The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘space’

Last year, Omega released a special edition timepiece to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo astronauts voyage to the moon.

Read more from the original source: 
A Historical Recreation of a Copy

Look at that pic. Take a real good look

Original post: 
You’ll never ID this photo (unless you read Reddit)

Before I begin, that headline is completely ripped off a Eurogamer commenter , so never let it be said that I’m above stealing jokes within the right context. OK, so, it seems that the new “DLC” for BioShock 2 (which came out four days ago) isn’t really DLC at all! Nope, the content is right there, already on the disc that’s sitting inside your Xbox 360

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BioShock 3 found on BioShock 2 disc

Editor’s note: The most valuable employees of any technology company are the engineers and scientists, which is why everyone in Silicon Valley does whatever they can to ensure the continuous supply to this talent pool. The size of the talent pool is ultimately determined by the number of people who graduate from colleges and universities with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degrees. The U.S. is graduating fewer and fewer scientists and engineers, causing concern in many quarters.

While many people agree this is a problem, not everyone agrees on what should be done about it. Former Intel chairman and CEO Craig Barrett is a strong proponent of priming the pump with more undergraduate science, engineering, and math students. Duke/UC-Berkeley professor (and regular TechCrunch columnist) Vivek Wadhwa thinks that better rewards for people who pursue engineering and science degrees is the right approach. So we asked Barrett and Wadhwa to debate the issue of how best to fix technology education in the U.S. Their exchange is below:

Vivek Wadhwa:

Craig Barrett is someone who I hold in the highest regard. Ever since he retired as Intel’s CEO, Dr. Barrett has made it his life’s mission to improve U.S. competitiveness. He believes that the way to do this is to teach more math and science. And he believes we need to graduate more PhDs in science and engineering.

I wholeheartedly support improvements in education and know the value that math and science skills provide. But the problems I see in U.S. competitiveness aren’t related to the numbers of engineering PhDs or scientists that we graduate. American companies are shifting R&D abroad because it makes economic sense for them to be near growth markets, and they can hire talented workers at a lower cost. It isn’t about deficiencies in American workers or a weakness of U.S. math and science education.

We are also graduating enough PhDs in science and engineering. The problem is that the majority of these graduates are foreign nationals (who are now increasingly returning home). American’s don’t consider it worthwhile to complete advanced science and engineering degrees because it doesn’t make financial sense for them to do so. Research by Harvard economist Richard Freeman showed that because salaries for scientists and engineers are lower than for other professions, the investment that students have to make in higher degrees isn’t cost-justified. Doctoral graduate students typically spend seven to eight years earning a PhD, during which time they are paid stipends. These stipends are usually less than what a bachelor’s degree-holder makes. Some students never make up for this financial loss. Foreign students typically have fewer opportunities and see a U.S. education as their ticket to the U.S. job market and citizenship. Hence, 60% of U.S. engineering PhD graduates are foreigners.

As this article from Scientific American discusses, the problems are even worse for graduating scientists.

…But today, however, few young PhDs can get started on the career for which their graduate education purportedly trained them, namely, as faculty members in academic research institutions. Instead, scores of thousands of them spend the years after they earn their doctorates toiling in low-paying, dead-end postdoctoral “training” appointments (called postdocs) in the laboratories of professors, where they ostensibly hone skills they would need to start labs of their own when they become professors. In fact, however, only about 25 percent of those earning American science PhDs will ever land a faculty job that enables them to apply for the competitive grants that support academic research. And even fewer—15 percent by some estimates—will get a post at the kind of research university where the nation’s significant scientific work takes place.

So, my argument is that if we create the incentives for American children to study math and science and to complete advanced degrees, the magic will happen. In addition to math and science, we should teach our children about world culture, geography, and global markets. In the era of globalization, these subjects are equally important. And while we fix the incentives for Americans, let’s do all we can to keep the best foreign students who come to the U.S. to study, here, so they are competing on our side.

