Google Apps drives collaboration for transportation mobile app RideScout

Posted by Joseph Kopser, Co-Founder and CEO at RideScout

Editor's note: Today, we hear from Joseph Kopser, Army Veteran, Bronze Star recipient as well as Co-Founder and CEO at RideScout, a mobile app that aims to streamline transportation by showing real-time information on public, private and social options in one single view. See what other companies that have gone Google have to say.

Several years ago, I was on active duty in the Army, serving as Special Assistant to Army 4-Star Chief of Staff General George W. Casey, Jr. at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. I lived less than 10 miles from my office and everyday I faced the question, “what’s the best way to get there?” I could take the bus, I could carpool, I could walk, and I could even take a taxi, but there wasn’t one service that helped me pick my best option for that particular day. Furthermore, I saw so many people, likely going to the same place as me, with four empty seats in their vehicles.

My frustrations spurred a discussion with a few Army buddies of mine, and in 2011, Craig Cummings and I decided to do something about it. Together we launched RideScout, a mobile app that helps people figure out the fastest and most cost-efficient way to get from one place to another. It takes real-time information and schedules on cabs, buses, trains, ride shares, and emerging services like car2go and Sidecar and pulls it into Google Maps so people can easily compare the options. Not only does RideScout help people get where they need to be faster, but it also reduces the number of cars on the road, increasing transportation efficiency and reducing harm to our planet.

Soon after RideScout got off the ground, I moved to Austin to teach leadership and military strategy at the University of Texas. Craig and I realized we needed a platform to help us collaborate and build the company collectively, despite the physical distance between us. We chose Google Apps from the get-go because its cloud-based platform allowed us to do exactly that. Now, RideScout has employees in Austin, D.C., and contractors in other cities working all hours spread across different time zones. We also use a lot of tablets and portable laptops, so storing everything in the cloud and being able to access it — regardless of our device — is essential.

Google Docs has been a crucial tool for the team, especially the product developers as we’ve gone through our app development iterations. We hold dozens of quick brainstorm sessions every week to go over product requirements and designs, and with Docs we can stay in sync throughout the process because we’re all looking at the same information at the same time. As we matured, we started seeing the same kind of collaboration happen in Presentations, and even with Drawings — they all became living documents with people commenting and editing simultaneously. I think of Docs and Spreadsheets as whiteboards, where RideScout employees can throw out ideas and iterate on them as a team in real time.

Security also was an important consideration for us. We knew we wanted a cloud solution from the beginning, and Google Apps is a platform we could trust to keep our information safe. Because we don’t have to maintain our own servers, it’s just one less thing we have to worry about. And as a startup, taking something off your list of things to worry about is fantastic.

RideScout is scaling quickly. In July we had seven employees and we’ve more than doubled since then. The ability to add a new employee to the system in five minutes or less is extremely important when we’re working on limited resources and stretched to the max to get the product to market. With Apps we’ve got a platform that scales with us, so as we grow and expand to new markets, our employees can worry less about the process of sharing work and focus more on building a great product.

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Flying Scarfs empowers artisans in Afghanistan and around the world with Google Apps

Posted by Jonathan Hudgins, Co-Founder and CEO, Flying Scarfs

Editor's note: This Veterans Day, we’re celebrating our veteran’s contributions and successes as entrepreneurs, by highlighting a handful of the 3.7 million businesses run by veterans in the U.S. Today’s guest blogger is Jonathan Hudgins, Co-Founder and CEO of Flying Scarfs, an enterprise that empowers partners in developing countries to flourish in the global economy.

When I deployed to Afghanistan with the 335th Fighter Squadron in the summer of 2011, I didn’t expect to return with an idea for a nonprofit, much less a plan for making it a reality within months of getting home. But that’s exactly what happened over the 6 month stint. During my time in Afghanistan, I spent days exploring the local Bagram bazaar with three of my fellow Air Force Officers and future co-founders, Joseph Stenger, Joshua Carroll and Ryan Bodenheimer. We befriended a merchant who was selling scarves made by widows in the area, then giving the proceeds back to the women so they could educate and support themselves. These women typically didn’t have much access to capital or jobs, so this gave them some financial stability — and with, a stronger political voice.

Flying Scarfs Team

As our deployment came to an end, we realized there was an opportunity to stay connected with and support the Bagram community by selling their scarves back in the U.S. and sending the proceeds back to the women who made them. By sharing their creations with a broader audience, we could stay connected with the community while also helping the artisans achieve economic success and stability. That’s how Flying Scarfs got started. We had the idea, the business plan, the connections in Afghanistan, and even a retail store, my parents’ shop in North Carolina, to sell our first batch of scarves — the next step was finding a tool to connect the dots. Google Apps was our answer from day one: we could appear professional right off the bat with our @flyingscarfs.com email, and with the cloud-based storage and email, we didn’t even need an office. That was essential at the time, since Joey, Josh and Ryan were still on active duty and we were all in different locations. With Google Apps, we could still stay connected and up to speed no matter where we were.

Two years later, we’re grown up and are even more spread out, but with Google Apps, we’re always on the same page, whether it’s on Gmail, Docs or Spreadsheets. Our CFO, for example, keeps a master financial spreadsheet that gives the rest of the team visibility into our expenditures, costs, sales and margins. We review it each quarter, but if an odd charge shows up at any point, he can ping us and ask if we know where it came from. We can just add details to the Notes column in the spreadsheet, and voila, everyone else knows where it came from.

Hangouts have become an equally integral part in keeping the team up-to-date on the latest updates and developments, both on a regular basis and for ad hoc meetings. When ABC World News published a piece about us in August, for example, our daily website traffic suddenly increased by 100 times our average and our order requests from our online store shot up. We were all over the place — our CFO was in Chicago, Ryan was in Idaho, Josh was in DC, and the rest of us were in North Carolina — but by jumping on a Hangout, we were able to outline a clear plan for handling the sudden activity. A phone call doesn’t always do the trick when you’re trying to replicate the kind of brainstorming you’re able to do when you’re together in a room, while a Hangout was exactly what we needed to plan our immediate next steps.

