Many of our posts here on ReadWriteStart offer tips on launching your startup and insights on how to become a successful entrepreneur.

But as the saying goes, hindsight is often 20/20, and in that spirit we offer a round up of lessons learned from the month of April.

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Build Customers, Not Just Products: Devver co-founder Ben Brincherhoff describes the dangers of emphasizing product development at the expense of customer development.

Respond Promptly to a PR Crisis: Blippy‘s response to a leak of customers’ credit card information points to the importance of responding quickly and correctly to potential public relations disasters.

Pay Attention to the Technical and the Business Aspects: Startups need to balance both the technical and business sides, as WePay co-founder Rich Aberman advises.

Retain Customer Trust: Responding to ongoing allegations about improprieties, Yelp lifted the veil on its review system, demonstrating the importance in being transparent and open in order to maintain both customer trust and company reputation.

Know When to Veer Off-Course: As Spark Capital” partner Bijan Sabet argues, it’s important to be nimble and know when to divert from the project roadmap.

Hire the Right Execs: This post looks at Ben Horowitz’s thoughts on how startups can be sure to put the right executives in place.

Have an Exit Strategy: Although the speculation continues about whether or not Foursquare plans to sell, discussions between the popular location-based service and Yahoo serve as a reminder that having an exit strategy can help you shape the direction of your business.

Although these posts document realizations entrepreneurs have had in hindsight, hopefully other entrepreneurs can learn from these lessons and use them to be better equipped for the future.

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How can you tell a 1973 Batard Montrachet from a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill? Or a ’45 Mouton-Rothschild from a box of Franzia? Well, you could taste the difference, presumably. But what if you had to discern between the ’45 and one of the top years of the Eighties? Few could. And while the difference might be taste, it certainly is money.

People collect wines for a number of reasons, but one of the top ones is the fact that a good wine appreciates. If a counterfeiter is good at selling one similar wine as another it can make the difference between $2000 and $200,000. Now some wineries are using RFID to hold the counterfeiters at bay.

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In the wake of junk bonds, the “irrational exuberance” of the Internet and the housing boom, all now nothing more than echoes of collapse, the wine bubble is appealing to the skeezy, of which the wine world has no paucity.

So some wineries, like Vinyard 29 in Napa, California, are using small RFID tags, distinct radio frequency signatures buried in the labels. With smart phones gaining more muscle, users can often select one with an RFID reader built in. With such a phone, a consumer can just “phone up” a bottle prior to buying to make sure it’s legitimate.

RFID tagging in wine started at least as early as 2004. In 2005, Italy’s Arnaldo Caprai wineries began using the SmartCorq system. Now, the transmitters can fit in labels and foil.

Security is not the only use for RFID in the wine business.

eProvenance uses RFID to keep a coherent track of wines as they travel, often globally, from vintner to buyer, ensuring the wine’s safety, but also ensuring it has been kept at ideal temperatures during its voyage.

Bàcaro, a high-end retailer, has installed an RFID reader in a table at their Zurich airport kiosk. The customer places a bottle on a table. Its RFID tag is scanned and the scanner instructs an adjacent screen to show information on the wine’s region, vinyard and taste.

Things that go for a dime a dozen rarely serve as the proving ground for experiments with technology. But anything as valuable, easily counterfeited and constantly mobile as wine is going to attract many such experiments. RFID seems one that has gained significant purchase in that community.

If robots ever do take over the world, you can look forward to an illustrated tour through the wine-making regions of the Mosel valley. Then, of course, well, it’s kill, crush, destroy time, isn’t it?

Top photo by Darin Barry
Bottom photo by jsgphoto

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Here on ReadWriteStart we are often providing resources and tips for young companies looking to raise funding from venture capitals and angel investors. This week’s recommendation for our Weekend Reading series, <emMoney Magnet: How to Attract Investors to Your Business by Jacoline Loewen, is a book aimed at helping entrepreneurs learn how to deal with financing and how to make their businesses attractive to investors.

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Author Jacoline Loewen is a Canadian business consultant and strategy writer who has aided companies seeking capital and private equity. In Money Magnet, Loewen provides valuable lessons she has learned from her career on raising capital in a style that is “informative, relaxed and easy to understand,” according to book’s description. Though the book was published in 2008, and most of Loewen’s work involves multi-million dollar businesses, there are still some lessons startups can likely take away from the book.