Craig Barrett:

Economic competitiveness in the 21st Century will be quite different than in the past. With the free flow of information, capital, and people, economies will have to look for new comparative advantages. Most observers of this topic conclude that there are only three things that a country can do to increase their relative competitiveness and provide for an increased standard of living for their citizens. Countries have to invest in the education of their work force (smart people), they have to invest in research and development (smart ideas) and they have to provide the right environment to let smart people get together with smart ideas and create new products, new businesses, and new services. The most fundamental of these three issues is education. Historically the standard of living or per capita income has tracked closely with the level of education of the work force—as education lets workers add value to what they do and as the economy grows the standards of living increase.

Looking forward every major economy has identified the general areas that will drive innovation and economic growth. Japan, the US, and the EU have all listed those technologies (nanotech, photonics, new materials, micro electronics, alternative energy, biotech, etc) that will be key for development, productivity improvements, and growth. All of these areas have the common foundation of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Hence it is straightforward to conclude that work force expertise in STEM will be a determinant of economic growth.

If we look at the US for a moment we can make several observations about the education of our current and future work force.

1. US kids on average do poorly in mathematics, science and problem solving when compared to their OECD peers;
2. Fewer US kids choose to major in the hard sciences and engineering each year (most of our engineering graduate students are in fact foreign nationals).
3. The current 25 year old generation will be less well educated (defined by college graduation rates) than the 45 year old generation
4. Most OECD and emerging economy countries are increasing their college (and STEM) graduation rates

So in contrast to the importance of STEM education for economic performance in the 21st Century we see the US moving in the opposite direction. Certainly our universities are still top ranked in the world in STEM but increasingly the graduates of those universities are foreign nationals who are often choosing to return home to pursue their professional careers. And we are producing no more STEM graduates than we did decades ago.

If the US is really serious about competing in the 21st Century economy we will have to decide to compete. This simply means that you have to create the work force (smart people), invest in R&D (smart ideas) and make sure the environment is attractive to investment in innovation (do something about tax rates, make it easier to form corporations, provide incentives to invest in R&D and make capital investments, etc). Otherwise you will see the continuous flight of capital and jobs to regions of the world where governments have made the environment more attractive. This is not a simple issue of wage rates—corporations chase after the best possible work force in areas where the total cost is most attractive and often the total cost is much more heavily weighted by corporate tax rates and incentives, not wage rates.

STEM education is key for our future. We need a major upgrade in our K-12 education to produce high school graduates who understand and appreciate STEM.

We need more undergraduates majoring in STEM for the jobs of the 21st Century. And we need more STEM graduate students to drive those industries that are key to our future. As a measure of how rapidly things are changing with time, it used to be that many STEM Ph.Ds turned right around and went after faculty positions in our universities. Today, STEM Ph.Ds are the entry level education requirements to get into the engineering and research laboratories of the successful tech corporations in the US, like Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, IBM, etc. It is also certain that not every STEM graduate is going to pursue a limited career in STEM. STEM education is a great introduction to many other professions – the basis of STEM education being problem solving means that this education is a great entry to other jobs. In fact the most common educational background of the Fortune 500 CEOs is engineering.

So at a time when the rest of the world is gearing up for competition let’s refocus the US to do the same. That is unless you believe our future is in low value add services or manufacturing, investment banking, tort lawyers or asphalt ready construction jobs. Somebody has to create some wealth if you want your economy to grow.

Vivek Wadhwa’s Rebuttal:

Again, I wholeheartedly agree that we need to improve K-12 education and I agree about the importance of STEM education. The question is, how do you motivate American children to enter fields like science and engineering that are harder than others to learn, don’t provide the economic rewards, and that aren’t considered “cool”? We can’t force our children to do PhDs in math.

As the article from Scientific American showed, many engineering and science PhDs can’t even get jobs – in academia or industry. This is after they have worked for years at ridiculously low wages as researchers or postdocs. Those that do get jobs don’t ever make up for the financial sacrifice they have made. When American children choose to study science or engineering, their friends call them geeks or nerds – they are made to feel inferior. Their Indian and Chinese counterparts are held in high regard by society and end up at the top of the social ladder. Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists are often national heroes. Here, our kids idolize football players and rock stars.

We can’t also just tell our children that the nation’s competitiveness and standard of living depends on them making sacrifice and completing advanced degrees in math and science. They won’t care. We should improve the K-12 education system as you suggest. Our corporations should also invest in workforce development – which they generally don’t. We should also provide tax breaks for research as you say. And we should fix our university research system (I have written about the big problems with this).

