• Device type: mobile, tablet, PC, Mac
• Geography continent, country, state, city
• System Information OS, OS language, browser, browser language, existence of media plugins, screen resolution
• Referring source: domain, keyword used in search, organic or commercial traffic, affiliate (Personyze is also tightly integrated with AdWords, DoubleClick, Google retargeting and more)
• Social Information, via Facebook connect: when opted in, visitor's social information (that the visitor agreed to share with the website) is available for segmentation; name, gender, age, location, marital status, number of friends etc
• Time of day, time since last visit
• Demographic information from 3rd party 
• Visitor behavior in the site during current or past sessions: articles the visitor read, how much time spent on the site, number of visits, clicks, key-presses etc

Because Personyze is directly integrated with WordPress and Joomla, all contents, posts and themes become available within the Personyze interface for segmentation - meaning users can utilize Personyze as an almost infinitely flexible site analytics tool. Personyze is also integrated with email campaign managements tools MailChimp and ConstantContact meaning that highly specific email campaigns can be run using the Personyze segmentation.

One of the flip sides of al this app development is the corresponding drag on testing - that horrible stage that no one really likes, but everyone needs to do. One player looking to aid in that stage of the process is Soasta (rhymes with toaster!)

Soasta bills themselves as the "cloud testing pioneer", providing Web testing services to test performance, scalability and reliability of both websites and Web applications by simulating traffic spikes for both testing and production applications. CloudTest has a number of different offerings including;

• CloudTest Mobile for mobile application performance testing


• CloudTest Enterprise integrated internal and external testing with clouds such as Amazon EC2, IBM, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace.


• CloudTest Professional (Pro) more control and scale than the enterprise product


• CloudTest Standard an internal testing tool


• CloudTest On-Demand a full product+service offerings for organizations with no testing team themselves.

• Testing of web and mobile applications, including applications using HTML5 to REST Web services


• Test building with visual test creation tools


• Integration of application, system, and network monitoring data


• Analysis of results in real-time through a dashboard


• Upgrade path to a more scalable CloudTest edition

In demos the CloudTest product had a simple and intuitive test builder functionality that makes it easier for a testing team to spend less time designing tests, and more time running them - and that's never a bad thing. App testing has never been more important - with this new freemium offering, Soasta is hoping it will gain more customers for its suite of testing products.

That may just be changing. Rollbase, an alternative platform that we covered recently, has introduced an automatic migration from Force.com. This means that users can, in theory, take a Force.com application and transfer it, with the application logic intact, to either Rollbase's own servers or, in something amusing given Salesforce.com's disdain of servers, to on-premise customer hardware.

Rollbase is pretty cheap and cheerful - monthly fees for a basic service are $30 with tiered pricing for more specific functionality. It's also eminently flexible in terms of deployment - Rollbase.com can host it on its own cloud or it can be downloaded

The Rollbase Automated Force.com Migration Tool (this is the bit that aims to ease the acquisition of Force.com customers) is available now at no additional cost as part of the Rollbase.com Hosted Cloud service as well as Rollbase Private Cloud, which can be downloaded, installed and deployed on both in-house or third party hardware.

There are a couple of caveats, the Rollbase site advises that:

Rollbase cannot convert APEX and SOQL code for you. Some formula fields and components with custom code may not work in Rollbase without modification

I decided to put Rollbase to the test and in an undercover operation, with the names of the operatives changed to protect their privacy (for obvious) reasons, I arranged for a trial of Rollbase to occur. We discovered the following:

• Initial hiccup. Signed up, received login details but they didn't work. Seems the email goes out immediately but there is some delay in provisioning the account. Tried again later and it worked.
• UI is fairly basic and spare.
• CRM module inspired by Salesforce.com clearly. Same core objects, core functionality.
• Salesforce.com import feature was simple and straight forward. Tested importing a standard object Cases and a related custom object.
• Looks like formula fields etc come across but the syntax won't always translate.
• Received an email from Rollbase CEO Matt Robinson advising they had proactively fixed my formulas which hadn't translated. Very good.

