Converting AdWords to use my Google Account

Today when I logged in to check on my AdWords traffic from the past few days, I was prompted with a welcomed surprise. Finally, I could use my Google Account now with the Google AdWords service. This was something I had been waiting to use for almost a year instead of having two separate Google passwords.

I went through the process, but it was not perfect!

I have had my AdSense account since before the integration was started, in effect creating two separate logins wiht different passwords and different password requirements. Honestly, a big pain until now.

First, upon logging in -- I was prompted for the opportunity to convert my current Google AdWords login to a Google Accounts login. I jumped at the chance and walked through the wizard. One of the options, which was important to me is that I am not the only person using my AdWords account. Therefore it would allow me to setup multiple Google acocunts with the appropriate permissions. I walked through the rest of the wizard and effectively assigned my AdWords account to my Google Acocunt which hosts my other services like GMAIL, Picasa, Blogger, Google Analytics, and more.

Just as promised, I was taken to the login screen and I was able to login using my Google Account instead of my AdSense account -- great news. The only problem? I was never prompted or allowed to give other accounts access to my AdWords account -- a big problem. After a little investigation, I could not find anything under account access or any other configurations for Google AdWords. It appears to be missing from the options.

For most people it is probably not a big deal. However, where I had previously been willing to have a shared account for Google AdWords with one login, I am not for my entire Google Account. This presents a little predicament until it gets resolved.

Google AdWords, how about it? Have you had a better or different experience that is working for you? Has Google already fixed it? Let me know with a comment.

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Working! Blackberry 8800 GPS Internationally in India

Great news to report on my recent trip to India in terms of the GPS working internationally on my Blackberry 8800 (Other models include the 8820, & 8830). If you recall from my trip back in July, I tried several times -- but could never get an accurate GPS signal in either Germany or India. After the success I had in Cancun, Mexico -- I decided it was worth another try in India to get some sort of GPS signal reception.

This time, after some fiddling with -- I was able to get the GPS to work. However, it was not easy...the good news is that once I finally located the GPS signal, it worked consistently.

When I walked off the plane, I immediately had phone service in Germany (Vodafone) and India (Air-Tel) along with data service. But GPS did not work immediately in either location.

How did I get it to work?

Well, the famous Blackberry 3-finger salute. A reset of the entire device by simultaneously holding down ALT+CAP+DEL seemed to resolve the issue. After approximately one minute for the device to reset, it started to pick up the necessary GPS signals from the satellite and I was live in India!

I ended up using the GPS device with Google Maps for the majority of the trip in Bangalore. While I was not driving, it gave me a much better perspective of where I was in the city of Bangalore. For how chaotic the city was -- the Google maps were very detailed, even down to many of the side or unlabled roads. This makes it easy to understand where you are in the city. An added benefit of the mapping in Bangalore, India is that it includes a number of notable sites as icons on the maps such as temples, parks and other places of note. Great, especially if you are out sight-seeing.

In some of the more remote areas of the country such as Coimbatore, the maps are no where near as developed. Some of the main routes into and out of the cities are included, but not a lot of the streets around town.

Still, it was a great relief to get ths Blackberry 8800's GPS working in India. It only took me two trips. If you are running into any problems with your GPS internationally, I would recommend the ALT+CAP+DEL 3-finger salute a try before you get too frustrated!

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iPhone & GMAIL: Ashley Finally Got her IMAP Access

It took longer than Google said it would. Today - Saturday, November 3rd Ashley finally had the magical "Forwarding and POP3/IMAP" tab show up in her GMAIL properties which could start the process of MAPI enabling he iPhone for the GMAIL account. Interestingly, IMAP was automatically enabled without any additional changes or selections being made.

Ashley had been waiting for this for awhile – mainly because she was sick of having to manage her GMAIL e-mail in two separate places. Once in her iPhone and then again through her web browser. In the end it took Google over “about a week” (here) they suggested – more like 10 days, but who is counting anyways?

We initially attempted to follow the instructions here, but there is one huge item to get right that is not mentioned -- and we missed this important key initially. If you had your iPhone setup to use the wizard based email application for GMAIL, you are not presented with an option to change between POP3 / IMAP or other types of connectivity.

