Google Apps Marketplace

According to Google, over the last three years more than 2 million businesses began using Google Apps. With the unveiling of the Google Apps Marketplace, one can only expect this rate to increase at an increasing rate. Simple configuration and low maintenance has made Google Apps an excellent choice for startup businesses entering the market. In addition to the existing drivers for moving business processes into the cloud, the Google Apps Marketplace makes it possible for businesses to move their existing operations into the cloud without losing the functionality of their beloved (and most likely outdated and costly-to-maintain) desktop applications.

In conjunction with the recently released Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange, Google Apps is becoming a very appealing platform for existing enterprise and governments alike. IT admins are going to have to come up with really good reasons to present to their CTOs to justify staying away from the cloud.

What is Google Apps Marketplace? Google Apps Marketplace enables developers to market their cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps platform. Businesses already using Google Apps can browse the marketplace and find cloud applications that can enable the business to do something new or replace an existing desktop application. The third-party cloud apps can then be installed by an admin to a Google Apps domain in a couple of clicks. The admin goes through three steps: 1) Agreeing to Terms of Service provided by the third-party vendor, 2) Granting access to necessary data, 3) Enabling the app.

Immediately after, the third-party application integrates seamlessly into your Google Apps — the control panel appears for the admins and the end-users see the new application within their Google Apps accounts. All third-party apps rely on existing authentication — eliminating the need for employees to have multiple logins for multiple systems and use the same data store for contacts, emails, and documents. Everything is stored in one place.

What can third-party apps do? Even with the marketplace in it’s nascence, Google has clearly worked with vendors to make sure that from the very beginning, an excellent array of free and for-pay third-party apps is available.

For example, OffiSync, once installed on Google Apps along with an add-in for MS Office (2003/2007/2010) enables integration between the desktop MS Office applications and the Google’s Docs platform. This makes it easy for users to work in their familiar (and often more functional) desktop Office application while saving their documents directly to the cloud with a single-click. A big plus is that saving documents directly to the cloud unlocks collaboration and sharing features otherwise unavailable on documents saved locally.

Other examples include apps that enable ’shared contacts’ directories, team collaboration tools, cloud telephony, CRMs, media sharing suites and so on. The full-offering of the installable apps can be browsed in the Google Apps Marketplace.

What is the impact of the new Google Apps Marketplace? The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy for businesses to create a tightly integrated set of applications accessible from anywhere using a single logon. For many businesses, Google Apps can virtually eliminate the need for inefficient processes such as syncing (passwords, documents, databases entries) amongst incompatible software packages while simultaneously wrestling to keep the syncs operational when individual packages are updated to newer versions. Google Apps Marketplace allows businesses to design their solutions using third-party apps (which can be thought of as ‘modules’ for the Google Apps platform) without creating additional points of failure and encountering integration issues. All this while maintaining high level of fluidity between various apps and a consistent look-and-feel across the board.

Google Apps has always been a cost-effective alternative to Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise and Lotus software for email, chat, and document sharing. With the addition of the Marketplace, the Google Apps platform is improving in its weaker areas such as interoperability and availability of third-party addons. The Google Apps Marketplace enables supply-and-demand forces to promote innovation that is extending the Google Apps featureset beyond it’s core and making it an even more appealing platform for businesses and organizations that are open to moving their operations into the cloud.

While this tip probably won’t help you if you have a generic name or share a name with a celebrity, it should work pretty well for most names.

Google Alerts is a nifty service from the big G that allows you to receive emails whenever a new item that matches certain keywords in Web, News, Blogs, Video, Groups, or ‘Comprehensive’ which looks for keywords in all of the above. Better yet, you can generate an RSS feed that will keep you up to date on new entries with your name ‘as-it-happens’.

Once you create a feed, you can easily add it to Google Reader or your favorite RSS aggregator and keep track of new information as it enters the Google search index.

Have a better way of keeping track of your online identity? Post them in the comments.

Google Buzz, Google's latest attempt at social media.

Is Google Buzz yet another social media site to visit? Is it really revolutionary enough to challenge the social networking ‘default’ of Facebook and the microblogging ‘default’ of Twitter? Many are asking this very question.

While Google Buzz is not revolutionary social media platform, it is different enough and good enough at what it does to challenge Facebook and Twitter in their respective strengths. For one, Buzz does what ‘the best of Facebook’ does and the ‘best of Twitter’ does and it does it better. Buzz is an open platform with a well-documented set of APIs that allow other services to seamlessly connect up and contribute information. Google Buzz plays nice with the industry leading social media standards which.

Why then doesn’t Google Buzz connect to Facebook? The answer is simple — that isn’t the game that Facebook wants to play. Facebook has a very restrictive API that makes it difficult or impossible to extract useful information. Facebook’s current strategy for user retention is to make it inconvenient for users to move their information — rather than to give users new innovative features to keep users put.

But does Google Buzz have any answers to one of the more pressing challenges of social media — the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) — the excess amount of ‘useless’ information overcrowding the ‘useful’ information? Maybe not right away, but I think Google has a much better shot at providing us with the answer than anyone else in the business.  Google knows a ton about how to show users what they want to see. They are arguably the world-leader in targeted information delivery. Be it Google Search, AdSense/AdWords, Google News, or GMail spam filtering — they have the expertise to tackle the SNR problem. Before Google, people accepted that they had to look through a couple of pages of search results on Altavista or Ask before finding what they were looking for. Nobody complained until Google came along and said “We can do better”.

