February 26th
At about 2:30pm Duncan Riley from TechCrunch announced our public beta launch allowing readers to sign up early:
Rollbase PaaS Service To Launch, Invites For TechCrunch Readers
It was a great way to kick things off and as of 9am today (the 29th) about 500 accounts have been created since this announcement. The most surprising stat: our preview video was viewed over 43,000 times within 36 hours of the post. Meanwhile we've received some really great feedback on usability and features/functionality from initial users who have spent time in the system. We're putting together a user feedback page and plan to highlight some of this over the next few weeks. Please send us any feedback you have - good, bad, or indifferent. The best way to do this is via the online Support Center accessed by clicking "Support" in the top right of your Rollbase account.
The number one question has been around pricing and although we are not announcing this formally until Q2, many users want to know what the service will cost before devoting a lot of time to building apps. We are still working on finalizing the pricing model, but you can expect Rollbase to be a subscription service sold on a monthly per user basis at about $25 per seat. [update: this is still in flux, we are receiving a lot of feedback on pricing, please let us know what you think]
February 27th
On Wednesday we headed up to San Francisco for the SaaS Summit 2008 conference where we officially announced the public beta and had a chance to give some live demos to attendees. Press release here:
Rollbase Announces Public Beta Launch of its Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Business Users
(I am writing this as Jim Steele of Salesforce is giving an overview of the "Salesforce Ideas" application, which our "Ideas" application provides a competitive alternative to built entirely using Rollbase Portal technology.)
I had a chance to speak with Stacey Higginbotham from GigaOm who wrote about Rollbase the next day in a post entitled:
Rollbase Wants to Make Programmers Obsolete
Stacey really captured the essence of Rollbase at the end of her post with "It may no longer be enough to deliver software as a service, it may have to be infinitely customizable as well". Our mission with Rollbase is to provide an increasingly flexible and extensible platform for business users to create and customize business applications without requiring programming expertise. We are not trying to put programmers out of a job. rather we are trying to give some fraction of the power of software development to people and businesses who do not have the time, resources or expertise to create applications using traditional software development methods.
February 28th
Thursday morning we issued our second press release announcing that OpSource, the SaaS hosting provider that organized the conference, is powering the entire Rollbase infrastructure:
Later in the day Kristen Nicole from Mashable talked a bit about Rollbase:
Rollbase Beta: Has the PaaS for Business Arrived?
Some others we've seen:
- What Was Difficult 10 Years Ago Is Cake Now
- Rollbase: Platform as a Service for Business Users
- Make Your Own Business Apps
- OpSource SaaS Summit 2008 Begins
- Pick 'n' Mix Business: Heads in the clouds?
- woah. that was fast
- Web application development made easy
- Rollbase Throws Its Hat into the PaaS Ring
Let us know if we've missed any...
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