It has been a while since my last post - I will get back to regular updates with the coming week.  What is the topic tonight?  How about how small the valley is.  Silicon Valley, that is.

I get a lot of entrepreneurs from far away lands (this includes LA) asking me what it is like to live and work in Silicon Valley.  Without being flippant, it is just like any other place.  The only difference is that the guy in front of you at Whole Foods just may be Steve Wozniak, and everyone is absolutely psycho about whatever it is that they do (CCD chip design for embedded systems with applications in robotic surgery is just one of the topics at recent BBQ).

Darren Cunningham sent me a link to Guy Kawasaki's blog post of his TiE presentation that he did last year.  I thought to myself that everyone knows that Guy is the best orator in tech - period. Yes, this was a great speech, but surely everyone knows this already?  Maybe not.  Maybe I'm getting old(er) and my friends are getting younger.  For those of you new to the Kawasaki way - check out Darren's pick for must see entrepreneurial fodder - Guy's TiECon speech from last year.  Every entrepreneur owes it to themselves to hear from Guy at least once in their formative stages.

This is very fitting, as this Friday TiECon 2007 starts and then on Monday Guy Kawasaki will keynote the Salesforce Developer Conference in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara).  It really is a small valley.

Over the past couple of weeks, the hard corps crew at the incubator (you know who you are) have made me think about our mission.  32 companies united in purpose - accelerate our collective success in our respective markets - on demand. 

We are starting to see success coming out of our freshman incubator class, and here is my analysis of those who have seen the biggest wins coming out of the incubator:

1. Take advantage of the privileged access.  We share offices with some of the best and brightest minds.  Inside salesforce.com, as well as within the entire incubator partner pool.

2. Don't focus on just one aspect of your business.  Product review, positioning and packaging are just as important as figuring out who to meet in sales.   Business development opportunities are likely just a few cubicles away.

3. Take the initiative.  Kudos to Dreamfactory, Right90 and Convenos for starting up technology and business best practice committees.

4. Participate in as many colloquium meetings as you can.  The dialog and speakers have been great.  Inside information on platform roadmap, marketing programs, technology and more are being provided twice per week now.  We have had more than 22 meetings in the first quarter, and we are on track to have more than 35 this coming quarter.

5. Think big.  One example:  Centive wants to own the compensation management space - on demand or otherwise.  They have promoted one of their superstar employees to be "GM of AppExchange Solutions".  They are building out complete business strategies within the incubator - product, marketing and sales strategy.  They understand the power of PR and marketing, along with building the killer app.

6. Communicate.  With salesforce.com.  With other incubator partners.  The roundtable sessions are a great "open" venue to voice your issues and bring up new ideas.  One-on-one time can be requested at any time with your salesforce.com incubator team.

What are you waiting for?  The second phase of the San Mateo incubator is set to start in June.  Apply today to become a member of the elite team of innovators of the Business Web.

Our first partner led colloquium was hosted by OpSource last Tuesday.  For those of you not in the know, OpSource provides industry-leading SaaS enablement and delivery services for ISVs making the transition to delivering their solutions on demand.

David McKenzie gave us a detailed presentation on the best practices of operational excellence for on demand delivery.  For many ISVs out there, the challenge to take their existing applications to market as a SaaS solution is a daunting one.  For many of you, the choice has been made - deliver your application via the Apex platform to gain leverage and access to a huge business ecosystem (659,000 paying subscribers and rapidly growing).  But what about your existing SaaS offering?  Do you have to port it all to the Apex platform?  In some cases, you may design external components to be mashed up inside your Apex application - so, how will you manage this service to the degree of RAS (reliability, availability and security) provided by the Apex platform?  One answer is OpSource.

OpSource has solved this problem for many AppExchange partners today.  They understand the Apex platform and modes of integration (Web services, single sign on, etc), and they are experts in securing Software as a Service offerings.  Check out the Podcast and presentation to find out more.

Today's Apex Technology colloquium featured Ron Hess as speaker.  The podcast for his talk (and his deck) is available in the AppExchange Incubator Wiki (look for new podcasts section).  Ron gave us a quick run through of the Apex Seminar deck (since we are all familiar with Apex development, we covered the material in less than 40 mins).  That left us lots of time to review some of the code samples that he used as examples. 

Ron started off by explaining the concept of Apex Code packages and progressed to dissecting small code examples for us.  At this point, we examined the very first public code example shown at Dreamforce - the Lead de-duplication trigger.  This simple example was easy to understand, and provided a suitable sample to see the new debugging features in action (soon to be released).  We were able to modify the code (by using an Eclipse plugin - excellent IDE support) and run it on the spot.  We ran the code remotely, as well as showing it off in action (within salesforce.com). 

Since I was familiar with this example, I knew of one shortcoming and offered up a challenge to the audience to see who could fix the sample first.  Well, wouldn't you know, but within a few minutes I received an email from someone in the audience with the 2 lines of Apex Code that fixed the problem.  Yes, during the colloquium.  Steve Lehr of Ringlead shot over the fix, and I am glad that he was the first to provide the solution.  You see, Ringlead is the leading provider of a real time service to de-duplicate leads as they get posted to salesforce.com using Web2Lead.  The subject matter expert showed his true colors. 

