: Integrate Paid Search and Social Media for Better Marketing Results
– How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media for Real Results

Gladinet, a desktop software program aimed at connecting users to their online storage, is fast becoming the go-to program for Windows users looking to map desktop drives to their favorite web services. Already, users of the software have been able to add network drives that connect to Amazon’s S3, Box.net, and Windows Live SkyDrive, among others. Additionally, the program makes cloud to cloud backup and migration between services as easy as drag-and-drop.

Today, the company is announcing the addition of Google Storage, a service nicknamed “GDrive” among Internet users, to its lineup of supported options.

Accessing Google Storage from your Desktop

Although Gladinet previously supported Google Docs, Google’s online office suite, they did not yet provide an option to connect to Google Storage. This additional online storage space is provided to Google users who need more gigabytes than is provided for free via Google’s programs. Specifically, Google Storage is shared between Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Docs. Affordably priced starting at $5.00 for an extra 20 GB per year and going up to 1 TB and beyond, Google Storage users have access to some of the most reasonably priced cloud storage available on the net today. And with the recent change to Google Docs, which now allows any file type to be uploaded, the storage space is more valuable than ever.

With the additional support now provided by Gladinet, you can drag-and-drop your files from your desktop to Google Storage using Windows Explorer. Once installed, the software allows you to map a virtual drive in Explorer to your online sites and services.

Why Bring the Cloud to the Desktop?

While some may scoff at such a hybrid approach to cloud computing – after all, the whole purpose of the cloud is to move away from desktop-based software – Gladinet is an incredibly valuable tool for both transitioning to the cloud and for managing cloud-to-cloud backups.

For those of us who have collected multiple gigabytes of files over the years, using the various cloud services’ own uploading tools can be tedious at times, even painful, especially when attempting the initial upload to a new service. With Gladinet, though, you can upload everything you own with just a few clicks. That makes the final move from desktop to cloud much easier for those ready to make the change for good. Additionally, since multiple services are supported, Gladinet lets you backup your online files from one cloud storage provider to another. For example, you can backup your Google Docs to Amazon S3, EMC Atmos, Box.net, Windows Live SkyDrive, among others. Gladinet even allows you to automate this cloud-to-cloud copying procedure.

The backup feature and its related automation procedures are only available in the paid editions of the software. However, the basic drive mapping abilities are supported in the free version of the program which runs on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 2003 computers only.

Black Friday is upon us and retailers online and off have brought out the big guns for the busiest shopping day of the year. While most of the doorbusters are long gone, you can still catch some terrific bargains online.

We scoured ads, online deal sites, and our Twitter accounts (hey, if we have to work today, we’re going to try to shop at the same time) and found five can’t miss deals.

Amazon.com $150 off MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops – Edited to add: Amazon.com has sold out of the regular MacBooks (other retailers offer them through Amazon but not at a discount) so the $150 off only applies to the MacBook Pro models at this time. Lots of sites have Apple stuff on sale today – even the Apple Store – but only Amazon offers free shipping, no tax (unless you live in Washington), and an instant $150 off either the 13? MacBook ($849 today only), the 13? MacBook Pro ($1049 today only) and the 15? MacBook Pro ($1549 today only). If you are looking at getting a portable Apple laptop, think about doing it today.

1 TB LaCie External hard drive – BH Photo Video has the fashionable and spacious Lacie external hard drive for $90. It’s one of the best prices you can find on a 1 TB external drive right now.

$30 Canon Multifunction Printer – Office Depot has the Canon PIXMA MP490 for just $30 after a $70 instant savings. The price is good through tomorrow. Print photos, make copies and scan documents.

Sony HDTV and Blu-ray Combo – BH Photo Video has a Sony 42? LCD HDTV (120hz) and a Sony Blu-ray Live enabled Blu-ray player paired together for just $804. If you’re looking at upgrading your home theater this season, this is a great package.

$529 Toshiba 40? HDTV” - Tiger Direct is selling a 40? Toshiba 1080p HDTV for $529 plus shipping. It’s a great deal for this particular set and Tiger Direct is donating at least $100,000 to the Susan G. Korman Foundation this weekend.

What are the best deals you’ve managed to find? Share them in the comments!

Never say never: Adobe Labs is today showing off a couple of Flash applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform at its annual Adobe MAX event.

A couple of demo applications made by third-party developers are already available on the Apple App Store and are built using the brand new Flash Professional CS5, of which a public beta with pre-release support for building applications for iPhone is planned for later this year.

You can sign up here if you want to be notified when the beta kicks off for real.

Basically, Flash Pro CS5 allows developers to use Flash technologies to develop content for iPhone and iPod Touch devices that were previously closed to them.  The Flash developer tool converts Flash apps into ones that can work on the iPhone, since the iPhone still does not support Flash.  So this is a workaround.  But developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build applications for the devices, and because the source code and assets are reusable across the Flash Platform runtimes (Adobe AIR and Flash Player) it is aimed to also give developers a way to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments.

Note that this does not mean you’ll be able to watch Flash-based web content on your iPhone just yet:

The new support for iPhone applications in the Flash Platform tooling will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone, but it may allow developers to repackage existing web content as applications for iPhone if they choose to do so.

Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today.

Flash Professional CS5 will enable developers to build applications for iPhone that are installed as native applications. Users will be able to access the apps after downloading them from Apple’s App Store and installing them on iPhone or iPod Touch.

More information is available here and soon, also here.

These are the example applications that you can test now if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch (any model):

Direct links:

Chroma Circuit
Trading Stuff
Ficklebox
Just Letters
South Park
That Roach Game
Red Hood