Using Google Apps lets us to focus more on what matters to us: empowering artisans across the world. And since we’re not tied to a single desktop computer or physical office, we’ve even been able to add new partners in Kenya and Haiti and seamlessly start selling their products back in the U.S. Because that’s what it’s all about - sharing the beautiful work of craftspeople with a wider audience, so they can support themselves economically. That’s what we believe in.

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IAVA gives veterans a voice with help from Google Apps

Posted by Derek Bennett, former Army Captain and Chief of Staff at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA)

Editor's note: This Veterans Day, we’re celebrating our veteran’s contributions and successes as entrepreneurs, by highlighting a handful of the 3.7 million businesses run by veterans in the U.S. Today, we hear from Derek Bennett, former Army Captain and Chief of Staff at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).

When Paul Rieckhoff returned to the U.S. after serving in Iraq as an Army First Lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader, he couldn’t help but notice two things: how difficult the return to civilian life could be, and how important it was for veterans to join the national dialogue in the media and on the ground. Starting IAVA was his way of doing something about it - and it has accomplished quite a bit since its inception in 2004. IAVA is the country's first and largest organization dedicated to supporting and representing new veterans and their families, with nearly 300,000 members and supporters. And we’re as dedicated as ever to our original mission: helping veterans understand the benefits available to them, ensuring their voices are heard in mainstream media, and giving them a safe community to ask questions and get advice from fellow vets.

A lot of amazing people have helped us get where we are now - a lot of selfless veterans, generous civilians and dedicated employees. But we also couldn’t have done it without some help from technology like Google Apps. We’re a mobile company: we have offices in New York and Washington, D.C., but often travel or work from home, and our volunteers come from all over the country, so we have a pretty flexible work policy. Since Apps allows us to access our email and documents from anywhere, whether on our laptops at home or the mobile Drive app on our tablets, our teams can get their work done whenever and wherever they need.

Google Spreadsheets have completely revolutionized our volunteer signup process at recruitment events. Instead of having people sign a piece of paper, entering their names on a spreadsheet, and emailing the new version around, we have our team take tablets into the field and enter information directly into a Google spreadsheet. That way, we know everything is up-to-date at any given moment, not to mention we save time and minimize the risk of typos or forgotten updates.

While Spreadsheets help us bring in new volunteers more efficiently, Hangouts make it possible to build camaraderie between our team and those volunteers. We recently launched Squad Leaders, a program where IAVA ambassadors host barbeques, set up networking events and provide professional mentorship for vets in their local communities. We want to make sure our Squad Leaders feel as connected to the core IAVA team as they do with the vets in their neighborhoods, and Hangouts help make that happen. We use them to conduct Squad Leader training sessions and to run regular check-ins, so our ambassadors feel personal connections with a program that’s otherwise geographically spread out.

Veterans are service leaders, entrepreneurs, teachers, students, parents and politicians. IAVA’s mission is to make sure they’re all those things and everything else they want to be - that they feel fully supported and represented as citizens. Our veterans have already committed so much to their country by they time they return home that they should feel empowered to accomplish even more in the years ahead. With 2.6 million veterans, it’s no easy feat, but with the help of a growing team of employees and supporters, I think we’re off to a pretty good start.

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RuckPack turns an idea on deployment into a business at home with Google Apps

Posted by Rob Dyer, Marine Corps Aviation Officer and Founder and CEO of RuckPack

Editor's note: This Veterans Day, we’re celebrating our veterans' contributions and successes as entrepreneurs, by highlighting a handful of the 3.7 million businesses run by veterans in the U.S. Today, we hear from Rob Dyer, active duty Marine Corps Aviation Officer and Founder and CEO of RuckPack, a peak performance nutrition shot.

The idea for RuckPack was born while I was deployed to Afghanistan with Marine Special Operations Command. While at camp we’d talk about how great it would be to start a company together when we got home — we could keep the gang together and hire other veterans to build up the team. We even came up with a business idea: a nutrition shot with all the vitamins and minerals to keep guys in our position healthy and focused through the long, tough missions. And before we knew it, we had the early makings of RuckPack.

We tried to get the company up and running when we got back from Afghanistan, but it was hard with everyone spread out all over the country. I told a Marine buddy of mine about the business plan and some of the challenges I was facing. He told me the first step to getting the company off the ground was to start using Google Apps for Business. The majority of our team is still on active duty, myself included, but wherever we are, we're able to stay connected using Google Apps. That's helped us release two flavors of our nutrition shot that are being sold at stores and shipped to soldiers abroad.

Google Apps is the technological backbone to RuckPack — it’s what keeps our 12-person, multi-million dollar virtual operation running without an office. Hangouts keep us connected, whether it’s a conversation about a website change or a celebration of a big sale with a retail distributor. After spending day and night with these guys in the military, seeing their faces on a Hangout makes it feel like we’ve still got the gang together.

Google Docs and Drive help us keep track of and centralize our business plans and documents. Any time we get on a call with an investor, think of a topic for a blog post, or request content changes to the website, we open a Doc and share it with the appropriate people. That way, we can all keep tabs on our work, whether we’re checking in from Japan, where one of our teammates is stationed, or from Annapolis, where I live and teach at the Naval Academy.

Today, we launched our Veteran Distributor Program (VDP), which allows any U.S. veteran to join our sales force and receive a commission on any RuckPack product they sell. Our team knew from the start that we wanted to help fellow veterans; this was our way of expanding it beyond the core team. The concept of the VDP was launched and refined in a Google Doc, with each person on the team contributing with additions and comments along the way. We don’t have to be in a room together to get a great idea off the ground. We just needed a shared Google doc.

There's nothing like the bond I felt with the guys I was deployed with. There was a sense of team and trust among us that we all missed when we got back home. What's great about RuckPack is that we’ve been able to revive that same bond and camaraderie. Google Apps has helped us keep that sense of working towards a common goal — only now that goal is building a great business that helps the guys still out there serving our country.

