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Google and Salesforce announced today that they’re releasing the Force.com Tool for Google APIs, a library that allows developers using Salesforce’s Force.com platform to access the data in Google Apps. Like the Google-Salesforce partnership announced in April, this deal should benefit both companies — Force.com gets better applications, and Google gets another push into the larger businesses where it’s trying to make inroads with Google Apps.

The two companies were already working together, so not only could the users of Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) service already access Google Apps from within the Salesforce.com interface, Force.com developers could already create applications that integrated Google Apps. The new toolkit makes the process smoother, however, by allowing the creation of applications that access the data directly. Developers can use Apex code to access the APIs (application programming interfaces) for the Google’s Contacts, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Documents and Blogger tools.

For example, a company called CODA has already created a sample app that allows their customers to input their data into Google Spreadsheet, then move it to the CODA 2go financial tool with the click of a button. One of the big selling points here appears to be ease-of-use; on its developer blog, Salesforce just posted an entry showing that a developer can pull events from Google Calendar with only five lines of code.

This integration should continue to make Google Apps more useful and popular in a business environment — where some companies are skeptical about whether Google’s relatively lightweight, online applications can meet their needs — particularly since Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff sounds lukewarm about a similar partnership with Microsoft. Of course, it will only pay off for Salesforce if businesses actually care about integration with Google Apps. But since the six of the top 10 applications sold on Salesforce’s AppExchange are Google-related, it looks like businesses do.

The project is free and open source, and is hosted at code.google.com.

There are already numerous customer relationship management software offerings out there that target large corporations. So you’d think it was game over as far as new CRM entrants was concerned.

But start-up Zoho has launched an “enterprise edition” of its low-cost CRM products, in yet another move by an upstart to lower the cost of software by offering it over the Web.

Zoho’s move comes just a few days after CRM company Salesforce announced it will be integrating with Google Apps to offer those low-cost office applications to its customers.

The big new feature in Zoho CRM is role-based security administration, which should be an easy way to manage permissions and access within the hierarchy of a big company. The new update also includes improved customization and support for 11 languages. Zoho goes into more detail about the changes here. The enterprise edition of Zoho CRM will cost $25 per user per month, putting it on the low end of the industry price range.

As a company, Zoho tends to deliver solid products, then differentiate itself through pricing and by linking its broad array of applications (including Zoho Meetings, Zoho Invoice and ZohoDB) together into a powerful package.

Judging from the Salesforce-Google announcement, Salesforce also realizes that integrating multiple applications into a single package is crucial. Zoho chief executive Sridhar Vembu was dismissive of the new partnership in a blog post. (The title alone — “Very Expensive + Affordable = Still Very Expensive” — makes Vembu’s argument pretty clear.) In that post, Vembu also says that Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff had offered to buy Zoho, but Vembu turned him down.

You can read our coverage of Zoho’s latest application, Zoho Invoice, here.

Executives from Google and Salesforce took the stage in San Francisco today to celebrate what they’re saying is the impending death of desktop software. The newest nail in the coffin? The integration of Google Apps into Salesforce’s customer relations management service, as outlined by Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff (pictured, left), Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and others, who also offered jabs at software giant Microsoft.

There was a lot of mutual love in the air — Schmidt and Google Enterprise Vice President Dave Girouard both said that Salesforce’s software-as-a-service business model paved the way for Google Apps, especially for turning Apps into an enterprise-level offering. Benioff, meanwhile, got personal, describing Schmidt as a longtime friend.

What they didn’t get into were many specifics about how, from the business side, the Google-Salesforce partnership will work. For one thing, when the announcement hit last night, I predicted that someone would ask if Google plans to buy Salesforce, but, well, I was wrong. It turns out attendees weren’t interested in getting the inevitable “no comment” and focused instead on the announcement at hand.

Someone did ask about about the details of Salesforce’s and Google’s revenue sharing (basic Apps integration is free to Salesforce customers, but the company will eventually start charging $10 per customer per month for a premium service). Benioff wouldn’t say, and Girouard only noted that Google focuses on developing products first and figures that “business will follow,” which makes it sound like Google’s cut isn’t very large.

