On one Tuesday of each month, Google spotlights some new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace. This week, it was Grockit, Elance, ERPLY, Insync, Rainmaker, Pipeline Deals, Idea2, Kashoo, SimplifyThis, Offiserv, Mindquilt, and RecMan. You can see details about these particular apps here. 

Google has been doing a lot to promote the use of Google Apps, but the Apps Marketplace has to be one of the most significant factors, because it simply opens up a whole realm of possibilities for the use of Google Apps, just like Android or Apple’s App Store opens up new possibilities for phones. WebProNews exchanged a few words with Google Apps partner lead Scott McMullan about it.

We asked McMullan how the apps featured in Google’s App Tuesday series have contributed to the growing interest in the marketplace itself. "Every new application brings a new capability to our customers," he says. "Some of these apps are highly specialized (e.g.Elance to find and manage an outsourced workforce) and some are very mainstream (e.g. ERPLY for managing sales)."

"In general, more apps for Google Apps translates to more customer interest — and purchases — in the Marketplace," he adds.

The Marketplace has over 200 installable apps that Google says are accessed by 4 million Google Apps users. The top installed app is a free social productivity, project management and task management tool called Manymoon. Here’s an intreview we did with Manymoon’s co-founder and CEO Amit Kulkarni at Google I/O earlier this yerar :

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When asked what Google is doing to encourage developers to populate the marketplace, McMullan tells us, "We are bringing them customers. B2B web application vendors are very interested in finding new ways to acquire customers at low cost, so our key value to these vendors is to bring them new customers, and new customers that are acclimated to the cloud to boot."

On App Tuesday this week, Google introduced the first education app in the Marketplace, Grockit, which is a social learning platform for students.