another Campfire One :-)

Update: the video and more information can be reached from the apps developer blog.


When about a year and a half ago the first "labs" services for Google Apps appeared, the blog post mentioned that

We also intend to eventually open up this platform to all App Engine developers, so that new and existing software vendors can build easy-to-consume software for the million-plus businesses using Google Apps today.

Since this announcement, is has been relatively silent around this topic. While Google has been occasionally rolling out features that provided a glimpse of things to come, the bigger integration story had never been told. Until tonight, that is.

The first article that I saw on Google News was from venturebeat.com, mentioning a Campfire One that has happened only hours ago:

The search giant just announced a new service called the Google Apps Marketplace.

As the name suggests, it’s an online store where third-party developers can sell their applications to the 25 million users of Google Apps.

The presentation was really exciting -- especially when different software companies took the stage and demonstrated how tightly integrated their applications with Google Apps were. Think of apps that are able to

• Use a Google Apps account for sharing login credentials via OpenID


• Securely access google data like docs or calendar via GData and OAuth


• Tie together Google Apps, Salesforce, and other web services seamlessly


• Tie into and display additional data within Gmail


• Be listed and installed from a central Apps Marketplace, where customers can discover
  great enterprise apps -- and developers monetize them.

It will be exciting to see if the creation of such a market place will do to the apps infrastructure what other apps marketplaces have done for example to the Android phone or the iPhone. Will we hear new success stories about small hobby developers who build insanely popular enterprise apps and become the next software business sensation? Time will tell.

Congratulations on the launch -- I'm looking forward to see what happens next!

Random rants and stuff to read

I don't really twitter or send facebook or buzz status updates, so here's a snippet with stuff that's not really enough material for a full post. Sorry if it's a bit short; if you prefer better thought-out posts, here are two interesting things I ran into this week. Enjoy :-)

• Lessons from Doom
• Your high IQ will kill your startup

Let's talk about the Nook from Barnes and Noble. I don't buy a lot of gadgets, but this one I own. Reason to choose it over the Kindle was its support for open formats (I love the fact that I can get books from my library online) and the lend me feature, which was advertised as the possibility to borrow e-books from other users. In fact, the recent post about gdata apis was a simplified version of a gdata booksearch, part of an app I was building to make it easier to find other Nook owners to borrow books from. However, I scrapped that effort when I learned that the lend me feature only works once per book. You heard right: if I buy an ebook from Barnes and Noble, I can lend it out once, and never again. This idea is almost as bad as making a computer game that is played offline but still relies on serves on the Internet being up.

Here's the cool part however: I was at the B&N in Santa Clara yesterday and chatted with the sales rep. Turns out that some of the Nook Developers come to the store for a Q&A once per month. Like so many other beloved software products, the Nook gets developed in the Bay area. I doubt that they will be able to give any satisfying answer to the "why" (it's probably more a legal or political than a technical restriction), but the fact that one can reach out to the devs is a pretty nice thing. I love living in the Silicon Valley :-)

The other ten percent, revisited.

When I started this blog almost two years ago, I had originally intended to focus on the simple question: using tools like App Engine, could the hobbyist and part-time developer put services on the market that would create a nice profit without hosting cost eating it all up, and without maintenance turning the hobby into a full-time career? Since then, I have broadened focus a bit, in particular because the first apps that were released were not exactly encouraging. I had concluded that it was too soon, yet never followed up and revisit the subject.

A few days ago, I needed to get new passport pictures for my German passport. Foreign passports have other size and style requirements than the US, which makes it a bit hard to find a photographer in my area. I did a web search and ran into epassportphoto.com. The business model is wonderfully simple, and while I doubt that they are running on App Engine, I believe they totally could (at least nowadays, where all the necessary APIs are in place):

• have a website that allows users to upload pictures and serve a lower quality version back
  
• use a client-side app (flash? javascript?) to resize a low-quality version of the picture and crop it correctly so that it complies with the requirements of the specific country
• on the server side, perform the operation on the high-quality image and serve the result for download
• as an alternative to download, guide the user through a checkout flow (external payment processing)
• if the user pays, store the picture on the server and send it to an inexpensive photo printing service near the user's location (the last step may happen manually)

The business model is good, and (if done right), one could probably process a lot of photos on App Engine this way before even exceeding the free quota. I don't know what platform those guys are running their service on, but the site was so well made that I felt it more convenient than doing it myself with the Gimp. The price was just right for me -- profit made.

What's your favourite service that you could totally see running on App Engine with today's APIs? Post it as comment to this blog.