News flash! If you have a medical practice that qualifies for $44,000 in economic stimulus incentives for adopting an EHR as specified in the HITECH Act…and you adopt a “free” EHR package…then obviously you get to pocket the entire $44,000.

Practice Fusion runs on Salesforce.com’s cloud development platform, Force.com, the Cadillac of cloud app development platforms. And recently Dell, Inc. announced a partnership to bundle hardware with Practice Fusion’s SaaS solution including zero interest financing (for 3 months) for medical practices.

Unlike on premise client/server solutions a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution runs completely in the cloud. So you don’t have the expense of servers and even more importantly the people resources that are necessary to support the servers. Your annual savings with a SaaS solution can easily be 10’s of thousands of dollars over what you would pay for a solution requiring on premise hardware maintenance and support.

I took advantage of Practice Fusion’s academic program to signup for an account and have been reviewing their extensive library of youtube training videos.   The availability of these videos make learning Practice Fusion’s features a snap.

So who’s using a SaaS EHR solution? On their website they claim that over 30,000 physicians and practice managers in 50 states currently use Practice Fusion’s Electronic Health Record which sounds pretty impressive to me.

So what’s the catch? How do these guys make money? Well Practice Fusion is an ad-supported product. On their website they say “medical advertising placements are non-intrusive, completely private and never pop-up.” And if you really can’t stand the ads then  you can switch to an ad-free version for a $100 a month per practitioner at any time.

HTML 5 is an exciting technology and a game changer in the web multi-media space. Time will tell how it all plays out.

The meetup had a good turnout of around 35 along with three Basset hounds and a small grey cat constantly wandering in and out of audience legs.   These four animals seemed to be amazed to see all these people sitting in their living room.

Judi gave an interesting presentation about her approach to site development with Wordpress, along with tips and tricks she has learned since starting her business 1.5 years and 45 Wordpress sites ago.

I really enjoyed hearing the diversity of ideas and perspectives from attendees who represented a wide variety of backgrounds…designers, developers, consultants, experienced and in-experienced.

And I have to say this little area on the west side of Inman Park bordering Krog Street is one of the coolest places in all of Atlanta.

Notes from Judi’s presentation are at http://www.newtricks.me/.

A inventory application created in real time with Force.com in this breakout session

For the past few years I have attended this annual afternoon event by Salesforce.com which is usually held at the Buckhead Westin.   As always this was an impressive first class event with food, drinks, give-aways, informative keynotes, and breakouts on the latest Salesforce technologies.  Every year I learn something new and leave feeling  freshly inspired and encouraged about cloud technology in general.  As usual the event was packed with 300-400 attendees.

The keynote always starts out with a definition of cloud computing…(1) multi-tenant, (2) pay as you go, (3) realtime, and (4) auto upgrades and then provides an update on Salesforce statistics in terms of growth and customers. Salesforce now has grown to 72,500 paying customers,  all without traditional marketing…basically word of mouth.  Salesforce is ISO 27001 certified for those who worry about security in the cloud and boasts three global data centers…east coast, west coast, and Singapore.

Basically Salesforce wants to take the best of the consumer web and bring it to their customers. To meet this goal they are rolling out a new service called Chatter Collaboration Cloud, with a very facebook like feature set and designed into all of the Saleforce products. Like Facebook Chatter has a “wall” containing update posts from people, objects (like documents), events, and even Salesforce entities like Contacts.  Chatter is currently in beta and will be available to all customers free of charge later in 2010.

Besides free food and beer/wine give-a-ways included three books, “Salesforce.com for Dummies“, “Service Cloud for Dummies”, and “Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry.”

Ok this year I really am going to take my new found inspiration, along with my Force.com workbook, “Building your first cloud app in 30 minutes,” along with my free Force.com developers account, create a fantastic application, and add it to AppExchange, Salesforce.com’s online marketplace for applications built with Force.com. Or maybe I’ll just return to this same Salesforce.com event in 2011 who knows.

