Read on Peter Krasilovsky’s blog, a summary of Dan Rubinstein’s (Head of Small Business product initiatives at Google) presentation he gave at the Kelsey ILM 2006 conference in Philadelphia.

Highlights:

• “Google is going to meet SMEs halfway to get them to actively market themselves on the Internet.”
• They’re launching microsite solutions to help SMEs that don’t have a website but want to advertise on Google (only available to AdWords advertisers)
• They’re building a Website Optimizer tool that will help SMEs take the guesswork out of landing page testing (also only available to AdWords advertisers)
• They are also focused on real-time local inventory (possibly done through the Intuit/StepUp partnership)
• They would eventually like to offer “deep cross-merchant, cross-product metrics that will help consumers know what to buy, and where to get it right now”
• They also want to “establish standards for aggregating and categorizing and protecting personal information”

Dan Rubinstein also thinks that “for local business ads, mobile is the killer ap, not the desktop”

Additional info on that presentation can be found on the ZDNet blog.

What it means: Google is going to ecommerce-enable SMEs, whether traditional media wants it or not. It’s going to be a slow process but by offering a complete portfolio of products and services around eBusiness (including obviously advertising), they become the de facto center piece of the action. At the same time, they don’t really have a choice given that 99% of their revenues is dependent on linking to Web sites (up until they develop a pay-per-call model). I’m surprised Dan Rubinstein did not mention Google Checkout though.

Harry adds: I’m with Dan, for local, mobile is the killer app… now, how does one get around those walled gardens again?