Google: India could be cloud computing market

Google- world's largest search engine administrator- is pinning hopes on the growing cloud computing market in India with plans to double its engineering headcount in the country in next two years, a senior company official said here today.

According to Peeyush Ranjan, head of engineering, Google India, the IT major is gearing up for tapping the market though the market is said to be still in its nascent phase.

He said the company is keen on putting in place the technologies and its engineering team to cater to the market demands.

"We target the SMB market in India for cloud. The country like China is a very price-sensitive market and the small and medium businesses are showing interest in adopting the cloud model primarily due to the cost advantages at various points of its implementation," Ranjan said.

He said Google already has about 3 million clients on cloud and in India, the number is at about one lakh comprising major educational institutions, corporate and SMBs.

"Between Google Bangalore and Hyderabad, we have a team of about 300 engineers working on the cloud technologies. This is the largest cloud focused team for the company outside US Now, in order to cater to the growing market opportunities, we are preparing to hire hundreds of engineers into this team," he said.

He, however, refused to provide the exact number of employees to be hired.

Google Apps, the company's offering for the enterprises to move into the cloud, have about 25 million active users currently.

"We are signing about 3,000 businesses every day and we are approaching the market through about 1,000 authorised resellers," he said.

Source: "The Economic Times"

Google AdSense New User Interface

Google AdSense, the search giant’s ad serving application, is unleashing a brand new interface for its 2 million publishers. The AdSense interface is how publishers set up, manage, optimize and see reports on the ads on their sites.

AdSense actually has two products: one is AdSense for Content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside their content. The other is AdSense for Search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Although, we recently found out that the majority of AdSense publishers are using the content product.

A year ago, Google rolled out a private beta test for 30,000 publishers, but now is opening up the new interface to the public. The new UI will be available in more than 30 languages and in each of the 200+ countries where AdSense is available.

One of the main additions to the UI is that Google will present publishers with more data insights, including a number of new simple, graphical reporting tools. Publishers can run performance reports by ad type, ad size, ad unit, targeting type, and bid type for total earnings and other metrics, over custom date ranges. Google will also now provide detailed graphs of view impressions, clicks, and earnings.

Google has also made ad controls more powerful, allowing publishers to filter which ads and advertisers they want on their site. Publishers can now filter ads from specific advertisers, categories, and ad networks. And it’s easier to review and manage ads that have been placement-targeted and publishers can now search for ads in the ad review center by ad type, keyword, URL, or ad network, and choose to allow or block them.

And AdSense now make it easier to see earnings and payment information, to run reports, or make account changes.

Google will be steadily allowing publishers to access the new interface over the next few days. While publishers can continue to use the older version of the management interface, the search giant expects the new UI to be popular, especially with the new reporting analysis and controls.

Source: "CrunchBase"