We then spent some time reviewing a very cool Apex Code feature - creating custom Web services on the fly.  Any Apex Code method can be exposed as a fully functional Web service, simply by declaring the method with the identifier webService.  How elegant and simple!  We generated the WSDL for our Web service and were able to inspect the WSDL doc immediately.  Possibilities abound for this feature.

Our final code sample was a review of Dave Carroll's latest vCal Apex Code app.  This was still in development, but was functioning perfectly.  We can't wait to see the final product - this is going to be a great demo and example of the power of the Apex platform.  Perhaps Dave will show this off to us next month when he talks in the next Apex Technology colloquium.

The talk centered around code governors - the need for them, and the challenge in creating a safe and scalable on demand programming language.  The latest release of the Beta Apex Code Language reference is available online, and contains the latest information on this topic.

Remember to check the AppExchange Incubator Wiki for up to date information on colloquium speakers and other events.  The program is now in full swing, and we have expanded the colloquium tracks to 2 days per week. 

Tuesdays PM colloquium was postponed due to a last minute conflict that came up for Matt Ho.  We substituted a round table discussion with the participating incubator members to discuss recent announcements, upcoming events and whatever else came to mind.

Jeff Yoshimura from the AppExchange team reviewed the last week's new product announcement for our Wealth Management Edition.  He framed up what is in the product offering, how it is positioned and what our overall strategy is to support the financial services business line at salesforce.com.  We are going to follow up this visit with a demo of the Wealth Management app so that we all can see what the new edition looks like. 

I announced to the group the date for the upcoming Incubator launch event - check out the Wiki for details on this event.  We are going to provide event details and PR guidance within the coming weeks for our incubator partners.  We have scheduled Gordon Evans from Salesforce.com PR to be our featured speaker in this month's Salesforce Way colloquium (check the Wiki calendar for timing).

Amy McCarthy of OpSource shared with us information on next week's SaaS Summit in Monterey.  Many of us are planning to attend this event, which will kick off our spring conference schedules for SaaS events and Web 2.0 conferences.

We rounded out our group discussion with a demo of the Infopia solution by Ralph Eddy - the  AppExchange Technical Alliances lead.  Ralph was in Salt Lake City last week (tough gig) supporting our partner at their annual user conference.  It was a great example of a seamless integration between services - eBay sellers were able to sign up for a free trial of the combined solution on the spot, and start responding to customer inquiries and issues immediately.  This was a very thoughtful provisioning process (upon trial sign up, all of the existing seller history - orders, products, listings - were pulled into salesforce.com to provide for a complete view of the customer).  Great demo.  Great app.  No wonder this won the Appy award at Dreamforce for breakthrough app of the year.

Today we saw the first focus group convene, where Jim Yu of the platform product management group hosted an afternoon session to discuss some ideas we have for upcoming features for the AppExchange and Apex platform.

It was interesting to see the interaction between some of our closest partners and our product management team.  Gone are the days of mock characters depicting personas of your target customer. Profiles are old school.  The new school is talking to active customers, iterative development based on current needs.  Our incubator partners have a vested interest in the development of the Apex platform, and make for the best "voice of the customer".  Our incubator partners have now been elevated to the distinction of "extended family' - trusted advisors in our quest to deliver the first on demand platform for enterprise solutions.

As we interviewed the partners to find out how they were using some of the development features of the platform, it was enlightening to see how these talented developers had thought out of the box in delivering their solutions to customers all around the world.  Through candid dialog, we were able to test some of our design concepts and gain insights into what is really needed to make developers and partners successful going forward.

After the focus group, we kicked off a networking event where the PM team and the core development team behind the AppExchange met with the incubator partners and AppExchange partner teams.  It is not surprising to see that many of us are old friends from prior employers, and share a passion for pushing what is possible in the software-as-a-service world.  This is the first of many round table discussions to come.

Tuesday's colloquium was hosted by Darren Cunningham - former Product Manager for Dashboards and Analytics.  Darren is now the AppExchange Category Leader for Analytics, Data Quality and Data Augmentation (e.g., Sales Intelligence).

Darren started off by giving us an update on the Spring '07 release of the Salesforce.com service.  The release cycle has already started (the Sandbox service of Salesforce.com has already been upgraded), yet only a few partners in attendance had actually taken advantage of the Early Access Program (EAP) available to all AppExchange Partners. 

The Spring '07 release event is planned for March 19, so there is not much time left before we launch our 22nd major release to our 29,800 customers.  The EAP is now live, and provides Standard and Premium Partners with early access to the Spring '07 release so that you can test your existing apps (regression testing) and also get a jump start on developing with some of the new platform features (like time-based workflow, metadata api and email relay).

