If there's one thing that all i-Dialogue employees share, it is our passion for music. Either listening to jams at work or playing actual instruments. So it is with great interest that I've been monitoring the Salesforce.com Dreamforce Facebook page to learn who the musical entertainment will be for the Dreamforce Gala event.

Oddly, the listed musical entertainment has changed 4 times over the past 4 weeks:

• Bare Naked Ladies
• Foo Fighters
• Journey
• INXS

Can you guess what next weeks band will be? I personally would not mind seeing Train again (last years band).

Some possibilities:

Jefferson Airplane or Grateful Dead (Bay area icons)
Stevie Wonder (hey... he's on the road. Why not?)
Santana
Counting Crows
Dreamforce (actual band of Salesforce employees that form in the 11^th hour to provide entertainment)

Enter your prediction as a comment below. The winner will receive a free i-Dialogue hat (tongue pressed firmly in cheek here ).

On the heels of my previous post, I forgot to mention the English/Spanish localization by i-Dialogue customer www.ArcoProperties.com. Perusing their site really makes me want to spend a couple weeks down in Panama

i-Dialogue customer iGrafx recently localized their interactive online resource center with German content.

Salesforce.com CRM is easily configured to capture customers language preference. Just add a custom field to Lead and Contact named something like "Preferred Language" and map the field to i-Dialogue's "Language" field.

Whenever a customer clicks on the language bar at the top of an i-Dialogue page, or submits a localized web form, the customer's language selection is automatically updated in Salesforce.

iGrafx has also localized their email auto-responders to German for a truly relevant and localized dialogue. Future plans are in the works for Italian and Spanish sites too.

I was doing some research on the Wayback Machine when it dawned on me to check out Salesforce.com's earliest available archive.

Here it is, circa November 28, 1999.

Lot's of new faces at i-Dialogue. See our company page for details.

People recently joining i-Dialogue include
Michael Palmer: Interactive Web Development
Mitchell Hanson: Marketing
Joseph Tjaarda: Interactive Web Development

Fake Steve Jobs has been outed by the New York Times. Bummer... let's hope the writing style doesn't change after moving to Forbes.com.

It's no surprise that Salesforce.com is pretty much the only game in town for on-demand CRM, and their ecosystem of partners have greatly benefited from their ability to provide a reliable and extensible distribution platform.

When Salesforce announced a 10% partner royalty program for AppExchange leads, many partners were forced to closely examine the value of this partnership. Some partners had clear objections, while others (such as us) signed up for the program on good faith that the obvious obstacles would be ironed out along the way.

The upside potential seemed great. www.AppExchange.com would become the eBay of online business apps and both Salesforce and Partners would mutually grow and prosper. But Salesforce's 10% royalty fee was decidedly larger than eBay's 5.25% fee and the requirement for partners to pay for certified listings and positioning made the eBay metaphor even harder to digest.

For a company that differentiates itself on a "No Software" mantra, the AppExchange appeared to be implementing a decidedly "old school" partner program taken right out of the Enterprise Software playbook.

But apparently Salesforce is listening. I received this email just yesterday:

Due to feedback from our partner community, we are phasing out the 10% revenue share requirements for AppExchange partners. On Aug 9^th, we will hold a webinar to announce updated partner program tiers as well as new program benefits and services.

So, we'll see. This is the start of a positive dialogue. For those who are interested, the webinar registration form is here. I encourage all potential Salesforce partners to attend, as the Platform-as-a-Service model is here to stay and a healthy relationship with Salesforce is clearly required if you want to participate in the future of business software.

When I first started following Salesforce performance trends in March 2006, they were processing about 38 Million transactions per day and 10 Million on the weekends.

Now the slow days are 38 Million and the peaks are at 100 Million per day. See for yourself at http://trust.salesforce.com . It'll be interesting to learn how these transactions break down at Dreamforce (API vs. End User Apps).