It's tough to say what their intent is regarding this program. My initial inclination is that they have multiple possible motives for providing this service:

1. To bring more awareness to their developer services and offerings in the small business sector. They've recently stated that SMBs are of huge interest to them. For example, check out "Google My Business", a recent play of theirs:

http://www.google.com/business/

2. To potentially fuel early stage acquisitions and/or funding opportunities via Google Ventures. What a wise play to see how startups are using your offerings to vet them before acqui-hiring or offering funding.

What are everyone else's feelings on this play?

I think the basic idea is that if Google helps high growth companies launch, using entirely their infrastructure, that will pay dividends down the road, in many areas across the company. Startups built and scaled on Google products will stay loyal and have vendor lock in.

Also the emphasis on UX assistance and Play store priority sounds like they really want to improve the Android ecosystem.

I think you nailed it. They've been pushing hard on bringing the Google Cloud Services and App Engine up to speed, and if they can catch more big players early on, it will serve as good demos on how to scale with their systems.

There's a secondary goal here in that it benefits them to have a pool of skilled individuals out in the market who are familiar/expert on the Google platforms/technology.

So if they get a few hundred startups to use Google, most of them fail, a few hold steady, a few become heavy users of Google adn they make some money.

But - there's people from every one of those startups who now are familiar with how to use the Google platform and will potentially recommend/use Google at their next startup.

> vendor lock in.

I think this is the final goal

Nah, I don't think that's the final goal. Individually luring in startups doesn't scale well at all. I suspect they are trying to get a much higher 3rd-party throughput through their services to seed the community with use.

I just wonder whether they might be more successful with this if they explained what they hope to get out of it.

It's probably more than creating awareness for their dev services. From what I can see, they're rapidly increasing partnership efforts for their ad-based products (e.g. AdX integration). Could be a trojan-horse type of move to get in front of developers who will someday be serving ads to generate revenue.

Pretty similar to yours. They seem to be offering incentive for very early startups with spotlighting and ways of improving UX through design/consulting. Not sure how applicable this would be to a startup that knows how to market its target audience, though.

I think the additional value add they're promoting is simply exposure. It's one of the few things that every startup wishes they had more off. I would anticipate signups to be fairly high just for the off chance of increasing eyeballs.

I do know that Google's marketing team has a budget they can utilize for successful partners/resellers to increase exposure. The reasoning behind the budget is that if Google partners succeed, Google ultimately making more money.

I think historically had google played nice with existing startups and not competed against and crushed them, I would be really into this.

There's just more bad than good potential with this company and possible competitors.

I just found out about Polymer by clicking through the site, so I'd say the first point is pretty realistic.

This looks like a simple case of Google follows BizSpark.

Next up, Larry Page dances across the stage shouting "Developers, developers, developers, developers"

I am (slightly) serious though. Google seems to slowly be following Steve Yegges advice to become a platform - and this is the best way to give that platform a workout. Without developers building on GAE / ApIs it's never going to break out of the current hole of being a few great API Islands in a sea of otherwise invisible underwater services.

How much of Google's cloud stack are you required to use to apply for this program? If they require you to use GAE for your backend for example, I think it's going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of startups.

GCE is a more generic/flexible backend service. Run whatever you want on there.

"Include" is not "limited to": https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/operating-systems

You can use GCE. If you embrace the cutting edge technique. You can try to deploy by docker. It seems deploying the docker image to Google is a good choice

Good question! Is Polymer required? Would a different framework but with the new Google UX/UI design be fine too?

You can run your GAE workloads on AppScale on your own infrastructure (or on GCE, AWS or whatever IaaS you choose).

GAE works really well for massive scaling without needing to worry about infrastructure, though it has some pretty weird limitations at times.

For everything that GAE can't do, we have a GCE instance running to handle it.

One thing I like about GAE is that it encourages good practices. Many people cut their high-scalability teeth on it.

Right, but when you rely on other services that that haven't cut their teeth yet, it becomes a problem.

For example, if you're pulling 50 MB from an API that doesn't allow multi-part downloads, you can't do it with GAE because they have a 32 MB limit per connection.

You can use GCE which is essentially EC2.

Not quite clear on this program. It it more of a biz spark type thing from google? Are they planning to fund some early stage startups?

It would seem that they are attempting to promote the use of their platforms for new startups in exchange for personalized feedback, networking, and free promotion. I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up funding some of the resultant projects down the road but currently it appears that they're just testing a new method of connecting their developer relations teams with promising startups.

We had applied to this initiative a few days back. Not sure what is going to come of it. We use Google Cloud for our public cloud (mowbly.com), but we have kept the product deployable across any other J2EE capable environment like EC2, Azure etc.

The https://developers.google.com/startups/develop section reminds me of http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

This may also be a way for Google to get eyes on early promising individuals or companies for acquisition or funding (think http://www.intelcapital.com/ maybe)

Edit: Clicking the apply button has a survey that includes how you will be working w/ Google Tech

Anyone know what the eligibility criteria for this is? is this open to people from all over the world or restricted to a particular demographic?

From what I can see in the application form it looks like you can apply from every country. I also can't find any other information that conflicts with this.

It looks like the eligibility criteria are pretty lax, but they are probably going to receive tons of applications and do some heavy filtering. It wouldn't be unthinkable that the country plays a role in that filtering, but that is only speculation.

yeah i saw that, but they also mentioned this is a beta program and they're giving preferential treatment to teams nominated by their own developers. Might make sense to just wait it out.

Google icons:

we will release these icons later this summer through our design guidelines available for use on Android and web:

-- http://youtu.be/isYZXwaP3Q4?t=12m21s

presumably soon there: https://www.google.com/design/spec/style/icons.html

This could be a good content marketing play as well for qualified lead gen outreach on other platforms -- offer clear value to developers in exchange for their e-mail addresses and accompanying data points about those developers.

Got no idea about the eligibility criteria for applying this. I'm curious about whether people currently using Google Compute Engine and applying material design get the higher priority or not

My prototype is deployed on AWS. Would I be ruled out?

Also, having not use their stack, how hard would it be for me to move over to their stack which, I'm guessing, would be a requirement.

Does anyone know if there is a deadline or time limit to apply?

I would also see this as an opportunity for Google to increase the quality of apps entering the Android ecosystem.

Exciting! :D I submitted my project. Hopefully the response is promising and not just a marketing scheme.

Does this package include priority SEO placement?

That would be a real value add ;)

Is this BizSpark for Google products?