Home from Sleeter

I thought I would give a quick recap on the Sleeter Conference partly to try to rethink everything I heard. By all accounts Sleeter was a great success! We met a lot of amazing people and had a great time showing off our product. It fired us up a lot for next year's Sleeter Conference and made us realize that we were talking to exactly the right people. As a vendor it's interesting to see what other technologies are out there. It's pretty amazing to see how developers, accountants, bookkeepers et cetera have come together to solve problems encountered everyday. There were a couple "surprises" in areas where I expected more advancement. One thing that was odd to me was that there wasn't a lot in the "out of browser experience" category. We were the only out of browser application at the show. Looking at where other industries have gone with this (ebay Desktop) I say it's safe to say next year's Sleeter show will feature a lot more Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The lack of RIA amazed me so much that we're actually going to have a guest blogger later on to talk to us about what's happening in that realm in other industries.

Next year I think will be a much different story as the Intuit Partner Platform continues to develop and offer applications to the business world. I suspect that over the next few years you'll see a big change in vendors at the Sleeter Conference as more products come out of Intuit's Federated App Platform. Expect to see a few more vendors next year offering applications on the Intuit Marketplace.

The second thing was the lack of iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile OS apps. It just doesn't seem like we've fully taken the plunge on going mobile. For vendors it means tons of opportunity but on the other hand it also means there's a lot to learn. I feel that some of the hesitance with going mobile is security fears.

Overall we had a great time. I wanted to say thank you for everyone who stopped by and made our trip down so incredibly worthwhile.