Salesforce outages vs Competition

Since last October there has been a lot of writing about Salesforce and their outages. This has of course started a discussion about the reability of SaaS. Like this one 'Salesforce.com's hiccups'  (Rough Type, 2006-02-01).

In order to be transparent Salesforce created the site http://trust.salesforce.com.
A site that monitors the uptime for their service.

However, the surprising part is that other SaaS companies are using this to impress the market. "Some of its rivals have taken to monitoring the site and sending e-mails to reporters whenever something is amiss."   The Tech Beat 2006-04-27 

How clever is that?
I guess the question the potential customers are asking themselves are if to go for a webservice. Not which one. Like pointed out in this ZDnet article 'Are Salesforce's outages sullying the reputation fo the SaaS model?'

Skype is just getting better and better

To use Skype for calling over Internet is nothing new. However, now they have the solved the problem of people not being online. The introduction of a voicemail service solves that beautifully.
Click here for more info.

Not surprisingly that OECD in a report see Skype (and other VoIP) as a threat to fixed-line carries.

Time to 'mash up'?

Don't happy with the functionality on a particular site? Why not create an improvement on top of the existing service? This is called 'mash up'. The CNET definition being 'Mash-ups' - "that let people combine information from different Web sites are reshaping the Web experience, allowing independent developers to better control and customize the information consumers can get".

A 'mash-up' is based on APIs to interact with a site and "to pull data from Web sites and to combine it with another information source to create something new".

Links in the area:
"From web page to web platform"  CNET article, 16th august 2005

Flashmaps A great site using Google Maps
Click here to find out where I live...

Winerybound.com  Contains listings of all the wineries in the U.S.
On the first page, click on the link 'view all wineries' and you will see the 'mash-up'.