The Force.com AppExchange is getting a face-lift and you can catch a sneak peek by reviewing The New AppExchange webinar presented earlier this week. For any of you developers and partners out there looking to grow your business on the AppExchange, be sure to take a look at what’s to come.

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The New and Improved AppExchange – Coming Soon!

Editor’s note: this is a “Sponsor Post” by one of our long-term sponsors.

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Mashery: APIs the Key to a Thriving Cloud

Back in December we challenged the Developer Force community to build exciting Force.com Sites applications in the Force.com Sites Developer Challenge. 348 people from all over the world registered, yielding 32 solid submissions. The challenge was open-ended, which resulted in a wide variety of submissions.

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Announcing the Results from the Developer Challenge!

When it comes to running custom apps in the cloud, there are basically two architectures. One involves an IaaS (Intel-as-a-Service) provider like Amazon with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) where you load your own software stack onto Amazon’s pay-as-you-go bare metal (virtual as it may be). The other is to develop your code to run on one of the Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Continued here: 
Podcast With Google’s Pete Koomen On New Business Model For App Engine

When Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO of Xactly, says his Software as a Service sales performance management company began 2009 with a big bang, he didn’t — as one might assume in this economy — mean it in a bad way.

Original post:
Visions of IPO Dance in His Head: Q&A With Xactly CEO Christopher Cabrera

Announcing the release of the Force.com IDE for Spring ‘09! The latest release of the Eclipse plug-in for Force.com development contains the following major new features: Apex Editor Code Assistance provides Apex code completion suggestions for user-defined classes, system classes, and schema objects. Real-time code parsing highlights syntax errors and updates the outline view as you type. New Metadata Support in Spring ‘09 adds Custom Sites, Customer Portals, and Partner Portals, as well as enhancements to Schema Objects, Profiles, and Reports

Original post:
Force.com IDE for Spring ‘09 Now Available

Lately I have been tinkering with how I can use Facebook and the social network to help promote my debut novel that is due in the stores soon. I wanted to reach out to my friends, and get their feedback through reviews, with the hope that they would in-turn recommend my book to others and so on.

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Viral Marketing through the Force.com for Facebook Toolkit

Few months ago, I  wrote about accessing an external web service, in this case  Zillow  to enrich lead data in Salesforce CRM. Very briefly, Zillow provides the valuation of a property given an address using a proprietary algorithm. To incorporate this transparently into the application, we built an extension to the standard controller for Lead sObject and defined our own custom save method to override the standard behavior.

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Calling Web Services from a Trigger (and an update to Zillow mashup)

True Ventures got our attention by closing a Series A deal in the dark days just after the financial meltdown, funding Syncplicity . It has just announced that it is funding LoopFuse , a late entrant to the very crowded marketing automation space

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Loopfuse Gets Series A Funding from True Ventures

I came across the following thread asking for Documentation on how to Implement Email Services to post to a Case . This feature is powerful and the benefits are great. With Email to Apex, you can instantly convert any inbound email and automatically create a Case record in your Salesforce org

The rest is here:
Email to Case