Salesforce has unveiled a slew of new tools and services to lure developers to its cloud-based platform.

Leading the pack is Database.com, a cloud database that can power apps built for Android and iOS-based devices. These apps can be hosted on Salesforce’s own Force.com or other cloud-based platforms including Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure.

Database.com can also be used to run social media applications using a social data model that holds and manages data for social feeds, user profiles and status updates. Developers can specify followers for database records or request data feeds to display real-time data updates through social APIs.

The database is already used by over 100,000 Salesforce customers and is now generally available to all enterprises. It managed over 36 billion transactions and 13 billion custom objects in the second quarter alone.

A free account will support up to 100,000 records, 50,000 transactions per month, with support for three enterprise users. Additional capacity, transactions and users can be purchased at prices starting from US$10 per month.

“Database.com is the heart of the social enterprise,” said George Hu, Salesforce’s executive vice president for platform, marketing and operations.

“Just like Salesforce is reborn social, databases need to be reborn social,” he added. “That’s why we’ve redesigned our multi-tenant cloud database to be social, mobile and open”.

Salesforce has also beefed up Force.com with a new visual workflow designer that lets companies model and deploy business processes entirely on the cloud.

Users will be able to easily collaborate on business workflows using simple drag-and-drop features. The tool also lets partners and independent software vendors create new capabilities and to integrate with third-party apps.

Also new to Force.com is touch.salesforce.com, a feature that renders Salesforce apps using HTML5 to fit smartphones and tablet displays. What this means is that developers will no longer need to develop mobile versions of their apps to fit smaller screens.

One such app is Seesmic CRM, which lets users search their Salesforce accounts as well as look up and create leads, contacts and sales opportunities on Android phones. On the record, Seesmic says the app does not compete with touch.salesforce.com, but it’s hard to buy that line given the similarity between the two.

To entice the large community of Java developers to create apps for the Salesforce platform, the company announced Java support for Heroku, the app development platform that Salesforce plans to acquire for US$212 million.

Heroku, a Ruby on Rails cloud application platform, was created in 2007 with the aim of making deploying and managing cloud apps as easy as developing them.

The application platform features a workflow and interface designed to mirror how developers work. Because the platform is delivered as a service, there are no virtual machines, software and hardware to manage.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had said earlier that the Heroku acquisition was driven by calls for the company to embrace open development platforms such as Ruby on Rails and Java.

The vendor’s own Apex programming language, which employs syntax that is similar to Java, had been criticized for being too proprietary.

During a demo at Dreamforce 2011, Salesforce executives showed the ease with which a Java program can be deployed as a Facebook app in a few clicks with Heroku. The program, which allows Facebook users to purchase Harry Potter movie merchandise, was developed by Warner Bros.

Salesforce.com is deepening the social connections that underpin its suite of cloud computing products.

Starting this October, its customer relationship management (CRM) customers will be able to see social profiles of customers with data mined from social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise social networking tool available for almost two years now, will also support instant messaging for the first time.

This means Chatter users will soon be able to chat with fellow workers, share screens, collaborate with partners and approve requests directly from their Chatter feeds.

Salesforce also announced Chatter Service, a question-and-answer portal that allows businesses to answer customer enquiries from social feeds.

The service can also connect to public social networks, effectively extending a company’s Chatter network beyond the boundaries of a traditional self-service portal.

A new Chatter API and Chatter for Microsoft SharePoint will also let a company extend its Chatter feeds to third-party applications such as content management systems.

The social enterprise

The on-demand CRM vendor last updated Chatter in December 2010, when it introduced a free Chatter version that lets all employees in an organisation participate in corporate social networking.

The latest slew of enhancements were conceived just nine months ago, right after the company concluded its annual Dreamforce confab last December.

“We took a backseat and realized we have to change,” Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, said during his opening keynote at Dreamforce this year.

Michael Peachey, director of product marketing at Salesforce, concurred, adding that the rise of social networking has made a deep impact on organisations since last year.

To tap on this social media wave, he said, businesses will first need to understand who their customers are.

“So, rather than having a CRM contact record with a phone and e-mail address, you need to know what they like on Facebook and who they connect with,” he added.