Last year, we wondered whether Salesforce has much to offer Google, but this deal seems like a win for both companies. Integrating Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk opens up some new functionality to Salesforce customers — all of your Gmail and Google Talk correspondence relating to a particular customer can now be stored in Salesforce, for example. More importantly, bringing everything together in a single package and a single interface creates a real incentive for businesses to make “a hard commitment” to doing business in the Internet cloud, Girouard said. It could be particularly important in getting bigger companies — an area where Goolge Apps is still trying to make inroads — to make the switch.

Executives from both companies also made it clear that they’re targeting Microsoft. In some cases, the digs were implicit, if not exactly subtle, as when Benioff said “the standard bearers of the old industry” (read: Microsoft) were too busy protecting their “cash cows” (read: Office) to offer any decent software-as-a-service. Sometimes the antipathy was little more open, as when Benioff said he isn’t interested in a similar integration with Microsoft: “The last I heard, Microsoft Live was dead.”

Benioff also touted Google Apps’ integration into Salesforce’s Force.com platform, where developers can build applications and sell them via Salesforce’s AppExchange. Two startups were showcased at the presentation — Appirio, which offers four apps including a marketing campaign timeline for Google Calendar, and Astadia, whose app allows companies to quickly compile and collaborate on business quotes — but there seems to be lots of opportunity to build much more.

Desktop business applications just took another hit with the launch of Salesforce for Google Apps, which integrates Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs into Salesforce’s customer relationship management service.

The concept is pretty simple: Companies who use Salesforce’s online service to manage sales, marketing and customer relations can now access Google Apps within the Salesforce interface. While using Salesforce, businesses can now collaborate with customers on Google Docs, send them messages via Gmail and schedule meetings on Google Calendar (see video below). You won’t be able to accomplish much that you couldn’t do before, if you were using Salesforce and Google Apps separately, but integrating the products should make things a lot easier.

The benefits of Google’s web-based productivity applications are obvious — without Google Docs, I suspect life at VentureBeat would quickly become an impossible tangle of email attachments. But the new integration gives companies another reason to ditch Microsoft Office and move their word processing, spreadsheets, etc. onto the web.

Google and Salesforce have already partnered to make Google AdWords available in Salesforce.

I’ll be attending Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff’s discussion at noon Pacific today (Monday), and I’ll post details shortly afterwards. Expect lots of questions about whether Google and Salesforce will be doing more to team up against Microsoft. I’m sure someone will ask Benioff if Google will buy Salesforce, and I’m equally sure his response will amount to, “No comment.”

updated
Zuora is a Silicon Valley company that says it offers a simpler, less expensive way for companies to offer online subscription services. It launches today announcing it has gotten $6.5 million in a first round of funding led by venture firm Benchmark Capital.

Until now, software companies like Salesforce or gaming companies like World of Warcraft have faced a lot of pain in selling their products to subscribers.

The main provider of subscription services to date has been Portal Software, but it costs between $1 million and $3 million to implement. Aside from paying for Portal’s software, you have to employ consultants to help implement it, create a database and maintain it all. Meanwhile, smaller companies unable to afford Portal are forced to do their sales by hand, using an Excel spreadsheet, or relying on a credit card company which lets customers make an automatic payment every month.

With the explosion of software companies offering their software as a monthly subscription (known as Software as a Service, or SaaS), Zuora’s chief executive Tien Tzuo said he thinks there’s a significant market for its product. Zuora will begin by targeting SAAS companies, but they cater to all kinds of services, including game companies like WoW.

Zuora, based in Redwood City, Calif., was founded by executives who previously worked at Salesforce and WebEx who found that Portal wasn’t working for them. Tzuo spent nine years at Salesforce, and he led the company’s project to build its own subscriptions services product. Tzuo then decided to leave Salesforce to start his own company specifically designed to offer these services. Rather than discouraging him, Salesforce’s chief executive Marc Benioff encouraged him to do so, and agreed to invest as well. Tzuo’s co-founder, Cheng Zou, who is chief technology officer at Zuora, built the subscription billing service used by WebEx.

