Google Appointment Slots

Ever had to meet individually with a set of people in series? Me too. Have you found a way of doing it that wasn’t excruciatingly cumbersome?

Well, google may have just solved this problem for us. It’s a problem we know well.

Say we go to a real estate office to meet with 8 people. We’d like to meet with each person for 30mins. So in total we need to block out 4hrs. You email out to all the attendees the time frame, say between 12 & 4pm, in half hour sessions, and then you wait to hear back from everyone. Inevitably there will be conflicts and overlaps from the get go.

Everyone will email back to you at a different rate, no sooner has one slot filled, than another wishes to have that same slot, all before you have had time to update the latest available slots.

Introducing Google Appointment Slots

What google has done is added a new function called “Appointment Slots”. The way the process works is as follows:

• Open your google calendar
• Click Appointment Slots (shown as a New! feature)
• Create a block of time or split this large block of time into slots of however long you want

• then this calendar can either be embedded into your website, or you can create an appointment sign up page
• then when someone visits their calendar its overlaid with the appointment slots, where their preferred slot can be chosen, which then updates the remaining available slots

Google says that this feature will rolled out within the next few days.

Google Chrome | Cloud Print

If you haven’t already swapped over to google’s chrome browser, here’s another reason to tempt you away from Internet Explorer (that you are probably using to read this).

Imagine you are reading an article on your iphone at an open house and would love to have it print out at home. Or perhaps you are in Starbucks need to print out an email for when you get home, no problem, google cloud print gives you access to your printers from wherever you are.

Much of this week’s browser news has been about the release of the latest  update from Firefox. Firefox account for 30% of the browser market, IE has 45% and google chrome weighs in 3rd at 14% (according to slashgear). Of all of them chrome is the fastest growing.

We’ve been using chrome really since it’s initial beta launch and we haven’t looked back. Like trying anything new, it did feel a little different at first as we weaned ourselves of IE but now, having to check our work in IE is almost a painful experience.

Chrome, is a stunningly good browser. Browsers are the canvas on which we paint our websites, so we are constantly flipping between them to ensure consistency of our websites across all platforms. Chrome is fast, customizable and intuitive.

The rate of new features and improvements that come with it are equally impressive.

My current favorite is Google Cloud Print. What this allows you to do, is print to your printer regardless of your location (as long you are signed into your google account and using Chrome).

google cloud print lets you print to your printer regardless of where you are and what you are trying to print from, iphone, ipad, your laptop in starbucks…

When you are at home or the office your printer is right there, however, how many times have you wanted to print something for later when you are out and about. Or from your phone. Or from your ipad which requires either an air print enabled printer or a $6 app?

How to set up google Cloud Print

Sign into your google account, gmail etc, google apps for business etc.

1. Click the wrench icon at the top left
2. Choose options
3. Click under the hood, scroll down to google cloud print and click sign in to google cloud print.
4. Sign in (again, I know, I know, but it’s google’s thang) and you should see a confirmation page.
5. If you want edit down the list of printer to print to click Manage Print Settings, then click Printers  and from there you can delete any printers you don’t want to show up.

Here are the google support docs

New limeyboy.com Logo?(QR code)

Ok, so I admit it, I love pixel graphics. I love bar codes too. I don’t what it is about them that is just graphically fascinating, the negative space perhaps? We’ve seen these newer QR codes on our UPS & FedEx packages that come to the office from time to time and really liked them, and now they seem to be coming the main stream.

Although they are very pleasing to my human eye, they are actually designed to be read by your mobile device (formerly known as a telephone). Your phone scans the image, like the bar code reader in the grocery store, and your phone’s browser will then take you a predetermined website address…such as your listing.

Recently, very recently, we have started hearing requests from real estate agents we work with about incorporating them into their marketing.

The suggestion is that you place this on your yard sign for example and folks scan it, and then are taken to your site.

All sounds good, although this is predicated upon your potential client having downloaded the app onto their “device formerly known as a telephone” so that they can read this and make sense out of it.

At the moment, this is something that the usual gang of tech-comfy-agents, want to do, who knows if it will hit mainstream.

For me though, this really reminds me of a device that we were sent during the dot-com madness. It was an additional mouse which sat your your desk, (which tragically looked like a mouse of the furry nature), and it was essentially a bar code reader. You would bring your bar codes to your desk, and then scan them to be taken to the company’s website. Having gone through the kitchen pantry shelves, the novelty wore off pretty fast.

For me, using the phone’s GPS location software to pin point you outside a home for sale is a much more likely avenue for the future, than this method.

Are your client’s asking you about this?