I attended the recent Salesforce.com Users conference last week which is now aptly called Dreamforce. Aptly because the overwhelming theme this year, was the ‘Cloud’ and I suppose most dreaming takes place in the clouds.
It’s a gathering that attracts almost 10,000 which is held in San Francisco. This is my second trip there, but the first as an attendee, and in particular for their Partner Summit. The perspective as an attendee is certainly a different one for me, running from one session to another, makes exhibiting actually seem like a breeze.
Salesforce.com marketers rank among some of the best in B2B marketing, and the best practices sessions were very good. These marketers know how to run campaigns, and measure everything. Email marketing is assumed, and marketing automation like ActiveConversion is quickly being adopted. Aggressive doesn’t even describe the kind of energy that the marketers here exude. You wouldn’t want to be marketing against these guys, unless you’re a Salesforce.com marketer as well.
With over 220+ booths, and a packed schedule, it was hard just to get 2 hours in to do the expo justice, as aisle after aisle of Salesforce.com AppExhange partners hustled their SaaS offerings. AppExchange partners integrate their offering with Salesforce.com to produce marketing automation solutions, hosting, integrated email, data cleansing etc. You name it, and it was probably here. Award for the newest innovation at the expo from me goes to Zuora, which is a billing platform for Appexchange partners.
Force.com, which is their platform for creating applications in the cloud, is still a primary focus. I was at the introduction last year, but now I’ve seen and met people actually on it. It has traction, if for no other reason than Microsoft, IBM, Google or anyone else really has a platform for Cloud Computing. Microsoft has announced, but without a credible presence in SaaS, they will need to do some catching up.
There didn’t seem to be much Canadian representation at the expo, except for the CRMfusion guys from Toronto who do a great job of data cleansing with their product. I did meet a number of Canadians that were attendees. Ian Hayes of Breakeven Solutions was particularly noteworthy, as he runs a company that helps non-profits (exclusively) use Salesforce.com effectively. A great idea, and in a way, a great cause.
There were 3 keynote speeches, each taking 2 hours by Marc Benioff (Salesforce CEO), Michael Dell and Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point). And the ‘Global Gala’ featured the Foo Fighters for 2 hours of classic rock. An absolutely packed agenda.
A lot to Dream in 2.5 days. But if you ever get the chance, and particularly if you're a Salesforce.com user, it’s well worth going.
ActiveConversion is the technology leader in total marketing measurement (TMM) and demand generation for SMBs. We help companies manage marketing... [more]
Salesforce.com is the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) services. More companies trust their vital customer and... [more]
Renton, WA-based Etelos recently launched Etelos Platform Suite, which lets companies move their application to the cloud. The twist? No coding required. Etelos has offered a CRM and a marketplace for selling apps in the past, but after recently canning their CEO, founder and new CEO Danny Kolke has refocused on more (hopefully for Etelos) profitable ventures.
Etelos is responding to what their customers want, says Kolke.
"Our larger partners want the opportunity to have their own marketplaces and tools to manage distribution channels. Additionally, they have applications that they need to move to the web for implementation and scalability. The future of all software is moving to the Web for distribution, and we are proud to have Etelos powering part of that shift," Kolke says.
There are four components to the Etelos Platform Suite - the SaaS Application Platform enables tech companies to move their application or service to web-based SaaS distribution and the SaaS Marketplace Platform lets you market suites of SaaS applications and developer kits. The SaaS Distribution Platform allows tech companies and service providers sell additional SaaS/web apps to customers - distributors can purchase the marketplace and apps. The SaaS Syndication Platform lets SaaS providers distribute their app to a growing network of marketplaces.
Etelos is revolutionizing the way Web-based applications are developed, distributed and consumed to empower organizations to use Web-based... [more]
Vancouver's Vivonet announced today that they have acquired Kingston, ON based DAS Software Inc., developers of web-based retail point-of-sale solutions. The acquisition of DAS Software represents an expansion of Vivonet’s software as a service (SaaS) product suite and extends market presence in the North American specialty retail segment.
DAS Software is a provider of web based multi location point-of-sale (POS) and integrated web store solutions. Effective immediately, DAS Software's products will be rebranded and sold as "HaloShop" under the Vivonet's Halo brand.
Established in 1999, Vivonet is a SaaS solutions provider that enables, acquires and organizes millions of transactions every month for customers in the hospitality and retail sectors across North America. Vivonet provides secure web-based POS, enterprise management, payment processing and performance benchmarking solutions for its clients. Vivonet’s Zata market sales intelligence product aggregates transaction data and helps clients to benchmark their performance against other users and the industry at large.
Vivonet offers its employees the opportunity to work as a part of a team in a young and growing company creating leading-edge technology solutions.... [more]
Amid stories of layoffs and funding troubles for so many start-ups across the country, Seattle's Earth Class Mail just secured $5.1 million in new capital from over four dozen angel investors. Earth Class Corp delivers postal mail over the Internet by manually scanning in each piece and sending it to a digital PO box. Users can therefore check their postal mail from anywhere in the world. The company has increased staff by 35% over the past two quarters, and has opened several new processing centers to meet increased demand from a growing customer base.
“We’ve been reeling from having too many prospective customers, including about 40 national posts, and only a handful of senior sales executives to respond,” said CEO Ron Wiener.
The company is benefitting from recent economic pressures, as large businesses and government offices clamor for "paperless" solutions designed to cut costs related to mail handling. Because offices using Earth Class Mail often choose to recycle up to 90% of their postal mail, the company is also benefitting from an increased demand for carbon footprint reduction.