Zuora’s first customer is Coremetrics. Zuora says it will undercut Portal significantly, charging on the order of a few thousand dollars a month. Benchmark’s Peter Fenton joins the board.

[Update: We failed to mention another competitor, Aria, which has served SaaS companies with a billing services for more than three years, but it has focused on the gaming industry (our coverage). It raised $4 million in a first round of capital from venture firm Hummer Winblad back in October, and counts  Flagship Studios, Hellgate London, DigitalBridge, ZoomInfo and others among its customers. Aria says  it has been used in more than 236 countries.]

Here’s the latest (updated) action:
1) Kyte.tv raises $15 million
2) Electric Sheep Company lays off 22
3) FCC receives 700MHz auction applications
4) Microsoft signs $500M ad deal
5) GPS devices fly off the shelves
6) Netsuite sets high price for planned IPO
7) Eric Eldon, celebrity at large?

Kyte.tv raises $15M second round — An online startup that offers a video player allowing near-live communications by video, photo and chat, Kyte has picked up some steam online, attracting a decent-sized audience and celebrities like 50 Cent to its service. The $15 million second round was provided by Telefonica, Nokia, DoCoMo, Swisscom, Holtzbrinck and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, according to Robert Scoble. Quite a hefty amount, in comparison to the $2 million investment into live streaming video company, Ustream that we reported in yesterday’s roundup. However, Kyte still has some work to do in competing against newer, sharper-looking rivals like Qik, which says it can stream live video straight from your phone, something Kyte doesn’t quite do (though is working on).

Electric Sheep Company lays off 22 employees — It’s time to cull some lambs from the fold for the Electric Sheep Company, which builds software that third-party companies can add to virtual worlds Second Life. It had planned to build an ad network within these worlds. Instead, it has cut almost a third of its workforce, and is giving up on the ad plans for now. It plans to branch out beyond Second Life to worlds like Metaplace (our coverage). More details are at ClickZ News.

FCC receives applications for 700MHz auctions — More than two hundred applications were filed to bid on the upcoming Federal Communications Commission auction for the 700 Megahertz wireless spectrum, planned to begin January 24th. Although some applicants must correct and finalize their applications, the list contains some notable names — Google, of course, but also Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s venture firm Vulcan Capital, and startups like Frontline Wireless (expected). Check out the lists of finished and unfinished applicants yourself for more.

Microsoft signs $500M ad deal with Viacom – Taking a first step toward becoming a viable competitor to Google in the online ad market, Microsoft signed a deal with Viacom that it says is worth about $500 million, over a contract period of five years. Google, in turn, immediately claimed that the deal is proof that Federal anti-trust watchdogs should allow its merger with DoubleClick to go through. Microsoft may well be kicking itself, because as Bloomberg reports, the Federal Trade Commission will likely approve the Google-DoubleClick merger this month (although it must also find approval with European regulators).

NetSuite sets high price for planned IPO — First the expected range for NetSuite’s initial public offering was $13 to $16, then underwriters boosted it to $19 to $22. Now the final price has been set at $26, almost double the original range. That means that Larry Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Oracle whose family owns over 70 percent of the company, will make out like a bandit. NetSuite, of course, is a competitor to Salesforce, whose own stellar performance on the markets likely helped improve NetSuite’s outlook. Ellison was also at one time an early investor in Salesforce, which is now run by a former employee of his, Marc Benioff.

GPS devices becoming cheaper, more ubiquitous — Many GPS devices have dropped below $100, and even the better units often retail for little more than $200. Sales of the devices at local malls are through the roof, according to Dean Takahashi. Cell phones, likewise, are providing an ever-cheaper way to find your way around. Excellent news for the dozens of startups that have sprung up offering to show you the way to the nearest store, friend or event — now the question is, which will come out on top?

VentureBeat’s own Eric Eldon becomes a celebrity — Admittedly, those are the words of Speedddate.com, a dating startup that ran a session with eight “celebrity bloggers.” We (or he) will take the compliment. Way to end those lonely nights of blogging, Eric.