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Foundry Group takes venture capital to the cloud with Google Apps

Editor's note: Colorado has enticed all sorts of pioneers since its Wild West beginnings. We’re excited to highlight a handful of these trailblazers - the intrepid entrepreneurs, aspiring micro-brewers and ambitious thought leaders - who have helped create the adventurous and innovative culture the Centennial State is known for. Today, we hear from Brad Feld, Managing Partner at Foundry Group, a venture capital firm based in Boulder, Colorado. Join us next Wednesday for a Hangout on Air with Brad and fellow Techstars co-founder David Cohen to learn more about technology in the startup world.

What prompted you to start Foundry Group?
My partners and I started Foundry Group in 2007. We had previously worked together at Mobius Venture Capital and learned an enormous amount, both good and bad, from that experience. We built Foundry Group on a very clear strategy which included a set of deeply held beliefs centered around the power of networks and what we call “business love.” We treat each other with the utmost respect and truly like each other, and that attitude spills over to how we treat entrepreneurs and other investors. The firm is based in Boulder, Colorado but we’re national investors: 33% of our investments are in Colorado, 33% are in California, and the rest are made to organizations across the U.S.

When and why did Foundry Group decide to use Google Apps?
We switched to Google Apps in 2010 after spending the three years prior with a traditional environment grounded in Microsoft Outlook, Office and Exchange, with dedicated in-office servers. We had a heterogeneous computing environment -- some Macs and some PCs -- and the Mac users were definitely second class citizens with the Microsoft apps, while everyone suffered from disruptive email or server issues at least once a month. Meanwhile, we were using Gmail at home, and as most of our computing activities shifted to being Web-based, it was a natural evolution for us to go Google. As more Macs infiltrated our small 12-person office and the vast majority of the companies we invested in were on Google Apps, we felt incredibly anachronistic using a non-Google Apps environment. Switching was the obvious and smart decision.

How does Foundry Group use Google Apps?
Google Apps allows us to have truly continuous communication. We are incredibly aggressive Gmail users and are comfortable with the endless flow of internal email given the way conversation views work. In 2010, this was transformative for us, since we travel a lot and the ability to jump on any device from anywhere was infinitely more satisfying than the “sync my Microsoft email, connect to a VPN to access to files and wait as things grind away” experience we had gotten used to.

Does Google Apps cultivate a certain company culture?
We have an open culture and Google Apps plays a big role in maintaining transparency. Rather than meeting daily, for example, we run our entire business over one lunch on Mondays, and we use a single page on Google Sites to keep track of all the topics we discuss.

What are the most surprising benefits you've seen with Google Apps?
The continuous improvement of the actual products has been a great magic trick. We regularly discover a new Google Apps feature that quickly gets incorporated into everything we do. We each use various add-ins -- both to Chrome and specific apps -- and have found the third-party extension around the Google Apps infrastructure to be incredible. Several of the companies we’ve invested in, including Yesware and Spanning, are direct participants in this ecosystem, and it’s pretty awesome to see how it evolves.

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Techstars assists tomorrow’s entrepreneurs with help from Google Apps

Editor's note: Colorado has enticed all sorts of pioneers since its Wild West beginnings. We’re excited to highlight a handful of these trailblazers - the intrepid entrepreneurs, aspiring micro-brewers and ambitious thought leaders - who have helped create the adventurous and innovative culture the Centennial State is known for. Today, we hear from David Cohen, Co-founder and CEO of Techstars, a mentorship driven startup accelerator based in Boulder, Colorado. Join us next Wednesday for a Hangout on Air with David and fellow Techstars co-founder Brad Feld to learn more about technology in the startup world.

Can you tell us about Techstars?
Techstars is a startup accelerator program that pairs promising entrepreneurs and their companies with seed funding and mentorship from the top venture capital firms and angel investors. We started in Boulder in 2006, and over the last seven years, we’ve opened six new offices, graduated 234 companies, and helped create nearly 1,900 jobs.

Why do you think Boulder has become such a hot spot for entrepreneurs and startups?
Boulder has a very "give first" culture. Investors, inventors, CEOs and engineers open their doors and ears to aspiring entrepreneurs, and they do it without expecting anything in return. People here genuinely want to help others, and it has really turned the area into a hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship.

How has Google Apps helped Techstars?
Google Apps is a boon to our operation efficiency. We've saved a ton of money, which is huge in itself, but more importantly, we're far more productive than we could be with other solutions. The collaboration features in Docs and Drive alone have saved us hours we would’ve wasted emailing attachments back and forth, trying to reconcile changes.

Do you see many of the Techstars startups using Google Apps?
More than 80 percent of Techstars startups use tools from the Google Apps platform to run their business. Most of them began using tools like Gmail, Hangouts and Docs in their personal lives, so using the business version of the platform comes naturally for them. Google Apps is heavily ingrained in our startup culture.

What’s one of the major cultural benefits you’re seeing with Google Apps?
Hangouts have revolutionized the way our company, startups, mentors and investors connect and collaborate. Our program relies heavily on successful partnerships between co-founders, startups, mentors, venture firms and employees, so having the right tools to help everyone work is vital. We have dedicated Hangout monitors in each of our offices for ad hoc discussions, staff meetings, and mentorship sessions. We vet and interview Techstars applicants over Hangouts, since our applicants come from all over the world and conference calls don’t quite capture their personality or company vision. And since our mentors are just as spread out as our applicants, we use Hangouts to connect them with the startups they’re advising.

What Google Apps product could you not live without?
I could not live without Google Docs. I literally have 15 Google Docs open at any given time, so I know I’ve got everything I need in front of me and can switch back and forth easily between them to get my work done.

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Google App Engine helps MAG Interactive handle explosive growth of word game, Ruzzle

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform blog)

Editor's note: Today we hear from Daniel Hasselberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of mobile game development company, MAG Interactive, based in Stockholm, Sweden. MAG Interactive produces some of the most popular games in the world, including Ruzzle, which has more than 45 million players in 142 different countries.

