TechnoPhile Blog

Google Apps Marketplace: Instantly Connect Your App To 25 Million Users, Profit.

Business to business software can be a tough sell. Online B2B can be even a harder sell. While there is certainly money to be made, unless you’re one of the big players, the likelihood you’re going to succeed is pretty small. Starting today, Google is taking their roll as one of the big players and extending a platform to boost some smaller players.

Tonight, Google has unveiled their Google Apps Marketplace. This is an app store for enterprise apps in the cloud. Using a set of APIs, these third-party apps can deeply integrate their products within Google Apps, which already some 25 million people are using. And that also includes over 2 million businesses ranging from startups, to small businesses, to Fortune 500 companies.

For customers, this means a one-stop shop for a variety of applications that their business or organization can use. And it’s extremely simple to get started with apps in the marketplace — it just takes 4 clicks, Google says (though that initial click will have to come from your domain admin to approve the use of the app). For developers, particularly small startup developers, it means instant access to more users than they can likely imagine. It also potentially means something more important: money.

Like the popular mobile app stores (Apple’s App Store and Google’s own Android Market), Google is allowing developers to sell their apps through this Marketplace. And they’re actually offering a better deal: Google will keep just 20% of the revenue, while the developers keep the other 80% (compared to a 30/70 split with the Android Market). The reason for this better split is that Google believes the B2B market is a bit different, and they want to entice developers to join on board. And instead of Apple’s App Store, which charges a $100 yearly fee to developers, Google is charging a one-time fee of $100 to enroll in the program and that’s for as many apps as you want to create.

It’s The Google Countdown

Here’s a nifty little Google Easter Egg on this fine Friday. If you go to the Google homepage and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with no query entered, a countdown timer will appear below the buttons. As of right now it stands at 1765472, with each second ticking off the last number in that sequence.

Some quick math (with Google’s help) tells us that 1,765,472 seconds equals a little over 20 days. What happens in 20 days? It could be the end of the world, when Google becomes self-aware, or 2010. You decide.

To make sure, we went ahead and switched our system clocks to trick it into thinking it was December 31, and sure enough, the countdown ends at January 1 at midnight. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a payoff when the timer hits zero. Maybe Google will add that later. That is, if they got it done before the code freeze.

Morning Buzz: Live From Google’s Major Step Into The Social Spotlight

This morning, Google is hosting an event at its Mountain View, CA headquarters to show off a new social product it has been working on. Google VP of Product Management Bradley Horowitz, VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, and product manager Todd Jackson are on hand to show it off.

Below, follow our live notes (paraphrased):

They’ve announced it will start in a few minutes, waiting for people in traffic, etc…

Horowitz: Exciting news to share this morning. This is exactly the right audience. Next 45 minutes to hour we’re going to be showing off something. I bet many of you are live-blogging this. That’s not really realtime cause I can talk faster than you can type. We’ll be talking about that. It shouldn’t be so much work to find the right audience for content you want to share. The moments of our life is the most precious time we have. We want tools to manage it better. Let’s take a walk through time and space.

Several years ago a couple of Yahoos thought they could organize the web. Soon they hired up 10,000 people to organize content. Then come algorithmic search engines. But it was still pretty bad. There was no relevance. It was still really hard to find things. 5 Years later came Google. We’re seeing the same thing with social sites now. But it’s even hard to find value cause there is too much noise. When you have 500 or 5,000 friends it’s very difficult. TMI, oversharing. There are lots of ways to define friends – that’s how you can have 5,000. And this will continue growing, and the problem will get worse and worse.

This is a large scale problem. A relevance problem. We like these kinds of problems. It’s like when we launched Gmail. Today it’s Google Buzz we’re launching. A Google approach to sharing.

