So what’s the product that’s being announced, now that this is out of stealth? I’m not sure.

Sponsor

In the two page press release we received, there’s much boasting Domo transforming BI. But no talk about how it will actually do that. The actual product is only mentioned in the final paragraph, and it is only described as an “executive management platform.” That tells us nothing.

My initial instinct was to skip the story. We’re a tech blog, we usually leave the funding stories to other sites. But the tech press has been quick to pick this up – and it is an awfully big funding. And the lack of details is bothering me. When the stories about Color were going around, at least there were clear descriptions of what the app actually did.

Now that the announcement has happened, there’s some detail on the Domo site, but for the most part it’s just advertising copy. “Domo seamlessly delivers real-time intelligence from all those sources into one browser-based view, accessible across any device, including mobile platforms such as the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android.” The whole point of BI is to aggregate data from around the enterprise into one location so that it can be visualized and analyzed, so this statement doesn’t tell us much, except that it’s a real-time BI tool with mobile clients. There’s some screenshots that look pretty, but Domo’s certainly not the first pretty BI suite.

We can work out a little from the fact that Domo acquired Corda Technologies, which had actual products available before the acquisition.

I get a few pitches a week from companies claiming to reinvent or revolutionize or democratize business intelligence. Most of them have a hard time explaining how its dashboards are actually any different than Cognos or Business Objects or newer offers from TIBCO or JackBe.

Domo may have some amazing secret sauce. And I’m sure the investors are better informed than we are about what’s under the hood. I want to hear more about Domo before I write it off as just another BI dashboard vendor. And to Domo and James’ credit, there was an actual product demo at the press event.

But this feels awfully a lot like bubble behavior. Lots of talk about funding and revolutionary technology. Not much talk about what the products actually do or how they are different from existing technology.

Lead image by Umberto Salvagnin

Discuss

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What can you use the application for?


SalesForce Chatter provides companies and organizations with a free private social network. The application is available in a number of formats, including versions for mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads, Blackberry and Android phones. A desktop version is also available that allows the user to access SalesForce Chatter without using their browser. The application is also ideal for companies with remote employees. Through SalesForce Chatter, employees can quickly communicate and resolve issues or work on projects regardless of where they are geographically located. SalesForce Chatter supplies companies with a secure, private place to hold discussions that are intended for only two or more people. Users can post questions to other departments through SalesForce Chatter to get faster answers. The system also works for employees who are responsible for resolving customer issues. The user can contact multiple departments if needed to get faster responses. SalesForce Chatter lists conversations much like Facebook status and comments. The user can see who posted the comment, when and what it says.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Chatter.com is a product of SalesForce. The company was founded in April of 1999 by Marc Benioff. Today, SalesForce includes over 3,000 employees and is based in San Francisco, California. The current team consists of CEO and Chairman Benioff, Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami, EVP and CFO Graham Smith, Senior Vice President Jeff Lautenbach, Vice President Maria Martinez, Senior Vice President of Marketing Kraig Swensrud, EVP of Law, Policy and Corporate Strategy Kenneth I. Juster and EVP of Technology Parker Harris.

What are the differences to other apps?


SalesForce Chatter offers a system that is very similar to Facebook in the layout and design. What makes the application so appealing for businesses is the privacy and security it offers to its users. A company can give its employees an easy way to communicate directly with one another, even if they are not physically in the office. The application is also designed to protect private conversations that must stay among a smaller group of people, such as accounting discussions or other sensitive topics.

How does the application look and feel to use?


SalesForce Chatter is designed with colorful personality and a functional user interface. The website utilizes a blue, red and orange color scheme that creates an eye-catching contrast with its bold logo. The user interface is set up very similar to Facebook, with the user’s avatar or image in the upper, left hand corner and their comments and status updates along the center. To the right, the user’s contacts can be seen. The resemblance to Facebook is hard to ignore, however this layout has potential to give employees an easy, fast way to communicate and stay updated.

