There’s a useful roundup of Google Apps over on the Official Google website.

“As you might have heard recently, in addition to search and advertising, we’re focused on a third key area of innovation: powerful applications that run on the web and that let you collaborate and communicate in new ways.”

They now offer email, calendaring, document creation and collaboration services for individuals, and with Google Apps, businesses, schools and other organizations can “customize these tools and use them as their own internal systems”.

It seems more than 100,000 organizations of all sizes have started using Google Apps to deliver “powerful services to employees, students and members”. The great advantage is that there’s no hardware or software to install or maintain.

The site gives info clicks for four institutional categories : small business, enterprise, school, and Family and Group.

Read the rest of the piece.

A new advertising system has been announced by Google. Instead of its now traditional cost-per-click arrangement centered around Adsense and AdWords, the company has introduced “Pay-Per-Action — Pay only for actions that you define”.

“… you’ll create an ad and define the action that you want a user to perform when they visit your site, such as signing up for your newsletter or purchasing a product. Then you’ll set the amount that you’re willing to pay when this action is completed.”

The point of the procedure is that you’ll only pay when a user clicks on your ad, visits your site, and completes your desired action.

Pay-per-action ads complement your current campaigns by providing a new pricing model that extends your reach and allows you to pay only when a defined action is completed on your site. This beta feature is currently available to AdWords advertisers in the United States on a limited basis as part of our beta test. Read below to find out more.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch thinks the new ad system will crunch the affiliate middlemen. “Affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. These networks also operate on a cost-per-action basis, mostly with online retailers. Even though some of them have scale, they will not have the ability to compete with Google on sheer size of network.”

That remains to be seen, but no-one can fault Google’s determination to remain in the forefront of internet advertising.

Google today announced Apps Premier, its subscription package of premium, hosted business applications in direct competition with Microsoft.

For $50 (£26) a year per user, Google Apps Premier Edition will offer business customers a number of web-based applications including email, word processor and spreadsheet. It will compete with Microsoft Office’s desktop-based Word and Excel.

A Microsoft spokesman downplayed the launch, claiming online services such as Google’s are “not alone in altering today’s technology industry. Productivity applications represent a very competitive space in which more than 450 million users around the world have consistently chosen Microsoft.”

The Times (London) reports : “Microsoft’s Business Division, which includes Office, accounted for $3.5 billion of the group’s revenues of $12.5 billion in the latest reported quarter, making it the largest source of sales. However, industry insiders say that Google has been quietly preparing for months to tap Microsoft’s cash-cow. Keen to supplement its lucrative search business, Google has built massive data-storage plants, thought to be years ahead of those so far developed by Microsoft and IBM.”

This “cloud” is now being used to host both software and data, while the internet becomes ever more the operating system.

Tom Austin, of Gartner, the technology analysts, said: “This constitutes a real threat to Microsoft’s business model. Eventually, it will have to switch from limited-use licences to software as a service. That will require a fundamental reengineering.”

Despite investing heavily in Office 2007, which was released earlier this month and which, like its predecessors, is anchored firmly to the PC, Microsoft has earmarked $2 billion to develop its own data centres.

The company added that it is now partnering other businesses “to capitalise on emerging services, such as advertising-based software, subscription or on-demand software”.

Most of the Premier Edition components are already available free. “From today, for the first time, it will charge for “white label” tools that carry its customers’ brands, so that e-mail addresses can be in the name of the client company.”

Google Future will be receiving a complete redesign and makeover in the next week or two. Apart from upgrading to Wordpress 2.1, the latest version, it will receive a brand new designer styling (pictured) by Thord Hedengen.

As this site is affiliated to our 21st-Century Phi network magazine, the colours will be blue based but similar in styling to the example shown above.

There may be some disruption to service while this work is carried out, and fresh posts will be delayed for a few days.