More than a year ago, I wrote about 37Signals’ plans to unveil a ‘CRM type’ application to go along with their wildly successful Basecamp and Backpack online applications. What was then referred to as ‘Sunrise’ has now morphed into ‘Highrise’ just as details are beginning to emerge. The original announcement hinted at a CRM style solution, while today’s announcement lays out a more modest vision. Instead of trying to address the sales force automation (pipelines, opportunity management, etc.) aspect of CRM tools, Highrise will help you track the relationships in your business (and personal) life. 37Signals expects to slowly reveal the features of the new tool in the coming days leading up to launch. If you’d like to get in on that launch, be sure to register here.
Like their other online applications, it looks like 37Signals is painting with a broad brush stroke. Already there are some people complaining about this feature or that feature that hasn’t made the cut. Yes, Highrise does not live up to the expectations that were created by pre-announcing Sunrise, but I don’t think anyone will doubt the usefulness of the application when it does launch. From what I’ve read, so far, it doesn’t look like a legitimate replacement for my SugarCRM deployment. But, then again, I can’t wait to see what these guys have come up with.
This is interesting, and encouraging, news. NetSuite - a company that started off as an online personal accounting company - is preparing for an initial public offering. Michael Arrington has the scoop over at TechCrunch:
Techcrunch » Blog Archive » NetSuite’s Going Public, Looking for $1 Billion Valuation
NetSuite, the fraternal twin of SalesForce (both companies CEOs came out of Oracle and have similar business models), is preparing to go public next year based on 2006 revenues of about $70 million.
I remember NetSuite when it was NetLedger, a tiny (and boring) startup from the web 1.0 era that was funded by Larry Ellison himself. Back in the day when ubiquitous connectivity was not a given, I had a beta NetLedger account to manage my personal expenses. It was an interesting concept, but a bit of a leap of faith to put personal information online - not to mention trying to access the application on flaky internet connections. The company eventually evolved out of the personal accounting business to build a rock solid all-in-one ERP-CRM application for small and medium sized businesses.
What’s encouraging here is that NetSuite is an ‘old guard’ web company, one that survived a bursting bubble. Of course, they could have ridden the growth wave coattails of SalesForce.com, but nonetheless, it is good to see that they’re still around and well enough to go public.
Google announced this morning that it had purchased JotSpot, one of the more creative wiki application companies out there. One of the huge benefits of this is that Jot’s capabilities will now have a large infrastructure and essentially be free to use. Hopefully Google won’t wait too long to integrate JotSpot into its other offerings, but I’m not holding my breath on that. Google has yet to integrate gmail, calendar, and it’s “Office” offerings onto a common platform. When they do, however, the addition of JotSpot will make the Google ‘platform’ a serious contender for those looking to put all their eggs in ‘the cloud’.
The boys over at 37Signals dropped another hint that Sunrise may be around the corner. ‘Bout time the world got a decent CRM tool….I hope they don’t dissappoint us.