Rather, you must DELETE your current GMAIL account on your Apple iPhone and then go through the standard (non-AOL, Hotmail, or Gmail) account addition process to have the option of selecting the right type of connectivity (IMAP) and complete the configuration process.

Luckily, once we got through the initial setup confusion, the rest of the configuration was very straight forward. Not to mention that article over at 5thirtyone.com has some great advice and tips for making Gmail more effective with all the tagging, archiving, and sorting that you need.

Good luck and enjoy, Ashley is!

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GMAIL MAPI Service, How much longer?

While I do not read the Google Blog every day, I did catch that Google is going to offer IMAP functionality for Google's mail application, GMAIL on Wednesday.

I had been waiting anxiously for my account to change, but thus far no dice. No changes for Ashley as well. Both of our accounts still says, "Forwarding and POP" instead of the Holy Grail of "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" once it will be enabled.



For Ashley, this has been a frustration. With her Apple iPhone, the only option is POP3 which is pretty annoying. She's mentioned a few times how annoying it is to delete the emails first on her iPhone and then have to also delete them on gmail. This will all come to an end very quickly.

Looks like it will take up to a week to get the IMAP on our GMAIL, according to Google. Also, thanks to Greg Hughes' Blog, I already have a link to get the iPhone setup on IMAP functionality with GMAIL quickly.

I'm with Greg, it is hard to be patient and keep waiting at this point. At least for now, the GMAIL application on my Blackberry 8800 works great.

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Blogger Languages – A Funny Thing Happened Today

I wonder if Google & Blogger are too smart for themselves. The reason that I wonder is that a very funny thing happened today in Cancun, Mexico. When I signed it to catch up on a couple of postings – I logged into Blogger like I normally do. However, something very strange happened. Upon completion of the auto-login to the Google account things were completely different.

How different were they? Not too much, just that – the language on everything was now Spanish rather than English. Apparently, Google’s Blogger decided to detect that my IP address was coming from a location here in Cancun, Mexico and reacted to that. Every link and instructional information was now in Spanish on my Dashboard – without evening asking me if that was my choice. Very odd behavior.

Furthermore, it took me a few seconds to find and realize where the I could change the setting for language because 1) I am not completely fluent in Spanish anymore, and 2) I have never really looked for our cared about the languages setting. However, I hit the drop-down for language and found “Ingles – English” and everything went back to normal.

Here’s the odd part, I have logged into Blogger from several different countries including Germany and India and have not had this behavior. I actually suggest that the automatic language detection and changing for someone who already has a Google and a Blogger account that is set to English is a bad idea and bad user experience.

I guess I need to report this to the folks at Blogger as a bug that needs to get fixed.

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Google Street View or Google Peeping Tom?

The latest buzz from Google the last 24 hours or so has been in regards to their new ‘Street View’ software that they have now integrated into Google Maps. Now, not only can you get maps, directions, and satellite imagery – but you can get a street level view of what is happening or what a particular area looks like. (As of Thursday, May 31st)

Since the announcement, there has been a lot of concern coming from privacy advocates and other sources. Some mentioned that you could see some person picking their nose in San Francisco, or seeing some other folks entering an adult store in another city. With the amount of uproar initially, one would think that Google was capturing this imagery in real-time and allowing folks to watch or effectively become peeping Toms in cities already identified by it.

So, curious to the functionality being offered – I decided to take a look at Google’s Street View functionality in their Google Maps application. Given that I have been spending a lot of time up at our (Intuit) Mountain View office, I took a couple of quick looks around the city of Mountain View for the familiar sites.

First there is the building where I have been spending a lot of time, Mountain View – 3.



Then there is the hotel I have been staying, but it is on the outskirts of Mountain View and not yet covered by the maps – just a little too far down on El Camino Real.

The last item I checked was the Trader Vic’s just a little farther down on El Camino Real and was able to locate it.



