Posted by Simon Corbett, Founder & Managing Director, Jargon PR

Editor's note: This week we’re featuring news, stories and updates about our vibrant partner community as we host more than 700 partners for our second annual Global Partner Summit. Today, we hear from Simon Corbett, Founder & Managing Director of Jargon PR, based outside London. Keep an eye on this blog, our Google+ page and visit our program site for more information on the Google Apps Reseller Program.

I worked at a few large PR companies for a decade before starting my own shop. I saw an opportunity for a small, nimble company to help businesses in the tech industry, and launched Jargon PR in a converted country barn outside London in 2008. Since then, we’ve grown to 12 people, added an office in the U.S. and even netted a few awards along the way.

The PR industry is extremely competitive, and we’re always looking for ways to differentiate ourselves. A few years back, we realized there was an opportunity to do just that with Google Apps. Most of us were using Gmail at home and wanted to be able to create, share and collaborate on documents in real-time at work, too.

There was one big, hairy obstacle in the way: we used Microsoft Outlook, worked on multiple devices and operating systems, and I had no idea how to switch to Google. How would this work if I was using a MacBook Air and another team member was on a PC? We needed someone to walk us through the process, hold our hand and make sure our work didn’t skip a beat along the way.

That’s where Ancoris came in (and saved the day). I’d researched online to learn more about Google Apps Partners, and, after realizing Ancoris were just down the road from us, set up a meeting. The team had done dozens of these migrations, both large and small, and talked us through the process from start to finish, addressing each of my concerns. They took the ambiguity and fear out of the switch. A few meetings later, our Ancoris team came to our office to make sure everything went smoothly, and we were up and running in less than a day. It was quick — no drama, no stress.

Now, gone are the old fashioned days of bad, hit-your-head-on-the-desk technology. No more asking someone to email the latest version of a document, and having to wait for different time zones to wake up to share them. We do all our work on shared Google Docs, so everyone has access to the most up-to-date information and can collaborate in real-time, whether they’re in London or California in somewhere in between. I can open a draft press release from the Drive app on my mobile phone while I’m sitting with my clients at the British Library’s Business & IP Centre. And as the company grows, it takes 30 seconds to set up a new employee with an Apps account, no training required — they’re already using it at home, so using it at work is an organic experience.

Our partnership with Ancoris has continued far past the migration, too. They send us email newsletters with product updates and new features. They’re accessible on chat and via a tech hotline for quick, one-off questions. And because they’re local, they’re never too far away for an in-person visit. Moving to Google Apps, and doing it with the help of a great partner, has been a game changer for our business.

Posted by Joseph Kopser, Co-Founder and CEO at RideScout

Editor's note: Today, we hear from Joseph Kopser, Army Veteran, Bronze Star recipient as well as Co-Founder and CEO at RideScout, a mobile app that aims to streamline transportation by showing real-time information on public, private and social options in one single view. See what other companies that have gone Google have to say.

Several years ago, I was on active duty in the Army, serving as Special Assistant to Army 4-Star Chief of Staff General George W. Casey, Jr. at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. I lived less than 10 miles from my office and everyday I faced the question, “what’s the best way to get there?” I could take the bus, I could carpool, I could walk, and I could even take a taxi, but there wasn’t one service that helped me pick my best option for that particular day. Furthermore, I saw so many people, likely going to the same place as me, with four empty seats in their vehicles.

My frustrations spurred a discussion with a few Army buddies of mine, and in 2011, Craig Cummings and I decided to do something about it. Together we launched RideScout, a mobile app that helps people figure out the fastest and most cost-efficient way to get from one place to another. It takes real-time information and schedules on cabs, buses, trains, ride shares, and emerging services like car2go and Sidecar and pulls it into Google Maps so people can easily compare the options. Not only does RideScout help people get where they need to be faster, but it also reduces the number of cars on the road, increasing transportation efficiency and reducing harm to our planet.

Soon after RideScout got off the ground, I moved to Austin to teach leadership and military strategy at the University of Texas. Craig and I realized we needed a platform to help us collaborate and build the company collectively, despite the physical distance between us. We chose Google Apps from the get-go because its cloud-based platform allowed us to do exactly that. Now, RideScout has employees in Austin, D.C., and contractors in other cities working all hours spread across different time zones. We also use a lot of tablets and portable laptops, so storing everything in the cloud and being able to access it — regardless of our device — is essential.

Google Docs has been a crucial tool for the team, especially the product developers as we’ve gone through our app development iterations. We hold dozens of quick brainstorm sessions every week to go over product requirements and designs, and with Docs we can stay in sync throughout the process because we’re all looking at the same information at the same time. As we matured, we started seeing the same kind of collaboration happen in Presentations, and even with Drawings — they all became living documents with people commenting and editing simultaneously. I think of Docs and Spreadsheets as whiteboards, where RideScout employees can throw out ideas and iterate on them as a team in real time.