When we launched our word game Ruzzle in 2012, we had no idea it would become an international sensation almost overnight. We initially promoted the game only to our family and friends, but within two weeks of our launch, Ruzzle was the No.1 game on the Swedish App Store.

I believe if we hadn’t used Google App Engine to build the backend of Ruzzle, we wouldn’t have been able to scale fast enough with our own servers, which would have killed the app in the marketplace. There were about a million downloads of Ruzzle per month in the Nordic region, Holland, Spain and Italy through 2012. As we refined the game’s social integration through channels like Facebook and Twitter, we grew rapidly in Italy and the United States. In 2013, Ruzzle became the No. 1 game download on Google Play and the App Store in Italy, Sweden, the United States and many other countries.

Things were especially crazy at the end of last year. We were seeing about 700,000 new players each day from December 2012 through January 2013. We added 20 million users in a single month! It was incredible to see App Engine scale – and just keep on working – as we grew from about 5 million players to 25 million players in just a few weeks.

Our decision to use App Engine as the platform for Ruzzle and our new game, QuizCross, was strategic. Some of us at MAG Interactive helped develop the server platform for one of the most popular music download services in the Nordic region, so we knew about the challenges of having to scale quickly. While we didn’t anticipate Ruzzle’s popularity, we did recognize even before creating the game that we could face scaling problems if we were successful. So we decided from day one to use a cloud solution.

We looked at Amazon’s platform but preferred Google’s approach to cloud solutions. Google’s scalability was an important factor in our decision, but we also appreciated the company’s transparent pricing. The more efficient we became with App Engine, the less we paid.

The Google Cloud Platform team has been great to work with, as well. They are very supportive and appreciate our feedback. The technical support experts at Google are amazing, too – very hands-on. They know the platform extremely well and can help us work through any challenge.

We’re also using Google BigQuery for business intelligence. We track millions of events in the game every day so we know what users are doing – or not doing – and how we should improve the experience. We really like that we can throw enormous amounts of data at BigQuery, and it still performs. It only takes a few seconds to get results, and there are no scaling issues. It’s also easy to use. We have just one data analyst doing all the work with BigQuery but could probably use more people. If there are a few brilliant data mining experts out there who can imagine a future in Stockholm, please give us a call!

One thing we’ve learned from our BigQuery analysis is that the more users play Ruzzle, the more they improve their skills. New players typically find about 18 words in the two-minute time frame they’re given. After they play 100 games, they can find about 50 words, on average. I think that tracking player improvement is what keeps people playing and has helped to make Ruzzle so popular.

BigQuery offers our company a lot of insight into the use of our games and how we can improve them. We’re looking forward to expanding our relationship with Google as App Engine and Cloud Platform evolves.

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Google helps schools stretch tight budgets

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Director, Chromebooks for Education

The 2013/14 school year has started, with U.S. educators and their students returning to find much lower budgets available to meet ever-higher aspirations. Three districts shared their stories with us about how Google Apps and Chromebooks help them provide excellent opportunities for students, even in these challenging times.

Huntsville School District, Texas

Third grade students in Huntsville School District
collaborate on a Chromebook

Last year, Huntsville Independent School District struggled with outdated equipment and poor cellular coverage. To address these challenges, they built a wireless network, established free Google Apps accounts for email and word processing, and earned a $100,000 grant, which they used to purchase 350 Chromebooks for grades 6-12. Today over 1,000 students have access to Chromebooks, and high school students even take them home. Charlie Baker, a math teacher, explained the value of Chromebooks at home: “Students can send me a snapshot of the screen to illustrate a problem they’re struggling with. I can use Google Hangouts to help them work through to a solution. Student engagement is higher, and the quality of work has improved significantly."

Merced High School District, California
Although the communities of Merced Union High School District face many economic challenges, the District provides the latest tools for learning. Information Systems Manager Anthony Thomas told us that a year ago, when the district was evaluating computers, students test-drove a range of candidate devices and “voted overwhelmingly in favor of Chromebooks as the most valuable educational tool.” The high school deployment has been so successful that the district aims to be 1:1 with more than 5,000 Chromebooks by 2016. Anthony sees students using Chromebooks in locations all around the school campus, just as they might in a work environment. “The 1:1 Chromebook environment has a major impact on districts like ours,” says Anthony. “Today’s work environment is all about teams, and that’s what these students are learning. They’re acquiring real job skills.”

A student in Queensbury School District works
on his Chromebook

Queensbury Union Free School District, New York
Matt Hladun, Director of Technology for the Queensbury Union Free school district in rural New York State, faces a different challenge. Matt lost a number of IT staff to budget cuts. With 2,500 Chromebooks and just three team members, he really appreciates the minimal support that the devices require, saying “it’s hard to argue with increased student motivation, more efficient teaching processes, better communications, and a saving of tens of thousands of dollars a year in software costs. Introducing Google Apps is the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. I’m seeing teaching change, and I want it working everywhere. It is absolutely making a difference.” Matt was also able to establish a “Technology Bullpen” of five teachers in each building who help their peers get the best out of the devices and tools.

To learn more about Chromebooks for Education, visit our website and review the IDC White Paper “Quantifying the Economic Value of Chromebooks.”

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Google Apps helps CustomMade operate at the speed of small business

Posted by Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade, an online platform for buying custom goods from local Makers. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

CustomMade is built on quality craftsmanship. We’re an online marketplace that matches our customers with a network of nearly 11,000 of the world’s best craftspeople - we call them Makers - to give them access to high-quality, custom-made goods. My co-founder, Seth Rosen, and I started CustomMade because we love working directly with Makers to build things that matter to people. We’ve been able to make it successful because we have tools that let us maintain the high metabolism that small companies require.

We started in 2009 as a two-person company working out of my one-bedroom apartment, and by being nimble and operating quickly, we’ve grown to 45 full-time employees working out of our headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Google Apps for Business is the agility engine that helped us get there. It’s been the backbone of our communication and collaboration, letting us focus on getting work done rather than how we get it done - a crucial distinction for a small business.

