In my great expectations of Google Android coming to Canada on June 2nd, I’ve started experimenting with developing some apps for the Android platform. My first app is called “The Taxman” and will calculate the amount of tax you owe per year in your province/state – well only Canada for now.

I had trouble adjusting to what an “Activity” was and how to handle it. Here is a quick and dirty way to create an Activity, and to switch to another Activity (think of it as another screen) on the click of a button.

1. Create a new Android project – or you might already have one created.

2. Add a new Class that extends android.app.Activity. You need a total of two classes that extend Activity. You will switch from one Activity to another.

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I’ve been a fan of Google’s mobile operating system Android for quite a while – technically since I heard about it 2 years ago. I’ve been unfortunate to live in Canada, because none of the telco companies here have carried any phones with Android (only HTC phones for now, but Samsung seems to be coming out with something soon).

But, on June 2nd 2009 Rogers is coming out with the HTC Dream and the HTC Magic and Google Android will be here! And on June 3rd Google Android will be in my hands. [I’m not going to be a geek and get it on the very first day it comes out, come on!]

So, in expectation of this date, I started playing around with Android and developing my own applications. To start off, it’s been absolutely easy, pleasant, and a breeze to setup. It was like stealing candy from a kid. I followed the instructions from the Android – Developers website and using Eclipse as my environment I was creating mobile applications in less than 30 mins.

To get the SDK follow this link: http://developer.android.com/sdk/1.5_r2/index.html
To read the installation instructions follow this link: http://developer.android.com/sdk/1.5_r2/installing.html
And I recommend using Eclipse if you do want to get the “30 mins effect”.

I wanted to test out the different functions/features that Android offers out of the box, so I thought of a simple app which would allow me to have a goal and thus opportunities to experiment. I am going to write a “tax” application. Unfortunately, this tax application will not fill out your taxes. It will calculate how much the government has to take from you each year. You will enter your country (Canada only for now), you will enter your income, and the result will be a summary of your take-home pay and taxes due, by province (or states for the US – eventually). I’m going to call it “The Taxman”.

I’ve just started this mini app, and as I go along I will post snippets of code that I found difficult to come up with – to help out anyone that is looking for the exact same solution. Also, I have a full-time job, so it will take me a month to complete this silly app :), so my posts might be infrequent.

This weekend I had a chance to start it off and I had trouble with a couple of things. I will write a separate post on each one over the next couple of weeks. Here’s three of those things:

1. How to switch from one screen to another (also called Activities)

2. How to switch screens with an animation effect

3. How to switch screens using a dragging motion with your finger – you know, iPhone stylez.

That’s it for now… those 3 posts will be coming out very, very soon!

I decided to get off my lazy butt, after 3 months of non-posts, and check up on something. Some time ago I wrote a post about an “On-Demand Index”. This was a portfolio of On-Demand/SaaS stocks picked by Rick Sherman on SeekingAlpha.com. I created some AJAX scripts that took data from Google Finance for that portfolio and made it into a page on this blog. I thought, this way you can always go to that page and see overall how the SaaS stocks are doing in real-time.

Well, here I am, half a year later, trying to find out what happened to those stocks.

This is the original chart from June 29th 2008 that got me started:

This is the chart on January 1st 2009, from the On-Demand Index page:

Yikes! The return over the last year is -47%! The return since Jan 1 is -11%!

There is only ONE company on that list that has posted an increase in the past half year,
athenahealth (ATHN)
June 2008: 30.2
January 2009: 36.08
%: 19.47%

All the others are in the red, with an honourable mention going to
Salesforce.com (CRM)
June 2008: 68.6
January 2009: 26.61
%: -61.2%

Here’s a complete listing of the changes since June 2008:

Ok, ok, you can blame the economy.  But maybe the market still hasn’t warmed up to the idea of SaaS as much as this blog has. Or, just as the original article claims, these are companies just like any other and they are suffering the same ups and downs as all other companies - the industry they are in is just a small portion of the overall formula.

For example, salesforce was hugely overvalued at $60 (personal opinion), while athenahealth keeps signing more contracts [1] [2].

I really want to say: look, all companies but one have posted decreases, this means SaaS is still new and not being adopted. However, I know in my heart that so many companies in the red must have some kind of influence from the sagging economy. It would be quite the coincidence if they are all red because of their industry.

That’s all for now. I will check back on these stocks soon. Maybe when the economoy is stabalized in 2 years, looking at these figures will make more sense.

I came across this article today on Forbes. Dan Woods tries to dig a little deeper into what has made Salesforce.com so successful. In the end, Dan boils it down to the fact that Salesforce.com is not successfully solely because they were the first to provide multitenant software at a large scale. It was the fact that solved a critical problem most people overlooked. They made highly configurable enterprise software; one that could be configured intuitively without a computer science degree. By making multitenancy a constraint, it probably forced their engineers to build very malleable software that solves many of their customer’s problems right out of the box. It could also be the fact that they chose CRM software which requirements don’t vary drastically from company to company.

Either way, if a company made single tenant software that had superb usability and configure-ability; would it still garner the same success? I’ve said it before; software as a service is just that, a service. It doesn’t matter what architecture. As long as your customers don’t own and maintain the software or the hardware then that’s “service”. It doesn’t matter what flavor it comes in. This is one of those terms that the marketing department keeps hyping up to prove that there really is some innovation in their software. Because in this world, big words sell software. Don’t let a Suit with a degree in International Relations fool you next time. They’re wasting blog paper!

