Google Building Digital Learning Apps

Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that Google, already active in the education sector, is talking to software developers about building apps for digital learning.

Google, the world’s largest search engine, seeks to lure more educational developers and is stepping up efforts to generate revenue from the project, company executives say.

Software sales for U.S. schools and colleges this year should surpass the 2009 total of $4.6 billion, according to Parthenon Group LLC. That could provide a new growth stream for Google, which gets most of its sales from search advertising. The company works with schools, providing free word processing, e-mail and spreadsheet programs to students and teachers. Now it wants to help outside developers sell applications to educators.
“If we can provide access to education apps to our 10 million users in thousands of schools, then that would be a win all around,” said Obadiah Greenberg, Google’s business development manager for education

Elsewhere, 148Apps.biz charts the development of, and news related to, apps in the iTunes store and reports that the number of iTunes store apps categorized as “Educational” is 26,155 or 7.98% of all apps in the store.  The “Educational” category trails only “Books, “Games” and “Entertainment” in numbers.
Add to this mix, Joel Klein heading off for work each day at News Corp.  He recently told told Yoav Gonen of the NY Post,