On balance for the price it seems very reasonable. They've managed to incorporate a good deal of functionality.

That's a pretty ringing endorsement from this person who isn't one to lavish praise readily. Rollbase has a logical use case out there - it's unlikely to see any sort of mass migration from Salesforce.com, partly because of the limitations on what can be imported and partly because of all the extra service and support (and, yes, certainty) that goes with being a Salesforce.com customer). However for very plain implementations of Salesforce.com, or specific test/dev situations, Rollbase could be on to a winner. It's also worth considering that the Microsoft Access import feature might be appealing for some organizations as a way to inexpensively convert simple Microsoft Access database applications to cloud delivery.

The video below gives an intro to the Rollbase solution:

The sessions highlighted in this post are Going 100% SaaS and Meeting without traveling. I also reviewed Joblogs, a CRM "relationship and management lite".

Going 100% SaaS

This was the session I really wanted to see the roll call of panelists was;

• Gadi Shamia (Revongo)
• Daniel Druker (Intacct)
• Doug Harr (Ingres)
• Robert Hull (Adaptive Planning)
• Jeff Schultz (Bill.com)

Not surprisingly the recent Debes article came up - the crowd, again not surprisingly, was dismissive of Debes contentions about the imminent demise of SaaS as a model.

First question was why aspire for 100% SaaS?

The panelists agreed that SaaS gives functionality to SMBs that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to access. There was also agreement around the enabling benefits of SaaS apps. Why build a data center or expensive traditional software when it's so much more readily accessible and cheaper via SaaS?

In response to a question from the floor about whether or not SaaS is actually cheaper or whether that is just a marketing spin, Doug Harr from Ingres gave the example of a Siebel implementation for 150 salespeople that cost $1.5million. His new company implemented Salesforce.com which cost $140k/year for 130 users.

Another question from the floor raised security concerns for large businesses - the panelists agreed that they had no real concerns about their data being in the cloud.

What sort of business is more likely to adopt SaaS? - not surprisingly the panelists felt technology companies were prime candidates, also service companies, young companies and rapidly growing organizations. Phil Wainewright brought up the issues around large businesses not going with SaaS due to their already sunken costs - again Doug Harr gave a great example where true total cost of ownership analysis can bring up surprising results - the costs and hassles with the old school behemoth software offerings are often sufficiently high to outweigh the monthly costs of a SaaS alternative.

Discussion around integration - feeling was at this point in time it's acceptable but this is where the growth will come from  - creating pseudo best-of-breed total solutions via integration of diverse offerings.

To be honest, given the fact that this conference is meant to be about visioning the future - it was a surprise that so much time was taken in justifying SaaS as a model - it would have been nice to see more time spent on a picture of what a truly 100% SaaS ecosystem would look and feel like - maybe next year....

Meeting without traveling

A panel discussion that the Twitterverse was no doubt interested in - check out the Twitter cred of the participants;

• Robert Scoble (Fast Company)
• Guillaume Cohen (Veodia)
• Gary Griffiths (LiteScape)
• Loic Le Meur (Seesmic)
• Alain Mowad (Polycom)

The panelists introduced themselves and their businesses/offerings. The panel ranges across the spectrum from super hi quality Cisco Telepresence systems down to Seesmic for low quality ad hoc solutions like Seesmic.

Loic Lemeur announced that Twhirl will include video within the next two weeks. He discussed the fact that video allows relationships to be formed around the world without actual presence - it brings people closer together.

Robert told of WalMart's ability to buy fabric internationally over video conferencing the quality is so high.

Cohen told of the savings that video conferencing brings - gas, time, environmental etc. People can work remotely easily - so long as the video integrates tightly with their existing workflow processes - people feel more comfortable giving feedback over video than "in the flesh". Veodia does all the hard work in the background and serves up one button for users to push - delivering up the best quality that the connection available can give.