Jackson: I’m really excited to show you what Buzz looks like built into Gmail. We started 5 years ago with our new approach to Gmail. First we grouped conversations. Then we added chat. Then we added video chat. Today will Google Buzz, we have a new way to share and communicate inside of Gmail. It’s a new world. I’ll focus on 5 key features.
1) Auto-following. We didn’t want users to have to peck out a totally new social graph. There has always been a giant social network under Gmail. You auto-follow the people you email and chat with the most.

2) Rich, fast sharing experience. Same nice Gmail UI and keyboard shortcuts. Special attention to media.

3) Public and private sharing. We want things Google can index, but also private messages.

4) Inbox integration. The inbox is the center for communication.

5) Just the good stuff. Some much social data, we need to filter the noise.

Late Last Year, Google Overtook Apple In WebKit Code Commits

Today, the blog Chromium Notes, which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit. Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project. Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project.WebKit is the open source web browser engine that both Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers (among others) are built on top of. As such, it should be obvious why both are so heavily involved in the project (others on the graph include Nokia and BlackBerry maker RIM). The graph ranges from 2007 to the present. According to it, on November 15, 2009 Google surpassed Apple in number of commits for the first time. Google has been ahead ever since, and the gap between the two appears to be growing. That said, the two big spikes for Apple came during major releases of Safari, so when Apple releases another version, it could spike up ahead of Google once again.I’ve included a picture of the graph below (Apple is the blue line, Google is green, “Other” is purple, Nokia is gold, and RIM is light blue). But be sure to check it out on Chromium Notes’ site as you can drill-down to see more detail there. The author has also posted the code for the graph on github.

Linus Torvalds: Google’s Nexus One First Mobile Phone I Don’t Hate

Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being “mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights” even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems.Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google’s Nexus One a couple of days ago. Torvalds has owned a number of phones before, including Google’s G1 device and ‘one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones’, but it took for Google to add multi-touch capabilities to the Nexus One before he finally broke down and bought one from the company’s web store.

Google working on smartphone software to automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue

Check your calendar, friends, for the first time in a long time I was just wowed by a tech story. Google says it’s working on smartphone software that would automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue. So, if you’re talking to your Venezuelan pen pal, and he says, “No me gusta el fútbol americano,” you can react in horror as you try to explain to him the importance of a game where more time is spent setting up plays than actually executing them is the greatest sport in the world. Porqueria. If all goes according to plan, the software could be ready in just a “couple” of years, which is to say Google has no idea when it’ll be ready for public consumption. You’ll recall that Google already has a fairly robust translation software suite, and it’s totally free. It’s not entirely machine translation, though, which is generally rubbish, since people can help contribute with certain words and phrases that might not mean what the literal definition suggests.Like, I just used the word “rubbish” to mean that machine translation is not always very accurate, not that it’s refuse. All part of Google’s plan to ensure that humanity is fully dependent on its services, I suppose. Here’s a tip: learn Spanish or French or Italian in high school, and you can pretty easily pick up any other romance language with not too much effort. Spanish and Italian and Portuguese are pretty much “mods,” to use a PC game word, of Latin, so it all works out.

The Cliq XT/Quench drops, brings Android 1.5 in tow

Motorola is keeping the Android party rocking with the Cliq XT — or Quench in Euroland. The handset doesn’t bring anything we haven’t seen before including the aging Android 1.5 release along with Motorola’s social media-centric MOTOBLUR home screen replacement. A respectable 3.1-inch 320 x 480 occupies the front, while a 5.0 MP cam with LED flash is housed on the backside. Wi-Fi, HSDPA, A-GPS rounds out the rest of the notable specs on the otherwise boring phone. In all, the Cliq XT seems like a poor successor to the Cliq. It’s not that the hardware is lacking, but the XT doesn’t take advantage of any improvements to Android as they share the same 1.5 release. The upcoming Verizon-bound Devour also uses the 10-months old Cupcake 1.5 release. Motorola is clearly committed to Android — which is awesome — but hopefully future plans include releasing handsets with the latest Android updates. That’s the whole point of Android after all.