“Platform” has become a buzzword this past year. With more and more business going online, the big Internet companies want to put logs in the fire, and make their living rooms cozy: Like never before, they’re providing third-party software developers support services and access to its users. The most prominent example is Facebook, which lets developers build applications and make money freely directly within Facebook.

Another, older company that has helped pioneered this model is Salesforce. Tomorrow, Bay Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners will announce a fund of at least $25 million for startups that develop applications on Force.com, Saleforce’s software platform to help businesses to build their own applications and host them with Salesforce (our previous mention here).

As you’ll see from Saleforce’s stock price since going public three years ago, its story has been rewarded by Wall Street (image via Yahoo Finance). It’s stock is at an all-time high.

The two venture firms believe startups that develop applications using Force.com may be able to provider cheaper, easier-to-use applications to larger businesses, especially to mid-sized businesses that get ignored in favor of Fortune 500 client companies by business-software giants such as Oracle and SAP. Many of these mid-sized businesses, often defined as having between 50 and 500 employees, instead build their own software or do without.

Bay Partners has already bet on Facebook’s platform, announcing AppFactory in July, a program for providing seed-stage funding to startups that build Facebook applications (our coverage).

Bay Partners is optimist about Force.com because some of its portfolio companies have already used Salesforce’s AppExchange to connect with clients and grow their revenue streams. One such company is Eloqua, a startup that provides software that helps salespeople and marketers in a company coordinate their efforts to gain customers — it is making more than $10 million in revenues, the firm tells us.

Salesforce will advise the two firms on investments, providing background information and assistance with due diligence.

Earlier this week, Forrester released two reports about social software, and how it is getting adopted within companies

Blogs, wikis, social networks, sharing — it’s all giving IT departments a major migraine.

Here’s a summary of the findings, plus a listing of recent fundings and other news in IT and business software.

IT departments have not stopped worrying about the many “risks” that employees introduce through using social web services, one of the Forrester reports says: Security hacks, intellectual property leaks, noncompliance with regulation, and other problems. Still, it goes on to say that IT managers, along with the rest of the employees at many companies, recognize that these services offer more efficent ways to create and share information than current software. Many employees are already using web services at work without IT’s permission, the other report says, making these employees the “gateways” for web 2.0 companies to get their wares adopted then sold within a business. In between the lines of the reports: IT departments are afraid web services will make their own roles less important.

Meanwhile, here are the latest companies targeting IT, and the money chasing them:

OnForce, an IT services marketplace, raises $6.75 million — The company’s web site connects IT professionals with businesses who want on-site help with their computers, local networks and other office technology. OnForce and its competitors can help businesses take care of one-time problems without having to bring an IT person on staff or enter into a longer-term contract with an IT services company.

OnForce says 5,000 businesses are using the service to find help, with more than 10,000 IT workers available for hire. It say says businesses have used the site successfully over half a million times with strong growth in the last year. The company [DROP: currently] does most of its business in the US, and is looking to expand internationally. Accel Partners led the investment. Earlier investors include General Catalyst Partners.

Free-lance.ru, a Russia-based online marketplace for software development, raises $400,000 — The company connects freelance software developers, designers, product managers and others with clients looking to build software. It has up to 15,000 freelancers and clients on the site per day, with a total of 100,000 people signed up on the site, it says. It will use the funds to seek more work with large companies in other countries. (Tip from Yakov)

PlanHQ, software for business planning, raises $250,000 — The New Zealand company offers a guided planning process for entrepreneurs looking to start a company. It walks you through creating team goals, financial projections, marketing and other aspects of starting a business. Once you start your company, it measures your ongoing progress against your plan, showing you valuable information like your financial performance. A sort of Basecamp, but customized for businesses — it even has a similar-looking interface to Basecamp. The software, which starts with a free 30-day trial, costs $9 to $49 per month. The company will officially launch at the DEMO conference next week, although the site is in public beta now.

