Tuesday night Google announced the creation of the Google Apps Marketplace, a place for third-party applications developers to share their work with the community of Google Apps users. Currently, businesses can use enterprise versions of Google's popular suite of web apps, and with the new Apps Marketplace, they can integrate outside applications into these services. One of the applications launching in the App Marketplace is Expensify, an online tool for gathering and reporting expenses.

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Expensify, whose motto is "Expense reports that don't suck," prides itself on its ability to create detailed and IRS certified expense reports without the need for a single scrap of paper. Users can associate a credit card with their account for automatic tracking of purchases, and Expensify will create electronic versions of the receipt, eliminating the need for paper receipt hoarding.

For expenses like hotel and travel reservations that require special treatment, users can email the confirmation to Expensify and the app will generate the data and include a PDF of the email in the report. If you use the wrong card or pay with cash, mobile applications for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Palm devices allow users to snap a picture of the receipt and send it to Expensify.

When sending reports, Expensify makes full color PDFs with tables, charts and graphs of the data. Recipients can accept, modify or reject the expense reports and can even reimburse the expenses from directly within Expensify by printing a check or sending a payment via direct deposit. Or, if need be, the reports can be send to third-party bookkeepers for review. Expensify's CEO David Barrett hopes, however, that small businesses and startups taking advantage of Expensify will be able to cut bookkeepers out of their work flow entirely.

"Expense reports affect everyone of all business sizes, from sole proprietorships to million dollar businesses...Everyone has this problem and everyone hates the current solution," Barrett told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. "One thing that makes Expensify unique from other applications is it's not built for accountants; it's built for the people actually doing it."

With the new Google Apps Marketplace, companies looking to implement the app into their business can simply add it as an extension of Google Apps. This means that employees won't have to create new Expensify accounts; the application does that automatically in the background when added to Google Apps through the Apps Marketplace. From anywhere within Google Apps, users can click the "More" tab at the top of the screen, select "Expenses" and they are directed to Expensify's site with the help of OpenID.

"We are very excited to have Expensify in the Google Apps Marketplace," said Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise in a press release Tuesday. "Through the Google Apps Marketplace, software vendors like Expensify are helping us build a rich ecosystem of integrated apps that work seamlessly with Google Apps."

One of the large benefits of the app is that it is relatively inexpensive. It is free for users to send reports, but costs $5 per month, per submitter for managers with the first two submitters free. Integration with FreshBooks and QuickBooks makes Expensify a solid choice to track and report expenses for small businesses and startups.

Additionally, Expensify is a great example of how third-party developers can now use Google's new marketplace to build, integrate and market their products. Startups can use and develop on Google apps like Gmail, Calendar and Docs instead of creating their own. This makes it much easier to quickly launch products and features, but running a business built on the shoulders of Google may not necessarily be a long-term solution. The marketplace does, however, provide great exposure potential for apps.

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Get Satisfaction, the popular online customer service company, just announced that it is bringing its service to Facebook fan pages. This new service, the Facebook Social Engagement Hub, will allow companies that have a presence on Facebook to easily answer questions from their customers on Facebook. The Social Engagement Hub recreates the Get Satisfaction experience on Facebook and allows users to ask questions about products or make suggestion for new features. One key feature here is that the discussion on Facebook and the Get Satisfaction topic pages are synchronized, so that questions that get answered on a company's topic page on Get Satisfaction also appear on Facebook and vice versa.

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Liberating Content from Facebook

The new Social Engagement Hub on Facebook will cost Get Satisfaction customers an additional $99 per month. As Get Satisfaction's co-founder Lane Becker told us yesterday, however, this expense could easily be worth it for these companies, as users on Facebook tend to be very active on these fan pages and really want to interact with these companies and brands on the social networking service.

As Lane also noted, conversations that happen around a brand in Facebook tend to be trapped in this silo. Thanks to the synchronization between the two platforms, however, brands can now take this content and make it useful outside of Facebook as well. Another problem for brands that Get Satisfaction is trying to solve here is the simple fact that conversations on Facebook only have a very short lifespan. Get Satsifaction now allows companies to capture these conversations.

Overall, this looks like a very smart way for brands to interact with their customers on Facebook and to streamline their social media customer service efforts.

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In a recent interview, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar told technology reporter Om Malik that his company was "very bullish" on mobile, even going so far as to say "we will embrace every device." That's a funny statement, considering that the company has been touting that same sentiment for years but has yet to launch anything for mobile, be it an app or simply a mobile-ready streaming site.

