I took a break from blogging for awhile, and now I’m ready to join Mike in writing more frequently. ReadyTalk has been growing rapidly over these past few months resulting in new faces and names to learn, new needs for processes where they didn’t previously exist, more dogs, more dishes in the kitchen, more activity. I’ve been living lead generation, producing campaigns, learning the ins and outs of Salesforce, dreaming about marketing automation software, presenting web seminars, reaching out to new partners and brainstorming how we can use conferencing to start intelligent, meaningful conversations.

During this little blogging rebirth, let’s revisit the fundamental reason why we are here, or the primary reason why I love what I do. It is this: your ReadyTalk account is a space full of power and potential. Choose your words well and be persistent and intelligent in bringing communities together, and you will fundamentally affect positive change in your unique way. Think about what you’d like to share with thousands of people around the world, and we can help you make it happen.

SalesForce.com and Google, together, made the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Good timing with their SalesForce.com Developer Conference which was also held on Monday and I was a fortunate attendee. SalesForce.com is not saying anything publicly about their future plans with Google, but stay tuned as it appears the two may soon come up with a partnership that will threaten Microsoft.

ReadyTalk is in the process of customizing SalesForce.com for our customer relationship management (CRM) needs as we migrate from our old system.

I was initially unimpressed by the high price of SalesForce.com, but as I see more of their product, as well as their new APEX code (in Beta), it’s becoming more clear as to why companies are embracing it. SalesForce.com has created what appears to be a solid infrastructure and it presents a clean, easily customizable front-end that has been carefully architected. It allows for developers to code and get fancy, but it’s not required to have an expert in-house in order for a company to customize SalesForce.com appropriately.

The number of participants at the SalesForce.com Developer Conference (between 700 and 1,000) speaks to the momentum building for SalesForce.com. There are a lot of eager developers excited to create (and sell) new applications for SalesForce.com, increasing SalesForce.com’s value to an even wider array of customers.

One of the highlights of the conference was hearing Guy Kawasaki speak. He spoke about the “Art of the Start.� Watch his presentation, it’s useful and entertaining and will benefit anyone who is interested in starting anything.

SalesForce SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) was announced yesterday, see the power of it, coupled with Apex code, in this demo.

Technorati Tags: SalesForce.com, Google, CRM, SOA, Apex Code