Salesforce introduces developer platform for building customized applications — The provider of web-based services for businesses has launched Force.com, designed for companies, especially large companies, to build their own Salesforce-based applications for managing internal processes. Many startups offer ways for people to create customized databases — DabbleDB, Zoho Creator and Coghead are but a few of many. It’s not clear if this move will hurt their businesses.

Salesforce + Facebook = FaceForce — This application connects the fun of Facebook with the business-focused utility of Salesforce, a good example of how Facebook’s developer platform can be used to connect with other applications outside of Facebook.

If you’re using Salesforce to keep track of customers, and you’re also friends with them in Facebook, you can use FaceForce to see their Facebook profiles within Salesforce, alongside their Salesforce contact records. You can even message, poke and send gifts to your Salesforce contacts through Facebook. You can also search Facebook for possible leads, and link your Salesforce data to them. You can see also see all of your Facebook friends within a specific company. More here.

A Salesforce developer and a Facebook developer teamed up to create the application.

Screenshot at top via.

Here’s more on the product integration announcement yesterday between Google and Salesforce, two of the most important players in online applications space.

At some point, the two companies were bound to collide because their target customers in the online applications world are the same. Salesforce has been a trailblazer in online business application market from the beginning. Google, which last month began pitching a “Search, Ads and Apps” strategy, is a relative new comer. Google has a wide range of offerings and Salesforce has its AppExchange platform.

Google builds (or more accurately, buys) and integrates most of the apps, while Salesforce has remained a platform. Their strategies stem from their origins. Google is an engineering company, while Salesforce is sales driven. Salesforce doesn’t have the engineering strength to build lots of apps, nor does it have the cash resources that Google has to acquire companies.

Salesforce has been frustrated. Chief executive Marc Benioff initially pushed NumSum (remember his memo?) one of the early spreadsheet providers. In Nov. 2006 at Web 2.0 Summit (at the Enterprise 2.0 mashup session), Benioff talked about integrating another online spreadsheet provider, iRows, into AppExchange. Ten days later, however, iRows’ founders joined Google. The folks at another online applications company, Zoho, in Pleasanton, Calif., said they had some discussions with Salesforce too a few months ago, but wouldn’t provide any other details. Zoho’s CRM app competes with Salesforce’s. Another provider in this market is ThinkFree, which Salesforce also probably talked with. But ThinkFree, according to reports, declined an offer by cash-rich Google, making it unlikely it would accept an offer from Salesforce (though this is just speculation). Currently Benioff is actively promoting EditGrid (and its integration into AppExchange). But he needs more than a spreadsheet application to continue leading in online applications. That leaves Google Apps.

Salesforce needs Google. But does Google need Salesforce? Less so. Integration between Salesforce and Google Apps make sense for work-flow reasons. Integration between CRM and other applications like email, spreadsheets, etc., makes sense too. But on price reasons, Google doesn’t need to make Salesforce its primary focus for distribution here. Google sells all of its business apps combined for $50 a user per year, and offers a lot of other stuff for free. Salesforce’s pricing is north of $60 a user per month.

Google is unlikely to buy Salesforce because Google has no history of buying larger companies unless they fall directly in its core business area (like advertising, where we saw Google buy Doubleclick). Google’s acquisitions in the applications arena are small, including Writely, XL2Web, Tonic Systems, JotSpot and Marratech. Google is more likely to acquire a smaller CRM player. While Salesforce has some marquee customers, the majority of Salesforce’s customers are small to mid-sized businesses which Google can serve well with its existing array of applications.

The more interesting question is how Google treats Salesforce moving forward. Will it hold to its “do no evil” policy?

Links to the latest action:

Our post about the 13-year-old CEO founder and chief executive of Elementeo, Anshul Samar, attracted an impressive number of outside links, briefly crashing VentureBeat’s site. Take a look at the additional video after the jump below to see him articulate his idea on stage under questioning. He says he is from Silicon Valley, and doesn’t want the adults to have all the fun. :)

Electronic Arts, the Redwood City video game publisher said it is investing $167 million in cash to buy a 15 percent stake in The9 Limited, a Chinese video game company — The9 gets exclusive license to publish EA’s “FIFA Online” soccer game in China.