Now, with the launch of the iPad just around the corner, the rumors of an iPhone/iPad Hulu app are rising up again. But there's a bigger mobile web than just the one accessible via Apple products, and that may be what Hulu has its eye on now. "We don't think about one device only," Kilar said.

However, going mobile is going to be a challenge for Hulu. And it's not as simple as re-encoding a few videos, no matter what you may have heard.

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Problem A: Hulu's Business Model Needs Work

The fact that Hulu exists at all is somewhat of an amazement. Through tenuous connections with major studios, the collaborative, experimental effort to bring streaming TV to web (and make it profitable) has managed to attract a number of users in the U.S. Although the audience size varies widely depending on who's counting, the company has managed to become a household name thanks to eye-catching commercials on NBC featuring actors from the network's top shows.

But there's a problem facing Hulu: in-video advertising is, apparently, not as profitable as once hoped. In fact, it's just too expensive, says Marc Ruxin, the Chief Innovation Officer for ad agency network McCann Worldgroup. Hulu has been aware of this problem, though, and has been hinting towards the launch of a subscription service, with News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch telling an investor conference last fall that the company, was looking at "adding subscription services and pay per view" options. Through the subscription model, Hulu could potentially generate enough revenue to keep the studios happy and maybe even encourage them to offer up more programming.

Unfortunately, the subscription model has yet to launch and the profits from video ads have been far too lean for some Hulu participants. Recently, for example, Viacom pulled two of the top shows - The Daily Show and the Colbert Report - from the site, claiming that they simply weren't earning enough money via the advertising model currently in place. Viacom Inc. Chief Executive Officer Philippe Dauman said that "on the current economic model for Hulu, there's just not much in it for us to continue at this time."

And so the situation degrades.

So what is Hulu doing now? It's trying to attract more viewers to its site with the launch of "If I Can Dream," an original series that premiered earlier this month. The fact that they're now making the foray into this sort of online programming is somewhat worrying. After all, if hit video webisodes alone made for a profitable service, then YouTube would have achieved profitability ages ago, instead of (maybe) getting there this year, five years post-launch. Let's face it, original programming is a bonus for Hulu users, but it's not going to take the place of hot shows like the now-departed Comedy Central fare.

Problem B: Will Apple Allow a Hulu App on the iPhone/iPad?

Another problem? Hulu has been planning to delay its iPhone app launch until a subscription model was in place, according to earlier reports. But with the biggest names pulling out, subscriptions could be a harder sell. Still, even if Hulu was able to make subscriptions happen, there are no guarantees that Apple would ever allow them into the iTunes store, especially considering they're offering a competing product. (See: Google Voice banishment from the iPhone, for example).

Meanwhile, Hulu's online site doesn't work in the iPhone's web browser because it was built in Flash. If Apple rejects the Hulu app from iTunes, the company's other option is encoding all their site's content in H.264 and make that available via HTML5, the new web language that offers streaming video sans plugin. Since this has already been done, a Hulu app could launch a player on the iPhone or iPad, if, of course, Apple allowed them to do so. If not, then a mobile site would have to be built in HTML5 - video controls, overall UI, advertisements and all. That's no simple process.

What's Hulu Doing Now?

So is this the plan Hulu has decided on now? It's hard to know for sure. Like Apple, the company is incredibly secretive about their plans and product roadmap, often refusing to respond to calls and emails entirely, even to say "no comment."

And yet, the Hulu iPhone app exists. We've spoken to someone who's seen it...but that was ages ago. For all we know, iPhone/iPad app plans have since been scrapped to work on a new solution that works around any potential Apple restrictions. But sources inside Hulu have clammed up lately, meaning they're either building something top, top secret...or perhaps nothing at all.

We hope it's the former, because frankly, an iPad without Hulu is a sad, sad affair. But will we ever see a real app? At this point, we're not holding our breath.

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Urban Airship, a Portland, Oregon based iPhone "push notifications as a service" company, announced this morning that it now offers push notifications for BlackBerry applications and will soon offer Android push as well. "We are going to see at least four, and potentially five, extremely relevant platforms for mobile applications in the near future," the company said, "and we intend to provide the push messaging and content delivery infrastructure for all of them."

If you've seen push notifications from Gowalla (a great use case, by the way), Tap Tap Revenge, Yowza or Urban Rivals, then you've seen Urban Airship's service on the front end. On the back end, the company is developing push and in-app purchase infrastructure for numerous apps and devices, including the forthcoming iPad.

