As you'd expect, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is a constant salesman. At a dinner last night in New York City, he kept showing everybody in the room his newest baby, Salesforce Chatter, which turns Salesforce into feeds of people and customer data. He was showing it on his iPhone, which he wields as a sales weapon. (Benioff cornered one poor CIO with his iPhone demo for a good 20 minutes).

I got Benioff to show me the iPhone app on video (above). It is a supercharged, Chatterized version of Salesforce’s iPhone app which is not yet generally available. But you can see how it is very Facebook-like in that you follow a stream of updates from people you work with. Each one has a profile. But companies and customers also have their own feeds and profiles. Anyone who uses a Twitter app on an iPhone or Facebook or Yammer will find this user-interface familiar.

Benioff might be a big believer in the iPad as a new window onto the cloud, but it is the iPhone that he can whip out every time he meets a customer that is going to help him sell Chatter. At the beginning of the video, Benioff also mentions the news announced earlier today that Chatter will get its own marketplace of apps.

It’s still early days, but app store analytics company Distimo is already diving into the App Store for iPad, gathering some data and analyzing the results. More specifically, the startup has compared some preliminary data for iPad-only applications across multiple categories in the App Store with its findings on iPhone apps.

Distimo tracked 2,385 unique iPad applications in the marketplace as of 6 April, which is significantly less than the 3,000+ apps Mobclix accounted for on April 4. Perhaps Mobclix counted the applications in the App Store that were available for both iPhone and iPad, while Distimo only looked at iPad-exclusive apps, which would explain the difference (we’re awaiting a response from Mobclix to learn more about their counting methodology).

Out of those 2.385 iPad-specific apps, Distimo found that the ‘Games’ category is by far the largest with 833 titles (35%), followed by ‘Entertainment’ with 260 apps (11%) and ‘Education’ with 205 titles (8.6%), respectively. The – relatively – smaller categories include ‘Weather’ (17 apps), ‘Navigation’ (18 apps) and, perhaps surprisingly, ‘Finance’ (with 21 apps).

When comparing categories across devices, ‘Games’ and ‘Entertainment’ applications appear to be even more popular on the iPhone than on the iPad: 70% of the most popular apps on the iPhone are published in either of those two categories, compared to 40% on the iPad. We should note that there are more than 150,000 apps for the iPhone today, so take any comparisons to the less than 2,400 iPad apps with a grain of salt.

That said, it’s hardly surprising that games and entertainment apps are clearly the most popular categories for both the iPhone and the iPad – both devices come with a high-quality touchscreen, boast powerful processors and are excellent for content consumption as well as playing anything from simple games fit for kids to complicated ones that require advanced gaming skills. But if the iPad, and by extension other potent tablet computers, will ever replace laptops (like some contend) is a whole different story imho.

Also, note the difference in percentages for the ‘Business’, ‘Productivity’ and ‘News’ categories.

Now let’s take a look at pricing.

Distimo found that 83% of applications for the iPad are paid, compared to 73% of all applications for the iPhone. We’ll see how this evolves in the future, but I’d wager that both will end up at approximately 25% free vs. 75% paid in the long run.

Also worth noting: the average price of all paid applications that are solely compatible with the iPad is $3.61, compared to $3.55 for applications compatible with the iPhone.

Medical applications are most expensive on both the iPad ($9.39 on average) and iPhone ($10.73). On the contrary, ‘Education’ ($9.10), ‘Healthcare & Fitness’ ($4.41), ‘Music’ ($6.86) and ‘Sports’ ($4.95) applications are significantly more expensive on the iPad.

Contrary, books are currently cheaper on the iPad than on the iPhone, which could be explained by the availability of the iBookstore on the iPad right out the gate.

Again, we’ll have to see how iPad owners respond to differences in pricing levels across categories over time before jumping to any conclusions.

AlertNow’s technology delivers voice, e-mail and emergency SMS messages at a rate up to 2.5 million per hour to parents, students and school administrators. The company, which sent 25 million message in February alone, has over 2000 schools using its product and will be used to Blackboard’s mobile technology. Saf-T-Net will also help Blackboard further its dominance in the the K-12 market; Blackboard’s software has been used predominantly by colleges and universities.

