Live: Google Apps Marketplace Launches At Google Campfire One

@mgsiegler / 6:04 pm PST • March 9, 2010

Tonight, Google is hosting one of their Campfire One events at their headquarters in Mountain View, CA. They’re using the event to launch their new Google Apps Marketplace. This is the app store that business applications can use to reach the more than 25 million people and 2 million business that use Google Apps for their domains.

Here are the links to our extended coverage on the Google Apps Marketplace:

Below, find our live notes from the event.

Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering

Two million businesses have “gone Google”
25 million users.
Everything you need is now in the cloud for businesses
Tonight we’re launching the new Google Apps Marketplace
It’s great for developers – who get access to these 25 million users instantly
It’s also great for users.
It’s simple to integrate.
Build your app. And you don’t have to use App Engine. You can use whatever you want.
And you can sell your app in the Marketplace.
What does Google ask in return? A one-time fee of $100. And a low 20% rev share.
Over 50 launch partners.

David Glazer, Engineering Director

I want to walk you through the “how” now – build, integrate, and sell.
Google Apps now has a large and growing number of extension points (we’ll be adding more over time)
there is a central management system
Universal integration to Google Apps navigation system.
We use OpenID to manage authentication. Single sign-on.
And we use OAuth for secure access to data. The OAuth grant of trust is built into the Marketplace.

We have a complete manifest.
Time for a demo. Here’s a developer showing off a “hello world” application.
Easy step-by-step process to get your application in the Marketplace.

It might take a couple of days for the app to show up in the Marketplace when you submit it.
A domain admin simply then clicks the “Add it now” button.
Then just three clicks left – 1) agree to terms of service 2) grant data access (such as to your calendar) 3) enable the app
You can even see it in the apps drop down if you’re in, say, Gmail.

Here’s Intuit now showing how to take a real app – for payroll – to show how easy it is to itegrate.
Intuit is the largest payroll provider in the nation.
We usually serve small companies, many are less than 20 employees.
Another demo, this time from Atlassian – a software development company
You can easily embed your information inside of Gmail.

The thing I’m most excited about is the studio activity bar.
With this, Google Talk can be used for instant collaboration.
All of this is available today. In fact it’s being used by 40 developers in a bus traveling from SF to SXSW in Austin, TX.

Another demo, Manymoon – a social productivity app.
We used open standards to convert free users to paid users.
Everything you’ve seen so far will be live later tonight – for this next demo, it will be coming soon.
Gmail contextual gadgets – like when a YouTube video is embedded in Gmails – soon third-parties will be able to use this.

Here’s a demo from Appirio – a cloud solution provider.
Glazer is now reiterating the main points about the Marketplace.

David Garrard from Google

When I joined not only was there no Google Apps, there were no apps. Gmail launched soon after I joined.
I joined to lead our enterprise initiative. It was the idea to take the innovation that happens quickly on the consumer side and putting it into the enterprise apps.
Cloud computing is the right formula for that
Three years ago we started with a modest effort. In Feb 2007 we immediately signed up 9,000 business — now we have 25 million active users and 2 million business.
And the growth rate is accelerating.
Higher education has really started moving towards the cloud with us.

And it’s happening in the Fortune 500 companies. And no companies that size have gone back.
Though it’s still not perfect, even today.
People always ask, ‘when are going to build x or y’ the answer is we probably won’t – we want to be a platform in the cloud.
Because of that we can put emphasis on our existing apps.
We’ll be talking more at Google I/O (which is already sold out).

And that’s a wrap.