Google Apps helps us smooth out the rough edges of running a small business, like onboarding employees. Teaching new hires about the business and culture is inherently difficult, but since most of our hires use Gmail on a daily basis, we don’t have to spend as much time teaching them how to use our technology. By giving them the tools they’re already familiar with, they’re able to adapt quickly and jump right into their jobs without worrying about how to set up a meeting with Calendar or share a Doc with their teammates.

With thousands of Makers selling tens of thousands of different products, we’re a very numbers-focused company. Google Apps makes tracking goals across all of our teams incredibly simple. Our sales, concierge, and product teams all work towards weekly goals, such as site traffic and requests for custom items, which they update constantly in a shared Google Sheet. This gives me visibility into each team’s performance and metrics, and I know the data I’m looking at is always up-to-date. We also use Docs and Sheets for operational tasks, like storing creative briefs and tracking licenses, contractors, addresses and funnel conversions.

Google+ Hangouts are our secret productivity weapon. We work with 15 freelancers and consultants, including 10 in India, one in the UK and the rest across the US. Hangouts make it feel like they’re right here in the office with us. Our team hosts five to 10 Hangouts each day - they’ve become an integral part of our day-to-day routine.

Moving fast and staying nimble is essential to CustomMade’s success, and Google Apps keeps us on our toes and forging ahead. Instead of spending time worrying about IT problems or outdated Excel worksheets, we focus on connecting Makers like Marv Beloff with bow tie enthusiasts and helping bring dreams of custom wood tables to life.

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Google Apps helps FIT4MOM keep moms healthy on the go

Posted by Susan King Glosby, VP of Operations at FIT4MOM

Editor's note: In honor of Mother’s Day, our guest blogger is Susan King Glosby, VP of Operations at FIT4MOM, a company that offers fitness programs for moms at any stage of motherhood. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Being a mom to three boys is my favorite job, but helping moms is a close runner-up. That’s what I get to do as VP of Operations at FIT4MOM, a franchise that offers fitness classes to help mothers stay healthy and in shape. We’re not your typical gym session; we run pre-natal classes for pregnant women, stroller classes for new moms with their little ones in tow and workouts for mothers of all stages to get their pre-baby bodies back. Since launching in San Diego in 2001, we’ve grown to 275 franchises and 1,300 locations nationwide, helping moms from California to Cleveland stay in shape, meet other mothers and have fun with their kids.

We’re a mobile company. Our franchise owners are busy moms who don’t have time to sit in an office and answer emails. They’re teaching classes in the local park, picking up their kids from daycare and taking care of their families. Unfortunately, when we looked at our technology, we realized our email and collaboration system wasn’t doing our on-the-go business owners any favors. After looking at some underwhelming solutions tailored for franchise operations, we discovered Google Apps and knew we’d found the platform we needed to help us get our work done whenever and wherever we had the time.

Our only remaining concern was whether moving from our old system to Google Apps would be difficult without a dedicated in-house IT lead. Our worries disappeared as soon as we spoke with Lark IT, our Google Apps Reseller. Lark walked us through the process step-by-step, from the moment we decided to switch to Apps to the moment we successfully migrated all 300 of our business owners and corporate team members.

Apps has been a game changer for our 11-person corporate team. We store all our essential documents in a single shared folder on Drive, so everyone on the team has on-demand access to HR-related forms, time-off requests and contact information for our franchisees and partners. We also have a shared Google Calendar that’s always up-to-date with training sessions for new franchise owners and opening dates for new FIT4MOM locations. That way, we know all our moms are always in the loop. Google+ Hangouts have become increasingly ingrained in our daily routine, both for recurring events, like our corporate staff meetings, and impromptu one-on-one check-ins with franchise owners.

Our franchise owners are also over the moon about Apps because they finally have the tools to let them work efficiently and on their own schedules. With Gmail and Calendar on their phones, they have constant access to class schedules and can communicate easily with their instructors and the moms in their groups. No more time is wasted running home to check their laptops.

FIT4MOM isn’t just about fitness - it’s about bringing together active moms who want to be both healthy and part of a like-minded community. Between our Fit4Baby, Stroller Strides and Body Back classes, our employees and customers are getting fit and creating long-lasting friendships. And while we’re having fun on the playground, we know Google Apps is keeping the company running smoothly in the background.

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Google Apps helps My Receptionist greet customers with a virtual smile

Posted by Jeffrey Noe, CEO at My Receptionist

Editor's note: In honor of National Receptionist's Day, our guest blogger is Jeffrey Noe, CEO at My Receptionist, which provides virtual receptionists and front office support services for small businesses. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Receptionists aren’t just the welcome committee for your doctor’s office - they’re the directors of first impressions for companies everywhere, from one-person e-commerce start-ups to global manufacturing corporations. My Receptionist provides virtual receptionists for small businesses who realize the importance of having someone on the front line but don’t have the resources to hire someone full-time. Our 65 employees across two offices provide phone answering services and front office support for our customers, so they can focus on what they do best: growing their business.

In our line of work, a technology hangup is on par with a dropped call, and in 2011, we realized it was time for an upgrade. We had a jumble of Microsoft products that didn’t work well together and made our day-to-day operations difficult. We needed a new platform that required fewer IT resources and helped our employees and clients communicate, collaborate and schedule better together. We experimented with Microsoft Office 365, but the pricing felt unnecessarily complicated and it relied too heavily on additional software to be the fully baked cloud solution we wanted. When we tried Google Apps, we immediately knew it was the right fit: not only was it cost-effective and easy to understand, but we could tell that Google had a more developed product and vision.

