Koral and Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com acquired in 2007 nine-person startup Koral and its on demand content management service. Kendall Collins, senior vice president of product marketing for salesforce.com, described the new offering, dubbed Salesforce Content, as the new killer application.

Koral may not be a so-called killer app for the salesforce platform, but it is a strong addition that will make it more useful and continue the company's lead in building a broad-based software-as-a-service business application platform.

“We noticed that the unstructured data world is exploding-- video, HTML, office documents, and email are not structured in a database with schema and metadata. When we looked at solutions today, we found that the software industry has failed end users in sharing and finding content on corporate intranets,” Collins said.

Collins is right that unstructured data is exploding and that most of the content management solutions today haven’t taken advantage of Web 2.0 concepts—such as user supplied tags, RSS, comments ratings, recommendations and AJAX--to improve the user experience. Koral also has the bonus of already being integrated with salesforce.com’s CRM applications, and has been renamed Salesforce ContentExchange.

 
Within Salesforce.com CRM, documents can be connected to an account, lead, or opportunity. They can be previewed online and Koral also creates a tag cloud from community tagging efforts. 

“Our strategy to look for technologies that will be broadly applicable to our customer base and core to customers,” Collins said.

It turns out that AppExchange is a fertile breeding ground, with salesforce.com poised to scoop up the best of breed from its ecosystem. Last year, salesforce.com acquired AppExchange  participant Keiden, which integrates salesforce with Google AdWords.

“Keiden and Koral both have tremendous overlap with the CRM user base,” Collins continued. “An important part of our strategy is managing the 85 percent of information in the business world that salesforce doesn’t manage today. We want to manage all business information on demand. Our ecosystem can leverage the content management platform.” 

Prior to the acquisition, Koral had about 1,500 free trial users of the service, which launched as a beta in October last year. The deal closed about two weeks ago, Collins said, but wouldn’t disclose what his company paid for Koral or the pricing and availability of the service. He allowed that in the last few weeks Koral has been more tightly woven into the salesforce.com user interface and moving the service into its data centers is a priority.

Koral allows users to access relevant documents within salesforce.com directly from an account, lead, or opportunity. Documents can be linked to a record for easy access throughout the sales cycle, and files can be previewed online. Koral also adds version control to salesforce.com, ensuring that users have the most current version of a document, and full text search, as well as filters and saved searches. Workgroups can set up virtual work spaces for collaborating on projects with sets of documents and library services for versioning, auditing and controlling rights and access to content.

Koral’s core technology will be exposed to developers, now called Apex Content. Collins said he expects to see applications for compliance, clinical trials, digital asset management and other areas.

Content Connect installs a snippet of code on the desktop to manage versions, automatically synching with the latest versions. Content can be added to an application by dragging and dropping it into Content Connect, and ContentExchange automatically recommends how to classify the documents in the index.

builds mobile payment app

Cloud Exchange Technologies LLC, a Memphis-based technology development company has launched its new product, i-Locale, a mobile application that allows users to load money to make online purchases, create coupons or send gift certificates for local businesses through their mobile devices.

i-Locale was launched earlier this spring and is available for 77 local merchants across the city. The app is available to be downloaded in the Android or iPhone platforms. It is free to consumers to download, and is being beta tested.

According to Ernie Dye, director of business development for Cloud Exchange Technologies, local merchants who are offering products on the app include Crazy Cleaners, Buster’s Liquors and Wines, Gibson’s Donuts, The Eclectic Eye, and The Dent Doctor. Dye said the company is hoping to cap out the beta testing with 150 merchants.

He said the product was created to allow local merchants to see who their customers are and where they’re coming from. That way, users can tailor offers for specific customers.

“If you search for donuts in the 38117 zip code, Gibson’s Donuts can send you a discount based on your search criteria,” Dye says. “Customers can opt in or out of push notifications, but we can bring retailers together.”

Dye said the company is looking for more retailers to continue the beta testing with. Once the testing is completed, he says the service would probably cost around $40 per month to retail customers, but they don’t have to pay Cloud Exchange a percentage of their profits, which is how other group coupon offer companies make money. He says there are plans to sell advertising on i-Locale, which would include a featured business of the month and offers for their services.

“We won’t take a percentage of the business (we create for customers),” he said. “That’s big for us.”