The issue I am highlighting is that even if we did all of the good things you suggest, this would not fix the problem of American children not being motivated to become scientists and engineers. My top students at the Masters of Engineering Management Program at Duke University still vie for high-paying investment banking jobs; they don’t become engineers. It is the same with our top PhDs in math; they become quants at investment banks. Their talent ends up being used by investment banks to find new ways of bilking the financial system.

We need to create the excitement about science and engineering at the national level and motivate our best and brightest to become engineers and scientists. And we need to make it worthwhile financially for them to help our country stay competitive and to solve the problems facing our planet. This is as much a marketing problem as it is an investment problem. An example of a way to fix the marketing problem is what National Academy of Engineering President, Charles Vest, proposed with the Grand Challenges for Engineering program. But this is a tiny first step. We need to do a lot more.

Craig Barrett’s Rebuttal:

Let me respectfully disagree with one point Vivek makes and then give some suggestions on how to overcome his second issue.

First, this is not a financial compensation issue. If it were then every kid who goes to college would choose to major in engineering because a BS in engineering (almost any subject) commands the highest salary of any university graduate. Most kids don’t major in engineering because they don’t have the interest, the aptitude, or they like some other major more. Our young college graduates do not chase the dollar; they tend to follow their interests. In addition, when I look at the unemployment statistics, engineers are usually amongst the highest employment professions in the country. Certainly the percentage of NFL or rock star wannabes or business administration majors or medieval history majors on unemployment is much higher than that for engineers. So can we please move away from the simplistic argument that STEM doesn’t pay?

In addition if you look at graduate school and the graduate Ph.D who spends years working as a Post Doc angling for a teaching position at a prestigious university you simply cannot do an ROI analysis on his or her investment to land the faculty position and conclude that no one will be a Post Doc. The individual is chasing that faculty position because that is what they really want to do. Just like an aspiring actor spends years doing bit parts to finally land the big role. You know that because the end point, the faculty position, is not the highest paid option for the Ph.D. He or she can make more money in the private sector and probably have greater resources (capital facilities and research dollars) to pursue interesting problems. The Post Doc pursues their interest precisely because that is what they are interested in. As there are many more Post Docs than faculty positions available we have to conclude that Post Docs are Post Docs because they want to try to become faculty members and that Post Docs do not represent an inherent limitation or barrier to people trying to obtain a Ph.D in STEM. The private sector has a strong appetite for STEM Ph.Ds—just look at the hiring practices of the major corporations.

The real barrier to pursuing degrees in STEM is that we have almost a perfect filter in place in K-12. For a student to want to major in STEM in college they have to exit high school with a strong mathematics background. That means that they need to have a good math teacher in nearly every grade (in addition to having a good physics, chemistry, and biology teacher). We know that about 1/3 of all math and science teachers in K-12 are not certified in their subjects and probably do not do a good job educating and motivating their students. If you assume for a moment that you need 12 good math teachers in a row to exit high school being proficient in math then the calculation of the probability of such an event happening is simple: 0.67 raised to the 12th power shows you what a perfect filter the K-12 system is.

So how about a national effort to get more STEM content majors into K-12 teaching? A few exciting programs have started in this space (UTeach out of Texas, Teach for America, the revamp of the education school at ASU). All we need to do is start recognizing that hiring content experts in K-12 is more important than hiring someone who has studied education pedagogy for 4 years. Just imagine how many folks interested in STEM want to take all those School of Education classes to get their teaching certificate.

On to the point where I want to support Vivek, i.e., the need to get more kids interested in STEM during K-12. This can happen in the class room with good teachers (can you imagine a PE teacher doubling as a math teacher inspiring kids to want to pursue math?) and it can happen outside of the class room. For example I just spent yesterday afternoon in Phoenix at the FIRST Robotics Championship competition—the energy, the enthusiasm, the application of STEM was fantastic. But only about 15,000 kids nationwide participate in this competition. Just suppose we had a FIRST team at every school in the country. Next week I am at the Intel Science Talent Search (the Nobel equivalent for high school students doing research). The 40 finalists will be doing research better than my Ph.D thesis topic. But only about 1500 kids a year enter this competition—what if we had 15,000? Or 150,000?