Money Magnet is a bit like Fundraising 101. Loewen describes the various types of investors, how to meet and pitch to them, how to read term sheets and how to handle relationships with investors as companies grow. She also provides a run down of the important things investors look for from potential companies, as well as the “four brutal questions” they all ask. The first question most investors ask, she says, is “Are you the right people to make this happen?”

“The teams most likely to attract money will be those that demonstrate they will roll up their sleeves, get on with the unglamorous grunt work of operating plans and do things just a little bit better,” writes Loewen. “Anyone new to running a company who has a good idea and now wants funding, probably will not get the money, no matter how smooth they appear. No one, except your mom, is going to fund your learning curve.”

It’s interesting that she singles out all entrepreneurs with no experience and says they will most likely not get any funding for their idea. Depending on the VCs they seek out, this may be true, but there are plenty of opportunities for inexperienced entrepreneurs to get funding, though the odds are leaning against them. The other questions she says all investors will ask center around the investment opportunity, sustainability and return on investment – questions which will all essentially prove your readiness to get the company off the ground.

Loewen’s insider view into the investment process provides an unique perspective for startups looking to meet and woo potential investors. Most advice on the subject comes from either the entrepreneurs involved in the deals or the venture capitalists doling out the cash, so an angle from a consultant who has facilitated numbers of deals is certainly a fresh one.

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RedHat recently announced that premium enterprise subscription customers are now able to move their Red Hat Linux licenses to the Amazon cloud in the form of EC2 instance. Amazon EC2 is the first cloud provider that Red Hat is supporting for this service.

If you have a block of Red Hat Linux licenses, you can now enroll with the company to enable these to be authorized on an EC2 instance with you Amazon account. We took a few moments to sit down with the team from Red Hat to learn more about the details of the partnership.

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Going Elastic

One of the big reasons motivations is the ability to support enterprise use cases, such as web hosting, that are increasingly including a part of their service in the cloud. Red Hat is committing to make the latest versions of Red Hat Linux available on Amazon EC2 at the same time as their normal release. This includes both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Red Hat Linux.

Red Hat is already supported on virtualization platforms such as VMware and (of course) KVM, so this move is a natural extension in giving IT the ability to run a Red Hat image wherever and however they host their compute resources.

A Few Considerations

One nice thing about Red Hat in the Amazon cloud is that the company is proving updates to the OS to the Amazon customers as well.

Of course, this is available today in the normal subscription service, but in talking to the company we were able to envision a cloud future where your Red Hat instances on EC2 “report in” through a messaging service that they are ready to be updated. We can see a time where provisioning updates, including pulling servers out of the pool gracefully, reconnecting them, could be triggered by a Red Hat update and automated through the pool of services.

Red Hat emphasizes that when hosting your licenses on Amazon EC2 that you will be billed for what you use. Just like you can configure instances spin-up and down based on need, your license pool can extend as well. Like the core computing billing the license tally will follow this pattern. Something to consider when you are allocating licenses. We wonder if there will be an “elastic pool” someday, or if the company will offer deeper incentives for scaling.

Getting Started

The Red Hat Cloud Access subscription feature is available for Amazon EC2 now. To learn more about Cloud Access, visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/access/

Here’s a few more resources we found that are a good starting point:

• Getting started
• Red Hat in the Amazon cloud
• Subscriber guidelines
• How to enroll

Red Hat Linux in Amazon’s cloud makes sense for enterprise customers. We like the fact that the company launched in a way that supports existing license holders and enables license portability.

Red Hat is also helping companies build clouds with its virtualization technology and large asset in Linux. The company is positioning itself to be a force in cloud computing by continuing its legacy of open software.

We wonder: Will all software platforms move to Amazon? Will there a be a time that the “cloud distribution” is the first priority at Red Hat and other operating system releases?

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The new version of Tweetie, the iPhone Twitter application acquired this month by Twitter Inc., says it contains a surprise. What’s the surprise? When you pull down the stream of Tweets to refresh, a slot machine appears.

