We just closed down our booths at Dreamforce and are all heading back to our respective cities.  Based on credible sources Dreamforce attendance was just a few people shy of the expected 10,000.  That is a very interesting number considering some of the economic news as of late and companies that have travel bans, spending freezes, etc…  This really speaks to the power of SaaS (software-as-a-service) and PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and the value companies see in the cloud even in tough economic times.

This Dreamforce was very different than in years past for more reasons than just the growth in attendance.  The entire first day’s keynote was purely around the platform and force.com enhancements.  Depending on what tracks you attended you almost wouldn’t remember that salesforce.com has a CRM product.  With the advances in APEX, Visualforce and now Sites they have put together a very viable platform that can be used in a wide variety of situations.

We have received a lot of great feedback for our new products that we unveiled at Dreamforce, or shortly before so.  Everyone loves the idea of Search2GO (demo) and searching for data within salesforce.com from their iPhone for any edition of salesforce.com (other than Group edition).  It was exciting to talk to someone from Japan by our mobile booth who is a big fan of Expense2GO and has been using it since it launched with the AppStore back in July.  It really proves the international support of the iPhone and force.com when you see users from all over the world storing data in their local language and currency.

We were fortunate to have early access to force.com Sites as well as the Amazon toolkits and the timing worked out perfectly as we could use them as the foundation for our new Lasso2GO product suite.  We are very impressed with what you can do by leveraging best-of-breed services from force.com and Amazon Web Services  to build cloud platforms that were not possible before these platforms existed.  It was exciting to see Charlie Bell (VP of Infrastructure for Amazon.com) on stage with Marc Benioff and Adam Gross and have them showing off our upcoming CardLasso application.  I’m looking forward to applying this same technology stack to our customer base as we help them build new applications we haven’t even imagined.
 

CHICAGO and SAN FRANCISCO – Today at Dreamforce 2008, salesforce.com’s annual user and developer conference, Model Metrics revealed a revolutionary cloud-computing application called CardLasso. CardLasso, part of the Lasso2GO application suite that utilizes services from salesforce.com’s new Force.com Sites capability and Amazon Web Services, enables users to capture business card information using a mobile device camera and automates the transcription of contact data, which is automatically presented for download to the user from www.lasso2go.com.

<Link to full press release>