Security also was an important consideration for us. We knew we wanted a cloud solution from the beginning, and Google Apps is a platform we could trust to keep our information safe. Because we don’t have to maintain our own servers, it’s just one less thing we have to worry about. And as a startup, taking something off your list of things to worry about is fantastic.

RideScout is scaling quickly. In July we had seven employees and we’ve more than doubled since then. The ability to add a new employee to the system in five minutes or less is extremely important when we’re working on limited resources and stretched to the max to get the product to market. With Apps we’ve got a platform that scales with us, so as we grow and expand to new markets, our employees can worry less about the process of sharing work and focus more on building a great product.

Posted by Jonathan Hudgins, Co-Founder and CEO, Flying Scarfs

Editor's note: This Veterans Day, we’re celebrating our veteran’s contributions and successes as entrepreneurs, by highlighting a handful of the 3.7 million businesses run by veterans in the U.S. Today’s guest blogger is Jonathan Hudgins, Co-Founder and CEO of Flying Scarfs, an enterprise that empowers partners in developing countries to flourish in the global economy.

When I deployed to Afghanistan with the 335th Fighter Squadron in the summer of 2011, I didn’t expect to return with an idea for a nonprofit, much less a plan for making it a reality within months of getting home. But that’s exactly what happened over the 6 month stint. During my time in Afghanistan, I spent days exploring the local Bagram bazaar with three of my fellow Air Force Officers and future co-founders, Joseph Stenger, Joshua Carroll and Ryan Bodenheimer. We befriended a merchant who was selling scarves made by widows in the area, then giving the proceeds back to the women so they could educate and support themselves. These women typically didn’t have much access to capital or jobs, so this gave them some financial stability — and with, a stronger political voice.

Flying Scarfs Team

As our deployment came to an end, we realized there was an opportunity to stay connected with and support the Bagram community by selling their scarves back in the U.S. and sending the proceeds back to the women who made them. By sharing their creations with a broader audience, we could stay connected with the community while also helping the artisans achieve economic success and stability. That’s how Flying Scarfs got started. We had the idea, the business plan, the connections in Afghanistan, and even a retail store, my parents’ shop in North Carolina, to sell our first batch of scarves — the next step was finding a tool to connect the dots. Google Apps was our answer from day one: we could appear professional right off the bat with our @flyingscarfs.com email, and with the cloud-based storage and email, we didn’t even need an office. That was essential at the time, since Joey, Josh and Ryan were still on active duty and we were all in different locations. With Google Apps, we could still stay connected and up to speed no matter where we were.

Two years later, we’re grown up and are even more spread out, but with Google Apps, we’re always on the same page, whether it’s on Gmail, Docs or Spreadsheets. Our CFO, for example, keeps a master financial spreadsheet that gives the rest of the team visibility into our expenditures, costs, sales and margins. We review it each quarter, but if an odd charge shows up at any point, he can ping us and ask if we know where it came from. We can just add details to the Notes column in the spreadsheet, and voila, everyone else knows where it came from.

Hangouts have become an equally integral part in keeping the team up-to-date on the latest updates and developments, both on a regular basis and for ad hoc meetings. When ABC World News published a piece about us in August, for example, our daily website traffic suddenly increased by 100 times our average and our order requests from our online store shot up. We were all over the place — our CFO was in Chicago, Ryan was in Idaho, Josh was in DC, and the rest of us were in North Carolina — but by jumping on a Hangout, we were able to outline a clear plan for handling the sudden activity. A phone call doesn’t always do the trick when you’re trying to replicate the kind of brainstorming you’re able to do when you’re together in a room, while a Hangout was exactly what we needed to plan our immediate next steps.

Using Google Apps lets us to focus more on what matters to us: empowering artisans across the world. And since we’re not tied to a single desktop computer or physical office, we’ve even been able to add new partners in Kenya and Haiti and seamlessly start selling their products back in the U.S. Because that’s what it’s all about - sharing the beautiful work of craftspeople with a wider audience, so they can support themselves economically. That’s what we believe in.

Posted by Derek Bennett, former Army Captain and Chief of Staff at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA)

Editor's note: This Veterans Day, we’re celebrating our veteran’s contributions and successes as entrepreneurs, by highlighting a handful of the 3.7 million businesses run by veterans in the U.S. Today, we hear from Derek Bennett, former Army Captain and Chief of Staff at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).

When Paul Rieckhoff returned to the U.S. after serving in Iraq as an Army First Lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader, he couldn’t help but notice two things: how difficult the return to civilian life could be, and how important it was for veterans to join the national dialogue in the media and on the ground. Starting IAVA was his way of doing something about it - and it has accomplished quite a bit since its inception in 2004. IAVA is the country's first and largest organization dedicated to supporting and representing new veterans and their families, with nearly 300,000 members and supporters. And we’re as dedicated as ever to our original mission: helping veterans understand the benefits available to them, ensuring their voices are heard in mainstream media, and giving them a safe community to ask questions and get advice from fellow vets.