Peachey said the next step is to create customer social networks so businesses can listen, engage and serve customers.

“The final piece is to create employee social networks where your employees can collaborate internally in the same way that is familiar to them,” he said.

These pieces will form the cornerstone of Salesforce’s “social enterprise” vision, which the company says will transform the way businesses collaborate, share and manage information.

Benioff said: “By creating social customer profiles, employee social networks, customer social networks and product social networks, companies can delight their customers in entirely new ways”.

Salesforce also seems to have softened its stance on keeping customer data on the cloud when it announced a data residency option for Database.com, the company’s cloud database service.

This is targeted at companies that want to take full advantage of the cloud, but are hesitant to do so because of data security concerns.

With this new option, companies will now have the option of keeping readable versions of sensitive data in their own data centers, while making full use of Salesforce’s trusted cloud computing model.

The latest slew of enhancements represent a laudable attempt by Salesforce to capture a major slice of the enterprise social networking market.

The ability to extend enterprise social networks to external stakeholders, coupled with CRM records enriched with social data, will further create stickiness among users of the Salesforce platform.

However, it remains to be seen if businesses will bite.

While industry observers have called for companies to integrate social media into their CRM strategies, a mindset shift, from managing customers to managing relationships, is needed.

Most call centres agents are trained to manage complaints and troubleshoot product problems, rather than build relationships with customers through social media.

More importantly, call centre agents have to be trained to handle conversations on the social Web, which can be daunting for those unfamiliar with social networking.

Take a look at the Youth Guru YouTube video below. It’s quite a hilarious series, with 15 videos to date. *Chio peng* (aka ROTFLMAO in hokkien dialect). Well done Youth Guru folks!

The content in this series is far more fun than many of the videos on the official Singapore2010 channel on YouTube. Youth Guru should have its own YouTube channel, or just highlighted instead of being lost in the array of official videos on the main channel.

As I’ve said before, I think some of the social media content for YOG needs more love. For example, this Youth Guru series is hilarious. Others, like the Odyssey Singapore 2010 virtual world, needs a little bit more work.

The key issue is that all of them could use a little more publicity. And as I’ve said before, one relatively easy way is to reach out to the Singaporean blogs!

As part of the worldwide promotion to create buzz around the event, the Singapore Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee (SYOGOC), together with the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), is creating a virtual world called Singapore 2010 Odyssey.

Said RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay, Chief Executive Officer of IDA at the official launch on Saturday 6th March: “The Singapore 2010 Odyssey is a unique virtual world platform offering many possibilities for learning, social networking and entertainment, as it reaches out to the youths from all over the world in a fun and interactive way. The development of the 3D virtual world is testimony to Singapore’s infocomm capabilities in innovatively harnessing digital media technologies to support major events like the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games.”

Of course, what’s more important is the content of this virtual world. I had a preview of the world last Wednesday at a media/blogger session (the news was embargoed till today) but to see how it really was working out, I decided to give it a real life test.

So I went to the website, registered for an account and downloaded Odyssey, which is around 240MB. Installation crashed once on my Windows 7 machine, but it could have been just a stray glitch. Patches were automatically downloaded and installed, and in general getting Odyssey running — from registration to installation — was quite smooth.

The first thing I noticed about Odyssey after getting in was that it was pretty much empty. Of course, I logged in at around 1am on a Sunday morning, but for the day after on when this thing was launched, you’d expect more people. Besides myself, there was only one other lonely soul, and I couldn’t tell if it was an NPC or player character.

The second thing that struck me is that the look and feel is very much like Second Life, but it’s not by Linden Labs. The game world was created by HiPiHi, a China-based 3D company.

When you first enter the game, you get an introductory video clip on how humans are doing badly vs. aliens in the Intergalactic Olympic Games in the year 3010. By taking part in games, you can help humanity do well. The story doesn’t have much impact on the actual gameplay though.

Gameplay itself is a series of mini-games, where you mash keys to play with other players in various sports. Thus far, the only ones available are archery, swimming, shooting, hurdle race and basketball. More will be added later, according to in-game text stating this.