How does the registration process work?


New users can create a SalesForce Chatter account by entering their company email address in the space provided on the homepage. After doing so, the user can click the green and white “Sign Up” button to the right of the field. The user is advised that they must check their email inbox for a registration message. Members joining an existing SalesForce Chatter network must have an official company email address.

What does it cost to use the application?


The cost of SalesForce Chatter may make it appealing to make different users. Anyone can create an account and use the application for free. All users are given the same access and there are no subscription fees or other charges, even when creating a new private social network.

Who would you recommend the application to?


SalesForce Chatter is a great tool for small to medium size businesses. Larger businesses could use it as well however the free access and design seem to cater towards the small to medium business range. Many users are already familiar with Facebook, which makes it even easier to learn the SalesForce Chatter interface.

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Salesforce had already been utilizing Radian6. The company recently unveiled its Service Cloud 3 initiative, which involves Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network support via Radian6, so the acquisition makes a great deal of sense. Radian6 product manager Ryan Strynatka told us back then that they were shooting for general availability by August.

“Radian6 adds huge value to salesforce.com by delivering the public, social web across all our products,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “Giving customers the social intelligence they want with the business context they need will further differentiate our products and accelerate our growth.”

“Radian6 brings the voice of the customer into the enterprise, helping to transform way a business operates,” said Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun. “We look forward to working with salesforce.com’s customers to show them the power of listening to, and engaging with, the social web.”

According to Salesforce, Radian6 is used by over half of the Fortune 100, and companies like AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversation.

The deal was expected to be closed before the end of July, so it appears that no time was wasted. Salesforce intends to integrate Radian6 across its product offerings.

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Salesforce had already been utilizing Radian6. The company recently unveiled its Service Cloud 3 initiative, which involves Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network support via Radian6, so the acquisition makes a great deal of sense. Radian6 product manager Ryan Strynatka told us back then that they were shooting for general availability by August.

“Radian6 adds huge value to salesforce.com by delivering the public, social web across all our products,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “Giving customers the social intelligence they want with the business context they need will further differentiate our products and accelerate our growth.”

“Radian6 brings the voice of the customer into the enterprise, helping to transform way a business operates,” said Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun. “We look forward to working with salesforce.com’s customers to show them the power of listening to, and engaging with, the social web.”

According to Salesforce, Radian6 is used by over half of the Fortune 100, and companies like AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversation.

The deal was expected to be closed before the end of July, so it appears that no time was wasted. Salesforce intends to integrate Radian6 across its product offerings.

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Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce has acquired social media monitoring platform Radian6 for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock, the companies have announced.

“With Radian6, salesforce.com is gaining the technology and market leader in social media monitoring,” chairman and CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff said in the company’s announcement.

This is the third large acquisition in recent months by Salesforce, which has acquired Ruby cloud platform Heroku for $212 million in December. That same month, Salesforce also acquired contact management startup Etacts for an undisclosed amount, and in January, the company scooped up web conferencing service Dimdim for $31 million.

Social media management and monitoring space has been the center of several large investments and acquisitions lately. In February, Vitrue secured $17 million in funding, while Buddy Media raised $23 million last October.

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According to Salesforce, Radian6 is used by over half of the Fortune 100, and companies like AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversation.

“With Radian6, salesforce.com is gaining the technology and market leader in social media monitoring,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “We see this as a huge opportunity. Not only will this acquisition accelerate our growth, it will extend the value of all of our offerings.”

“Social media has made every business recognize the value of paying attention to the voice of the customer,” added Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBru. “Radian6′s technology is built for the new norm of customer engagement – real time, two way conversations that includes social channels. Joining the salesforce.com team will allow Radian6 to grow faster to meet the demands of our rapidly expanding customer base.”

Salesforce says the acquisition will accelerate the enterprise’s shift to “Cloud 2″ by helping companies better manage the social interactions taking place both inside and outside their companies.

