Today at the DEMOfall 09 conference, CallSpark announced a new technology for mobile phone users. The application is a dynamic address book that lets you search for people across multiple accounts and social networks as well as in the popular CRM system, Salesforce , Whitepages , Yellowpages , and Yelp . But CallSpark isn’t simply a useful address book service, it also lets you view real-time information about whoever you’re calling.

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CallSpark: A Dynamic Mobile Address Book

Ever feel like you were making a sales call that you didn’t have enough information for?

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DEMO: CallSpark gives salespeople data to make smarter phone calls

There are two distinct approaches that the industry has taken towards platform as a service (PaaS).  The first approach is offering an integrated and vastly simplified programming model in the cloud.  This provides all the infrastructural benefits of Cloud Computing like multi-tenancy, automatic upgrades & elastic infrastructure PLUS it speeds up application development considerably.  Force.com is representative of this approach. I would also encourage you to checkout Mike Kreaden and Peter Coffee’s blogs.  Mike relates Force.com to 4GL environment and Peter refers to three independent studies which quantify the productivity improvements of developing on Force.com – one study found a five fold improvement in developer productivity. The other approach is to wrap existing products and APIs into a PaaS.  Essentially, the approach involves packaging existing products (database, middleware, tools) into a deploy-able unit and them provisioning it for each tenant into an infrastructure cloud – either something like Amazon or a custom built one.  This may be somewhat of an over simplification but the fact remains that these existing products were not built for a multi-tenant environment so some form of retro-fitting or working around is required.  Even if we assume that the provisioning and management infrastructure works smoothly to provide the infrastructural benefits of cloud computing, you still have to deal with the same old, complex application development model.  The JEE for example, has over a dozen APIs that you need to learn and then each of the each component – the database, the middleware etc.

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A hog in armour is still but a hog

Calling all partners! Think you’ve got a killer Force.com app?  Do you want a shot at fame and glory in front of 10,000+ customers at  Dreamforce 2009 ?  Prove it—and get in the game for the final round of the elite Force.com 40 partner innovation showcase .   There’s less than 1 week left to join the ranks of the most innovative salesforce.com partners that have built killer apps on Force.com.

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Force.com 40 Showcase – Last Chance Deadline!

As Goldfinger said to James Bond, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence.” The third time something happens, you have to take it seriously, and that’s what’s happened with productivity measurements for development on Force.com.

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The 3×5 Case for Force.com

Just like many of us these days, my todo list keeps getting longer and longer. One of those things that I never get enough time to do is blog, and contribute articles to the developer community.

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Test Cases & Test Suites

The summer season just ended, but that doesn’t mean the good times are over.

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Winter ’10 Release Preview Webinar now Live

Did you know that you can configure Force.com apps to act as a Google Visualization Data source ?

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Force.com as Google Visualization Data Source

Practice Fusion , a major provider of electronic health record services announced a partnership today with BioReference Laboratories — one of the largest full-service laboratories in the U.S. The Practice Fusion system will allow physicians at BioReference to easily view, add information to, and redistribute patients’ health records. The PracticeFusion platform allows doctors from various facilities and regions to continually update individual patients’ charts.

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Practice Fusion funnels electronic health records to BioReference Labs

Marketo , the software-as-a-service company offering marketing automation solutions, has raised an undisclosed amount in a third round of venture funding.

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Marketo, the software-as-a-service company offering marketing automation solutions, has raised an undisclosed amount in a third round of venture funding. Based in San Mateo, Calif., the company is backed by Mayfield Fund, among others. It counts Atari, Genentech, 3Com and Slide in its clientbase, now 500 strong. Specifically, Marketo says it combines software offerings that complement each other to help its customers optimize their marketing strategies. For example, many businesses use Google Analytics to understand web traffic, where it’s coming from and why, and tools from Salesforce.com to keep track of their customers. Marketo’s software does both. It generates revenue by selling its software to B2B companies at varying prices, depending on the level of services needed. The company raised $8 million in a second round of funding in August 2008 from Storm Ventures and InterWest Partners, following a 2006 first round totaling $5.4 million.