Here is how I've been able to shrink the main partition:
TechCrunch
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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.
Zoho, a web-based productivity suite that was called a "fake Office" by a Microsoft VP, is announcing a significant partnership with Google today. The startup will be a launch partner for Google's recently launched Google Apps Marketplace, which allows vendors to sell applications that compliment Google Apps. Here are our notes from the announcement. Zoho will be integrating two of its over 20 business applications - Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects with Google Apps.
So starting today, Google Apps users will be able to add on-demand CRM app Zoho CRM and project management software Zoho Projects into Google Apps. While Zoho has previously rolled out the ability log-in to its applications via your Google Apps IDs, the two applications have been specially formatted for further immersion into Google Apps with App's extended APIs. IT admins will now have an option to add Zoho Apps to their domains through Google Apps Marketplace. Once the IT admin adds a Zoho application to their domain, all users within the domain will have access to the Zoho Application through Google universal navigation. main will have access to the Zoho Application through Google universal navigation. 
Tonight, Google launched its Google Apps Marketplace, an online storefront for Apps products and services. Here are our notes from the announcement. And of course, the marketplace is launching with a number of pilot partners (50 to be exact). One of those partners happens to be recently launched Socialwok, a product that ads a social layer to Gmail and other Google products. At last year's TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. And the startup just launched a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail.
Socialwok in the the Google Apps Marketplace allows organizations to use their existing Google Apps accounts to login into Socialwok and create a social network for their domains to share within Google Docs, Google Calendars, Google Spreadsheets and other Google objects in feeds. For example, with the Socialwok Gmail gadget, users can view, post and comment on various feeds in their organization right from Gmail.
Andrew Wilkinson of MetaLab has just written a blog post accusing Mozilla of plagiarizing the design of its FlightDeck editor. To make matters worse, Wilkinson says that MetaLab actually bid on creating the design for FlightDeck months ago, but was turned down by Mozilla.
While Wilkinson is understandably upset, at this point,it looks like the plagiarized image is just a mockup on the Mozilla wiki — not the actual product (though it's obviously still in bad taste). We've reached out to Mozilla for a comment. You can see a screenshot comparison from Wilkinson's blog post below.
Update: Here's a comment from Mozilla, stating that the copy-and-paste design was a proof of concept:
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.
Over the last few days, a strange situation has been brewing between Amazon and a sizable number of comic book fans. On March 7, Bleeding Cool broke the news of an apparent Amazon sale featuring high quality hardcover Marvel graphic novels at bargain-basement prices of .99, when their retail prices were more along the lines of 5. Alas, it turned out to be a pricing error. Amazon could have simply canceled the orders (which is common practice for online retailers), but instead, it tried to do right by its users and said it would honor some of the orders. Except it didn't actually have enough books in stock to do what it promised, leading to another wave of frustration from the comics fans. Now Amazon is looking to smooth things over with some dollar gift certificates.
The tale is a bit complicated. After word of the apparent sale began to spread, plenty of comics fans began to snatch up the books as quickly as they could, causing some of the graphic novels to climb toward the top of Amazon's best seller lists. 
Later this week, thousands of ironic t-shirts will be arriving in Austin for the 16th annual South By Southwest Interactive festival.
At about this time, it's traditional for tech publications to publish handy guides to "surviving SXSWi" - packed with useful advice that's basically interchangeable with that for any other festival since the beginning of time.
"Drink plenty of water!" "Prepare for some late nights!" "Plan ahead to make sure you don't miss anything!" "Pack sturdy shoes!" "Always use a condom!". Useful advice for SXSWi, certainly, but also applicable for Oktoberfest, Glastonbury, Woodstock and the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia (although for the latter, replace 'shoes' with 'sandals' and 'condom' with 'sprig of silphium').
This year, though, I decided to use my experience of past SXSWi's to produce something more useful. A very specific and completely foolproof guide on surviving this year's event. And here it is...
Tip One: Don't go to South by Southwest Interactive.
Twitter has just announced that it is launching a new anti-phishing feature that allows Twitter's Trust and Safety team to monitor all links submitted through the service for potentially malicious attacks. Part of the new feature will involve the use of Twitter's link shortener twt.tl, which may now start popping up in some of your emails and direct messages.
At this point, it's not really clear which links are being converted to Twitter's twt.tl shortened links. We just ran a test at the TC office with two different links: one for an article on GigaOm, and another for a bit.ly link that pointed to a page on Google Buzz. The links I received on my Twitter client were both unchanged, but both were converted to twt.tl links in our Email notifications (obviously neither of them had malicious content).
SV Angel, the angel fund founded by super-angel Ron Conway, is losing one of its general partners to a portfolio company. Brian Pokorny is now the CEO of fast-growing Silicon Valley-based Dailybooth.
Dailybooth, the runner up in the "best social app" and winner of the "time sink" categories at this year's Crunchies Awards, is "your life in pictures." Some 6 million monthly visitors share pictures and status updates with eachother. "It's a community for self expression," says Pokorny.
A typical interaction: a users posts a photo, taken with their webcam, showing what they're eating, what they're feeling, or perhaps with friends in the background. Other user then respond via text or photos. Some strings go on for hundreds of responses. Here's an example.
Earlier today, Google chief economist Hal Varian gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news.
Google is understandably on the defensive, trotting out Varian to paint an unemotional picture with as much data as he can muster. But the picture he paints is a dour one for print media. For instance, the chart above shows the decline of overall newspaper ad revenues. Newspapers have taken huge hits in classifieds advertising (in blue) and national brand advertising (in red). The online portion (green) is still too small to make much of a difference.
