Google Apps Marketplace Gets An Education Category

A little less than a year ago, Google launched its very own app store for enterprise apps, the Google Apps Marketplace. Using a set of APIs, third-party apps could deeply integrate their products within Google Apps and offer these free or paid apps to the productivity suite’s users. For Google, the marketplace was a way to add additional layers and productivity to its business products. Over the past year, the marketplace has grown to include over 200 apps from startups like Zoho, Aviary and Socialwok. Today, Google is creating additional categorization to the app marketplace by adding a new segment for education apps.

Aimed for Google’s 10 million Google Apps for Education users, the category offers over 20 applications from 19 vendors including specialized apps for schools and universities such as social learning game Grockit, grading software LearnBoost, math teaching tool DreamBox, design apps Aviary and more.

While the addition of a new segment into the Apps Marketplace isn’t monumental, it does represent a strategy that Google is working towards with the marketplace. As we wrote in our review of the marketplace last Fall, developers found the marketplace to have a lot of noise and tough to differentiate for end users.

Clearly, offering highly categorized apps helps users sort through this noise.