Rseven Blog

Go ahead & download it!

Dreamforce conference has always been described as exciting and having the atmosphere of a gathering of believers. This is my first time attending and exhibiting at Dreamforce and even from day one on Monday, I can confirm that it has a higher energy level and more excitement than other conferences I’ve been to. This week the 8th annual Dreamforce conference is taking over all three Moscone Centers (North, South, West) in San Francisco. They’re not missing the opportunity in using the number 8 by having huge signs saying Collabora8, Innov8 & Crea8. Salesforce is fully embracing the tweet & text trend & not just at the superficial level – Chatter (Salesforce Twitter-like service for Salesforce users) boards are shown everywhere & they’re used extensively to promote, discuss & share about Dreamforce for weeks before the conference started.

It’s always funny to see big corporations attempt to do guerilla marketing against smaller competitors. Early in the morning I saw a few MS chariots (Segway with a front cover) on the corner of 4th & Horward trying to lure Salesforce users to use their MS Dynamics CRM Online service. This is the biggest gathering of Cloud Computing users ever (22,000+ attendees) – I don’t think anyone was swayed. Oracle did something less crude, they put up a billboard on the building opposite Moscone West. I think they need to get Iron Man to fly around to impress this crowd – the force is strong in this group.

During the partner keynote, George Hu was firing up the ISV & Consulting partners of Salesforce by showing how much Salesforce have grown. He spoke to one partner earlier that was pleased with a 75% annual business growth and said “You’re at the bottom of the class! – Salesforce partners experience growth of between 75-130% annually”. As an ISV partner, this the kind of encouragement I want to hear. He brought CA onstage (Platnum Sponsor), they were selling their developement tools on Force.com (Salesforce app platform). I was more interested by the subsequent speaker from Etherios showing off their unique charity web app that was developed on Force.com. It’s called The Rucksack, built for IAVA – that rewards veterans with tickets to sporting events (MLB, NFL, Nascar etc) donated by corporations.

Each time before the EXPO was opened, a huge crowd builds up at the entrance like it was Black Friday at Best Buy. We were lucky that our booth was next to the traffic and right in front of a popcorn & peanut stand. The EXPO was like a carnival, they had peanuts, cotton-candy & hot dogs during the Networking Reception. I saw a man dressed up like Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Jose Wales – I hope he was hired to do it. We met a lot of relevant people interested in what we do. And the good thing is that unlike other tech conferences, attendees here are specifically looking for solutions to enhance their sales effort – so we don’t have to do a lot of hard sell.

We are grateful to be featured as an Ovi Daily App on 1st Nov 2010, thank you very much Kevin Sharp for reviewing us. We will fix the annoying things that you mentioned. On the Symbian front, we are now busy making our app compatible with Symbian^3 so that Rseven will run on the new Nokia N8, C7, C6 & E7. Expect it soon in Ovi Store.

In the past few months we have been busy attending conferences such as DEMOFall 2010, TechCrunch Disrupt and Plug and Play EXPO. And the amazing news is, we won the Innovation Winner Award at the Plug and Play EXPO.

From the early days of Rseven, we get a lot of suggestions to integrate with CRM software because the sales personnel would be able to automatically log their sales calls into the CRM instead of manually doing it (which they loath to do). Hence we came up with another premium version of Rseven which we call Rseven CRM that lets you export your call logs, SMS, MMS, emails (and soon BBM) to matching contacts in a CRM system. We naturally pick Salesforce as the first CRM software to integrate with because their services are delivered online (on the cloud as they say) and have extensive published APIs that we can use.

This is how it works. After you upgrade to Rseven CRM you can match your contacts in Rseven with your Leads & Contacts in Salesforce. After that, all call recordings, call logs, SMS, MMS & BBM with those contacts will be automatically exported to the Activity History of that Lead or Contact. Rseven CRM will prompt you to key in your Salesforce credentials & the security token (which you can generate in Setup > Reset Security Token in Salesforce.com) to link your Rseven account with your Salesforce account.

Rseven CRM upgrade costs $192pa ($16 per month). Let us know what you think of it by emailing us at support@rseven.com.

Oh and another thing. You would have noticed by now our website has been revamped & looks super cool (as they say in France). The transformation is still ongoing with minor tweaks here & there to make it all in tune with the new design by the gifted designer Tommy Ng. Let us know what you think of the new website.