The slot machine’s wheels spin, then stop. Some percentage of the time you’re rewarded with a little graphic telling you that Tweetie will soon be known as Twitter for iPhone (congrats to you!). This sure looks like the future home of advertising on Twitter for iPhone, doesn’t it? Twitter’s Sean Garrett says that’s not the case, “The slot machine thing is just a fun way to get the word out about the upcoming change from Tweetie to Twitter.” It sure looks like prime real estate, though.

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Now, there may not be ads up there in the future, but offers, promotions, paid inspirational haiku – something? That placement just seems too valuable for the company to let it sit there empty. Just as ads are coming to Twitter (relatively unobtrusive sponsored Tweets at the top of search results) so too can we imagine the free iPhone app will have ads. This seems like as good a place as any to put them. It’s an easy assumption to make: tech investor Dave McClure freaked out on Twitter today calling them ad units, and the thought certainly crossed our minds when we saw them yesterday. Time will tell…

Storm trooper image from MotivatedPhotos.com.

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The deployment of Google Apps in Los Angeles – the same deployment that’s supposed to save L.A. $5.5 million over the next five years and inspire many other cities to follow its example – isn’t going according to plan.  Although it appears that neither side is entirely to blame, several problems have cropped up.

A group of city employees has been testing Google Apps, and they recently held a meeting to discuss their findings.  City Administrative Officer Miguel A. Santana then wrote in a letter to the chair of the Information Technology and Government Affairs Committee, "At the meeting many of the departments expressed concerns about both the performance and the functionality of the new system."

Santana explained, "Performance concerns focused on the slowness with which e-mails were sent, received, and accessed in the new system.  Functionality concerns focused on features currently available in GroupWise that are unavailable, or significantly different, in Google’s system.  Further, the Los Angeles Police Department indicated that several security issues have yet to be resolved, and that a pilot of its technical support staff must be successfully completed before it can be expanded to the rest of the LAPD."

Of course, Santana also noted that city’s data networks may not be configured correctly, that city employees are using Firefox and Internet Explorer when they’re supposed to use Chrome, and that running Google Apps and the old GroupWise system at the same time isn’t helping anything.  Plus, some of purportedly unavailable features do in fact exist.

Google Apps doesn’t offer other features, however, and the LAPD’s concerns are significant.

So a full implementation of Google Apps has been delayed, and if the situation isn’t resolved soon, it looks like L.A. will have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars (again) for GroupWise licenses.

Big hat tip goes to Leena Rao.

Do you remember Google Wave? After a lot of hype around the initial launch of Wave – which some pundits billed as an “email killer” at the time – things have been rather quiet around the service. The latest update to Wave, however, could push the service back into the public eye. Publishers can now easily embed waves on their sites and readers can see them without having to be logged in to Wave, which makes Wave a great live blogging platform.

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Wave for Live Blogging (and more)

At first glance, this looks like a minor update, but for the first time, you can now easily embed waves on your own site. Google notes that you could use Wave for real-time RSVPs with the Yes/No/Maybe gadget and to publish documentation via embedded waves. For us, however, the real potential here is live blogging with Wave.

The interesting thing about using Wave as a live blogging platform, of course, is that readers can see what a blogger is writing in real time. Live blogging doesn’t get more real time than that.

Wave allows users to easily style text and embed images and videos. Adding additional writers to a wave is also as easy as adding another contact to the wave.

Wave Elements: Embedding Waves Made Easy

Until now, embedding Waves took a bit of work and users who weren’t logged in to Wave weren’t able to see your updates. Thanks to the newly released Wave Element tool, however, embedding a wave is now simply a matter of copying and pasting a snippet of JavaScript into your site or blog post. To make a wave public, you also have to add the public@a.gwave.com account to your wave.

You can see an example of what an embedded Wave looks like below.

One Caveat: Doesn’t Work With Internet Explorer Yet

The Wave team, however, also points out one major deal-breaker: the embedded waves don’t work with Internet Explorer yet (even with Chrome Frame). The team plans to resolve this issue soon, however.

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I said last week that “When the level of evil plummets…I wonder, for instance, if Tinhorns the world over aren’t taking the week off to apply neat’s foot oil to their collection of rubber hoses.” I had no idea how right I’d be.