While the ease and popularity of Gmail was a key driver in our switch to Google Apps, Google Docs and Drive have completely changed the way we collaborate internally and with our clients. Before, we put our training material in plastic binders, which would then be sent out to 70 people, including clients. Every time we needed to make a change - even to one page - we would need to reprint 70 copies of each page and send new binders out. You couldn't help but sigh heavily when you had to update a piece of information or update a process, because it meant another trip to the printer. Now, with Google Docs, the process, printing and need for mailing disappeared entirely. We just go online, make the change in our doc, and rest assured that everyone has the same up-to-date training manual for immediate access.

Google+ Hangouts have also become a mainstay of our day. Every morning our executive team, which is split between our two offices, huddles on a Hangout. If someone is travelling, they’re patched in and don’t miss a thing. Hangouts are also tightly integrated with Google Calendar, so our meetings are just one click away.

Our virtual receptionists are the first line of contact between a lot of small businesses and their customers, so it’s essential that we give our employees the resources to stay up to date and be knowledgeable about our clients. Our receptionists may not give out candy or cold water to the folks they interact with, but with the help of Google Apps, they have the tools to make our clients - and their customers - happy.

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Pierre Hermé, the “Picasso of Pastry,” chooses Google Apps to bake his wares

Posted by Olivier Lacoste, Head of IT, Logistics, and Sales Shops at Pierre Hermé Paris

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Olivier Lacoste, Head of IT at Pierre Hermé Paris, a French pastry company. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Being a French pastry chef is a little like being a Kenyan long-distance runner or Brazilian soccer player – you follow a long line of those before you who have been the very best at their respective trades. Pierre Hermé became a celebrity by being the youngest person to be named France's Pastry Chef of the Year. Mostly, though, people really love his macarons.

Today, Pierre Hermé Paris® has boutiques in France, United Kingdom, Japan, United Arab Emirates and soon in China with our 450 employees making and selling French pastries, macarons, ice cream, candy, coffee, tea, jam and more. We’re growing rapidly as consumers around the world try and appreciate our products. As the head of IT, it’s my job to make sure we have a technology solution to facilitate that growth.

We chose Google Apps because it gave us the most up-to-date technology to work with and was scalable for our internationally expanding workforce. We found that some of our employees were using Google tools on the side, so we decided to roll it out to the entire company with the help of Google Apps Reseller Cirruseo. We were up and running in less time than it takes to make one of our signature chocolate macaroons. We’ve been happy with the way Google Apps lets us do things that weren't possible before. For example, Pierre Hermé will record a video of himself baking a difficult pastry and store it on Google Drive so our bakers around the world can learn from him while at work or on their mobile devices.

As any pastry chef will tell you, collaboration is key. Pierre Hermé Paris employees need a technology solution that lets them share ideas and recipes easily from anywhere on the globe. Working together on documents may be less sweet, but it’s no less important to our business than working together to produce one of our signature macarons.

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Katz Americas coasts to success with Google Apps

Posted by Tom Muraca, Director of Marketing at Katz Americas

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Tom Muraca, Director of Marketing at Katz Americas, the largest manufacturer of beverage coasters in North and South America. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Katz Americas may not be a household name, but when you put a drink down at a tavern or restaurant, our product is probably under your glass. We’re one of the biggest manufacturers of drink coasters in the United States, with over 100 employees across our two facilities in Buffalo, New York and Johnson City, Tennessee.

We weren't always such a large company - we grew quickly through a handful of mergers over the last few years - and when we finally had a chance to come up for air, we realized our technology hadn’t kept up with us. We were stumbling along with a fractured email and collaboration platform built around Microsoft Exchange 2003 and a few file-sharing servers. It was expensive and unreliable, especially for a company without a dedicated IT department. Upgrading our hosted system didn’t make financial sense, and Microsoft Office 365 didn’t win our team over. Google Apps did both, and its stability and security features were especially attractive. We decided to make the switch to Google Apps in September of 2011, and with help from Dito, our Google Apps Reseller, we were up and running by January of 2012.

Google Apps has helped us streamline and modernize our day-to-day work. By using Google Drive, we’ve cut the average time it takes to deliver an estimate and mocks to a customer from one week to just three days. Instead of sending different versions of huge files around by email, we create a single shared folder on Drive and house each proof there. That way, we can easily share, edit and collaborate on our work as a team in less than half the time it took before.

The Gmail and Google Drive mobile apps have changed how we interact with potential customers and sell our product when we’re on the road. Now, I can pull up a design on my phone while I’m speaking to a customer at an industry event or even create a rough prototype on the spot. I can also add their information to my contacts, get a quote started for them immediately, and follow up via email within minutes of finishing our conversation. Google Apps lets us give our customers on-the-spot, personal service, and that gives us a huge advantage over the competition.

Google Apps has been the keystone of our revamped company strategy at a time of significant change. The way I see it, it’s also just the beginning: our employees are constantly finding new features and sharing their favorite use cases, so I can only imagine the benefits we’ll see a year from now. In the meantime, we’ll get back to focusing on our core business - protecting tabletops from condensation and spills with surfboard-shaped coasters (and some normal shaped coasters, too).

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Mollen Eliminates 16 Million Pieces of Paper with Chromebooks

Posted by Chris Behling, President at Mollen

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Chris Behling, President at Mollen, a national healthcare services company specializing in the delivery of remote and local healthcare services. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Mollen enables clients and patients to access and deliver healthcare services in the most convenient and cost effective ways possible. We do this by leveraging a network of over 200,000 healthcare professionals to deliver services wherever people live, work, play, worship and shop. Mollen is also the largest independent mass-immunizer in the country and last year we conducted over 100,000 healthcare events across all fifty states.

The healthcare services we provide typically require a lot of physical documents: in 2011, we used 20 million pieces of paper for everything from patient records to insurance verification to credit card processing. Paper gave everyone problems. It was an imposition on our patients, who had to spend time manually filling out forms, our nurses, because it slowed them down, and finance, because it delayed billing. It was also a drain on the environment.