The Apex Code Developer Preview is also underway, and all were encouraged to register and start working with the world's first on demand programming language.

The session was focused on understanding where to get needed inputs for application and listing design, product ideas and getting plugged into the community at large.  Core understanding of the salesforce.com application is a prerequisite for building any application on the Apex platform.  Before heading into the AppLabs course, be sure to check out the partner academy page for online training on the ADN wiki.

We also discussed at length some of the critical success factors that Salesforce.com employed over our 8 year history. Some of us commented on Tien Tzuo's recent talk at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership series.  Check out the podcast to listen to his talk on what defines The Salesforce Way and how Salesforce.com came to define what we call The Business Web.

Best practices abound - just ask anyone on the AppExchange team for insights into what makes a great app and listing.

Today was Platform Day at the incubator (at least unofficially).  Right on the heels of yesterday's Apex Code webinar, Andrew Waite - Product Manager for Apex Code - gave us an intimate seminar on the inner workings of this groundbreaking advancement in on demand computing.  Andrew shared with us the current state of the developer preview program for Apex Code, and also outlined the next stages of release for us - so that we could get a glimpse into what is coming up on the road to GA later this summer.  We had a strong showing for both seminars - about 12 incubator companies were in attendance, and were able to get some inside information on what to look for in the developer prerelease now, and how they can help to shape the final release by working closely with Product Mangement throughout the release process.

We discussed some of the internal projects that Salesforce.com is working on, and talked about some of the early feedback from the developer preview.  For those of you new to Apex Code, check out the details on the ADN.  Not many of us have actually coded yet, but from the level of dialog and probing questions asked of Andrew, it is clear that all of us will be beating a path to the developer preview  to start working on discovering what we can do with the world's first on demand programming language.

After a short break, we were joined by a contingent of the platform product management team for a networking session.  After introductions by each team member, we went on a tour of the campus to show off our new state-of-the-art facility.  From the looks of it, I expect that at least a few team members will be making regular visits to the incubator to work side by side with some of the cutting edge partners working on their killer Apex apps.  We talked about the opportunity for us to conduct focus groups with the the incubator partners to get real time feedback on platform features that we are contemplating, as well as those in development.

We finished off the day with microbrews and snacks, and were joined by other members of the AppExchange team.  Our Chef d'Affaires - Rene Bonvanie (SVP and GM of AppExchange and Developer Marketing) also dropped by to check out the action and introduce himself to the audience.  I am hoping that the interaction and free flow of communication continues on the note struck today.  All of the developers I have worked with in the incubator are challenging themselves to come up with the killer feature - and killer app, built on the Apex platform. 

Today was the first organized trip to visit Salesforce.com Headquarters in San Francisco.  Our objective was to network with customer facing employees and provide them with some context of what the incubator companies are building on the Apex platform.

Incubator companies represented were:  BackWeb, BlueWolf, Centive, Convenos, DomoDomain, Dreamfactory, Eloqua, InsideView, OpSource, TwoConnect, Vertical Response, and Xactly.

We kicked off the day with a presentation to our sales and services bootcamp - 35 of Salesforce.com's new recruits.  We spent about an hour with them, breaking out into one-on-ones to better introduce ourselves and describe the services that we are bringing to market to meet the needs of our mutual customers.

Lunch was catered, and afforded an opportunity for others in Salesforce.com to drop by and introduce themselves.  We had folks from developer relations, marketing, sales engineering, product management, field sales and corporate sales have lunch with us.

For many partners, this was their first opportunity to visit Salesforce.com Headquarters and be introduced to the Salesforce.com culture from the inside-out.

Now that the formalities are done, many of us are heading over to the Royal AppExchange to finish off the day trip to San Francisco with some of our new found friends.

As part of the AppExchange Incubator Program, we get together on a weekly basis to discuss topics such as product management for SaaS companies, doing business The Salesforce Way, sharing ideas from partner to partner, as well as pushing the envelope with on demand development using the Apex platform.

Today was the kickoff of our colloquium series, and it was fitting that Dave Carroll and Ron Hess led a discussion on the Apex Platform.  Dave showed off a simple, yet compelling native app written entirely on the Apex Platform using Apex Code.  He also pointed out how powerful the Apex Eclipse Toolkit is (thanks for developing this great plug-in, Dave).  Ron was able to provide a concise primer on Apex Code, referring to some of the projects that he has already delivered with this new on demand programming language.

We had a healthy mix of salesforce.com employees (technical alliances and product management), along with a few of our incubator partners.  The intimate setting allowed for a deep dive on upcoming hooks for Apex Code, design patterns for leveraging the Apex platform with composite apps, as well as a lengthy discussion on the central role that S-Controls play in Winter '07 development.

Natan Zaidenweber (CEO from Stakeware) was - once again - won over by the sheer magnitude of the development framework provided in the Apex Platform today.  He was thoroughly blown away by discussions of what is coming later in the year with AppStore.

Rajeev Gupta (CTO from Avankia) was challenging us all with probing questions around leveraging reports and views via the API.