Mowad says that Polycom is much more focused on real time video sharing - gives examples of tele-medicine and tele-education.

Questions from the floor.....

What are the coolest things the tools could have?

• Someone who has video on 24hrs a day when she works remotely - a sense of intimacy when they're not there
• How do you create a technology that becomes so immersive that one feels that they're "really there"
• Video brings an experience as close as possible to real life
• Video enables Seesmic to run an international development team with real time collaboration

How can video-conferencing work when their are larger teams?

• Remote controlled monitors that move depending on who is talking!
• There's a threshold beyond which video conferencing just doesn't work - 9 or 10 people perhaps?
• There is a perception of presence - the host of offerings - audio, video, IM etc build up a feeling of intimacy that means that the group feel together - even if the camera is focusing on someone else at the time

Discussion ensued about the fact that going forward the ability to catalogue the audio from a video stream - allowing for searching and text string recognition.

Joblogs launches!

I took the opportunity to meet this morning with Steve Ireland from Joblogs - a startup out of Canada which launched their offering today.

Joblogs is most readily described as CRM, relationship and management lite. It serves up a nice, intuitive and quick workspace which allows for the aggregation of contact information, email and documents and links and stakeholder comments all in one location. Their name is a mashup of Job and Blogs - not blogs in the traditional sense but in the sense of being enablers of two way communication and idea collaboration.

It's a good solution for anyone handling large number of customer interactions - service based industries being the most obvious - anyone that requires daily coordination of a dynamic set of different data streams.

It goes out to general release on Monday 9 September and has been bootstrapped via subscription from a previous offering. Joblogs puts their specific points of difference as;

• Non-obstructive user interface (e.g. no save or cancel buttons, and of course no page refreshes)
• Customizable databases with drag and drop
• Private blogs with that serve as a point of collaboration for business projects
• Arbitrarily relate different records together
• Email dropbox that automatically links messages to associated contacts, companies and projects

Here's a screencast of the product:

And it's over!

Sitting in the last session of the conference with organiser Ismael Ghalimi going over the tools used to run the entire operation - 500 physical attendees and a couple of thousand virtual ones. All planned and arranged in a couple of months - it's been a whirlwind.

Overall it's been great to be around a bunch of people who "get it" - understand the cloud and what it can bring to business going forwards.

If I had any criticism it would be that a lot of time was spent talking about where we are at - not so much time spent envisioning the future. Obviously with a number of vendors present this isn't a surprising fact - but nonetheless it would have been great to have some vision sessions that were vendor agnostic.

Anyway... thanks to all the attendees, thanks a bunch to Ismael and his team and I look forward to seeing you all again next year.

Here are some of the sessions I've enjoyed today, including the Google keynote, Project Management 2.0, and Money 2.0 (with video embedded below)...

Google Keynote

Matthew Glotzbach (Google Enterprise) listed the ten things that he can do in the clouds today that he couldn't do a year ago. It was a very Google centric presentation - but nonetheless a good reminder of how far we've come in a short space of time. Matthew's list included:

1. Having access to everything on the go - iPhone
2. Being able to search through all my email - Gmail
3. Chatting with customers and partners - in any language - Matthew gave a very cool live demo of inline translation of chat!
4. Collaborating simply Google products Sites and Docs
5. Organising travel - (the only non Google product making the top 10 - TripIt)
6. Easily collecting data from co-workers and customers using Google forms
7. Building a scalable business application on the cloud platform
8. Using online templates for docs, spreadsheets and presentations
9. Running fast, secure and stable web apps (Chrome)
10. Securely sharing video in apps with Youtube for Google apps

There was lots of backchat on Twitter from attendees that it was very much a Google pitch, however it has to be said that if Google is at the forefront of cloud computing then they have a right to crow about it.

Project Management 2.0

Fellow blogger Zoli Erdos moderated the panel. The panelists were:

Dean Carlson (Viewpath)
Andrew Filev (Wrike)
Bruce Henry (LiquidPlanner)
Mark Mader (Smartsheet.com)
Guy Shani (Clarizen)

It was interesting that there didn't seem to be a huge amount of differentiation in the offerings - they're all perhaps fighting for the same customers.

