Google is the worlds #1 Brand...

As a student of brands, the web, free tools, and marketing, I find it amazing and simultaneously not suprising that Google is the worlds #1 Brand, according to Millward Brown. They define the value of the brand as "Brand Value is the financial value of a brand, defined as the sum of all earnings that a brand is expected to generate." Even more remarkable, they are a brand that gives away much of their product. Read the full report - BrandZ-2008-Report.pdf (application/pdf Object)

I started thinking about the Google services I use frequently, and it's an impressive list (listed in rough order that I use them).

Gmail
Free

Blogger
Free (mostly, I pay to have the custom domain)

Bookmarks
Free

Notebook
Free

Calendar
Free

Search
Free

AdWords
Pays me

Google Maps (on the computer and my phone)
Free

Picassa
Free

Picassa Web Albums
Free

Google Talk
Free

Google Groups
Free

Google Documents
Free

Goog-411
Free

SketchUp
Free

YouTube
Free

Groups
Free



Something makes me think I'm missing a few. Impressive.

For a full list of available Google Products, click here.

Google now predicts the future. Not a Joke.

Ok, so it's only future traffic patterns, but still, pretty damn cool.

In about 30 markets, when you look at Google Maps, and click on the "traffic" button, it will show you current traffic patterns. But look for the button to change the time, and you can change the day of the week and time of day, and Google will tell you what traffic to expect.

Of course, it uses past data to predict based on patterns, so a wreck or other anomaly would not be included, but it would allow you to see whether there are patterns in traffic, and perhaps reroute.

Pretty cool. Now if only this would be incorporated into a car based GPS, and done in real time to calculate the best route. Imagine if Google plotted your route, but knew that a certain area got slow at 5:25 every evening, and your route would take you past there, so it re-routed. That'd be cool.

maps.google.com

Google Notebook

Here's another tool I've been using for awhile. As often as I use it, I haven't blogged about it before. Over at Google Operating System they noted that Google has rolled out some new features for google notebook. But first, what is Notebook? It's exactly what it sounds like. As you cruise the web, if you see something interesting, highlight it, right-click (with Firefox or Explorer extenstions installed) and save it to your notebook. You can have as many notebooks as you want, so it's easy to have Notebooks for different subjects. You can also share Notebooks with other users, which is awesome. When I was in school, we used features like this to create a central Notebook that several of us used to work on group projects. When my wife and I were planning our last vacation, we used Notebook while planning. I use it all the time for work. Simple, but very useful.

Some features:

• Publish a notebook online, so anyone can see it. Or not.
  
• Share you notebook for collaborative notetaking.
  
• You can publish an RSS feed of your notebook.
  
• You can clip text, pictures or links. They are saved with a link back to the original page.
  
• Of course, you can search your notebooks.
  
• You can export to Google Documents. From there, you can export to Word. For those of us that still work in Desktop apps part of the time, it'd be very nice to be able to do this in one step instead of 2.
  
• Your notes are available on any net connected computer
  

Give it a try, and let me know if you come up with any really cool uses.
Google Notebook
The FAQ

No lefts? This could be an awesome Google Maps or GPS feature...

UPS has gotten significant press for their use of software to maximise efficiency in their route planning. (See this New York Times article) The article claims that through efficient route planning, including the elimination or minimization of left hand turns, they have had some astonishing results.

the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons.

At $3 a gallon for fuel, that's $9 million in savings. I wonder what it cost to implement?

How cool would it be if this was a feature in Google Maps or a GPS unit? You enter all the errands you need to do in a day, in any order, and it spits out the most fuel efficient and time efficient options, especially if it took traffic data into account.

Google Calendar Sync options - Getting better.

Google has finally released support for syncing to your desktop calendar. This could be a very cool tool for keeping multiple calendars on multiple computers synced. Unfortunately, they don't yet support syncing multiple calendars on multiple computers, which for me greatly limits the usefulness of this. But if you're stuck using Outlook, it could be a start, and if they add support for multiple calendars, it could be killer.

The Google Blog post on it.

I have a Google calendar for personal stuff, and several for work. I like to share those with teammates, without them seeing what I'm doing on the weekend. I even keep a few personal ones to keep organized.

It is possible to sync multiple calendars using Thunderbird/Lighting/extensions.
I used this tutorial to set up my Laptop (Windows XP), my desktop (Ubuntu Linux) and they stay sync'd perfectly. Using a different system to sync my smartphone means all three platforms stay perfectly sync'd. I love adding an event on my laptop, and having it appear on my phone.