Currently, Blackboard provides software for 5000 educational institutions. The company recently boughtTerriblyCleverDesigns, a startup that helped create iPhone and other mobile apps for colleges and universities, for $4 million.

In November of last year, Gowalla finally extended its reach beyond its iPhone app with a version of its app that worked on the mobile web for Android (and the iPhone’s Safari browser). It was a pretty good web app but had some limitations, which founder Josh Williams accepted because his team was at work on a native app for Android as well. That wait is over.

While it’s not yet in the Android Market, Gowalla has released a very early beta version of the native Android app to its most dedicated users that patrol the company’s Get Satisfaction page. Williams posted about the new app a few days ago, and noted that “Technically, we are calling this beta release 0.1. We will release a more fully featured beta to the Marketplace before the end of the month.” Since it’s not in the Market yet, you can only get the app by visiting this static link — or by using your Android camera to scan one of the bar codes you can find in that Get Satisfaction thread.

Note: To install the app, you have to have your device set up for the installation of “non-Market applications”. This site runs through how to do that, but basically you go to Menu -> Settings -> Applications, then check the “Unknown sources” checkbox.

So how is the app compared to its iPhone brother? Well, surprisingly, in some ways I think it might already be better. While, as Williams, notes, it is currently missing the Trips feature, and it’s not doing any image caching, the 0.1 build of Gowalla for Android is slick and lightweight. As you’ll notice right away, the app has a distinctly different look because it has ditched the iPhone’s green hues for a cleaner, white look. I can’t tell you how many Gowalla users I’ve talked to that hate the green look of the iPhone app and would like a way to change it (I’m included in that list).

More importantly, the Android version of Gowalla flips the features of the service so that your friend check-in stream is now the first tab. This makes the Android version more social right off the bat than the iPhone version, which buries that information in the last tab.

Gowalla’s Android launch is timely as the SXSW conference is less than a month away. Last year, both Gowalla and rival Foursquare launched their iPhone apps at the conference, with Foursquare able to take an early lead over the past year. Foursquare now has apps for all the major mobile OSes except for Symbiam. Meanwhile, Gowalla is also close to launching a BlackBerry app. Game on.

Check out some early screenshots below.

[thanks Wes]

With 400 million users, Facebook is seeing 2.5 billion photos uploaded every month. Scrapblog, a startup that allows you to make beautiful Flash-based online scrapbooks, is hoping to help Facebook users make pretty collages of their photos via a new Facebook app, Share the Love.

When you first start using Share the Love, the app will employ Scrapblog’s recently launched QuickMix technology to instantly generate a photo collage with up to ten Facebook photos. The photos will be automatically arranged with a set theme, which you can change easily (Valentines themes appear to be set at the moment). Similar to Scrapblog’s online site, the app offers users coordinated stickers, backgrounds and captions. And users can easily change photos from the photos they are tagged in and from their personal albums. You can also bypass Scrapblog’s technology and start from scratch by picking a theme and choosing the photos to feature. Once you are finished designing your collage, you can publish the scrapbook to your Facebook page and photo albums.

Scrapblog is monetizing the app by offering premium content, which you can purchase through Scrapblog credits. On their first visit, new users are granted 100 credits to spend in Scrapblog’s Share the Love Marketplace, which features stickers, backgrounds and text. You can buy credits through a credit card or PayPal. And users can earn extra credits for free if they use mobile payment platform BOKU’s system. Additionally, users can earn credits by simple using the application and creating collages. The startup is also trying its hand at creating a gaming atmosphere with the app by employing a points system. By using the application and sharing collages, you can unlock various levels of the app. Each level promised exclusive content, such as premium stickers and backgrounds, with which users can customize their photo collages.

It’s wise for Scrapblog to begin to leverage the power of Facebook photos; especially considering that the startup provides a compelling technology to users. Of course, Facebook just rolled out their own slideshow feature and there are other Facebook apps, such as Photo Books, that allow users to create scrapbooks and collages from their photos.

Scrapblog, which recently brought on Jill Braff as CEO, just raised $2.5 million in series B funding from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, bringing the startup’s total funding to $10 million. The company was first introduced back in 2006, briefly went offline, and relaunched in March 2007. The site has grown to over 2 million registered users who have created over 4.4 million Scrapblog pages.