Let’s be honest, not many people would say Microsoft are the most innovate. They’re almost never the first to market but you have to give them credit; over time they dominate any market they enter. Or as Steve Ballmer puts it, they just keep “Coming and Coming and Coming” There are lots of examples, just look at: Internet Explorer, Office, Exchange, SQL Server and XBox.

Just a few days ago, Microsoft’s Live Mesh was awarded Best Technology Innovation / Achievement at the Crunchies awards. Sure this is no Garnter. But it’s one of the only times that a bunch of Google-horny journalist admit that Microsoft has made a great product. Not surprisingly, Live Mesh is a product that I extremely love. I’ve been harping about it to all my friends.

To put simply, Live Mesh’s strategy is to enhance the Windows platform. To webify it if you will. You install Mesh on all your devices and it will keep your files and folder in sync all the time. You’re probably thinking “OK, so what”. Built into Mesh is the Live Desktop so you no longer need to be at your computer to access your files. All you need is a computer with Internet access. In fact, the Live Desktop is so slick that it feels like you’re using Remote Desktop through the browser. The more I use Mesh, the more I find ways to make my life easier. This is what I can do with Mesh:

• Work on a file on my desktop, close it, go home and continue working on it from my laptop. No uploading required
• Keep my IE bookmarks in sync on all my computers
• Have the code I’m working on available anywhere without checking it in
• My music is available on all my devices
• Install Mesh on my phone, take a picture and it’s on my desktop. Goodbye USB cable
• Share files with my friends by dragging it into a folder
• My data is always backed up on another machine or in the cloud

Mesh is one of the components of Microsoft’s Azure strategy. The other half is focused on providing managed hosting for applications and services. Although Mesh is a little further developed than the other components of Azure, I’m really looking forward to what Microsoft releases in the coming year. And for all those “2009” predictions … really?

Feel free to try Live Mesh today!

Naturally the most discussed topic right now is how this “economic crisis” is going to affect the SaaS business. Will the lower cost of ownership finally persuade CIOs to adopt SaaS? Or will all the small businesses (which make up a majority of SaaS revenues) go bankrupt drying up the wells of ‘recurring revenue’ that most software companies depend on? It’s a tough question.

Sinclair Schuller over at SaaS Blogs poses an interesting question: Is it the right time for ISVs to enter the SaaS market in this economy? Will the economic turmoil provide an big opportunity for subscription software?

Sinclair argues that companies aren’t looking to cut monthly recurring expenses to reduce cost. Instead they’re looking to cut large expenditures or big ticket items that will make a significant dent on cost. Therefore Schuller argues that SaaS is, in a sense, is immune to corporate downsizing for the reasons above.

I’d like to add my thoughts to this discussion. First of all let’s assume that we’re talking about software that is business critical like CRM or ERP. As a SaaS provider, your product has to have some degree of importance for your customers’ day-to-day operation. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter economic crisis or not, you’ll be out of business sooner or later.

With this in mind, I would say that companies ARE NOT going to make an all-or-nothing decision. The CIO is not going to say “Should we completely scrap our Salesforce CRM to cut costs?” Instead, they will begin to throttle their consumption of these services to reduce their monthly costs. I mean isn’t this the value prop for SaaS? So instead of doing the right thing and buying a login for each employee. They’ll start doubling up or sharing logins. Or they’ll only provide logins for sales reps and not the marketing department. Or they’ll downgrade their version since they extra features aren’t always mission critical. Anyways you get the idea. Just think, when money is tight at home; you don’t stop eating you just eat less.

So I’d suggest to ISVs looking at getting into SaaS to pay close attention to the pricing model and make it recession proof. Just because you offer hosted services doesn’t mean people will flock to your company. This is not like the movie Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner where “if you build it, they will come”.

Take for example, Omniture. Their pricing is NOT based on per user. I can create as many users as I want because it’s based on the amount of data you send to their system. Basically, Omniture is BI system where marketers can embed code into their website to collect data and analyze visitor behaviour. In this case, you can’t really throttle the amount of money you spend on Omniture. What you pay is directly related to the amount of traffic on your site. And what are you going to do, tell people to stop visiting your site? Or will slowly stop implementing Omniture across your entire site? You could do that, but without the intelligence you wouldn’t be know how to enhance your site and generate more sales. So this doesn’t give customers a way to throttle their consumption but at the same time it provides a critical service for the company and thus cannot be axed altogether.

I think that’s the key. Figure out a subscription model that is well within your customer’s budget make it difficult to throttle. If you provide extreme value to your customers then it’s difficult to be on the cutting block. It’s best to nail this down before acquiring a single customer. The pricing model isn’t something that you can just change without pissing everybody off. Why else do you think Telcos charge per minute for your mobile, but charge a flat rate for the landline? I bet it even costs the Telcos less when you make a call on your cell phone than your home phone. But what’s done cannot be undone and if they all of a sudden started charging per minute at home, hell would break loose.

It looks like Salesforce is back with their pranks. Back in the day Salesforce had been known to picket Siebel events and pull all sorts of publicity stunts.

After catching a whiff of Ballmer’s hint, it looks like they’ve hired people to stand outside PDC with donuts trying to promote their Platform.

Frankly I think it’s kind of juvenile. Who are they going to convince by hiring some kids with rickshaws and Krispy Kreme?

Via Seattle Tech Report

The Salesforce.com bikes / Joseph Tartakoff