A lot of amazing people have helped us get where we are now - a lot of selfless veterans, generous civilians and dedicated employees. But we also couldn’t have done it without some help from technology like Google Apps. We’re a mobile company: we have offices in New York and Washington, D.C., but often travel or work from home, and our volunteers come from all over the country, so we have a pretty flexible work policy. Since Apps allows us to access our email and documents from anywhere, whether on our laptops at home or the mobile Drive app on our tablets, our teams can get their work done whenever and wherever they need.

Google Spreadsheets have completely revolutionized our volunteer signup process at recruitment events. Instead of having people sign a piece of paper, entering their names on a spreadsheet, and emailing the new version around, we have our team take tablets into the field and enter information directly into a Google spreadsheet. That way, we know everything is up-to-date at any given moment, not to mention we save time and minimize the risk of typos or forgotten updates.

While Spreadsheets help us bring in new volunteers more efficiently, Hangouts make it possible to build camaraderie between our team and those volunteers. We recently launched Squad Leaders, a program where IAVA ambassadors host barbeques, set up networking events and provide professional mentorship for vets in their local communities. We want to make sure our Squad Leaders feel as connected to the core IAVA team as they do with the vets in their neighborhoods, and Hangouts help make that happen. We use them to conduct Squad Leader training sessions and to run regular check-ins, so our ambassadors feel personal connections with a program that’s otherwise geographically spread out.

Veterans are service leaders, entrepreneurs, teachers, students, parents and politicians. IAVA’s mission is to make sure they’re all those things and everything else they want to be - that they feel fully supported and represented as citizens. Our veterans have already committed so much to their country by they time they return home that they should feel empowered to accomplish even more in the years ahead. With 2.6 million veterans, it’s no easy feat, but with the help of a growing team of employees and supporters, I think we’re off to a pretty good start.

Posted by Rob Dyer, Marine Corps Aviation Officer and Founder and CEO of RuckPack

Editor's note: This Veterans Day, we’re celebrating our veterans' contributions and successes as entrepreneurs, by highlighting a handful of the 3.7 million businesses run by veterans in the U.S. Today, we hear from Rob Dyer, active duty Marine Corps Aviation Officer and Founder and CEO of RuckPack, a peak performance nutrition shot.

The idea for RuckPack was born while I was deployed to Afghanistan with Marine Special Operations Command. While at camp we’d talk about how great it would be to start a company together when we got home — we could keep the gang together and hire other veterans to build up the team. We even came up with a business idea: a nutrition shot with all the vitamins and minerals to keep guys in our position healthy and focused through the long, tough missions. And before we knew it, we had the early makings of RuckPack.

We tried to get the company up and running when we got back from Afghanistan, but it was hard with everyone spread out all over the country. I told a Marine buddy of mine about the business plan and some of the challenges I was facing. He told me the first step to getting the company off the ground was to start using Google Apps for Business. The majority of our team is still on active duty, myself included, but wherever we are, we're able to stay connected using Google Apps. That's helped us release two flavors of our nutrition shot that are being sold at stores and shipped to soldiers abroad.

Google Apps is the technological backbone to RuckPack — it’s what keeps our 12-person, multi-million dollar virtual operation running without an office. Hangouts keep us connected, whether it’s a conversation about a website change or a celebration of a big sale with a retail distributor. After spending day and night with these guys in the military, seeing their faces on a Hangout makes it feel like we’ve still got the gang together.

Google Docs and Drive help us keep track of and centralize our business plans and documents. Any time we get on a call with an investor, think of a topic for a blog post, or request content changes to the website, we open a Doc and share it with the appropriate people. That way, we can all keep tabs on our work, whether we’re checking in from Japan, where one of our teammates is stationed, or from Annapolis, where I live and teach at the Naval Academy.

Today, we launched our Veteran Distributor Program (VDP), which allows any U.S. veteran to join our sales force and receive a commission on any RuckPack product they sell. Our team knew from the start that we wanted to help fellow veterans; this was our way of expanding it beyond the core team. The concept of the VDP was launched and refined in a Google Doc, with each person on the team contributing with additions and comments along the way. We don’t have to be in a room together to get a great idea off the ground. We just needed a shared Google doc.

There's nothing like the bond I felt with the guys I was deployed with. There was a sense of team and trust among us that we all missed when we got back home. What's great about RuckPack is that we’ve been able to revive that same bond and camaraderie. Google Apps has helped us keep that sense of working towards a common goal — only now that goal is building a great business that helps the guys still out there serving our country.