The overall impression is that the footage is static and benign. While I am sure there are some areas that people will find that are questionable, Google took great care to contact organizations in the cities where they captured imagery to insure victims of abuse or people in similar situations were no exposed – which is very important. A previous try by Amazon’s A9 did not take such precautions and got them in hot water.

What Google did was send camera vans to the locations throughout the cities where they have the video imagery supported and they captured the images over time. Given the vast areas of scenery covered, I wonder what Street View Mashups we should expect to see in the coming weeks.

Oh yeah, and did you know Microsoft has a similar service available? Neither did I!

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Blackberry 8800 Google Mobile Maps (GMM) with GPS Installation Guide

As I wrote about last weekend, Google recently launch their Google Mobile Maps (GMM) with GPS (Global Positioning System) access for the Blackberry 8800 Series for RIM devices (8800, 8830). Since that time I have both installed and used the service within Google Maps. For a beta, its pretty impressive. I will be publishing my overall thoughts in the next few days, however this is the installation or how-to guide for the Google Mobile Maps for your Blackberry 8800 Series device.

Here is the step-by-step:
1. Browse on your Blackberry (or Opera Mini) browser to http://www.google.com/gmm.



2. Click on the 'Download Google Maps' link for the Blackberry 8800.



3. Click on the 'Download' button in order to download Google Maps version 1.5.2, it is approximately 200k in size and should take less than a minute to download on the Cingular EDGE network.



4. Downloading starts and completes in less than a minute.



5. Your Blackberry 8800 Series device will give the message "This application does not contain a signature. It might not be from a trusted source. Do you want to proceed?" Click 'Yes' to continue.



6. The application installer will return the message "The application was successfully installed." Click on the 'OK' or 'Run' button.



7. Upon starting up the Google Maps application, it will prompt you by saying "The application gmaps8800_v4_2_L1 requested access to your GPS location information. Do you wish to grant access?" This is required in order for the GPS to work with GMM. If you do not want the application to ask you every time you use it, check the "Don't ask this again" checkbox and click on "Yes."



8. Next, the application will attempt to make HTTP connections to Google Mobile Maps (GMM). You will be prompted with "The application Google Maps has requested a http connection www.google.com." Check both boxes if you do not want to be prompted again and then click on "Allow Connection."



9. First page of the terms and conditions. Read, scroll to the bottom and click on "More."



10. Second page of terms and conditions. Read, click menu or trackball and select accept.



11. Congratulations, installation and setup are completed. You will know it is working properly when you see the "Updating location" in the upper right hand corner and Google will allow you to zoom to your location by hitting the zero or "0" key.

Guide, Manual, Installation, Install, Tutorial, Step-by-Step, How to, Instructions

This guide is compatible with or the compatibility includes: BlackBerry 8800 and Blackberry 8830.

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Blackberry 8800 - Google Mobile Maps and GPS Now Available!

Wow, Google now has GPS enabled Google Maps for Mobile (GMM) available for the Blackberry 8800 smartphone for Cingular! I had recently mentioned in an initial installation of Google Mobile that I thought it was simply a matter of time until Google would figure it out and build the software to access the internal GPS in the Blackberry 8800 mobile phone.

Ironically, I had just recently download and installed TeleNav for Blackberry with the free 30-day trial that comes with it -- not to mention a pending post. Now, I will need to give the Google Maps for Mobile with GPS a try and see see how it goes. This is very exciting and you can be sure I will be trying it out and reporting back soon!

Here are the details from Google:

You Are Here — Even when you're lost, you'll always know where you are. Your location appears on the map itself, and moves as you do (you're the blue dot ).

Where's the nearest... — Find what's around you without entering your local information. Don't know the zip code of an area? No problem. Maps will look up listings around you, so you can get that cup of coffee, late-night pizza, or last-minute bouquet.

Is there traffic up ahead? — Plan your route in advance with traffic updates + GPS. See where traffic starts relative to your current location, and avoid delays.

How do I get there from where I am? — Get directions to where you're going without needing to type in your local info. Save time (and avoid sore thumbs).

In all, sounds like a very exciting and competitive package. I wonder if there is a nice voice that can be used to direct you as well?

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