Steve Barsh outlines a few surprisingly simple and effective ways to test your online market before planning and launching a final advertising campaign on Google AdWords. Beyond just helping you plan your campaign, testing your market with Google’s vast reach can help you effectively position your product or service.

Steve suggests orchestrating test campaigns with text that outline your product in various ways. Using your click-through rates, you can generate a basic level of insight into a potential market without spending valuable time and money on more advanced market research techniques.

Read it here: 5 Surprising Ways To De-Risk Your New Idea Using Google Adwords – Part 1 of 2

As fellow Apple-fans, our thoughts and prayers are with Steve while he recovers. Here’s hoping though, that Apple still continues to wow us this year (let’s just ignore Macworld).

-Aer

Smashing Magazine, as always, has an excellent post about a few web application elements that are not only trendy but extremely useful. Always good things to keep in mind if getting ahead is part of your game plan. (Click the image to view the article)

We would add something to this list: quiet tools; information and navigation elements that are crucial but unobtrusively present, giving you the feeling of polish:

Share, edit, delete, resize, timestamp functions are all there, but quietly there.

Netvibes does this really well with their highly customizable homepages. Their latest theme, Lumi, was just recently released. It’s a lot less flashy than their other themes, but mainly because of this new ‘quiet’ approach. Good on them.

At Aer, we have a few web applications in the pipeline. We’re excited to be in a time where tools and technologies are available to us to integrate these pinnacle-of-usability tools into enhancing the experience of our audiences and users.

-Aer

Getting the ball rolling is always the hardest part. The purpose of this blog is threefold:

• to share our insight and tools, because knowledge is a collective and collaborative enterprise;
• to bring attention to news that matters in our industry;
• and to announce company updates and job postings.

-Aer