Salesforce.com gets closer to 'iTunes' vision
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Salesforce.comÂ plans to widen the capabilities of its AppExchange Web site in 2007 to more closely resembles the online presence already established by companies such as Apple Computer and eBay.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Adobe Systems Flash-based service, already integrated with Salesforce.com, lets developers embed voice services into Web applications.
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Blog: Salesforce.com, SugarCRM find bones to pick with Microsoft's depiction of its hosted Live CRM plans.
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Seeking to diversify beyond its sales-force-automation roots, Salesforce.com on Wednesday introduced a new on-demand call center and help desk application service called Supportforce.
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In the hype of the CRM boom a few years ago,  sales force automation software seemed largely forgotten. Though not quite a dinosaur, it certainly was not a hot topic.
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It's official: Salesforce CRM tools work with Safari on Mac OS X machines.
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Apple has announced some aggressive new marketing tools to help expand the reach of the iTunes Music Store. The company has launched an affiliate program
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Custom CRM software developer Salesforce.com is still growing at warp speed, although it may take a natural dip in 2005.
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Not the interface you're looking for Salesforce.com's incredible disappearing act will continue next week the announcement of its latest platform and tools initiative to target developers.â¦
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Microsoft on Wednesday released a beta version of its highly anticipated online music download service, in hopes of unseating Apple Computer&#39;s dominance in the hot market.
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New service, co-founded by hacker DVD Jon, lets users share copy-protected files from iTunes.
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Salesforce.com has unveiled AppStore, which offers customers a single place to access, test out and buy more than 400 applications offered through the company's AppExchange marketplace.
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Hard drive-based audio player will get a new look and a lower price.
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Salesforce.com looks to make its developer platform a "peer with .Net and Java" with new user interface tools.
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In the coming weeks and months you'll probably see me writing about issues of podcatchers here, because I'm working on one. It's the third one I've written, so this time maybe I'll get it right.  A lot of things have changed since I wrote my first podcatcher back in 2001. 1. Back then there were no podcasts, so it was a proof of concept, a chicken without an egg (or an egg with no chicken), a step in a bootstrap. Today there are lots of podcasts. An embarassment of riches. 2. Back then implementing a podcatcher was simple, there was exactly one format to support, RSS 2.0 with enclosures. Today, luckily, it's still fairly simple, as far as the format goes. The only variability is the iTunes namespace, which complicates things, just a little.  3. Today there are enough users to make it possible to support lists of podcasts published by fans, and instead of just subscribing to the podcast feeds, you can subscribe to lists of feeds. I will publish one of these lists, in OPML 2.0 format, as a proof of concept.  4. The first version of this new podcatcher will run in the OPML Editor because that's where all my software runs at first. But the goal is to port it to run in other environments, some with millions of users. I want to provide a popular alternative to the one that Apple publishes which currently dominates the market. (Note: I'm generally pleased with the way Apple dominates, they've been very fair about allowing users to export their subscription lists. But if we want to create the opportunity for others to innovate in the area of podcast players, there has to be choice at the podcatcher level. That's my main motive for revisiting this area.) There probably are some other changes, and I'll write about them as the project moves forward. Now.... To people who say that Apple has the market sewn up, I say Bah! I think iPods are great, but they're designed to play music, not podcasts. Every bit of music is something you want to keep forever, a podcast loses almost all its value after you've listened to it once. You have to pay for music (in theory at least) but podcasts are free.  Podcasts beg to have a player that can download them without synching with a desktop computer. Okay that's something podcasts have in common with music.  I buy Apple products all the time. I've gone from resenting Apple so much that I wouldn't buy their products, as recently as 2005, to today when not only do I only use Macs, but I'm constantly telling people why they'd be better off using Macs. I can't help but evangelize the products, I think they're that much better than Windows PCs.  But as much as I love Apple (can't believe I actually said that) I still don't trust them with a whole medium. We need them to have competition. The rest of the tech industry seems to think they're immune to it, that creates a huge opportunity with someone with enough chutzpah to think they can do it. Yours truly, Dave Winer
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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.com is drawing particular attention to the analyticsÂ customization capabilitiesÂ it plans to offer in the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, known as Salesforce Winter '07. At an event due to take place Wednesday in London, Marc Benioff, the vendor's chairman and chief executive officer, is expected to preview analytics and dashboard mash-up capabilities as part of his "Future of Software" presentation. The announcement is part of a gradual run-up to the release of Winter '07, theÂ 21st generation of the on-demand CRM software, which is due to become generally available in the fourth quarter of this year. Analytics is loosely defined as the analysis of data contained in a company's enterprise applications to help highlight potential business trends. Being able to spot such trends early can help firms improve the speed and quality of their decision-making. Other CRM players including Microsoft, Oracle, and SAGÂ are increasingly placing more emphasis on their respective analytics offerings as key product differentiators. For instance, Oracle announced last month that it would add more real-time predictive analytics to its business intelligence, middleware, and applications afterÂ acquiring intellectual property assetsÂ from Sigma Dynamics. While the main theme of the current version, Salesforce Summer '06 which debuted in July, was integration between Salesforce.com's CRM offering and third-party products, the watchword for Winter '07 is "unlimited customization," according to Ariel Kelman, the vendor's director of AppExchange product marketing. Since Salesforce.com officially went live with AppExchange in January, a network to host third-party and custom applications and integrate them with Salesforce.com's CRM software, the vendor has seen plenty of demand for analytics offerings, he said. In Salesforce Winter '07 users will have the ability to fully componentize the on-demand CRM application's analytical dashboards so that they can mash up or bring together components of different vendors' business intelligence (BI) software which they can then share and manage. Users will be able to engage in a wide range of BI activities which can be displayed on their dashboards within Salesforce including supply chain analysis, complex what-if scenarios and profitability analysis. Business Objects is Salesforce.com's first BI partner to participate in an analytics mash-up between its Crystal Xcelsius data visualization offering and the hosted CRM software's dashboard framework, Kelman said. Other BI partners expected to support the mash-ups number around 13 initially and will include open-source player JasperSoft, he added. Analytics, e-mail marketing and sales tools have been the most popular offerings on AppExchange since January, but Kelman is already starting to see a second wave of component categories gaining more and more user interest. This next wave is around human resources, financials and IT tools, he said, along with project management, bug tracking and quality assurance. Although Salesforce.com remains focused on supplying hosted CRM, its AppExchange network continues to expand its capabilities to provide all kinds of business components, not just those with strong ties into CRM. Other features for Winter '07 include a new user interface based on Ajax or asynchronous JavaScript and extensible markup language, a hook-in to Cisco Systems' computer telephony integration option and full support for IBM's Lotus Notes collaboration software.
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Salesforce.comÂ is starting to provide some details about the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, including the product's primary focus, which will be customization.