Cuba arrests blogger Diana Virgen García. Garcia, who covers issues of free speech in Cuba, and supports the Ladies in White movement, was arrested on April 22. The next day she was “sentenced” to a year and eight months in prison for unannounced “charges.”

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Gizmodo reporter’s computers seized. After writing about the new iPhone, based on a leaked handset, whose origin is unclear, the California Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, a U.S. law enforcement authority, seized the reporter’s electronics.

Twitter takes down a Tweet. Responding to a U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice, Twitter eliminated a user’s post on a leaked music album.

Chávez starts a Twitter account. After frothing about how Twitter is terrorism, primarily because opposition members use it to good effect, Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, has started his own account.

China institutes yet another repressive online law. The law is nothing new. It merely “legitimizes” the gun-barrel instructions the state’s law enforcement agencies issue to ISPs and others to cooperate with state secrets issues.

Brazil objects to Google government request data being published. Google published government requests and Brazil “won,” making the most data requests of any country, 3,663, and the most removal requests, 291. They claimed the number was accounted for by child porn investigations, which doesn’t seem to be the case.

Nay Phone Latt, imprisoned Burmese blogger, honored by PEN. The PEN writing group honored the young blogger who is serving a 20-year sentenced after blogging about the 2007 Saffron rebellion in Burma.

Tunisia blocks Flickr. On the 28th, Tunisia added Flickr, the photo-sharing site, to its list of blocked services and sites. Chief among these are individual blogs critical of the government and video-sharing sites.

United Arab Emirates plan to monitor cybercafe users. The country’s Interior Ministry plans to require cataloging of cybercafe users under the guise of child porn. “The move to keep Internet-users under observation comes at the same time as a population census is being held in the countries of the UAE along with a standardisation of ID cards for all citizens.”

Belarus seizes journalists’ emails. A senior Belarus police officer allowed police computer experts to access the email and Skype accounts of independent journalists as part of an investigation for a defamation suit by a former KGB official.

Thailand arrests Facebook user. One of Thailand’s favorite tools to stifle dissent is “lese majeste,” the law that makes it a crime to criticize leaders, in this case the royal family. Unfortunately, there is no proof that Wipas Raksakultha did any such thing when he was arrested on the 29th.

India arrests man for fake Facebook profile. The unidentified man was arrested by the Dehli police for allegedly creating a fake profile of parliamentarian Rajiv Pratap Rudy. This is reminiscent of the arrest and imprisonment of Fouad Mourtada for doing the same thing for a prince of Morocco in 2008. The same questions needs to be asked now as then: what role did Facebook play in providing law enforcement with private user information? Or is there such a thing any more when it comes to Facebook?

United States Senators fault Facebook. Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Facebook questioning the company after it made a huge change in its site that enforced a site-wide change in privacy. Schumer also sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission calling on them to enact clearer privacy guidelines for social networks.

Egypt indicts videographer and blogger Wael Abbas. Abbas, who is most famous for posting videos of police abuse, including rape, of arrested citizens, is being pursued by the Egyptian courts. His appeal opened yesterday in Cairo on charges of selling communications services without a license. “Neither he nor his lawyers were informed of his trial on these charges and he was sentenced to six months in prison and fined 500 Egyptian pounds (65 euros) in his absence.”

Kazhakstan ISP blocks news sites. State-owned Kazakhtelecom has been blocking two news sites that are critical of government corruption.

Top photo by Andrian van Leen
García photo from World Women International
Abbas photo by Elijah Zarwan

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Apple plans to shut down Lala, the cloud-based streaming music service it bought in December 2009. Lala stopped accepting new users today and will close on May 31. Thanks to its unlimited music locker and innovative pricing scheme, Lala had long been a favorite of ours. Rumor is that Apple will revive the service is some form under the iTunes.com label, but as with all things Apple, this is just a rumor until Steve Jobs walks on stage and announces it.

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Given the date of the shutdown, we assume that Apple will make an announcement about its plans for Lala/iTunes.com at it’s annual WWDC developer conference, which is set to begin just a week after Lala shuts down.

Until then, here are 5 online music services that either allow you to stream your own music collection or give you access to large libraries of streaming music. Some of these even allow mobile streaming, which is something Lala never offered.

