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Open for business: the Google Apps Marketplace

Niels Provos — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:09:00 +0000

Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.

We've found that when businesses begin to experience the benefits of cloud computing, they want more. We're often asked when we'll offer a wider variety of business applications — from accounting and project management to travel planning and human resources management. But we certainly can't and won't do it all, and there are hundreds of business applications for which we have no particular expertise.

In recent years, many talented software providers have embraced the cloud and delivered a diverse set of features capable of powering almost any business. But too often, customers who adopt applications from multiple vendors end up with a fractured experience, where each particular application exists in its own silo. Users are often forced to create and remember multiple passwords, cut and paste data between applications, and jump between multiple interfaces just to complete a simple task.

Today, we're making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:

Intuit Online Payroll: A small business application that offers business owners a new way to efficiently run payroll, pay taxes and let employees check paystubs all within one integrated online office environment.
Manymoon: The company's free work and project management application for Google Apps makes it simple for businesses and teams to organize and share information including tasks, projects, documents, status updates and links with co-workers, customers and partners.
Professional Services Connect (PS Connect): This new cloud-based offering coming soon from Appirio, pulls contextually relevant information on people, projects, customers and transactions from a user's domain and surfaces it directly inside a Gmail message so services professionals can make more informed, real-time decisions.
JIRA Studio: A hosted software development suite from Atlassian enables software developers to flow naturally between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other design and development tools in order to better track and manage project issues and workflow.

Once installed to a company's domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike. That's the power of the cloud.

For more information on the benefits of the Google Apps Marketplace to businesses, check out our Enterprise Blog post. Developers interested in learning how to integrate with Google Apps can check out our post on the Google Code Blog. Or, you can explore the Google Apps Marketplace directly at http://google.com/appsmarketplace.

Finally, we'll be diving deeper into application development for the enterprise at Google I/O on May 19-20. We hope to see you there!

Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Product Manager, Google Apps Marketplace

Samsung reveals pricing for its 3D HDTVs, Blu-ray player, home theater system

Sean Portnoy — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:23:35 +0000

While Sony was announcing pricing in Japan for its 3D equipment, Samsung was letting us know how much that extra dimension will cost here for its HDTVs and components. And as already disclosed in my post the other day concerning Best Buy's forthcoming 3D push, Samsung is enticing buyers by offering a 3D starter kit that comes with the 3D version of Monsters vs. Aliens and a pair of active-shutter 3D glasses with the purchase of a compatible TV and Blu-ray player or home theater system. You'll appreciate the bonus kit because you'll be spending a minimum of around $2,000 to earn it. For LED-based 3D sets, prices start at $1,999.99 for the lowest-priced UN40C7000, and can run up...

Google launches the Google Apps marketplace

Garett Rogers — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:15:16 +0000

Google tonight launched what they are calling the Google Apps Marketplace -- a great way to build integrate and sell applications to the same users that are currently using Google Apps. It will be interesting to see what route developers decide to take as far as monetizing their apps. Is it going to be largely free apps that are ad-supported, or paid apps? I hope developers choose the paid apps model. It's extremely easy to integrate any application into Google Apps -- they are exposing a ton of API's, like single sign-on, being able to add a link to the nav-bar at the top, etc. It costs $100 for a developer to sign up to give you access to these...

IT failure: A shameful story

Michael Krigsman — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:11:20 +0000

A sad story that reminds me why studying IT failures is so important.

Please Welcome Yet Another Guy With a Beard

Jason Perlow — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:25:26 +0000

ZDNet is starting to look like a bit of a Rabbinical convention with a pretty solid collection of guys with beards.

TIBCO rolls out Spotfire 3.1 with spotlight on predictive analytics

Dana Gardner — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:49:07 +0000

While BI gives you historical data, the predictive analytics aspect of Spotfire 3.1 offers insights into what could happen next time you run a similar promotion. It can also help you fine-tune your promotions by targeting the customers that clicked on your ad, or offering different promotions to different audiences – and it does it almost instantly.

Fraud-prevention service ponies up $12m for ‘false’ ads

Team Register — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:17:58 +0000

Agrees to safeguard customer data

An Arizona company that sells services designed to prevent identity theft has agreed to pay $12m to settle charges it oversold their effectiveness and didn't adequately protect sensitive customer data.…

Jonathan Schwartz: How to play patent games with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates

Larry Dignan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:23:42 +0000

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz chimed in on patent lawsuits, threats from the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and how to manage a staredown properly.

Re: Ubisoft DDoS

Full Disclosure — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:59:41 +0000

Posted by Jan Schejbal on Mar 09

Am 09.03.2010 21:11, schrieb James Matthews:

If the attack behaved like LOTS of legitimate clients, it might have
been hard to lock out the bots while not locking out players.

The option that the attack is just made up as an excuse for too few
resources to support all the players should also not be forgotten,
although I consider that improbable.

Sincerely,
Jan

How about a location update with that Tweet, Facebook status?

Sam Diaz — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:46:24 +0000

It looks like Facebook and Twitter are gearing up for rollouts of features that tag locations.