This is where we need to mobilize the public and private sectors to improve. This is where we can catch the imagination of the next generation and turn them into candidates for those STEM Ph.Ds. There is sub critical mass working in this area – it just needs to be expanded. Suppose we organized the top 200 STEM oriented companies in the US and let them work at the local level to make FIRST robotics, science fairs, and computer club houses really happen across the US. Then we could overcome the tired arguments that our society doesn’t value STEM. There is a movement to make this happen right now. The best thing we could all do is throw our weight behind this effort.

Today at SXSWi, keynote speaker Danah Boyd took the stage to talk about privacy and publicity, and how they intertwine online. Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and has studied this space extensively for years. It was a compelling talk that challenged the notion that personal information is on a binary spectrum of public or private. To help underscore her points, she recalled and discussed a number of major privacy blunders from Facebook and Google. You can find my notes from the presentation below.

Boyd says that privacy is not dead, but that a big part of our notion of privacy relates to maintaining control over our content, and that when we don’t have control, we feel that our privacy has been violated. This has happened a few times recently.

How The Buzz Launch Failed

As a first example Boyd brought up Google Buzz. She says that nothing with the launch was technologically wrong — you could opt out of Buzz, elect to hide your friend list, and so on. But the service resulted in a PR disaster because Google made non-technical mistakes, doing things that didn’t meet user expectations:

• Google integrated a public facing system in one of the most private systems you can imagine. Lots of people thought Google was exposing their email to the world.
• Google assumed people would opt out if users didn’t want to participate. “I can’t help but notice that more technology companies think it’s ok to expose people tremendously and then back pedal when people flip out”, she says.
• You want to help users understand the proposition. You need to ease them in, invite them to contribute their content.

Boyd says that years ago, researchers noticed people in a chat room would often ask “A/S/L” (age, sex, location). So some services, looking to streamlines things a bit, started building user profiles that had this information. What they failed to understand is that this “A/S/L” was a sort of chatroom icebreaker. Users lost that, and putting that information in a profile — even if they would have shared it to answer that chat message — could creep them out.

With Buzz, Google found the social equivalent to the famous “uncanny valley” (where things seem almost natural, but aren’t quite close enough, so they’re creepy). They collapsed articulated networks (email) and assumed it was a personal network.

Boyd then transitioned to talk a bit about the fuzzy lines between what is public and private. She says that just because people put material in public places doesn’t mean it was meant to be aggregated. And just because something is publically accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized.

The Facebook Privacy Fail
Boyd’s second case study was Facebook’s privacy changes in December, when Facebook changed ‘everyone’ to the default. We’ve written extensively on this fiasco, which may take years to really reveal the extent of the damage it has done.

• Facebook said 35% of users had read the new privacy documentation and changed something in the privacy settings. Facebook thinks this is a good thing, but it means 65% of population made their content public. Boyd has asked non-techie users to tell her what they thought their settings were. She has yet to find a single person whose actual privacy settings matched what they thought they were.
• Boyd recounted a story of a young woman who had moved far away from an abusive father. The young woman talked with her mother (who had moved with her) about possibly joining Facebook. They sat down to make the content as private as possible, which worked well. But in December, the young woman clicked through Facebook’s privacy dialog (as most people did) and had no idea her content was public. She only found out when someone who should not have seen the content told her.

Boyd then discussed how different groups of people think about privacy. She says that teenagers are much more conscious about what they have to gain by being in public, whereas adults are more concerned about what they have to lose.

As an example, Boyd talked about a teenage girl who often put risqué, sometimes illegal content online. When Boyd asked why she’d want to do something, the girl replied, “I want to get a modeling contract just like Tila Tequilla”. Her calculation wasn’t about what she could potentially lose, but rather what she stood to gain.

Boyd says that most techies think about Personally Identifiable Information, but that the vast majority of people are thinking about personally embarrassing information. People often share private information with their friends in part because it allows them to bond, it makes them somewhat vulnerable and establishes trust. But when it’s through technology (e.g. Facebook’s public by default setting) it’s a huge technology fail.