Streaming Music Locker

MP3tunes

If you don’t want to be limited to playing the music that the music industry made available for on-demand streaming and you don’t mind paying a monthly fee, MP3tunes is also worth a look. Just like Lala, MP3tunes allows you to upload all your music to an online music locker and then stream it. MP3tunes offers a web interface, mobile apps and support for a range of other devices like the Chumby, Wii and Logitech Squeezebox. As we noted earlier this week, MP3tunes now offers up to 10GB of free storage.

Streaming Music Services

MOG

For $5 a month, MOG’s users get access to more than 5 million songs on demand. At this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, MOG also announced that it will offer mobile apps for the iPhone and Android platforms in the next few months. The service also offers artist-based radio stations that are similar to Pandora’s and Slacker’s offerings.

Napster and Rhapsody

While the name harks back to the early days of illegal MP3 downloads, Napster is now a pretty standard MP3 store that also allows you to stream any of the 9 million songs in its library. For $7 per month, you can stream all the songs in Napster’s library and download an additional 5 DRM-free MP3 files (more if you sign up for an annual plan).

Rhapsody also offers 9 million songs for on-demand streaming ($10/month), but unlike Napster, it also offers mobile apps (iPhone and Android).

Do-It-Yourself

Sockso

You can, of course, also use your own computer at home to stream music over the Internet. Simplify Music used to be our favorite service for doing this, but the company shut down last month.

A good alternative to Simplify Media is Sockso, an open source program, that can be installed on any Windows, OSX and Linux machine with very little effort (though you will need to set up the port forwarding on your router). The application gives you total control over your music experience and you can even share your music with anybody else on the Internet if you feel like doing so (and, of course, you have the legal rights to do so).

For a simplified version of this, also have a look at Opera Unite, which offers a built-in streaming music server for all Opera users.

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There’s only one week left until the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010, so we invite you to register now. Be a part of high-value, intimate conversations with people working throughout the world of mobile, from garage developers to industry luminaries.

The summit will take place May 7, 2010, in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. We are looking forward to some amazing discussion and debate about mobile with participants like:

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• Deb Schultz of Altimeter group
• Patrick Chanezon, Don Dodge & Bob Meese of Google
• Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless
• Scott Raney and Tom Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures
• Adam Blum of Rhomobile
• Brady Forrest of O’Reilly
• Brent Simmons of Newsgator Technologies
• Patrick Burns of DASH7 Alliance

As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the “unconference” format. Laura Fittion, founder of oneforty.com, had these thoughts about ReadWriteWeb’s last summit:

“There were a lot of investors there and it was a great dialogue between startups and investors. The unconference format was great because it got away from the bogus who-is in the real-time Web, and made it who-wants-to-be. You didn’t have to be big and influential to get your ideas across – if it was a good idea then it got heard. It wasn’t just Twitter, it was many things real time, defined pretty expansively.”

As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, who in our opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We’re using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum.

Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth, so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you – the attendees – who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business. Here’s a sample of some of the topics we’ll explore in both of these tracks:

• Geo-location services – what can you do using location as a platform?
• Commerce & Marketing – as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
• Content, Publishing & Recommendations – the technologies and best practices.
• Mobile Social Networking – how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
• Internet of Things – the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
• Augmented Reality – the technology and business applications of AR.
• Native App vs. Browser Based – Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

If you’re a company in the mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire, WorldMate, Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo.

The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can’t wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here, if you’re so inclined.

We hope to see you on May 7!

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In Reddit’s continuing effort to weed out spammers, it has taken another not-quite traditional step: email verification.

Okay, so it sounds perfectly traditional, but the site has gone and taken it one step further – email verification that is completely voluntary.

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Earlier this month, the social news and bookmarking site announced that it was going to be drafting its users in a form of crowdsourced spam filtering. This next step, it says, could make “the spammers’ job dramatically harder”.

From Reddit engineer Mike Schiraldi’s blog post:

First and foremost, nobody has to verify their email address. If you’re paranoid about this sort of thing and would rather jump off a cliff than tell reddit your email address, you’ll still be able to log in, vote, post crazy comments, submit links to bunker supplies and tinfoil hat designs, and everything else that you’re used to.