I’ve tried the shooting and hurdle race. Basically you mash keystrokes to compete with other players, for example, “E” to accelerate, and “spacebar” to jump in the hurdles relay. The problem is that if there are no other players to compete with you, there’s little point in this.

One type of game that you can play solo are the embedded flash games that appear in the world, lke this whack-a-mole game below.

Probably the most useful part of Odyssey is the ability to wander around the Youth Olympic Village, and for folks to get a sense of how the campus is without coming here physically. Other venues like the Marina Barrage and the Singapore Sports School are also available for a virtual walkthrough. I visted the Marina Barrage in Odyssey, and it is just a 3D model of the place for now. There’s precious little to interact with, and I guess more interaction will be added later.

Verdict: If this was an actual commercial game, I would say that it is unfinished in terms of content. Sure, it’s pretty, but that’s about it — there’s not much to do in here at the moment. To be fair, this charge can be levelled at Second Life as well.

But as a social platform to reach out to people for YOG, I believe it has potential, provided that the community managers for the Odyssey run events in it.

At the media session it was stated that the team behind Odyssey are running poster design competitions (from January to March 2010) and machinima competitions (April to June 2010) for our Singapore schools. They are also getting the school kids to code and generate content for the world. All of these are good ways to drive users and build a community around Odyssey, which in turn will create a buzz around YOG.

Community. This is the keyword here. On the YOG website there are many social media initiatives run, from the million deeds challenge, to WhyOhGee, a portal site with a blog, contests and photos. There is some content, but the community building for some of these intiatives seems lacking.

For example, the million deeds challenge was launched last year in March 2009, but to date they have only garnered about 50,000 deeds and still missing 950,000. And there’s only about five months left to YOG!

Don’t get me wrong. As a Singaporean, I of course want YOG to do well and raise our flag high in the international community. But if you want the social media part to work, you must engage the community — just building sites and content is not good enough. And it can be done. A good example that I like in the public sector space is yesterday.sg, which is run by the National Heritage Board.

In any case, reaching out to the Singaporean blogosphere — from technology blogs like ours to general blogs — is an easy step to help market these social media initiatives for YOG. You can’t have thin skin though, because bloggers will give unvarnished candid feedback. The second step would be to get community managers to engage the audience, like going to schools and talking about it, or setting up meetings with bloggers.

Sell Singaporeans the vision, and we’ll in turn help sell it to the world.

I’m really glad that the Gothere.sg folks got their 90 seconds of fame when Minister of Finance Tharman Shanmugaratnam mentioned them in the recent unveiling of the Singapore budget.

Gothere has built a darn heck of a great transport site in Singapore, and the guys have both passion and great ideas. Hopefully their S$100K project with LTA will allow them to grow into something more robust.

Caught up with them recently at Garag3, the NUS incubator for “mad geniuses”. When I was there chatting with them, they showcased their streetlevel views function to me, which I thought was pretty darn cool. Similar to Google’s StreetViews (available in US, Australia, Japan and parts of Europe), Gothere is first Singapore street directory site to incorporate such a function.

Although it was announced quietly on their website somewhere in December a month or so back, it is a function worth highlighting. Basically, it allows users to look at a visual snapshot of the roads where they are going, which is a great help if you’re unfamiliar with the place.

For example, if you’re unfamiliar with the roads around Plaza Singapura, you can take a look via this function, and the result is as shown below.

The photo can be rotated 360 degrees, allowing you to have a feel of what the place looks like. Photos are not in real-time, and yes, the Gothere crew spent days to snap photos of the roads around Singapore to serve from their site. With the amount of photos approaching the 4TB limit, assuming each photo is several MB each, this amounts to hundreds of thousands of photos. At least.

Founder Dominic Ee mentioned that the photos cover around 70% of Singapore, with some missing parts in the north of the island. For now, this function is going to be as put on the backburner as they have to prioritize on other things right now, like their first project with LTA. They will get back to this when they have more resources or need to do a refresh.

As it is, however, the function is still pretty useful. How it is accessed is via the camera icon in the top right corner of the map (see screen capture on right) when you do a routing search on Gothere.sg. Once the icon is highlighted, you can drag the cursor over the map, and anywhere there is a red dot, you can view a snapshot of the place.