We knew we needed to move away from paper and go digital, so we explored a number of different avenues - tablets, laptops and smartphones, among others. Ultimately we decided to go with Chromebooks with 3G, for a number of reasons. The first is security - with the Chrome Management Console, we could centrally configure the devices so they gave users access to just those sites and apps necessary for them to provide services. Second, Chromebooks enabled us to reduce our paper consumption by 80%, while providing our customers better service through a faster digital experience. And third, they’ve speed up our internal processes. Our nurses can now look up a patient’s medical history and determine if they’re eligible and covered for a given procedure, a process that previously would have taken days. And we’re able to accept credit cards and handle insurance billing onsite, ensuring that we’ll get paid for our services.

While security and paper reduction were the primary reasons we chose Chromebooks, we realized quickly there were additional benefits. Chromebooks have helped us more easily adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) by using 3G instead of WiFi. Using WiFi would have required us to audit each of the thousands of networks we would have been operating on. Whereas, since 3G’s built in to each Chromebook and communicates with our cellular carrier, Verizon, directly, we didn’t have an additional local area network we needed to audit, saving us time and resources.

By moving to Chromebooks, not only are we able to increase the number of people we’re able to serve, but we’re able to do so better, more securely and at a reduced cost. And by reducing our reliance on paper, we’re happy that we’re helping reduce our environmental impact, as well.

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Report from Down Under: Woolworths goes Google

Posted by Dan Beecham, CIO at Woolworths Limited

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Dan Beecham, CIO at Woolworths Limited. Woolworths is an Australian company that was founded in 1924 in Sydney. Today Woolworths has more than 3,000 stores across Australia and New Zealand that span food, liquor, petrol, general merchandise, home improvement and hotels.

As one of Australia and New Zealand’s most innovative retailers, we’re always looking for ways we can use technology to give our customers more convenient ways to shop — whether that’s in store, from the comfort of their computer at home, or on the move via our smartphone apps.

This innovative approach does not stop with our customers. As Australia’s largest retailer with more than 3,000 stores across Australia and New Zealand, our staff of 200,000 need intuitive technology that enables them to work more efficiently, collaboratively and effectively. To do this, they need to be able to access the right applications and information, from any location, using any device.

This is why we’ve decided to move to Google Apps and Chrome. Changing to a cloud based suite of tools is a key part of our strategy to use technology to promote greater collaboration, productivity and effectiveness. Over the next 12 months we will be rolling out Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk to the 26,000 staff in our national and state offices. This is the first phase of what we hope will be a company-wide transformation of our workplace technology.

We are also actively looking at how we can innovate with Google+, Google Drive and Google Sites to transform the way we approach other aspects of our business.

The move to Google Apps and Chrome builds on the successful roll out of Gmail and our ‘Tap to Support’ App on iPads to Woolworths supermarket store managers last year. The custom-made application, built on Google App Engine, helps our managers stay on the shop floor and focused on customers by allowing them to log a support ticket with our national support office in just one click rather than being tied to a PC in the back office.

Soon more of our staff will be able to experience the productive and collaborative benefits of being able to work from any device, anywhere. Geographically dispersed teams, like our merchandising or state based workers, will be able to use Docs to collaborate in real-time.

Going Google will transform the way our employees interact with technology and collaborate with each other at every level of the organisation. We’re looking forward to providing our staff access to intuitive consumer technology at work and see the move to Google as the beginning of our journey towards a more efficient and innovative style of working.

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Titans of Japanese business embrace the cloud

Posted by Shinichi Abe, Managing Director, Enterprise Business Japan

Since launching Google Apps for Business in Japan in 2007, we’ve seen some of the country’s best known companies embrace the simplicity and freedom of working in the cloud. The likes of Casio, Benesse and Kewpie Corporation are now using Google Apps for Business products, to work more collaboratively and efficiently.

Today, two of Japan's most venerable companies Kubota and FUJIFILM are making the leap to the cloud too. This news comes just a month after ANA announced that its 43,000 staff across 40 company divisions will soon use Google Apps for Business and Nikkei ranked Google as the nation’s number one cloud service provider.

Established in 1890, Kubota is an international leader in agricultural machinery manufacturing, with more than 20,000 staff across 20 countries. Overseas sales make up more than 50% of its business. As Kubota looks to increase its business abroad to 70% in the next five years, it will adopt Google Apps as an IT and communications solution. Google Apps will help Kubota facilitate a smooth overseas expansion by enabling employees to connect and collaborate real time across borders.

FUJIFILM is also on a path of international expansion. A household name in photography and imaging, FUJIFILM is now applying its world-class technology to the medical systems and life sciences sectors. As their business evolves they want an IT platform that is its fast and flexible so plan to move their 30,000-strong workforce to the cloud, Gmail and Google Drive.

Kubota and FUJIFILM join over 5 million businesses worldwide that have moved to Google Apps for Business. Enhanced with the features and controls that businesses need to be productive, innovative and successful, Google’s workplace tools are giving some of the world’s oldest and most established businesses a 21st century edge.

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Johnny Cupcakes has gone Google

Posted by Justin Hiltz, Media Futurist at Johnny Cupcakes

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Justin Hiltz, Media Futurist at Johnny Cupcakes, a designer, manufacturer and retailer of unique, limited edition t-shirts founded in Boston. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

We’re fans of individuality and expression at Johnny Cupcakes. Our t-shirts are specially made in small batches to help express and reflect our customer’s unique styles. This independent ethos helped propel our brand from a cult favorite in our hometown of Boston into a multi-million dollar, international business with stores in London, Los Angeles and, of course, across Massachusetts.

We’ve grown a lot since Johnny Earle started Johnny Cupcakes in 2001, but we’ve always put a premium on staying fresh – both with our designs and the technology we work with. When I joined the company two years ago, I realized our email system was causing more harm than good, especially at the rate we were growing. I knew we needed an upgrade, I knew it didn't make sense to install a server that required constant maintenance, and I knew most employees were already using Gmail on their own. Moving to Google Apps seemed both attractive and obvious.