In fact, we think (and hope) that normal, non-spammy users won’t even notice any change. The only ones who should have a problem are people who submit one crummy link after another, as often as the site will let them. We’re going to start limiting them to a certain number of crummy links per hour (and per day, per week, etc).

Schiraldi goes on to explain that “crummy” links are ones that are flagged as spam, fail to pass “deputy moderation” (that crowdsourced spam filtering me mentioned above) and links with more downvotes than upvotes.

So, if you surpass the number of crummy links allowed, all you need to do is verify your email address and “you’ll be granted a lot more leeway.”

It’s interesting to see these attempts at slight twists on traditional spam filtering because, as Schiraldi notes in the beginning of his blog post, “there are plenty of occasions when reddit users wish to remain anonymous” and “it’s a fine line to walk, crushing spammers without hurting [their] community.”

The IAmA is a perfect example. The name is a multipurpose anacronym, where someone says “I am a” but it also means “Ask Me Anything”. Without anonymity, this massively popular section of Reddit would be far less interesting, if not impossible.

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Google announced today that has provided mapping (via the Google Maps API) for a couple of highway safety initiatives around the use of cell phones in vehicles.

The first such initiative is Oprah’s "No Phone Zone", which lets users make a pledge under three different options: no texting, no texting plus handsfree calling only, and no phone use at all while driving. These pledges are then mapped in near real-time using the API, so others can see where and when these pledges were made.

The second initiative is about educating people about state policies related to phone use on the road. There is another map in which users can click on a state to see restrictions on texting, handsfree, and handheld phone use. Users can then click through for more details from the Governors Highway Safety Association, or even contact a state Governor’s office directly.

"Mobile communication has revolutionized the way we live, but unfortunately, irresponsible use has also made the roads more dangerous," says Jesse Friedman, a Google Product Marketing Manager. "In 2008, nearly 6000 people lost their lives in the US and more than half a million people were injured in police-reported crashes during which some form of driver distraction was reported — and according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, cell phone use was a major contributor to that."

I’ll go out on a limb and say Google does not want you to view these maps on your phone while you’re driving. Oprah’s site has more info about the No Phone Zone initiative.

Rather than just announce some partnerships, or even parade a few unfinished prototypes across a stage, Google may share some rather important information regarding its TV software with developers at Google I/O.  Enough info for developers to start making apps, perhaps.

Jessica E. Vascellaro and Don Clark reported this morning, "Google Inc. is planning to introduce Android-based television software to developers at an event in May, according to people familiar with the matter."

Then here’s a key additional point: "The decision to address developers suggests that the Internet giant may be hoping to kick-start a race to build applications for its TV platform, much in the same way that Google, Apple Inc. and others have courted developers for smartphones."

It’s not hard to imagine that there would be a lot of interest in these apps.  Something that could level out the volume differences between commercials and regular programming could become popular, for instance, and an IMDB app would qualify as a must-have.

We’ll just have to see how much information Google provides to developers.  Stay tuned for reports and live video straight from Google I/O, as a WebProNews team will attend the conference.

Last week Google changed the Local Business Center to Google Places, and along with that change came some new features for local businesses. We looked at those here.

Among those changes was the addition of Google’s tag advertising. For $25 a month, businesses (in certain cities) can use Tags to highlight their listings on Google.com and Google Maps. These are yellow markers that let you promote important aspects of your business. They can be used for things like coupons, photos, and other select features.  They don’t affect the rank of search results, but they give customers more information and may prove beneficial.

Google promised that while the offering was starting out in a limited number of cities, that number would be expanding. The expansion process is underway. Google has now announced the addition of 11 new cities.

The new cities are: San Jose, Houston, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder, Chicago, San Francisco and Mountain View.

"You’ll notice that we’ve added Mountain View, CA to the list of cities participating in the trial," says Product Manager Shalini Agarwal. "Because we are still tweaking the product a bit, we thought we’d make it available in our hometown so we can get quick feedback as we work on new features."

Businesses in the available cities can sign up for Tags from their Google Places accounts.

In a couple weeks, Google says it will launch a new tag type: "post to your Place Page". This will be a freeform text field that will let business owners highlight custom messages announcing sales or events.

The company did not indicate when more cities will become available, but I would expect the feature to make regular expansions in the not-too-distant future.