Earth Class Mail is starting to shift into SaaS mode rather than just offering their traditional outsourced mail processing, which is also helping their bottom line. Many new accounts are opting to use Earth Class Mail's scalable web-hosted platform rather than getting Earth Class Mail to do all the mail-handling for them.
The company has raised $21.4 million since inception, and was featured on a reality television show called "Startup Junkies" in 2007.
Earth Class Mail is changing how postal mail is delivered, for the betterment of individuals, businesses, national post offices, and the planet.... [more]
Jama Software won the Bend Venture Conference on friday. They were part of the 5 companies which presented business pitches to the 250 people who went to the conference. Jama provides an webservice which facilitates collaborative software product development.
The companies that presented were:
Gadget Trak was the winner of the wild card session where ten companies gave one minute pitches and was provided a slot to present and be eligable for the award.
This style of Angel Investment Conference has grown out of the activities at the Oregon Entrepreneur Network, which sponsors several events including the Oregon Seed , Angel Oregon (March 12,2009) and Venture Northwest (Oct 30,2008). This year, there are two new Angel investment conferences: The Gorge Angel Conference which as held in september and the Willamette Angel Conference (May 14, 2009).
These conferences in Oregon differ from the Early Stage Investors Conference, held by NWEN in Seattle, because the conferences forn an Angel Fund which creates an LLC which provides an award of a specific cash investment in the company. The awards range from $70,000 to $150,000 for most of these conferences. Jama Software was awarded $110,000 for the Bend Venture Conference.
There is a great write-up of the event in Bend by the local Bend paper.
Based in Portland, Oregon, GadgetTrak provides theft recovery and loss prevention solutions for mobile devices. Through our unique and... [more]
Toronto-based online invoicing up-start FreshBooks announced today the release of quarterly industry benchmarks based on anonymized aggregate data of all FreshBooks users. And with over 500,000 users to date, this data is going to have real value for small business people.
We’re releasing these benchmarks because the professionals that FreshBooks serves do not have access to the kind of performance information most other industries take for granted. The service oriented professionals that FreshBooks serves - web designers, copy writers, dog walkers, management consultants, magicians, interior designers, ISPs, computer technicians - can’t go to places like Dun and Bradstreet and buy a report about their industry. Even if they did, they’d find the metrics covered to be mostly useless to their way of evaluating the day to day performance of their business, so I’m hopeful that business owners will use this data to steer their business in the right direction in any kind of weather.
Freshbooks customers or fans are likely familiar with their report card service that gives FreshBooks account holders a quarterly snapshot of their business based on a handful of useful metrics (average time to collect payment, etc). These new industry benchmarks are similiar to the report card service however Freshbooks account holders will have access to far richer data - for example, at the profession level rather than just industry level.
Sounds like a great idea, especially when CEO Mike McDerment explains it:
Our mission is to deliver fast and simple invoicing and time tracking services that help you manage your business. We call these Unaccounting™... [more]
TechCrunch managed to post another incorrect story over the weekend. Serkan Toto made it to the last paragraph before he misspoke, calling Cambrian House “now-defunct”. Let me tidy up some facts: VenCorps, for those who follow these things, is a site built by the not-defunct Cambrian House.
Luckily, the “not-defunct at all” Cambrian House team was on top of the situation and released this blog post to combat the misinformation. This post contains an official letter from their counsel, a detailed FAQ, and the wit and humor we have come to expect from the Calgary company.
Thanks for clearing things up... again!
Launched in 2006, Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology... [more]
Vancouver's Sitemasher introduced today the full availability of its SaaS website management platform and announced that they have partnered with PEER 1 for a tailored managed hosting solution. Sitemasher combines and intuitive website builder, content management, analytics, search engine optimization and website hosting all within a single platform.
Sitemasher is built around the four primary roles in advanced Web design and development: the business or site owner, site designer, information technology expert and marketer or content person. Players in these roles often operate in silos causing problems as a site moves from vision through development. Sitemasher is a collaboration platform with an intuitive interface that makes the most cutting-edge website elements simple to implement and update.
Disclosure: Sitemasher and PEER 1 are sponsors of Techvibes.com.
Sitemasher provides a fully managed, hosted website solution that seamlessly integrates the website building environment, content management system... [more]
Explore the possibilities of the Internet, without the problems. A full solution web hosting provider, PEER 1 offers North America's most reliable... [more]
Last April at the Canadian Innovation Exchange in Toronto I took in all the company presentations and one stood out as solving a problem and being a huge time saver. Montreal-based Acquisio presented their software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that offers pay-per-click (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) management software designed specifically for advertising agencies. The company was founded in 2003 as a search engine marketing agency but after building software tools for its own use saw a opportunity to package it up for others.
Turns out the search engine marketing industry likes what they're doing. Vancouver's very own Alexandre Brabant of eMarketing101 is using Acquisio to manage PPC campaigns and is endorsing it online.
During the last few months that I have been using the tool and going through my own learning curve, I must say that Acquisio has help me save a lot of time in managing PPC accounts and I am now able to provide stellar reports to my clients.
Congrats to Acquisio for solving a real-world problem and impressing one of Vancouver's best.
Acquisio Inc. is a SaaS (software as a service) company that offers a pay-per-click (Google Adsense, Yahoo! Search Marketing, etc.) management... [more]