Google, Salesforce reportedly in talks. Merc story here.

Google submits spectrum auction plan to FCC. We’ve written about the new rules being designed to auction of radio spectrum, which could allow more dynamic wireless offerings. Google is now proposing what it calls a “real-time” airwaves auction model,” which would allow a spectrum license holder to auction off unused spectrum to bidders on a wholesale basis. Just like Google’s own online advertising auction.

Meg Whitman said she’ll never leave eBay for another company. See VentureBeat’s coverage of her address at TiECon, if you missed it.

Here’s the latest action:

Big names support Frontline Wireless, which wants to end-run carriers — James Barksdale, former chief executive of Netscape (left, top), and John Doerr, a big-name venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins (left, bottom), are the latest to back Frontline Wireless, the company we wrote about last month, which wants to bid for radio spectrum dedicated for public safety but which can also be used for profitable wireless offerings.

The long-wave spectrum will support wireless Internet devices, and spectrum ownership is a great way to bypass dealing with the monolithic carriers. Ram Shriram, an early investor in Google is already a backer. Vanu Bose, an entrepreneur and technologist, is also investing, according to the story in the NYT. Fact check: NYT calls Barksdale a Silicon Valley investor, but he isn’t based here. No word yet, though, on whether Google will invest. (Update: Doerr’s investment is on behalf of Kleiner Perkins, we’ve confirmed.)

Breitbart latest news site with traffic — We’re hearing that Breitbart, a news aggregator, got 22 million page views last month, simply by amassing news stories from wire services like Reuters, AP, and by getting an early look at stories posted to press release services (by paying them). Readers come to the Breitbart, click on stories, and Breitbart shares ad revenue with the original sources of news (AP, etc). We’ve contacted Breitbart to contact the traffic numbers. Note: While Google is getting sued from folks like AFP, and being pushed into licensing deals with CBS, Breitbart’s model is to say upfront it will sign the licensing deal.

Maxthon browser gets investment from Google — Maxthon, the browser company headquartered in Israel, has reportedly sold a minority stake to Google for $1 million (Techcrunch). Maxthon, has been catching on in China, in part because of its ability to circumvent Chinese censors. The investment is apparently part of a “strategic deal” that would make Google the browser’s default search engine. Maxthon has just crossed 80 million downloads of its browser, and reports that more than half its 14 million unique monthly users are in China. That’s excellent growth for such a young company, but it has slowed form the rapid pace last year, when Maxthon got five million new downloads a month for a period. And why only 14M uniques, when you’ve had 80M downloads? The company got $5 million from CRV, and seed money from Morten Lund and WI Harper in 2005. Reached by VB, chief executive Netanel Jacobsson declined comment.

Clipmarks releases tool to search what people are clipped — We’ve mentioned Clipmarks before (VentureBeat coverage), a service that lets you clip material from Web pages. It has now released Clipsearch, a way to search what others are clipping, and ranks the clips by popularity.

Krugle and SourceForge partner — Now you can search code on SourceForge, with the code search engine Krugle.

Yahoo signs deal with Viacom — This is the season of major ad deals. Google’s size and momentum brings it most of the publicity. But it has alienated some, including Viacom, which has sued Google for not aggressively filtering for pirated content on its video site, YouTube. Now, Viacom has signed a deal with Yahoo, which makes Yahoo the exclusive provider of search ads at MTV.com, Nickelodeon.com and other sites run Viacom.

Salesforce.com acquires Koral, a document management start-up — Salesforce.com, of San Francisco, will use nine-person San Mateo’s Koral’s technology in a new service to let customers’ employees find and manage documents and other content. The service, Apex Content, lets people collaborate on applications using documents such as video, email, HTML and other office documents. More detailed coverage here. Remember, Koral is the site run by Mark Suster (pictured left), who got pissed off last year when venture capitalists used their Blackberry during a meeting. He ended up getting seed funding. Maybe that’s good. Had he taken VC, he may have been forced to hold out for a bigger deal. We don’t know. See Suster’s blog. Anyway, the Salesforce M&A guys probably weren’t using Blackberrys during the talks.