Youcalc, which sells on-demand analytics apps for online marketing and on-demand CRM, has announced a series of analytics apps which it says are designed to reduce the time it takes analysts and administrators to "analyze sales force and call center activities."


"The term 'analytics' is used so loosely in the cloud communities that their popular definition can be confused with simple reporting," notes Rasmus Madsen, CEO of Youcalc correctly.

The real difference between reporting and analytics, Madsen says, is that while reporting is basically views of data already in the system - "total sales by region," et al - analytics lets you play around with the reportage, crunching the data and generating calculated metrics -- "lead conversion ratios," "funnel conversion ratios," et al.

What the Salesforce.com (News - Alert) analytics apps from Youcalc are supposed to do is let you perform custom analysis on the data in your Salesforce.com database, and "generate new insight in a fraction of the time it would take to use traditional reporting tools."

Back during the Beijing Olympics Youcalc had a cool widget comparing medals won to population and GDP to create "the real Olympic country rank."

Youcalc currently has more than 25 Salesforce.com analytics apps and promises more are on the way.

There's a lot of demand for apps spicing up charts and other presentations - industry observer Josh Lowensohn writes that newcomer iCharts "takes your data from spreadsheets and turns it into charts that are both hosted on the site and can be embedded elsewhere, including things like PowerPoints, message boards, and PDFs. What makes iCharts less worthy of the YouTube (News - Alert) cringe is that it's a solid business model. As billionaire panelist Mark Cuban pointed out, you can leverage out this technology to other companies that want to make their charts suck less, making a quick buck as a service provider instead of ending up as a destination site for orphaned sales charts."