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Airship developer Michael Richardson put the company's cross-platform efforts into context for us this morning:
We want to make it extremely simple for mobile publishers to communicate in a real-time fashion with their users. The mobile phone is the perfect channel for that and we want to provide the ability to reach any user, any time, immediately, without the high cost or difficult implementation of SMS.

Bringing that paradigm to BlackBerry and Android will open up big new markets for the company and easy new functionality for developers. The company is offering BlackBerry push right now by integrating with BlackBerry's own API. Android push will be handled end to end by Airship and isn't ready yet. "We'll handle the details of managing the persistent socket connections from the device and sending the notifications as needed along that connection," the company says. That's easier said than done. Richardson: "We're taking it slow to make sure that we do it right."

The downside to using a service like this of course is that it's a form of reliance on a small outside service provider. Quite a few companies have been willing to forgo building this kind of tech in-house to date, though. Urban Airship reports that it delivered 100 million push notifications in its first 6 months and 60 million more in just 4 weeks after that.

Into mobile? Check out the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010.

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For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We've moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than Twitter.com?

For that, there's Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two.

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The web-based version of Brizzly takes the Twitter stream and opens it up for the average user. It expands shortened links into full URLs, making it easier to know what you're clicking on, and turns links to YouTube videos or images into just that - embedded images and videos. In a way, it takes the guess work out of Twitter.

Today, the company is releasing a full-featured iPhone app that was built off of the skeleton of Birdfeed, the company acquired by Brizzly last fall. The app is a simple and doesn't offer some of the opening up of Twitter that you find on the website, but that would be difficult for an iPhone app to do, with it's limited real estate. Links are shortened and images hidden behind links, but that's as expected. Still, it handles multiple accounts, each of which you can view in its own stream. It also supports lists, mentions and DMs - all the standard stuff you would expect.

As we mentioned the last time we wrote about Brizzly, when the company added Facebook to its stream, the tool tries to make the experience of twitter simple for the non-geek. In that way, it interprets and explains Twitter Trends, the hashtags that are most popular at a given time. The Brizzly staff looks at hashtags and writes up a quick little blurb that explains what the Trends are that day and why. The iPhone app prominently contains these guides as a separate tab called "News".

Brizzly is expanding on this trend explanation feature with its launch of the Brizzly Guide on its website. The Guide gives each of these trends its own page, which is a "permanent source for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about," it says in its press release. In addition giving these explanations a permanent home, Brizzly has acquired WikiRank, a visualization web application based on Wikipedia data. It will be "integrating WikiRank technology into the Brizzly Guide" the company says in its press release. We can only wonder what will come of that, but it sounds interesting.

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Social media gurus: We all know one. If you're lucky, you know only one.

They are the attendees of tech parties, the "Twitter consultants," the armchair generals of the Internet, and their numbers grow by the day. Yet most of them couldn't distinguish a line of code from a badly punctuated haiku.

What's to be done with the social media experts? Accept that their blathering may contain some wisdom? Or require technical exams for all Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers? You decide! And make the NMDs among us take our "technical" quiz.

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There is always grave danger when amateurs turn overnight into experts. This sub-professional clown town is where B movies and Soulja Boy come from. It's also the birthplace of every blowhard who tells you you're "doing it wrong" without any technical knowledge or original thought to back it up.

Sometimes, it's not such a bad thing - in fact, there are a great many non-technical social media folks who are doing a great job of creating quality content and helping brands get themselved situated on the Web. But most of the people I can think of who fit this description have been doing their thing for so long that they've had to pick up a few technical tidbits along the way to ensure their continued success and to ensure they weren't sounding like idiots.

However, I hold the strong opinion that if you're working in technology - even as a PR flak or social media consultant - you should be able to understand some of the terms, concepts and people that make your business possible. Otherwise, you risk your own reputation by taking the chance that you're scarily wrong or laughably vague, and you risk gumming up the works for your clients by not knowing how to communicate with their audience, many of whom are very technical folk.

Ultimately, taking the time and effort to understand the technology you use is simply a matter of taking pride in your work, just like the barista who knows all the ins and outs of the perfectly pulled free-trade organic espresso or the skilled sommelier who, though he may not make the wine himself, knows everything about who did and where and how.

Take this quick survey, my social media gurus. (Techies, don't take the survey; you'll skew the results.) If you can't work out the answers, you might be sounding like an idiot - I tell you this because I'm your friend and I care about you. And remember, when you cheat, you're only cheating yourself, so no Wikipedia for you.

Let me know in the comments what you think about the issue. Am I being an elitist prig? Did I not take my rant far enough? How much do you think a social media expert should know about tech? Would you work with someone who couldn't sail through this "technical" survey?