Salesforce has already been utilizing Radian6. The company recently unveiled its Service Cloud 3 initiative, which involves Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network support via Radian6, so the acquisition makes a great deal of sense. Radian6 product manager Ryan Strynatka told us they were shooting for general availability by August.

The deal is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal second quarter ending July 31, so it sounds like it should be done in time for that. It’s already been approved by Radian6′s board of directors and stockholders.

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Umberto Milletti is the CEO of InsideView, the social CRM application which brings comprehensive sales intelligence gained from social media and traditional sources directly into any CRM platform for increased sales productivity and revenue.

Much has been written on the pros and cons of the freemium model by Mark Cuban, Malcom Gladwell and Chris Anderson, among others. Rather than debate, this post is a guide to how you can actually implement the freemium model for your business if and when you get to a point of serious consideration. I can share some of the unique experiences from our own business and how we switched from paid to freemium and whether it makes sense for your company.

Yes, You Should Consider Freemium

First question: Does freemium make sense if you already have a healthy paid-only revenue model? The answer is almost always “yes.” I know you’re thinking time is precious and often limited, but ask yourself, “What position would I be in if someone offered a free product that competed with mine?” If you are in the software or information business, the odds that it will happen are pretty good. Sure, it might not be as good as your product, but is it good enough to siphon customers?

We’ve seen this movie before, with enterprise software vendors ignoring SaaS and open–source technologies under the belief that they would not penetrate the enterprise. (Ten years ago PeopleSoft’s CEO famously declared “Marc Benioff is trying to get in the big leagues with a Wiffle ball and plastic bat.” That bat is looking a lot like maplewood now.) The freemium model is creating similar disruption in the enterprise software and information markets.

What Are the Make-or-Break Factors?

Upfront, it is much harder for a company moving from a paid product to go freemium (Paid2Freemium) than it is for a company that initially offered a free product. For the latter it’s a matter of survival, while the former usually has a solid business and thus, much more to lose. It is analogous to traditional software companies having a very difficult time shifting to SaaS because of the revenue-recognition impact to their existing model. But in addition to protecting a business from the above-mentioned attacks by a competitor with a free offering, a well-tuned enterprise freemium model can actually bring tremendous sales and marketing benefits: Low-cost, potentially viral adoption, and upsell starting points.

Here are some areas that prospective Paid2Freemium companies should explore:

Is Free Too Expensive?

You can’t afford to have a free version of your offering if it’ll cost you an arm and a leg to support those free users. You need to think about the delivery costs (including IT), support costs and any setup costs incurred by your organization. If you realize free will cost you too much, you have the option to define the free version of your product to be cheap to delivery, easy to support and set up (free users don’t expect a complex application anyway).

Do People Love Your Product?

If your product doesn’t have momentum, you should probably wait before introducing a free product. You don’t want lots of free users out there bad-mouthing your product because the user experience wasn’t so great. The bar for product quality is actually higher for free products than it is for paid products (which might seem counterintuitive). Some end users might be forced into using a paid product because it’s company mandate. Those same users will not engage with a free product unless they like it, since there is no one to force them. One of the great side-benefits of having a free product is that it really forces you to focus on the user experience.

Differentiating Your Free Offering From a Paid Offering

This is probably the hardest part, and probably one that will take a number of iterations to get right. You might always be tweaking the location of the upsell points that entice a free user to pay for your premium offering. Start with putting these upsell points in places where there is some value for the free user to need more and it’s evident there will be an increase of value if they turn into a paid user. A good example is Skype, which allows you to freely make calls to other Skype users, but upsells you to a paid call when you want to dial physical phones.

Will I Encounter Internal Resistance?

You should, otherwise your management team and your board are asleep at the wheel. One of the main areas of concern will be the potential cannibalization of your revenue stream. Your sales organization is likely to be concerned about this point. There might be questions about marketing (“Will free diminish our brand?”), product development and IT (“We need a bazillion dollars to create a highly scalable product and infrastructure”), finance (“You can’t make money with free, it’s just a cost-suck.”)