If you live in Singapore and you haven’t heard of or tried Gothere, do yourself a favour and take a look. It’s such a useful resource that I have the URL bookmarked in my brain.

I’ll flat out admit it: I’m a huge fan and user.

Of all the various map, location and road routing sites for Singapore, I feel that Gothere is the best. It trashes the competition out there in terms of usability and function: the incumbent Streetdirectory, StreetDB, and Google Maps.

Don’t even get me started on SLA’s map or Rednano’s one.

Started up in just May 2008 this year, Gothere.sg has generated buzz in the blogosphere but is still under the radar in the mainstream.

Why makes Gothere so good?

It’s fast, it’s easy to use, and it gives great results. And it has a ton of useful functions.

Want to avoid ERP? Check.

Find the best way to get to a location via bus or MRT or a combination of both? Check.

Estimated taxi rates for a route? Check.

Best of all, it is accurate and free. In the beginning, Gothere relied on the default Google map data, which was provided by Teleatlas. Problem is, this data was outdated, and the Gothere founders couldn’t do anything about it.

So what did they do? They drove around around Singapore and GPS mapped all the roads in Singapore. This set of new map data is now the founders’ intellectual property. Their Python backend still uses Google’s API for rendering, but the map data is theirs.

Said co-founder Toh Kian Khai in an interview with Techgoondu: “If there are any changes to Singapore roads, we will try to update the Gothere map within one day.”

Talking to all three founders – Kian Khai, Dominic Ee, and Kuan Chih Yuen, all 26 – one can’t help but feel inspired by their passion for their pet project. All three are drawing no pay and working full-time on their dream.

“We felt we could do a better job than the others out there,” said Dominic. “We have an edge over established companies – they can’t be so nimble.”

Product ≠ Business Model

However, one major downside is that they don’t have a business model yet. Sorta like YouTube or Google in the beginning, Gothere.sg has an excellent product but is lacking a revenue model.

To which I say, it’s fine for a while – it took Google some time to find their advertising model (pioneered by Overture) – but at some point pragmatics will take over: you need to survive as you build your product. I would hate to see Gothere die.

So Gothere folks, here are some ideas from me. Ideas are free — the hard part is finding out what works and implementing them.

• Look for help to grow your business. Think seriously about getting help from VCs, network to acquire mentors, and basically just talk to people. For example, the Singapore government is trying to encourage entrepreneurship, and there are grants being thrown around, from the likes of IDA, MDA, and Spring. It’s worth a look at least, for money or contacts.
• Write a simple business plan. Even if it’s a simple two pager that spells out what you’re doing and hope to achieve. Don’t know how to start? Go get a copy of Business Plan Pro or some other business planning software which guides you into putting together a coherent plan.
• Experiment with business ideas to see what works. Build a widget for companies to embed their location maps (something most about pages need), which will drive even more traffic to the site. Give it them for free, or charge them micropayments when it’s used, limited to a low capped amount to test the market. Build a locality search for ATMs for some bank, etc. I think a freemium model has potential – give it free to end users, but charge corporations and give them service support.
• Partner up with companies. For example, many mobile phones now come with A-GPS and you can bet the phone manufacturers need to include map support that they either build or buy. Build an OEM partnership with Nokia, HTC, Samsung, etc. where you become their map developers for Singapore. Work with a local telco to see if they can bundle this with their phones as a premium service and you get a cut. Or try Google or Yahoo to see if they would be interested as content providers. Partnerships are one good way to drive revenue, and some successful Singaporean examples are Muvee and TenCube.

Here’s wishing Gothere the best of luck!

(Note: This story is part of a series of stories on the web and tech innovation scene in Singapore. Check out the interview with Yebber and Shoplette if you haven’t seen it.)

The idea: you spot a pair of pink hello kitty slippers in a boutique mall in Japan’s trendy Shinjuku shopping district to die for, and you want to let all your friends know. You whip out your phone, snap it, and upload it where all your friends can goggle over your latest purchase.

Except that with Shoplette (beta), the whole world can find out what and where you like to shop.

