Apps are big business. From big brands to small ones, businesses are finding creative and interesting ways to harness apps to get customers engaged, to market their products, to drive traffic, and to drive sales.

This week, Google acquired app developer Labpixies. App platform provider Conduit (full disclosure: they do advertise with us), who is a partner of Labpixies, is facilitating a great deal of app creation and engagement itself. WebProNews spoke with President Adam Boyden, who discussed the power of marketing with apps the impact Google’s acquisition of Labpixies could have on the industry.

"Labpixies is a great company with fantastic technology," says Boyden. "They are a Conduit partner and their apps are in the Conduit App Marketplace. We are excited to continue our work with them and distribute their apps to our network of more than 220,000 web publishers and 100 million users."

"We see Google’s acquisition of Labpixies as validation for and proof of the massive marketing and revenue opportunity that browser apps represent for businesses of all sizes.  More than 19 new users join our network every second, adding apps to their browsers."

When he says all sizes, he means it. The company’s network includes hundreds of large brands like MLB, Travelocity, Fox News, Time Warner Cable, and the NHL. However, it’s mostly comprised of thousands of smaller entities.

"These small publishers share their content with millions of users via the Conduit App Marketplace and many get huge results – much larger than they could achieve with their own marketing efforts," says Boyden. "For example, Pitsi, a virtual pet mini-game that can be played from the chrome of the browser, was downloaded by more than 5 million users and those users interacted with the game more than 66,000,000 times in the first ten weeks of the year."

Conduit actually announced yesterday that it is driving 2.14 billion user activities and brand interactions a month.

Both Coca-Cola (through their partner Mediatronica) and eBay have created apps using the Conduit Platform. Mediatronica created the Coke Zero/Avatar App to promote their sponsorship of the Avatar movie and increase engagement with fans. Twenty-four hours after the first activation, the app was exposed to a million users in the Conduit Network. Ten days later the campaign had reached 8 million people in over 30 countries and generated nearly a million minutes of total viewing/engagement time. The eBay App in the Conduit App Marketplace generated more than a million active users in less than 3 weeks after launch, according to Boyden.