Google’s certainly made some enterprise inroads with Google Apps, and now it’s open the road for other cloud-based service providers to build on that success: it’s launching Google Apps Marketplace to sell third-party web apps that integrate with the Apps suite. The apps are sold as a subscription, with both monthly and annual pricing, and the billing is all handled by Google. Since it’s all targeted at the enterprise, the apps themselves are pretty dry — we’re talking notables like Intuit Online Payroll, eFax, and TripIt — but it’s pretty easy to see how Google could build a similar consumer-level marketplace into Gmail and Google Calendar sometime in the future. And then? Skynet. Video after the break

According to Microsoft, Pivot’s “a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online,” enabling “spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of [invisible] patterns and links.” According to me, it’s awesome. Pivot allows you to create and access data collections made from massive amounts of web information in a visual way. It keeps the same interface independently of the content of the collection, allowing you to dive in the data with ease, zoom out, reorder the collection in any way you want, filter data with one click, and establish relationships between different data sets with ease. To do this, it uses meta-information within an open XML structure to make those collections—which vary in complexity. Then it allows the user to manipulate the data view using Seadragon , a display technology specifically designed to move around titanic amounts of data and graphics in real time

Talk about rapid response. Just a day or so after Google blew a few minds by announcing its plans to serve 1Gbps internet to a select group of communities, Seattle mayor Mike McGinn has come forward and confessed that the Emerald City is ready to accept said offer. ‘Course, we shouldn’t be shocked to hear that one of the most educated and wealthy cities in North America — as well as ( almost ) being home to Microsoft — is up for a little fiber action, but it’s certainly interesting to see just how willing the local government is to share its resources with Gmail’s creator. We’re guessing that other tech-savvy cities throughout the US will be jumping in line as well, so if you’d like to be one of the first, now might be a fantastic time to ping your own mayor and get him / her on the ball. Seattle eager for Google fiber, other cities apt to fall in line originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:14:00 EST.

Fixing a typo is handy, sure, but something tells me that the less morally scrupulous among us will have a field day with Google Buzz ’s edit button—namely, this comic. [ DogHouseDiaries via reddit ]

This is even cooler than it looks: Fav4.org starts your browsing off with your four favorite website’s icons already queued up. You can customize from among the 34 current offerings, and it looks as though they’ll be adding more soon. That’s right: finally all you AOL/ffffound/MySpace/Linked In junkies will have a one-stop start page of your very own. Let the write-in campaign for a Gizmodo icon begin! [ Fav4 via NYTimes Bits Twitter ]

Appropriately following our explainer on why HTML5 won’t save the internet (yet) and the embedded discussion about video codecs and the future of internet video, MPEG LA—who licenses the h.264 codec—has announced they’re going to continue H.264’s royalty freeness for free internet video through 2016. Which sounds like it melts some of Mozilla’s core objections to anointing h.264 the internet video standard, but shnope. They’re pretty committed to a fully free and open standard. Just see Mozilla engineering VP’s longer post on the subject .

As if you needed any more evidence of the tech supremacy of your Nokia N900 or N810 , here’s Firefox making its official mobile debut on the most righteous Maemo OS. Available for download right now , version 1.0 will come with a pretty sweet feature named Weave Sync, which harmonizes your bookmarks, tabs, history and passwords across devices, making for a seamless transition between your desktop computer and your mobile one. We reckon we could get used to that. Alas, Flash support is still somewhat shaky, and does not come enabled by default, though you’re free to flip the switch and ride the lightning as it were. We’re sure Mozilla will appreciate any crash reports you might want to throw its way as well

We’ve heard (ever-so-briefly) about ENUM before, which is generally described as an IETF-sanctioned standard for converting traditional phone numbers into IP addresses. But for the most part, even techies would say that they aren’t exactly up to speed on what the protocol offers and / or promises. ArsTechnica has spent a good while underneath the mire, and it has arisen with an in-depth article that spells out how the standard can neatly collate a variety of contact options (email address, mobile number, home line, Facebook account, ICQ name, etc.) into a single address that’s recognizable by the internet that we so dearly love. In fact, user ENUM even has the capability to rank contact options by priority, so you could hit someone up via the mobile first and their Twitter account second should they not answer. The issue, however, is that the ‘”ENUM standard (RFC 3761) demands that ENUM is a public service and that the control of the telephone number lies in the hands of the end-user,” and it doesn’t take an economist to understand why ISPs and carriers wouldn’t be fond of this. Indeed, just nine nations have an ENUM registry in production, and the future isn’t looking too bright for the rest of us.

We’ve heard (ever-so-briefly) about ENUM before, which is generally described as an IETF-sanctioned standard for converting traditional phone numbers into IP addresses. But for the most part, even techies would say that they aren’t exactly up to speed on what the protocol offers and / or promises. ArsTechnica has spent a good while underneath the mire, and it has arisen with an in-depth article that spells out how the standard can neatly collate a variety of contact options (email address, mobile number, home line, Facebook account, ICQ name, etc.) into a single address that’s recognizable by the internet that we so dearly love. In fact, user ENUM even has the capability to rank contact options by priority, so you could hit someone up via the mobile first and their Twitter account second should they not answer. The issue, however, is that the ‘”ENUM standard (RFC 3761) demands that ENUM is a public service and that the control of the telephone number lies in the hands of the end-user,” and it doesn’t take an economist to understand why ISPs and carriers wouldn’t be fond of this. Indeed, just nine nations have an ENUM registry in production, and the future isn’t looking too bright for the rest of us.

Unicode is great because it supports multiple languages simultaneously, bringing international understanding, universal peace, and planetary love. And so is ICANN’s decision to allow domain names that use non-Latin alphabets. Until both combine to steal your credit card numbers. Or your login name, passwords, address, or whatever other data a phishing site can get from you.