This transition will require strong leadership and a core belief at the top (usually, the CEO). Otherwise the internal organizational antibodies will kill the free product before it’s had a chance to grow into your successful new business model.

The Freemium Journey

If you do decide to experiment with a freemium model, it’s important that you view it as a long journey — not a project with an upfront start and a finish line. It is an experience that will either modify the DNA of your company, or will fail (which is fine, at least you’ll know the pitfalls that your future freemium competitors will encounter.) The DNA of a freemium company is quite different from that of a traditional B2B company and evolving will make you stronger. Have you experienced the successes or challenges of a freemium model for your B2B company? If so, please share your experience with us in the comments below.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

– HOW TO: Use QR Codes for Event Marketing
– HOW TO: Grow Your Sales and Revenue Using 2D Codes
– 2D Codes: The 10 Commandments for Marketers
– How The iPad Is Helping Businesses Go Green
– HOW TO: Jump-Start Your Career by Becoming an Online Influencer

Image courtesy of Flickr, inggmartinez

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Say you just moved to Silicon Valley, and you’re looking for a new job in the tech industry. What Silicon Valley CEO should you work for?

Cubeduel, a side project of Urbanspoon co-founder Adam Doppelt and RescueTime co-founder Tony Wright, says it has the answer. Cubeduel connects to a user’s LinkedIn account and then asks him or her to choose between two colleagues, business partners or coworkers based on who they would rather work with.

Cubeduel’s users have clocked in more than 1.2 million votes so far, with 26% of those users voting more than 100 times, so it has a pretty decent sample size. LinkedIn, Microsoft and Google employees alone have voted more than 100,000 times.

So who’s the most popular CEO in Silicon Valley? That honor goes to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. He has won 100% of his duels on Cubeduel (16/16). Perhaps his previous stint as an improv comedian simply makes him more personable. Also topping the list of highly regarded CEOs are Brian Halligan of Hubspot (100%), Tony Hsieh of Zappos (83%), Gary Kovacs of Mozilla (81%), Marc Benioff of Salesforce (78%) and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn (75%, 54/72). Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious and CEO of Tasty Labs, won 88% (22/25) of duels.

Unfortunately, several other prominent CEOs get the dubious honor of being the least-liked on Cubeduel. Two of the least-regarded are Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp (7%, 1/13) and Matt Williams of Digg (18%). We can understand why people wouldn’t be happy with Matt Williams — how popular can you be when you lay off half of your staff? But it’s interesting that Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman is so unpopular. Bringing up the rear though is Jordan Glazier of Eventful (4%).

Cubeduel’s stats aren’t scientific, of course. There could be any number of reasons why someone chooses one colleague over another, and it’s all based on LinkedIn connections. Still, if you’re the CEO of a major Silicon Valley company, you’d like people to say they like working with or for you.

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It’s of course possible to like a clueless person or respect someone who’s a jerk, so we’re not really suggesting anyone put too much stock in these findings.  Still, they may at least influence how well different companies can hold onto talented employees.

Now on to the stats.  Ben Parr explained this afternoon, "Cubeduel connects to a user’s LinkedIn account and then asks him or her to choose between two colleagues, business partners or coworkers based on who they would rather work with. . . .  Cubeduel’s users have clocked in more than 1.2 million votes so far, with 26% of those users voting more than 100 times, so it has a pretty decent sample size.  LinkedIn, Microsoft and Google employees alone have voted more than 100,000 times."

Then Parr wrote, "So who’s the most popular CEO in Silicon Valley?  That honor goes to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.  He has won 100% of his duels on Cubeduel (16/16)."

HubSpot’s Brian Halligan also has a spotless record, Tony Hsieh of Zappos has won 83 percent of his face-offs, and Gary Kovacs of Mozilla, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn have earned scores of 81 percent, 78 percent, and 75 percent, if you’re curious.

