This is a big shout to Tim Inman for building a micro-grant solution on Force.com.  As some of you may remember, Tim Inman was a runner-up in one our developer challenges and now he has at it again participating in PayPal X Dev Challenge.

In a nutshell, the idea is that…

"…the first group is people that have a great idea/need/want. The second group is people who have extra resources and would like to "Grant a chance" for someone else to make it big. We will allow people to set up accounts highlighting what

As a member benefit of the Developer Force community, you can get first access to developer previews and special programs.  Starting yesterday evening, if you are from one of the 59 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (with the exception of Japan) and sign up for a free Developer Edition environment (aka organization), you will be provisioned an environment on our new APAC data center located in Singapore!

Because of the proximity to the Asia-Pacific
region, users in this region will get the best experience best possible performance and network
response time.  This… Continue reading

Back in December we challenged the Developer Force community to build exciting Force.com Sites applications in the Force.com Sites Developer Challenge. 348 people from all over the world registered, yielding 32 solid submissions. The challenge was open-ended, which resulted in a wide variety of submissions. Some chose to redo their company website on the Force.com platform, while others tried their hands at implementing travel reservation systems, e-commerce solutions, survey sites, and even a game—British bingo anyone?

Here are the top three submissions:

Best Visual Site:  Check out this submission from Craig Traxler and team

The Force.com team was down in Mountain View last night and will be here the next 2 days participating in the first ever Cloud Connect event.  This event brings together some of the cloud providers including Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, and others in an unconference manner.  Our evangelists will be participating in a number of activities including speed-geeking and chalk talk telling the story of Force.com.  Read about the event here.

There is also a coding competition with some starter use cases from us as well as the other sponsors that David Berlind and company helped corral together.  Our evangelists… Continue reading

As a program update, we are happy to announce that
submissions for the Force.com Sites Developer Challenge is officially opened.  A
number of you have already submitted entries! 

Here's a screenshot of a submission for an e-commerce by rgupta:
For these early
efforts, the submitters are getting something special in addition to their
t-shirts.  You know who you are, so expect something in the mail
soon. 

Submit your application and get a t-shirt by going to http://developer.force.com/submitapp. 
We'll be rewarding interesting submissions with Apple iPod nanos and touches.

As a reminder, the deadline for submissions is January 30, 2009 at 5:00
PDT. 

Many of you have been waiting anxiously for this latest release, so I am thrilled to announce the immediate release of the new PHP toolkit.  It is chock full of new features and enhancements; so much so that we bumped up the version number by an order of magnitude (v1.1 to v11.0).    Actually, the version number will now match the API version number.  For those that don’t know, the PHP toolkit provides you with an easy PHP interface to make Web service calls against the Force.com API without parsing XML.

Newly supported or enhanced in this release are:* Metadata… Continue reading