Google Conf. Call Transcript Bits

Here’s the verbatim transcript from Seeking Alpha. There’s lots of interesting stuff in there, too much for me to post — on video, mobile, AdWords simplification, SMEs, TACs, international, partnership deals and so on. But here are some interesting bits:

A comment from Sergey Brin re all the product launches and integration those products:

What we are concerned about is that if we continue to develop so many new individual products that are all their assorted silos, you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them. And then you will have to search before you can do a search, in many cases.

Instead what we’re doing now is we are trying to create the horizontal functionality across a range of products, across media types and so forth. For example, I mentioned already Google Apps for Your Domain, and that in a sense is a product, but really it just combines a whole bunch of other offerings together, seamlessly integrated together so they can work well for an organization.

Another example which we haven’t gotten quite up and running yet, but when you want to share your documents or your pictures or your videos, it would be nice to have the exact same way to share all those things, to have all that functionality available across all of those media types in the identical way, rather than developing sort of one-offs for each of those products.

There’s a whole set of initiatives that’s now going on in the Company to make our product offerings simpler and more consistent for all of our users.

Jonathan Rosenberg on AdWords “Starter Edition”:

So basically the AdWords Starter Edition is an alternative version of AdWords, and it’s a lot easier for novices to get into search advertising. It’s got a much simpler UI. I’m not sure in terms of color how much I can offer you. We have been using it extensively. We have been tracking the percentage of advertisers who start with AdWords Starter Edition who then actually are successful in getting their work to manifest itself in the form of a working campaign; and who then continue to opt into our ad systems.

We are doing much, much better there on a percentage basis in terms of getting the advertiser signed up. So in that sense, it has been successful. We are also then getting a number of those advertisers using AdWords itself. So the take rates are strong.

Jonathan Rosenberg again, on Local:

On the local side, I think we have seen very strong organic growth in local searches. A lot of this is particularly fueled by Maps usage and the growth in the Maps’ API and Google Earth downloads. I think there is a very, very strong ecosystem that has developed there around our API.

When you think about that, Larry mentioned in his prepared remarks, I think, that 50% of small businesses believe they can use the Internet for their marketing and sales, but 50% of them don’t have websites. So the real big win there I think may come from some of the work that we’re doing with Intuit with the QuickBooks 2007 integration. That will make it very, very easy for businesses to host pages, create them, set up a site, and then generate ads.

But if you want to check some out, type polo store, New York City. You can also a look at some of the printable coupons that Larry mentioned if you type in “carwashes in Mountainview”.

Mark Rowen – Prudential

And how are some of the monetization efforts in local going? I know you were doing some testing with some retailers, putting their names in the bullets on the Maps and things. Can you talk about that at all?

Jonathan Rosenberg

It is a real portion of our revenue. I can’t give you specifics in terms of percentages, but it is one of the things that we are tracking very, very carefully and that is reasonably significant at this point.