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Zoho Marketplace launches with Zoho Creator 3.0
Tuesday @ 6AM PST, we are announcing the launch of Zoho Marketplace - Available @ http://marketplace.zoho.com/ along with the release of Zoho Creator 3.0.
What is it?
Zoho Marketplace brings users and business application developers together. Zoho Marketplace contains a catalog of applications that are offered by the developers in a central place. Users looking for applications can purchase them directly from the developers. Users can also place requirements of their application in the Marketplace. Developers can then take these requirements and create applications for these users.
All the applications currently available on Zoho Marketplace are created and deployed in Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator already has 100,000+ applications created.
This fun video was created by our team that talks about Zoho Marketplace.
What kind of Applications?
The obvious question is, what kind of applications are available in Zoho Marketplace?
There are many applications out there that are not available off the shelf, but are needed in a particular use case or situation, but there is not enough market for vendors to offer such situated software as the need could be specific to a use case or an individual/business.
Zoho Marketplace is trying to address this particular need. This market is not big enough for vendors to make a living and not small enough to ignore. With Zoho Marketplace, we hope to connect developers directly with users to create and purchase such applications providing a platform in Zoho Creator.
Pricing?
Developers publishing the applications to the marketplace can choose to offer their applications for free or for a fee. There is no fee for developers to post their applications in Zoho Marketplace.
Once an application is added, users can view the demo of the app before purchasing it (if it carries a price tag). When a user purchases the app, the application is installed in that user's account. The developers will be paid in full with no Zoho commission. Based on the user's usage, Zoho Creator applies its pricing. If you have less than 10 Apps that you shared with less than 5 users, Zoho Creator is free.
More details of the pricing is available here. https://creator.zoho.com/showplan.do?serviceurl=/home.do
Video:
These videos give a quick intro to Zoho Marketplace & Creator.
Apart from Zoho Marketplace, today we also released a major update for Zoho Creator that lets you create more flexible applications.
As you may know, Zoho Creator allows non-programmers to create powerful data-driven applications that can be kept private, shared with a group or published to the world. But it can of course also be used by more advanced developers to add complex logic, interaction with other sites and more.
This release focuses more on the latter. We have added many new features and capabilities which make developing rich applications even easier. These include:
Custom HTML pages. Allows developers to create dynamic, fully customized HTML pages that are part of an application and embed forms, views, widgets, videos and more.
Layout Customization. Makes it easy to create great-looking applications in seconds. Choose from a variety of layouts and themes. And of course, you can also create your own.
Stateless Forms. Stateless forms allow developers to take advantage of all the Creator tools and environment, but gives them full control over where their data is stored.
And there's of course many others – like full support for CRUD (Create, Read, Update & Delete) operations, the ability to share/un-share an application (or just components of it separately), easier to create mashups by fetching and processing data from other websites, creating maps on the fly and some others.