The morning consisted of back to back keynotes followed by lunch at KSU’s new “green” dining hall The Commons and then two breakout sessions for the afternoon.

Carol Kruse, the Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing for The Coca-Cola Company

First keynote was Carol Kruse, the Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing for The Coca-Cola Company.  She mentioned that consumer generated content is much more effective than “corporate” generated content. So at Coke they encourage consumers to generate content in the form of photos and videos and post onto Coke’s Facebook fan pages. Often times launching promotion contests like “Show us where you drank your last Coke” to encourage participation by consumers. Carol says Facebook has been the most effective platform for Coke. And one lesson they have learned is that it’s better to just use the free features of Facebook versus creating custom Facebook apps. Notable quotes from Carol’s talk were “Fish where the fish are…the essence of social media” and “Facebook is the worlds 3rd largest country after China and India.”

Dan Siroker Director of Analytics for the Obama Campaign

The mornings second keynote was by Dan Siroker who left Google where he was the Chrome Project Lead to become  Director of Analytics for the Obama Campaign. He talked about how they used social media to attract donors to raise over $500 million for the campaign. His emphasis was on applying analytics and experimentation using multivariate analysis and A/B split testing on web sites, which he did for the Obama sites to dramatically increase donor contributions. He was also asked by the Clinton Bush Hatti Fund for similar assistance with their donor site.

Dan’s presentation included discussion of five lessons learned from working on the campaign.

1. Define quantifiable success metrics.

2. Question assumptions.

3. Divide and conquer.

4. Take advantage of circumstances.

5. Always be optimizing.

Now Dan is starting a new company called Optimizely.com which provides tools for web site analysis and optimization. Doing some research I also found Google Website Optimizer which seems to also perform multivariate and AB switch exierimentation testing for web sites.

After lunch there were way too many breakout sessions from which to choose and I could only attend two. After a difficult choice my first breakout was   Delivering Content Through Social Media – What works best for your message” by Kristin Parrish of Ogilvy Public Relations.

My second breakout of the afternoon was “Are You Crazy? Launching a Web Startup with 3 People, No Money and a Good Idea. ” by the three co-founders of the startup Regator.

The presentation was “The Beautiful Web” by Jason Beaird. Jason is the author of the book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. His talk was centered on design theory around color, typography, texture, imagery, and layout with critique of websites that exemplify these principles. I’m usually too focused on the technical aspects of a website and so Jason’s talk was a welcome and useful introduction to the non-technical aspects of web design. I immediately ordered his book from Amazon and am looking forward to reading it.

The important take  aways for me were finally understanding key differences between gadgets and robots and gaining some insight into how they are developed.  Plus a cool new (and free) development IDE called Aptana Studio which is available stand alone or as an Eclipse Plugin. As a bonus Andy provided CDs filled with software and examples for all attendees.

So what’s the difference between a gadget and a robot? In a nutshell a gadget is a program inserted into a wave that can be used by all wave participants like voting or drawing.  While a robot is a program added to a wave to perform automated tasks like making the wave public.

Installation of gadgets and robots into a Wave is very different. Gadgets are installed by entering the URL of the gadget whereas robots are installed as contacts and then added to the wave just like you would add any other contact.

Gadget and robot development are also quite different. A gadget can be written in a variety of languages like python, php, or even c#, and are simply publicly hosted web applications. Most gadgets even those written for non-Wave containers can run in wave. The main difference between Wave aware gadgets and non-Wave gadgets is that a Wave aware gadget can interact with the wave. Wave gadgets aren’t typically complete applications but rather they tend to be small add-ons that add a piece of functionality to a wave. Making a gadget wave aware starts with a declariation in the gadget specification of <Require feature="wave" /> which serves to give the gadget access to the Wave Gadgets API.

Robots on the other hand are all created and hosted on Google App Engine, which at this time only supports Python and Java.

I’m glad to see that Atlanta has an Wave Development group. I plan to add this meetup to my calendar and attend often.