Google Apps for Business makes communication a snap. We’ve grown to 50 employees, but still work at the same breakneck speed we did when it was just Johnny hustling to get the company off the ground. That’s why it’s essential to have the tools to keep up with our pace. Google Chat makes that possible. We love that we can send a quick ping to someone with a question, an idea in need of feedback or a project update without having to leave our desks.

Google Apps saves us a lot of time and prevents a lot of headaches. Take our recent website redesign, for example. Our customers are our biggest fans, so we wanted to show them some love by highlighting a handful of them on our new site. At first, the thought of coordinating, collecting and curating that amount of content seemed daunting. I was worried we’d have to use a 3rd party questionnaire app or do everything over email and pull it all together manually (and painstakingly). Then I realized I could do it all through Google Forms. I set up a questionnaire, sent it to our customers, and saw the responses show up in real-time in a single spreadsheet. It saved me hours of work I would’ve wasted emailing, copying and pasting.

Johnny Cupcakes is all about our customers – we love them and they love us. This connection fuels our drive to make clothes that are both exclusive and accessible. Google Apps allows us to communicate more effectively, which helps free up our time so that we can concentrate on the things that really matter: our customers.

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Dick Smith switches on to Google Apps

Posted by Linda Venables, Director of IT at Dick Smith

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Linda Venables, Director of IT at Dick Smith, an electronics retailer in Australia and New Zealand. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As an electronics retailer, you can imagine that staff at Dick Smith have a real passion for technology. They not only want to keep customers up-to-date with the latest innovations and gadgets — they want to use them too. This is key to our culture and as our company evolves we want to ensure that our highly mobile, tech savvy workforce have the flexibility to work in ways that suit them.

With more than 4,500 staff in 323 stores across Australia and New Zealand, we have a lot of people to communicate with. Connecting with part-time staff who don’t have corporate issued devices or email accounts, managing the rise of personal mobile devices at work, and trying to introduce more collaboration are some of the main challenges we’ve faced.

When we looked for solutions to these challenges, we decided on Google Apps because it was a great cultural fit, and it was intuitive, easy to maintain and packed with features. As many of our staff already use Gmail for their personal email account the training time is really minimal.



The sharing and collaboration features built into Google Apps and Google Docs are real pluses too. Whether our teams are in Sydney or Wellington, they'll be able to share and collaborate on documents in real-time, faster and more easily than ever before. We’re also looking forward to storing videos in Drive so when our CEO has an important announcement, we can record this for all our staff to review at a time that suits them. This is a great way to overcome some of the logistical challenges of having a part-time workforce in different time zones.

Overall, we see building community and fostering a collaborative culture as the greatest benefit to ‘Going Google.’ We’re looking forward to using Google Forms to get staff feedback and comments via regular staff engagement surveys and we’re even looking to extend our new collaborative approach to our interactions with suppliers and partners. Ultimately it’s about using the right tools so we can get down to running our business – and Google Apps lets us do that.

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Quickoffice on your Android and iPhone is here

Posted by Mark Beaton, Quickoffice Product Manager

One of the easiest ways to share old files and collaborate with others is to convert them to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. However, not everyone you work with has gone Google yet. So to help, Google Apps for Business can already edit Microsoft Office files using Quickoffice on an iPad, and starting today they can do the same on iPhone and Android devices. From Word to Excel to Powerpoint, you can make quick edits at the airport or from the back of a taxi and save and share everything in Google Drive.

In addition to bringing Quickoffice to new devices, it’s also now easier to find and use your Drive files from within the Quickoffice app. Sign in with your Google Apps for Business account and your Drive folders view will now include Shared With Me, Starred, Recent and any subfolders.

And in case you didn’t know, iPad and iPhone users can open and edit Office files directly from the Drive app. Just open Drive and select the file, make edits using Quickoffice and save it back to Drive.

Google Apps for Business users can download Quickoffice right now from the App Store and Google Play. We hope this makes it easier to work from anywhere on any device.

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GHouse has gone Google

Posted Tim Luckow, Founder & Owner of GHouse

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Tim Luckow, founder of Boston-based GHouse, a record label, management and promotion company. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Photo by Christopher Evans, Boston Herald

One of the most enduring critiques of the record industry is, as Q-Tip rhymed in 1991, "Industry Rule No. 4,080: Record company people are shady." While some things have improved since then, there are still plenty of ways the industry could be better. I started GHouse, a Boston-based music label, management and booking agency, to make that change happen.

Transparency reigns supreme at GHouse: we’re dedicated to showing our artists what happens behind the scenes on the business side so they can focus on their music. We want them to know exactly how much they’re making from digital sales, how many people are streaming their songs online and what each venue contract really means. It’s good both for the artists and for us: we’ve doubled our profits quarter-over-quarter since the start of 2012.

Google Apps makes that transparency - and the vision I have for my business - possible. The foundation of this clear communication sits in Google Sheets. We create, share and constantly update a spreadsheet for each of our artists that tracks performance across multiple channels, from the number of times their songs are live-streamed on certain sites to how many tickets they’re selling for upcoming shows. That way, the band can hop into the spreadsheet at any given time and know how much they can expect in royalties and sales.

As we’ve grown, so has the geographic distribution of our bands. Thanks to Google+ Hangouts, it feels like we’re still in the same neighborhood. Instead of having to venture down the Eastern seaboard on a bus each week, we’ll catch up with them over video conferencing. That’s eight hours I spend focusing on my business rather than commuting along I-95.

Most importantly, Google Apps has helped me prove the legitimacy of the business side of GHouse to the investors, who are an increasingly essential part of the company’s future. I track everything about the business in Sheets, including quarterly distribution and tour numbers, divided by artists and labels. The investors I’ve shared these with love how all this information is centrally located, impeccably organized, updated in real-time and accessible to the team at any time, from any device.

Google Apps is truly the core of my business. It’s helped GHouse function as a company for four years without an office, whether we’re updating our artists’ performance spreadsheets over lattes at a coffee shop or doing last minute planning for a SXSW showcase in Austin. I’m able to run a record label like I think it should be run. To me, that’s real success.

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