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View Survey

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Bookmarking service Delicious has just rolled out a Google Chrome browser extension.

Like other Chrome extensions we love to play with, this one is lightweight, fast and useful. There's no bulky sidebar here. Bookmarks can be created and saved with a miniscule "TAG" button and they can be searched from Chrome's excellent omnibar. So, do you think this will prompt loyal Delicious users - many of whom had been holding out on Chrome in favor of Firefox - to switch to Google Chrome entirely?

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This is what the button and simple form for bookmarking a page look like:

There's nothing worse for a bicyclist than finding yourself a mile in to a two-mile stretch of shoulder-less, busy, highway-speed traffic with no alternative route. Before today, this was a common occurrence if you went to trusty Google Maps to get bicycling directions, but starting today, that has all changed.

Google has added bicycling directions, lanes and routes to Google Maps, meaning you no longer have to drive, walk or bus to get directions. And we can tell you, bicyclists are excited.

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Before now, the only option to cyclists to get even remotely appropriate directions, was to use the walking option, but this would still ignore bike trails. Google has heard the pleas of cyclists and, from first look, we have to say that the feature is well implemented.

We gave it a test to see if it would put us on some of Austin's more bike unfriendly streets, but it managed to chose some good alternative routes and stick to the bike trails when it could. The directions got a little wonky when we threw it a few curve balls, but we expect this to happen with any mapping service, especially one still in beta. But, as we've learned, you can't just go mindlessly follow directions, lest you end up in a lake.

The new feature also includes a "Bicycling Layer", which shows bike paths and bike-friendly streets with or without lanes. Three different lanes appear in the layer.

• Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
• Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
• Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

According to Google, it has also taken steps to avoid uphill and long downhill routes, busy roads and even busy intersections. Google says that it even takes hills and other factors into account when calculating your trip time. "Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you'll require and the speed you'll achieve while going uphill," Google says in its Lat Long Blog.

Google worked with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy to bring more than 12,000 miles of biking trails to its map, along with bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. Google makes sure to point out that the feature is still in beta, so feel free to tell Google the next time you find yourself on a crowded, shoulder-less highway because of Google Maps.

And for those of you headed to fair Austin this week, make sure to take a look at the new feature, because it includes all of Austin's numerous bike trails and bike lanes. If you've never been to Austin for SXSW before, bicycling is the way to get around town and now you'll know how to get there.

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Navigating SXSW is overwhelming to say the least! To help you out ReadWriteWeb has been breaking the events, panels and parties down into vertical reviews. This post provides what we think are some of the best for marketers and online strategists. We'd also love to hear your recommendations in the comments.

Online strategy is multi-faceted. You need to know as much about marketing and understanding people and their motivations as you do perfecting the online experience, understanding the next technology breakthrough on the horizon and being an excellent conversationalist - while still being able to measure the impact of it all. So this list provides a smattering of some of the best to see in all four.

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This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn't your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon!

How Your Brand Can Succeed in the New Web

With Brian Solis. "Engage is the new book by Brian Solis that will debut at SXSW. Representing the third book on new media and its impact on society, culture and communication. Engage will help anyone not only understand the changes in the media landscape but also how to lead it. Brian Solis will be joined by a special guest to discuss the new book and answer questions followed by a book signing."

The Future of Influence

"The ability to share online has allowed consumers to control and filter the Web. For brands and publishers, tapping into Influence is critical to social media's future. What is influence and how is it measured? Leading voices in social media from multiple backgrounds will define the value of influence, discuss best practices, and predict future impact. Data will be shared! This panel is sponsored by ShareThis." With Tim Schigel, Paul Berry, Dave Knox, Mike John-Baptiste, Shiv Singh.

Extending Your Brand? There's an App for That

"For many, brand extension into the digital realm means a Web site, a banner ad, a viral campaign. But applications can extend conversations and perceptions of a brand, as well as add to discussions and ideas in compelling new ways. How can applications help your brand and idea be more authentic, genuine, user friendly, and just plain old fun? Learn from the folks that are making it happen. This panel is sponsored by Microsoft Silverlight."

The Human Experience

With Gary Vaynerchuk. The content of this presentation has not been announced, but knowing Gary and his successful track record in growing business through the use of social media, this one is not to be missed.

Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

With Douglas Rushkoff. "Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values."

I Don't Trust You One Stinking Bit

"What gives people confidence on the Web? Bringing together experts in social capital and online trust, we help you build the company your users can love and call their own." With Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data

Clay Shirky hasn't announced the content of his presentation yet. He "divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, Web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web."

