Google has a reputation for building amazing products and hiring the smartest nerds around. However, you might be surprised to find out that most of the products & services is widely known for were actually companies Google bought and integrated. The graphic below visually shows details of the companies Google has acquired.

Research by Scores.org

Some of these acquisitions have been very strategically important while others haven’t really been used too well. The real lesson to take away from this post is that you can grow exponentially through acquisition if you do the work to integrate and own the purchased company/products. We’ve made some acquisitions recently and are hard at work integrating. I hope to share them with you soon.

For the last 2 weeks, I’ve had some family members over from New Zealand. My uncle had brought his Sony VAIO laptop that was a few years old that had grown painfully slow. The main problem it had was that it had almost no hard drive space left.

The first task was to figure out where all the space had gone. This can be a very time consuming task if you do it manually.

Fortunately, there’s a fantastic free software for windows called WinDirStat that will analyze your hard drive, identify where all your space is being used and show it to you with a breakdown by hard drive.

WinDirStat

To download it, visit http://windirstat.info

Volcanic has acquired the digital assets of SamK.ca & 85ideas.com. We’re going to continue supporting the users of these themes and will soon be announcing some exciting improvements to the themes, as part of a larger, more exciting announcement.

I’d like to welcome Sam, who will be working with us to improve the themes, support the users and grow our themes library. I’ve used his Pixel themes in the past because of it’s unique look and we’re excited about having his talent as part of our resources.

Melvin Ram, CEO
Volcanic Web Design Company

Message from Sam:

Hi everybody
Over the past few years, I’ve received a lot of questions about ways to enhance, customize and personalize the WordPress themes that I have been distributing. I’ve been thinking of ways to do so, and I think I’ve finally found a solution that will make everybody happy.

If you like the themes that I’ve been distributing, you’re going to love this.
In the last few months, I’ve been chatting a lot with Melvin Ram of Volcanic Web Design Company. Melvin has been working with WordPress for a while now (you might know Volcanic better for the WordPress backup plugin they released) and is now preparing something very interesting concerning WordPress themes. Something that should make the WordPress community blissfully happy.

I will be joining Volcanic in this adventure.
The themes available on samk.ca and 85ideas.com will very shortly be hosted on Volcanic’s website, where we will proceed with their development and enhancement.

What does this mean?
For users, it means that within a few weeks/months, the themes will have an overhaul. More options, better ways to customize them etc. More of everything! For me, it means that I’ll be working together with Melvin in doing so. For the themes and domains, it means that their copyrights and ownership are now part of Volcanic.

We will therefore proceed to redirecting the domains to Volcanic, starting August 2nd, 2010

See you on the other side!

Sam

WordPress 3.0 has just been released and it features a ton of really awesome features. In the video below, I walk through how setup WordPress 3 and enable the multisite mode, which allows you to have multiple WordPress websites powered by one installation. The setup is easy but can be tricky until you see it done. Enjoy!

Here’s the code you’ll need to copy/paste into your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

I was recently interviewed by Marty Lamers of AdvanceMe.com on how visual communication applies to web design and how to make the best use of your marketing efforts directed towards your website. The interview was summarized and turned into jam-packed article you can read online.

If you’re looking to build a business that can move your market to buy from you and move your people to deliver the best they can deliver, I strongly recommend you watch the Mixergy interview below with Simon Sinek.

Simon goes into depth about why inspiring people really gives your business a gigantic advantage over your competitors, why you should talk about the Why of your company and how to build a business that others can be passionate about.

PS: Download my mindmap of this interview to visually see the ideas in the interview.
PS2: Subscribe to the RSS feed to get future mindmaps, marketing tips and more.

Download mindmap for Simon Sinek interview on Mixergy

Click the image below to download my mindmap for the Boris Wertz interview on Mixergy. And be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to get future mindmaps, marketing tips and more.

Boris Wertz on Mixergy

Last night I listened to an interview of AJ Vaynerchuk on Mixergy about social media and engaging your fans and customers. It was packed with some good information so I turned it into a visual mind map that I could use to easily review the info in the future. You can download it by clicking the image below. Let me know if it was helpful for you.

Download The Mindmap PDF

Derek Sivers’ 3-minute TED talk via 37signals.

One of the things that bugs me when browsing the Internet is when websites ask stupid questions. Let’s start out by defining what a stupid question is. A question is stupid if it is irrelevant to my immediate task or if you already have the answer to the question. Let’s look at an example:

IBM’s Leveno website asks a stupid question as soon as I enter their website: Select a country/region.

There is no need to stop people and ask them where they are from. They already have the answer to this question. Using a technology called geolocation which is able to map a visitor to a geographic location, they can make a smart guess and automatically direct someone to the right version of the website while giving them the option to change to a different language/location once in the site.

For WordPress users, there are plugins that simplify this such as the IP2Location plugin. It allows you to customize your content based on the location of your visitor.

It’s lazy web design to ask users to answer questions to which you already know the answer. Do the work to make the users experience on your website frictionless.