It should be interesting to see how Larry Page fares in these sorts of comparisons once he becomes CEO of Google.

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This year brought quite a few headlines of note to the developer world. While we each have our favorites, from new releases of classic tools to astounding announcements from tech companies, here in no particular order are a few stories that stood out to us this year.

In the comments, we’d love to know what stories stood out most to you this year, partly to indulge our sense of gratuitous end-of-year nostalgia and partly to help us hone our coverage for 2011, when we hope to bring you more fascinating web dev news than ever before.

What were your favorite dev-related headlines of 2010?

1. The Release of Rails 3.0

Early in February, the Ruby on Rails core team took the wraps off Rails 3.0, a long-awaited release of the popular Ruby framework.

Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson wrote on the Rails blog, “We’ve had more than 250 people help with the release and we’ve been through almost 4,000 commits since 2.3 to get here. Yet still the new version feels lighter, more agile, and easier to understand.

“It’s a great day to be a Rails developer.”

2. Salesforce’s Acquisition of Heroku

Earlier this month, Salesforce bought Heroku for a staggering $212 million, giving another token of legitimacy to the growing Ruby community as well as to cloud-based programming tools.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at the time, “The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time… Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position Salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers.”

3. Facebook’s Release of HipHop for PHP

In February, Facebook rolled out HipHop, an internal open-source project intended to speed up PHP for large-scale applications.

HipHop isn’t quite a compiler. “Rather,” wrote Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao, “it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it.”

The project was the culmination of two years of work by a small team of engineers; in the end, it got a thumbs-up from PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, who said, “”I think it is a cool project and it will certainly be a good option for some sites.”

4. The Rise of Node.js

Node.js has been around for a couple years, but 2010 was the year awareness and use of the JavaScript framework really blew up.

Commits have grown, as has the number of committers. Traffic to the project website has steadily climbed through the year, and downloads for Node.js from GitHub have predictably grown, as well.

As the organizers of the annual Node Knockout wrote, “It’s at the bleeding edge of a technology stack that allows developers to blur the lines between software, the web and the new like never before.”

5. Microsoft’s Release of Visual Studio 2010

The latest version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio, a big release by any standards, launched this year to impressive reviews from all corners of the web. InfoWorld said the release “marks a major advance in functionality and ease,” and The Register wrote, “It is hard not to be impressed by Microsoft’s tool suite.”

The IDE was overhauled, completely rewritten from the ground up. Support for Silverlight was added, and Microsoft also took this opportunity to release F#, a new programming language developed by Microsoft Research.

6. Facebook’s Release of the Open Graph API

Facebook and social app developers have long wrestled with Facebook integration for third parties. In the spring at its f8 developer conference, Facebook rolled out a brand new model for tapping into the social web, and it did so to unprecedented fanfare.

Dubbed the Open Graph, Facebook’s changes brought instant gratification and familiarity for Facebook users as they surfed the web — and they brought a fast and easy way for devs to integrate with the social network, as easy as a single line of HTML in many cases.

7. The Android/Java/Oracle Saga

What a year it’s been for Java! Not only is the language a key part in the programming stack of the fastest-growing mobile OS out there; it’s also the star of a big, potentially spendy lawsuit between two of the giants of the tech industry.

Sun, which developed the language in-house back in the dark ages, was acquired by Oracle. That deal became official in January, and Oracle wasted no time in getting litigious with Google over that company’s use of Java in the Android platform and the Dalvik virtual machine that stands in for the JVM on mobile OSes.

The lawsuit began in August with Oracle claiming that Google “knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property.”

Google quickly countered that it was shocked — shocked! — that Oracle would make such claims over an open-source technology. It followed with the assertions that Oracle’s patents are unenforceable and that if there had been “any use in the Android platform of any protected elements” of Java, Google itself “is not liable” due to the face that such violations would have been committed by third parties and without Google’s knowledge.

We’ll continue to keep an eye on the lawsuit and on Java’s role in the Android platform throughout 2011.