The Young and the Digital

With Craig Watkins. "In 2006, S. Craig Watkins participated in the MacArthur Foundation's well-funded digital media initiative alongside a select team of scholars and tech experts. The goal was simple: to understand young people's emphatic embrace of social and mobile media. Watkins went on to build a small research team that skillfully collected over 500 surveys and conducted 350 in-depth interviews with young adults, parents, and educators."

Design and Usability, The UX of Mobile

"The term 'user experience' used to be an afterthought in mobile application design. The iPhone changed all that and has set a new benchmark for user experience on mobile devices. This panel will serve as a primer for anyone interested in learning how to apply UX principles to the creation of applications for iPhone, Android, and mobile websites." With Barbara Ballard, Tom Limongello, Scott Jenson.

The Ten Commandments of User Experience

"User experience is the result of your interactions with a product or service, specifically how it's delivered and its related artifacts according to the design. In this presentation we will explain how following the 10 commandments can boost your project's ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more." With Raina Van Cleave, Nick Finck.

Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!

"So you've designed a great product, fixed a stack of usability problems and spent a fortune on marketing. The only problem is, people aren't using it. In this session you will learn how to get your users to do what you want them to through good design, human psychology and a touch of mind control." With Andy Budd.

My Three-Year Old Is My Usability Expert

"Children are perfect testers for the innate usability of visual structures. Learn how neuroscience and cognitive psychology research can make your designs and interfaces more intuitive." With Dave Stanton.

Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized?

"The emergence of the real-time Web enables an unprecedented level of user engagement and dynamic content online. However, the rapidly growing audience puts new, complex demands on the architecture of the Web as we know it. This panel will discuss what is needed to make the real-time Web achievable." With Scott Raymond, Brett Slatkin, Dare Obasanjo, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jack Moffitt.

Time + Social + Location. What's Next In Mobile Experiences?

"As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what,to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location." With Naveen Selvadurai, Josh Babetski, Greg Cypes.

ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?

"From Facebook's newsfeed to Twitter's relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the "stream" has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms - the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live - and how it's fundamentally changing the social Web." With Chris Messina.

HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches

"HTML5 is coming. Originally called "Web applications 1.0", it brings new semantics, JavaScript APIs for drag and drop, offline storage, generating images, plugin-free video and form validation. It's upset semantic Web advocates, accessibility evangelists and baffled developers. Cut through the crap: learn what it is and what it does."

What Are Analytics? A Guide To Practical Data

"Analytics are often a confusing and convoluted mess, but that doesn't mean that they have to be. The Guide to Practical Data will help ensure you're reaching your full analytical potential. Learn how to analyze public and proprietary data to accelerate the success of any initiative." With Margaret Francis, Blake Robinson.

Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for marketers and Web strategists. If you've got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin!

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Sales and marketing are not the same thing. It's true they both deal with relationship management and it's true that neither of these job descriptions require hardcore engineering, but just because they're both in the realm of words over code does not mean that they are the same. At the risk of muddling your mind with HR jargon, the core competencies of a marketer are very different from those of a sales person. Surprisingly, many startup CEOs insist on hiring for a VP of Sales and Marketing position.

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If you're the VP of sales and marketing for your company, this article is not about how you aren't doing your job properly. In fact, it's about how you're doing the job of two separate people and shouldn't be. Interwest investor Bruce Cleveland recently wrote an article entitled, In Search of the Mythical VP Sales and Marketing where he defines the separate domains of sales and marketing.

Says Cleveland, "Sales and Marketing are vastly different functions that require substantially different personalities, skills, and decades of experience to master...A CEO who doesn't understand this basic fact, or doesn't believe it, is not a CEO I want to invest in."

Explains Cleveland, a sales person understands the inner workings of B2B deal probabilities and the short term requirements to increase deal flow. Meanwhile, marketing people look at the landscape from a longterm perspective and lay the groundwork for sales through analyst, media and web leads generation. Essentially, sales people are great oral one-on-one communicators and marketers are great written mass communicators.

He writes, " I have found that the CEO who makes this serious mistake hasn't worked with someone who is an excellent Marketer and therefore discounts the role it plays." With expertise in the Software as a Service space, it's interesting that Cleveland believes the marketing role is the one that gets tacked on at the last minute. While sales offers obvious measurement through direct revenue generation, marketing tends to have a less clear set of metrics.

Cleveland explains that "today's head of Marketing must be an excellent demand creator (the "owner" of future revenue) through sales-ready leads." Essentially he believes that the marketer's job is to increase perceived value and generate demand on a massive scale in order to grease the wheels of the sales team.

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