Google+ Business Pages have launched!
Well, not for every business just yet. As Vic Gundotra SVP of Google Engineering writes, only a few businesses have their pages up by know. Other organisations can follow shortly.
(UPDATE: it seems like everyone can create them now. I just created two, one for my hobby project vanille shop and one for my employer DDB Tribal.)
A number of pages are already available (see below), but any organization will soon be able to join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.
This video shows a little more about the use case for businesses:
I especially like the quote at the end: „Business don’t make people happy. People do.“ Very true. Business is about people.
One interesting feature is „Google+ Direct Connect“. This allows you to put brand pages into one of your circles almost directly from the google search results. It has already been implemented for +pepsi, +toyota or +google (unfortunately, I can’t see that within the german google site just yet). Here is a video about it.