8. Apple Declares War on Flash

Tensions between Apple and Adobe ran high this year, beginning in January when the iPad launched without support for Flash. Then in February, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told employees why: “No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”

These were the words that launched a thousand blog posts. Throughout the spring, the two companies waged a war of words — and one sweet antitrust inquiry with the Department of Justice over Apple’s banning of Flash for iPhone app devs.

Steve Jobs dropped the bomb of the year in a passive-aggressive missive on Flash in which the Apple co-founder stated that Adobe’s programming technology “no longer necessary” and waxed hypocritical about open technologies.

But while he may have been passive-aggressive and hypocritical, he also may have been right. With HTML5 making a strong showing early in its lifetime, it was only a matter of time before a public figure of Jobs’s stature would make a statement or two about the death of Flash.

Of course, this tension has made for a convenient cozying-up between Google and Adobe along the way.

What Are Your Picks?

Again, let us know in the comments what your favorite stories of 2010 were — and Happy New Year from the geeks at Mashable!

With special thanks to our Twitter friends who made suggestions for this list: Jordan Runnin, Leon Gersing and Jeremy Bray.

More About: 2010, developers, News, programming, Web Development

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Salesforce has announced that it has acquired Heroku, a popular cloud platform for Ruby web apps, for $212 million in cash.

“The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2,” CEO Marc Benioff said in the company’s announcement. “Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers.”

The acquisition is about extending Salesforce’s leadership of the cloud, the company says. It’s not satisfied with just its cloud-based business software, but wants to also become the platform for cloud-based development. The company also operates VMForce, an enterprise cloud platform for Java developers, in partnership with VMware.

Ruby (specifically Ruby on Rails) has quickly become one of the preferred development languages for web applications. Twitter, 37Signals, Hulu and Scribd are just a few of the companies based off Ruby. By acquiring Heroku, which now boasts 100,000+ apps on its platform, Salesforce becomes a central hub for cloud-based development. This sets it up to be a leader of what it likes to call “Cloud 2.”

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Now, Salesforce has announced that it is acquiring Heroku for about $212 million. Heroku is a cloud application platform powered by Ruby. In fact, according to Salesforce, it’s the fastest growing platform of its type. 

The acquisition would make perfect sense for the company given its increased focus on social cloud-based enterprise apps. The platform powers over 106,000 social and mobile cloud apps. In fact, the company claims that developers added 2,600 new apps to the platform last week alone. 

The company points out that there are over a million developers developing on Ruby, and that the language was used to write things like Groupon, Hulu, and Twitter. 

"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. "Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

"We have a service that developers really love, and salesforce.com has the trust and credibility the most demanding customers expect," added Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian. "Together, we will provide the best place to run and deploy Cloud 2 apps. We believe this is the winning combination to bring cloud application platforms into the mainstream of the enterprise."

The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of January, and is subject to customary closing conditions.

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In September, the company released Chatter Mobile, and announced Chatter 2, which includes a desktop app. Now, Salesforce has announced Chatter Free, which the company says will accelerate adoption of social collaboration throughout the enterprise.

With Chatter Free, any Salesforce user can invite colleagues to collaborate with Salesforce Chatter. "The industry’s reception of Salesforce Chatter has blown away our expectations," said CEO Marc Benioff. "The fact that more than 60,000 enterprises have deployed Chatter within the first five months is amazing and the Chatter Free social invites are going to take Chatter enterprise-wide."

"With Chatter Free, salesforce.com is using the same social invitation model popularized by Facebook," the company says. "Now any Salesforce user can invite any colleague — even those who aren’t already Salesforce users — to collaborate with Chatter. By its nature, this social invitation creates a network effect, as the pool of Chatter users widens and deepens across a company."

With Chatter, employees can follow documents, people, business processes, and application data. Features of Chatter Free include: profiles, status Updates, realtime feeds, file sharing, groups, filters, invitations, Chatter Mobile, and Chatter Desktop.