Boyd also called out the presence of racism in social media. On the night of the BET awards last year, all of the trending topics were dominated by terms relating to the event and the black community. In response, some Twitter users made very racist comments — clearly even these open communication platforms are still prone to hate.

To conclude the talk, Boyd pointed out some of the challenges we will continue to face with regard to privacy online. She asks whether or not teachers can be expected to maintain a professional, pristine presence online — something that is very difficult to do while leading a normal life.

Ultimately, she says, “neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both.” We’ve been looking at privacy and publicity as a black-or-white attribute for content, when really it’s defined by context and the implications of what we’ve chosen to share.

Pixelpipe, the service that lets you syndicate text, audio, video and image files to 120 different social networks, blogs and sites, is adding geolocation functionality to its site with a Foursquare integration. The true virtue of Pixelpipe’s service is the fact that it lets you publish all types of files to various social networks and sites from a centralized place. And the startup offers its service on mobile devices, including a nifty Android app, as well.

Using Foursquare’s API, Pixelpipe now allows you to add check-in to a location with a link to media captured at the venue, which is hosted on your Pixelpipe Page. And you can check-in to a location with media (text, photo, video, audio or a file) with Pixelpipe’s Android app. Pixelpipe will present a list of venues to a user. The number after the venue represents the number of recent check-insFor example, if you are at SXSW, you can record an audio clip or video and post the media long with your check-in to the Austin Convention Center. The link will lead vistors back to your Pixelpipe landing page.

Sort of like a Ping.fm for media, Pixelpipe automatically distributes any new audio files, images, or videos to your profiles on social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. You can choose to group these services by tags, so you can be more selective about where you’d like to to post the content. Pixelpipe’s CEO Brett Butterfield tells me that Brightkite and possible Gowalla integration will be rolled out in the future.

As the geolocation wars heat up, it seems like web applications and mobile apps, both new and old, are getting into the location game. Hot Potato, SimpleGeo and new startups StickyBits and Social Great have hooked up their applications with Foursquare. And Foursquare competitor Gowalla upped the ante with a new release.

AMD is finally looking to get into the netbook game for real.

Original post: 
AMD working on actual netbook chipset, not due until next year

Yesterday brought news that Facebook is planning to launch its location offering at its f8 conference in the end of April. In first reporting the news, the New York Times noted that “the company was not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.” From what we’re hearing, that’s true — because they could be using some of those services to federate check-ins.

How do we know? Because it appears that a Facebook employee has been showing the app around to friends. One person who has seen it notes that the icon for the location feature has a pushpin on a map. This was apparently a beta version of an app, but the functionality, if Facebook chooses to go with it, would likely be built into the massively popular Facebook iPhone app.

When reached for comment, all Facebook would say is, “We are constantly experimenting with new ideas and products internally. We don’t have anything more to share at this time.” That’s not exactly a denial at all.

What Foursquare and Gowalla (the two location apps specifically cited by a source) had to say was more interesting. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley danced around the idea of working with Facebook on such a feature, but notes that anyone can access their check-in data through Foursquare’s API. And in fact, plenty of users are already pushing their check-ins to Facebook through Connect, he notes. Also, this page is sort of interesting. It’s what we call a placeholder.

Meanwhile, Gowalla founder Josh Williams said a bit more:

It’s no surprise that Facebook is wading into the location waters (cannonball!) — our ultimate goal at Gowalla is to provide the easiest and most fun way to share location with friends, regardless of where that information is distributed… Facebook, Twitter, etc. It will be important for folks like Facebook and Twitter to clearly spell out how this information is used and displayed.

That suggests that both Facebook and Twitter have been looking at ways to import check-in data. Twitter already syndicates the data through its Geolocation API, but as more and more players get involved in the space, it wouldn’t be surprising at all for the upstart players like Gowalla and Foursquare to ask the platforms (Facebook and Twitter) to make it more clear which data is being sent from where. And make no mistake, based on what we’re hearing, that’s exactly what Facebook aims to be with location: a platform. Yes, like their good buddies Twitter.