Google Buzz is not just Twitter on steroids. Google Buzz is much more than a 140-character-at-a-time microblogging platform. Google Buzz is a rich media platform. It integrates beautifully with Google-owned YouTube and Picasa and leaves the door open for other services to follow suit. Buzz also does this really well. Adding a link to the post quickly fetches the page description and the images that can be added to the post in a matter of seconds.

All in all, Google Buzz has not reinvented the wheel, but doesn’t mean it’s doomed for failure. The fact that people don’t see the product as radically different is actually a plus. I believe that if the mainstream views Google Buzz as ‘not that different from Facebook or Twitter’ it’s going to encourage more people to give it a try, even if they aren’t all that displeased with their current social media setup.

Unlike Facebook, Google Buzz is very tidy and clean, and very fast. People will appreciate the lack of advertising and absence of annoying so-called ‘apps’ and tight integration with GMail. Google Buzz may evolve into a social media aggregator — making it the go-to-place for catching up on the ‘buzz’ from all of your social media sites.

Google Voice Dialer

Edit (1/26/2010): The official Google Voice Extension strikes back. It is lighter than the Google Voice Dialer 3rd-party extension and includes an option to make phone numbers clickable in websites for easy Google Voice calls.

An open-source Google Voice Chrome Extension beats the Google’s official one in many respects. The Google Voice Dialer not only alerts you when you have a new SMS or a Voicemail, but it also allows you to easily call or SMS via Google Voice without leaving the website you’re on. The sleek jQuery interface is functional and appealing to the eye. If you use Google Voice and Chrome (dev branch) make sure it check out the Google Voice Dialer.

Edit (1/17/2010): Bummer. Service is shutdown due to ‘concerns of Google TOS violations’.

Those of you using Google Voice for your SMS needs might find a new free service called GVXMPP (Twitter: @GVXMPP) to be quite useful.

What does this service do? Well, it allows you to have your SMS sent to your Google Voice number to be delivered as an instant message to your XMPP-capable IM client (Pidgin, Adium, Trillian, MirandaIM, etc). This also means that you can reply to an SMS via an IM.

How does GVXMPP accomplish this? The service takes advantage of the Google Voice option to forward your SMS as emails. Then, a forwarding filter is setup to forward your SMS from your email address to your new XMPP address that you get when you sign up for the service. To summarize, your SMS travels the following way: Google Voice –> Your Email –> GVXMPP service –> your IM client. One of the great things about this service is that your SMS arrive nearly instantly and you can manage them easily without being near your phone and without cramped typing on a small keyboard. Guys at GVXMPP have created a very handy guide that makes setting this up a breeze.

Android Robot

My top 10 Android applications.

Locale: Locale makes it so that my phone never rings in class and so that I don’t get woken up by a ‘wrong number’ in the middle of the night. Locale has been the swiss army knife of Android conditional settings. Tasker has the potential to do what Locale does and more, but until then Locale is the go-to app.

3Banana Notes: An excellent all-around application with seamless web-sync. This well-designed app allows the user to quickly jot down notes, hash-tag them, attach photos, geotag and share via email, Twitter, Facebook and others. The webapp allows you to authenticate using your Google account —  great for those already logged into Google services.

Remember the Milk: While not technically free (requires $25 Pro subscription on the account), RTM is a phenomenal to-do list application. The interface allows pretty much full access to all of the features of RTM. As with RTM’s offerings for non-mobile devices, there is no learning curve to use the service, but it will take some poking around to really learn how to use the service most effectively. With features like Smart Add, adding tasks on the Android device is a snap and the use of Smart Lists makes it easy to only see the to-do items that you want to see. The application also allows geotagging of tasks (mail package when near post office), and ability to sort and filter tasks in any way you’d like.

Mute: A very simple but at the same time very useful application. Mute is essentially acts as a widget that allows you to mute all of your phone sounds and unmute them. Simply add a shortcut to your app on your desktop and press it once to mute, once again to unmute. That’s the only function of the app, but it does it well, and once you start using it, you’ll quickly realize how often you need to mute and unmute your phone.

Google Voice: Google Voice, requires the currently invite-only service from Google to function, but that doesn’t prevent it from being an indispensable application for Android users. The Google Voice application makes it easy to take advantage of a single number that never needs to be ported or changed. More so, the Google Voice app provides you with the ability to send and receive unlimited text messaging without paying a dime to your carrier and to ditch painful voicemail for Google’s — that includes transcription and unlimited message storage. In conjunction with the Fav5 from T-Mobile or the equivalents from the other carriers, you can effectively enjoy unlimited outbound calling since all calls dial out via a set number that can be added to one of the unlimited calling numbers.

Gentle Alarm: Now that cell phones have pretty much rendered alarm clocks useless, everyone needs a reliable alarm app. Gentle Alarm is well worth the three-dollar price tag. It allows you to do the expected: ringtones/music for alarm, changing snooze periods and setting multiple alarms that repeat based on any week pattern you desire. Gentle Alarm also has a lot of really useful additions that not all alarm clock apps have. It can fade in your alarm over a set period of time, and ring a ’safe alarm’ at the end of the alarm to make sure you are really up. It can also help you get better rest by playing a quiet ‘pre-alarm’ sometime before your actual alarm to try to wake you up when you aren’t in deep sleep.