Comments were raised around PM 2.0 bringing the end of siloed information. Participants claimed that no one is a project manager anymore - everyone is a manager, responsible for tasks.

Differentiation was drawn between mass scale PM projects that need Gantt charts, top down control massive documentation with the 99% of PM work where PM isn't needed. New way of thinking around a federated PM model where users can work in whatever way is best for them and behind the scenes the information is federated backwards and forwards between apps.

The feeling was that project managers today spend their time battling with crappy software - PM2.0 releases them to do real project management instead of being a project secretary.

The main takeaway and one which I concur with, is that no one player will replace the incumbent product (Microsoft Project), rather there will be an ecosystem of varied flavors of PM applications that all have a share of the market.

Money 2.0

I'm biased here as I moderated this panel. However feedback from participants and attendees indicated that the panel was really rewarding. We were a little time-compressed as the previous session had run late. The participants were;

Aaron Forth (Mint.com)
Marc Hedlund (Wesabe)
Justin Kitch (Intuit)
Jeff Schultz (Bill.com)
Mike McDerment (FreshBooks)

It was hard moderating a panel which was so polarised between the consumer and business space but notwithstanding that it went pretty well. The audience was a little jaded but the participants appeared to enjoy themselves and said they got something out of it. It was great to be around the real players in this space. There was some excellent discussion around what the Money ecosystem will look like in a few years time - the value to be gained once the connectedness is all pervasive.

Check out the video from the panel below

Tonight is a party that is being hosted by Zoho - they're announcing a couple of exciting things, one product based and one not. It'll be yet another chance to enjoy the backchannel conversations that happen at an event like this.

You can follow Ben's coverage of Office 2.0 on his personal blog diversity.net.nz.

Like other SaaS offerings, Zendesk offers significant cost savings when compared to its more traditional installed competitors.

Zendesk is remarkably easy to set up. Being SaaS based there is no installation required, it is available on one easy monthly subscription and all hosting and upgrades are handled for users. I set up a trial help desk in literally a few minutes. In keeping with this week's theme, Zendesk is iPhone ready.

How it works

Zendesk is aimed to be used by call takers at the same time as they're talking to their clients - because of this it seems that they've taken lots of time to think about simplifying the user-interface. They make good use of a very simple Ajax user interface and have also included tagging on cases to allow for quick and easy problem classification and searching.

Zendesk has also made good use of API's and can be integrated with other web offerings (campfire, MS Active directory, CRM etc) as well as providing for e-mail integration.

Primarily Zendesk uses tickets as the work stream. A call generates a ticket which can be updated, tagged, searched and resolved all via the web interface. Some features of there offering include;

• Fully customisable tickets
• RSS feeds for both tickets and views
• Tagging of all helpdesk attributes
• Self-service portal for help desk users
• Tickets are email integrated
• Built in SLA tracking
• Resolved tickets can be automatically converted into solutions and added to the solution database

This last feature creates a great self-learning solution centre that, with time, results in a much quicker and more efficient support experience for users.

Pricing

The basic offering, for up to 50 end-users and one agent, is free. From there on Zendesk offers tiered solutions with their premium plan offering unlimited end-users and up to 25 agents costing $349 per month. Like other SaaS products Zendesk is a pay-as-you-go service with no contracts, sign-up or termination fees. Below is a feature highlight video from Zendesk

ReadWriteWeb giveaway

Zendesk's name is a play on the fact that help desk situations can sometimes get a little intense. Zendesk are trying to bring the spirit of serenity to this normally stressful environment. As a bonus for ReadWriteWeb readers, they're giving away 10 of their Zendesk Buddha machines to the first 10 people who email this address.

A guest post by Ben Kepes of diversity.net.nz, a blog that focuses on SaaS, cloud-computing and Web 2.0 for the real world.