by Philip Gross under Industry Trends

Bill Lucchini (our general manager) posted on the Intuit Partner Platform blog about 10 great things that he heard at the ‘Startups and the Cloud’ event we hosted last week.

At the end of the event (or at least the part before the cocktails) I gave a closing where I recapped ten great things I heard. Several people came up to me afterward to request that I publish the list… so, here it is…(in the order I heard them during the day):

• Vishy Venugopalan from Longworth Ventures set a great baseline for the day with this overview of cloud computing.

• Scott Cook shared some great stories about the early days of Intuit from failed ads and trouble meeting payroll to the breakthrough insights that helped Quicken take off…

Read the entire list…

by Philip Gross under QuickBase News

Today we have announced a new developer program and toolkit for Adobe Flex in  beta.  This is huge news for us, and I want to take a moment and talk about what it is that we are doing.
The QuickBase Development Program is our Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, that allows independent software developers to build their own custom solutions on top of QuickBase using Adobe Flex.
We really think it’s the best, easiest way for a developer to build their own Software as a Service business. Why?

• It’s an extremely fast development platform. Our customers know how fast it is to build QuickBase applications with sophisticated functionality. Flex is a great front-end for QuickBase; it runs on almost any browser, any operating system, and allows for rich, expressive user experiences.
• The QuickBase platform pre-solves a lot of the drudgework with creating a new offering. Every web app needs – login authentication, user and role permissioning, database access, reports,  an open API, etc.
• Our pricing model. We charge developers based on the resources they use.  Our goal is to keep the pricing low enough to enable developers to release products that can be competitive in the market, and not have to charge a lot per user just to cover their expenses.
• Developers can set their own price, but we take care of the billing. This is actually a huge pain in the neck for developers. Handling financial transactions securely and well can be a time sink for a small organization, especially if they see some success… We already know how to do this, and take away this pain. We’ll bill and collect from your customers, subtract the resource usage, and pay the difference.
• Integration with QuickBooks data – The architecture takes care of QuickBooks integration to these new applications, synching of customers, vendors and employees.
• Access to millions of potential customers.  One difficulty of any new release is to get access to customers. These new applications will be listed on the Intuit Solutions Marketplace, which reaches millions of small businesses looking for QuickBooks add-ons.

We are not charging for the developer program; no fee to join; no fee to list an application with us when it’s ready. We really want the program to be for everyone who has a dream, and some ability to code (or to find someone who can code). Space is limited for our beta, though, and we are taking requests now. Check out our developer program page for more information.

by Peter Fearey under Industry Trends, Inside QuickBase

I recently presented the QuickBase business to 50+ marketing leaders at Intuit. During the presentation I made the statement that, “there’s a new market forming and QuickBase has the lead”.

I backed up the statement that “the market is forming” by saying that:
1) in the last year there have been many startups launching in our space, and
2) some established “packaged application” SaaS players have recently been trying to generalize their brands (e.g. salesforce.com and what they are doing with force.com)

I backed up the statement that “we’ve got the lead” by saying that:
1) Independent sources like compete.com show the startups not growing quickly, and
2) If you think about the packaged players with traction in their respective markets, I haven’t seen much public evidence of success with the more generalized offerings.

Compare that to QuickBase where we have over 200K purchased seats using 10’s of thousands of business applications…AND NO TWO APPLICATIONS ARE THE SAME! Because we’ve been focused on ease of use and customization for the last 5 years we’ve seen that every customer’s unique needs are being met by their owner personalization.

After I said that, someone asked me a simple question that, I must admit, I didn’t expect. He asked, “what’s the name of the new market”? I answered by referencing these “markets”…

1) “PaaS” (Platform as a Service). More and more bloggers are starting to place us and others like us in this category. For example, checkout Phil Wainewright’s great roundup of the PaaS space or what Duncan Riley wrote recently about PaaS.

2) Enterprise 2.0. Bill Ives from the Fast Forward Blog suggests we are an Enterprise 2.0 play.

3) Online Database. Many have described QuickBase as an online database. Most notably, checkout what Sean Aune wrote on Mashable.

I think the attributes of the new market are:
1) Targets business users and makes creating and customizing business applications simple,
2) Helps teams track and manage their business processes and workflow, and
3) Is offered through a SaaS model.

When flying home it occurred to me that I should see what others think. So…what market do you think we’re in- one of these or something completely new?

Peter