Online search has already revolutionised the way many companies do business and how we as consumers find the things we need. Smart marketers have used search engine optimisation to ensure their website are easily found by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Yet it is amazing how many organisations are still lagging behind when it comes to search and missing valuable business.

Well now Google is launching an initiative that will see the smart marketers move further ahead and the laggards choking on dust: real-time search.

According to Mashable, Google real-time search updates as stuff is happening around the Web – for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query. It works on mobile too (at least iPhone and Android for now).

That’s not all, though. Google’s announced that they’ve inked partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace to pull in data in real-time. For Facebook, that means public Facebook Pages, and for MySpace, it means any stream data that is publicly available. This is on top of the partnership that the company announced with Twitter back in October.

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Excerpt of Report by Jeanne-Vida Douglas. BRW Magazine

Technologies once limited to only the biggest budgets are now affordable for businesses of any scale. Here are five of the most rewarding. 

Information technology has been the biggest driver of productivity since mechanisation took over from manual and animal labour at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Research from Finland suggests that access to simple data storage and processing computing facilities will increase the productivity of an average worked by 9 per cent a year; access to the internet will boost it by 14 per cent; mobile computing will increase worker productivity by 32 per cent.

Nonetheless, small businesses, which stand to gain the most from investing in It services, are often the most reticent to take advantage of the opportunities technology provides.

Unlike their larger counterparts, SMEs are often founded and run by specialists. The real estate agent, the carpenter and the distributor all know their trades, but don’t necessarily have the time to investigate emerging technologies or sit down to create a strategy for how a certain piece of software or hardware might make their businesses run more efficiently.

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Inbound marketing is like a magnet for your company

Basically there are two forms of marketing:

Outbound marketing- where you spend money trying to interrupt your potential customers with your message

Inbound marketing – where your potential customers find you and decide to find out more

Outbound marketing is like a shotgun. Inbound marketing is like a magnet.

You are probably already doing Outbound marketing, so here are 8 reasons why you should be turn your marketing Inbound in 2010:

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