Cars Are Fast Becoming Smartphones on Wheels

Wireless connections in cars are becoming faster and more capable, bringing new features, new services—and new problems

Most new cars roll off the production line today with as many sensors, computer chips, and lines of code as you’d find in a trunk-load of smartphones. What’s more, thanks to deals between carmakers and wireless carriers, cars increasingly come with high-speed, always-on, wireless connectivity—setting up both new kinds of services and a higher potential for distraction and malfeasance.

Today, the third-largest wireless carrier in the U.S.,Sprint, announced a service that will let carmakers improve the sophistication of mobile apps that connect with a vehicle’s onboard computer system. Prototype apps developed for this new platform can send directions from a smartphone to a dashboard navigation system, adjust the air-conditioning system remotely so it’s cool before the driver gets in, or pinpoint a vehicle in a busy parking lot. The platform, called Sprint Velocity, uses protocols designed for machine-to-machine communications.

The Sprint platform also uses software from IBM called MobileFirst to manage communications between a car’s systems and outside apps. Such technology could also let cars report conditions to the driver or to manufacturers more regularly. “You might, for example, get a reading off a car that indicates that the vehicle is slipping on ice,” says Michael Curry, vice president of applications integration middleware at IBM. “That might feed back to a central network, and when the car manufacturer realizes that car is slipping, they may say, ‘Do we have other cars in that area that might be impacted?’ and send a notification to those vehicles or maybe even automatically put those cars into winter mode.”

Wireless connectivity has been creeping into cars since 1996, when GMintroduced its OnStar service. It uses a cellular network to provide hands-free calling, navigation, and call-center support during emergencies, and can be used to disable a stolen car remotely. Lured by the prospect of selling recurring subscription fees, all major car manufacturers now offer similar services. Ford vehicles have a slightly different service, called Sync, which connects to a cell phone and uses its modem to connect to a cellular network.

Command center:Chrysler’s Uconnect dashboard informatics system.

The “connected vehicle” market is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years, with a report from the GSMA, a wireless industry body, predicting that connected cars will create a market for related products worth $53 billion by 2018, up from $17 billion in 2012.

But as more wireless functions are added to cars, the risk of driver distraction rises. In April, theNational Highway Traffic Safety Administrationreleased guidelines for limiting the functions of electronic systems in cars. Defining distraction can be difficult, though. The new guidelines, for example, don’t apply to smartphones or other devices connected to a car’s “infotainment” system. And last month, a study conducted by AAA found that voice-controlled applications can be just as distracting as texting behind the wheel.

“[Distraction] is a key challenge for the auto industry,” says T.C. Wingrove, senior manager of electronic innovation at Visteon, a company that sells dashboard electronics to carmakers. Visteon is conducting usability studies to determine “what are the use cases that excite people the most, and what’s the best way to actually implement those in the vehicle so that you distract them the least and inform them the most,” Wingrove says.

The new connectivity raises the possibility that cars may become targets for hackers motivated by amusement and profit. In 2011, academic researchers demonstrated a way to take control of a vehicle’s computer system through a cellular connection. Stefan Savage, a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, who was involved with the effort, says car companies have invested heavily in security since this demonstration.

“Cars are much more secure than when we did our demo,” says Savage, although he believes greater connectivity will inevitably mean more risk, should hackers turn their attention to the millions of potential targets cruising around the open roads. “As you add more of these digital channels, you have to increase the attack surface,” he says. “There’s no way around it.”

The apps and features found in cars will also become more capable as wireless networks are improved. This year, GM announced that by 2014 most of its vehicles will come with 4G wireless capabilities, provided by AT&T, through its OnStar service—providing enough bandwidth to stream movies to passengers in the backseat.

Meanwhile, there is growing interest among drivers in connecting directly to the computer that monitors and controls a car’s engine and its various electronic systems. In April, Verizon began selling a device that plugs into a car’s onboard diagnostics port, and relays engine information to a smartphone, allowing trips to be logged, the car’s doors to be locked or unlocked remotely, and its engine to be started or stopped with a touch on a smartphone. Similar devices that connect to a computer or smartphone via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi can be bought at auto hardware stores.

Ultimately, the wireless connections in cars may augment dedicated car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure technology used to manage traffic and even prevent accidents (see “The Internet of Cars Is Approaching a Crossroads”).