[photo: flickr/24oranges.nl]

During the GamesBeat keynote at GDC today, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman took the stage to showcase the company’s game streaming technology, which allows gamers to play high quality 3D games without a console — OnLive does all of the intense rendering in the cloud, then streams it back to a lightweight client that will work on nearly any computer (it will work on TVs as well with an adapter). We’ve been hearing about the service for quite a while now (as well as its competitor, OTOY), but now OnLive finally has a solid release date: June 17, 2010. At launch, the service will be available in the 48 contiguous states.

The service will have a $14.95 per month base service fee, and then users will purchase games and rentals on an a la carte model on top of that. You’ll be able to purchase multiple months at a time to get a discount on the service. As a special for early users, OnLive is going to waive the service fee for three months for the first 25,000 users to pre-register at this page.

OnLive’s demos are always impressive. Today, Perlman showcased the service’s ability to play recent games like Crysis on a large TV, as well as on his mobile phone (because all the processing is done in the cloud, even an iPhone can handle it). He also showed off other features that OnLive will offer, like streaming movies and Xbox Live-like community features. It looks great, but OnLive still faces one very major hurdle: latency. Because gamers aren’t actually playing their games on a local machine, there’s a slight lag whenever they do anything. And in the case of ‘twitchy’ games like first person shooters, even 50 milliseconds of lag time can make the difference between a perfect kill and getting destroyed by your opponent. It’s unclear how much lag will be present once OnLive is deployed on a wide scale.

At launch OnLive will be available for PC and Mac only, and a MicroConsole TV adapter (which lets your TV hook up to the cloud service) will appear later this year. 1080p60 will be available in 2011 (Perlman says bandwidth available to consumers is what’s holding this back). International announcements are coming later this year.

Also be sure to check out our past coverage of OnLive competitor OTOY.

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.

As for what Google will do with their 20% share, they’re not entirely sure. “We don’t know what will happen with the revenue, but we think it’s a very fair rev share for the value we’re providing,” Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra says.

As you might expect, in the Marketplace, Google will feature certain apps on a rotating basis. And each will have a star rating system and reviews written by people who have used the app. Apps will be grouped into different categories to make it easier for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. Once they do, the four steps alluded to above are:

1. Click “Add it now”
2. Agree to the vendor’s Terms of Service
3. Grant access to the data that the app is requesting.  Some apps require data access, some don’t – only grant access to apps you trust.
4. Turn it on and start enjoying your increased productivity

So how does this all work? Google connection points for integration into Apps are actually done through open protocols such as OAuth. And while signing-in may seem like a pain across different apps, Google has streamlined that as well thanks to another open protocol: OpenID.

Once an app is hooked in to Google Apps, it will appear on your main Apps Dashboard alongside the other Google-made apps you use. It will even appear in the “more” drop down that Google uses in the toolbar across its properties. And because these apps are so tightly woven into Google Apps, they can take advantage of the built-in Google Apps such as Gmail and Gtalk to easily communicate within the third-party apps.

And there’s more. While it’s not quite ready to launch just yet, in the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch flexible billing options for third-parties using their services. Basically, this will allow companies to use Google Checkout to handle complicated billings, such as subscriptions. This could mean trouble for startups specifically in this space, such as Recurly. Also coming later will be detailed analytics for transactions, we’re told. For now, developers are free to hook up their data to their own analytic programs to run their numbers.

While Google’s options for this Marketplace sound nice and open, there’s actually something even better: you don’t have to build your apps on their platform. Whereas a big player like Salesforce wants to keep the apps it works with in the Force.com ecosystem, Google doesn’t care where you build it — it can be on App Engine, or on anything else. You simply hook your app up to the APIs and you’re ready to go. It’s a model so enticing that even a big Google competitor in this space, Zoho, is ready to work with them, and is launching as an initial partner. All told, there are more than 50 companies partnering up at launch, including a winner of the audience award at this year’s TechCrunch50, Socialwok.

As to whether Google could eventually roll this app store model out to the more consumer facing apps they offer, Gundotra gave me the old, “We have nothing to announce at this time.” That reads suspiciously to me like a “yes,” provided this is the hit it seems like it should be.