Most interesting is Adam Ostrow's take on Salesforce.com, an actual company that makes actual money, in contrast to the many, well free toys.
Is it just me, or do the announcements we hear from Salesforce seem to just make a lot more sense than a lot of the tie-ups we hear about on the consumer side of the Web? Last month, the company announced a deal with Google to launch Salesforce for Google Apps, and from what Ive seen in my brief tour of Visualforce, were about to see a lot of really useful applications being cranked out by developers in the Salesforce community. It certainly adds more credence to the theory that Facebook apps are just for fun.
I followed up with Jake Freivald, VP of Information Builders (IBI) on their announcement that the company was utilizing the Google Maps API to visualize geospatial data (see image at right courtesy of IBI). I wanted to know what led IBI to implement this feature in its WebFOCUS platform. "We needed to do for a variety of reasons," said Freivald. "What we are coding with latest iteration of WebFOCUS is to make it a platform for mashups. All you have to do with WebFOCUS is decide what data you want; what icons you want and what other drill downs you want to go to. Its not a lengthy development cycle and we want to make good on the promises of Web 2.0."