Chatter is included for free with all paying user licenses of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter Free is available to all employees of paying salesforce.com customers.

Also today, Salesforce revealed a new attempt to take on Oracle in the database market with Database.com, which includes a social data model, file storage, user management, authentication, and development tools.

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You probably recognize at least some of those. Oh, and its co-founders are Dave Morin (Senior Platform Manager at Facebook), Shawn Fanning (Founder of Napster) and Dustin Mierau.

Path is touted as "the Personal Network that you access on an iPhone". Essentially, if you use an iPhone, you can take pictures, tag people, places and things, and share with up to 50 people. We had a couple questions about the service. For one, who is the target audience of this? Facebook has over half a billion users, an adequate photo sharing tool, and a recently announced way to share things with only the friends of your choosing. Smartphones typically let you take pictures and share them via Facebook or other channels, including email. Plus none of these are exclusive to the iPhone.  Though to be fair, it looks like they do intend to support other devices in the future.

Matt Van Horn, VP, product development for Path tells WebProNews the target audience is "Anyone interested in sharing the memories along the path through life." 

Fair enough. 

What is the advantage of Path over just emailing a picture to the people you want to see it? "Many of us carry a camera phone, and our photos tell the stories of our lives," says Van Horn. "Path is a place to be yourself and share life with close friends and family. Path allows you to capture your life’s most personal moments and share them with the 50 close friends and family in your life who matter most."

So I guess if you want to share a photo with 50 people rather than a few or your whole social network of friends, Path is an option. Of course so is Facebook’s Groups. 

Ok, so Path is simply an alternative to Facebook photo sharing. According to NPR, Morin (who is also CEO) said Facebook has just become too big, too public, and that you really don’t want to share everything with hundreds of friends. 

Again, Facebook has addressed this with recent features, but I guess this is targeted at the people that don’t pay attention to all of that stuff or still don’t feel comfortable with Facebook when it comes to privacy. This is somewhat understandable, as the lack of regard for privacy reputation Facebook has (despite efforts to improve this) has been a hard one for the company to shake. This has become evident yet again as Facebook announced its new messaging and email service this week. 

Then you still have the people out there that just don’t use Facebook. There are some. Then again, Facebook isn’t the only other option. You have dedicated photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa web albums.  Nothing wrong with having another option though. It will be interesting to see how Path develops.

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With VMforce, more than 6 million enterprise Java developers will have an open path to cloud computing. VMforce will simplify how enterprises and enterprise Java developers can use cloud computing without compromising flexibility and control.

“Enterprise Java developers, welcome to Cloud 2,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com.

“This fundamental shift incorporates cloud computing, real-time collaboration and mobile devices like the iPad to meet the new needs of the enterprise. Now, in partnership with VMware, we are delivering VMforce and bringing Java to Force.com so enterprise Java developers can create powerful new innovative Cloud 2 apps.”

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Mobile Lite will offers existing Salesforce customers access to its CRM service via a number of smartphones.

Mobile Lite is available on Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s Blackberry smartphones and Windows Mobile devices.

"We want even more customers to experience the success possible with mobile access to our cloud," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com.

"We want our customers to take the cloud with them, wherever they go. By delivering mobile access to our cloud, for free, we’re accelerating adoption of the cloud and delivering value to customers in times when they need it the most."

Salesforce says its Mobile Lite service offers customers basic access to some of the most common CRM features including email, customer requests, leads, search solutions and other updated information.

"Ten years ago, accessing applications on your cell phone was considered advanced. Today, mobile access to enterprise applications is expected," said Sheryl Kingstone of Yankee Group. "Salesforce.com understands the productivity benefits that come with mobile access, and is making Mobile Lite an added benefit of Salesforce CRM."

Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition customers can upgrade to the full Mobile version of Salesforce CRM for an additional $50 per user per month. Unlimited Edition customers can have access to the full mobile edition for free.