“Shopping is a very social thing,” said Shoplette founder Shannon Low Shen-Li, 32, in an interview with Techgoondu. “If you spot a good buy, you are often excited to tell others about what you have bought!”

Shoplette’s social media platform allows anybody to “follow” your purchases, and they can even vote on whether they think the buy is a bargain or not. The more highly rated your purchase, the more visible it is on the main page.

Shannon likens Shoplette, whose beta officially started in May 2008, as a “sort of twitter for shopping”, where your friends can find out where you’re shopping in real-time. Photos and content can be submitted via MMS, making the input pretty easy.

Besides user submitted content, business owners can also set-up a virtual shop on Shoplette. A basic account is free (for now), but featured sites – which appear in a column on the right – are charged at the low cost of US$10 a month.

With such low rates and no other appreciable web advertising, it’s a wonder that the founders are making money at all. It turns out that Shannon (together with co-founder Kok Keong, also 32) is not looking at Shoplette as a money spinner, but as a test product to sell such Web 2.0 social platforms to companies who might want to use it as a marketing tool. His corporate site, Mobrick, lists their objective as building “crowdsourcing websites, content-driven social networks, user-generated content platforms” for organizations.

Thus far, their test product has generated fairly decent results.

Shoplette seems to have struck a chord with predominantly female shoppers in the teenage to early twenties range. According to Shannon, from a low user base of 20 testers in May, they have grown to around 1,000 shoplette members via word of mouth now — not bad for a young project.

“It takes time to grow a community,” said Shannon. “People sort of forget that even popular sites like Facebook were around for a few years before it really took off in the last two or so.”

Shoplette is self-funded, but they are on the lookout for VCs who can help them with contacts and experience beyond just the monetary aspect. As for starting a tech business during a downturn, Shannon was sanguine about it.

“If you want to start a company, you do it anyway despite whatever the economy is like,” he said.

(Note: This story is part of a series of stories on the web and tech innovation scene in Singapore. Check out the interview with Yebber if you haven’t seen it.)

Yebber is a Singapore-based website that aggregates reviews by end users and provides a mechanism for users to search for them.

So far, pretty standard. The catch? It pays you to have an opinion.

How does it work? You create an account, hammer out a review, and it pays you Yebber dollars, which can be exchanged for gifts or hard cash.

Started in March 2007, Yebber is the brainchild of Stewart Lau, CEO and owner of the site. What’s interesting is that Stewart is no wet-behind-the-ears youngster out to do his first start-up. The 52-year old veteran businessman has been running his own company, Integrated Software Engineering, for 21 years. Yebber is just one of the many products – ERP software, e-commerce platforms, and surveillance camera software are other examples – that his company has churned out over that period of time.

Stewart started Yebber “not because there’s a big potential in making money now”, but because he wanted a space in which people could throw bouquets and brickbats at vendors in the market.

This idea was born from his own personal experience. In his business past, there were some really scummy deals that he could not find an avenue to warn other customers about, so he built his own platform.

The Yebber dollar was an interesting evolution in this process. In the beginning, it was about giving a few prizes to the best reviews to incentivize people to write, but the Yebber team soon stumbled upon the concept that it’s fairer and more effective to reward all participants. The monthly rates are set by a formula dependent on advertising revenue and the reviews. Yebber dollars are also paid out for photos and videos submitted, and also for checking out reviews – an interesting concept and experiment that is still unfolding.

Besides the Singapore market, Yebber is also trying to branch out into the Malaysia and Indonesia market, and they’re looking for partners in other parts of the world to localize Yebber for their countries.

“Only the people in their home countries understand their needs and culture,” Stewart said. Yebber is also looking to partner with more Singaporean businesses, like this current promotion with the National Heritage Board (NHB).

As an end user, I find Yebber an interesting concept: it crowdsources opinions and pays them with advertising dollars.

Similar to growing a wiki, I feel that it needs to get a sizeable base, have strong moderation and publicity (all of which is hard work!) before it can take off. The content is a little raw, but it’s worth a look.

(Note: This post is part of the research for a spread of stories in Digital Life on the web innovation scene in Singapore. There will be a different slice of news in there, including how the companies are coping with the downturn.)