SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, has released a new version of Sugar 6. The new version includes a new user interface that promises speed, simplicity, and interoperability with other web applications and mobile devices. The company also announced it has made the primary source code repository for Sugar Community Edition publicly accessible.

Sugar 6 includes the Sugar Shortcut Bar, which is a persistent toolbar throughout the application that allows users to perform common tasks from the toolbar, including creating an account, contact, sales opportunity, document, note, task or logging a meeting or call. Included in the Shortcut Bar, users will also see a context-aware Global Search field which filters search results based on the module in use (e.g., Contacts, Opportunities and Accounts) and produces results without leaving the page.

The application has also received a bit a facelift, with a new, sleek look and easier navigation. In addition to the new user interface, Sugar 6 also includes native application support for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry Smartphones and even the iPad.

SugarCRM, which faces competition from Salesforce, Zoho and other companies that develop CRM products, had a bit of a shakeup last year when CEO John Roberts abruptly resigned last May. But with over 600,000 subscribers of the company’s products, and nearly $50 million in funding, SugarCRM seems to be doing just fine.

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Cloud storage and document sharing startup Box.net is announcing significant news today: the startup has just raised $15 million on Series C funding led by Scale Venture Partners, with existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and U.S. Venture Partners participating. This brings Box.net’s total venture funding to $29.5 million. As part of the deal, Rory O’Driscoll, Managing Director with Scale Venture Partners, has joined Box.net’s Board of Directors. The startup’s CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie did not disclose the valuation for the round but said the funding would be used for building out the platform further and for hiring staff in the company’s sales and engineering divisions.

When Salesforce’s enterprise-friendly social collaboration platform Chatter was announced last Fall, we focused on the social features and connectivity it could bring to the enterprise. It was, in fact, Salesforce’s first major venture into the social networking and collaboration space, and many think Chatter’s innovation will have a lasting impact on the enterprise and cloud computing.

But Chatter, which launched in private beta earlier this year to 100 customers, is slowly growing up, adding more customers and developing its own ecosystem. Today, Salesforce is expanding the beta program and launching ChatterExchange, a marketplace for Chatter Apps.

One of the more surprising things that came out of our all-star panel of consumer software VCs was an admission that Marc Andreessen is starting to invest in a new wave of enterprise software companies. He said he’d just closed one deal he couldn’t disclose, and was expecting to do more.

I talked with Andreessen briefly afterwards about his comment, asking if he meant software-as-a-service specifically and whether he meant niche products or core software for running big businesses. His answer was ‘all of the above’, if it’s the right company — he thinks it’s time for an industry reset. Oracle’s – and to a far lesser degree SAP’s – shopping sprees of the past few years have cleaned out most of the late 1990s enterprise software brush and most big businesses rely on one or both of the big vendors, with no best-of-breed competitors mixed in and very little in the way of new products and real innovation.

At the moment of a major disruption, it’s tempting to view the shift in power as coming from one company or individual. So we act like giggling schoolgirls when we spot Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt having a coffee, measuring the body language and the very fact of the public encounter in terms of war, two generals meeting on horses in the center of the engagement field, etc.

And given the time it takes to make chess moves even in this realtime world, we can guess they’re not talking about today but rather about tomorrow. The time between today and tomorrow has compressed, but the cycles it takes to produce hardware and ramp carrier buildout mandate iterative development as the only way to move forward rapidly. One thing building on the last, anticipating the next, maintaining and extending core advantages while opening up newer ones.

The iPad/Android/Silverlight agendas share many elements and surprisingly few differences. Since Ray Ozzie’s Disruption Memo 5 years ago this month, Microsoft has moved from a landlocked desktop company to one poised to launch its most profitable application suite in the Cloud. Silverlight is now the application development environment for most of Microsoft platforms including mobile, TV, and Web.

If you think 5 years is not a very long time, how about 3 years since Apple announced the iPhone. With the release of the iPad, Apple has in effect done something very similar to Silverlight in moving a considerable part of its development architecture to the new iPhone/iPad OS. The arguments about Flash that so captivated us a few weeks ago seem so irrelevant now that site after site caves to H.264. Google’s odd recommitting to Flash in Chrome the browser may be sold as a pragmatic acknowledgment of the existing Flash base, but it’s got more similarity to the Office team swallowing its pride as Silverlight marches forward across the OS Formerly Known as Windows.

Scratch the surface of the weekend’s I Hate the iPad, And So Must You meme and you’re really looking at the remnants of a view of the computing universe that positions open versus closed instead of two approaches busy nurturing each other along. It’s way beyond strange bedfellows, with Microsoft way out front in guarding online privacy and Apple continuing to leverage their investments in Web Kit and other open source technologies (read OS/10), while Google supports Adobe and its proprietary hairball at the very moment media properties are running away from it.

In fact, it’s a lot like the argument over the iPad (Flash, USB, multitasking): right, I’ll take two. Open technologies are used to advance the ball, then intermingled with closed technologies (the entire Google back end) to produce massive wealth and leverage. If you haven’t been listening to Steve Ballmer recently (he doesn’t get headlines for having Starbucks these days) you may not have heard that Microsoft is all in on the Cloud. Office is soon to ship for the Cloud, just as Ozzie insisted would have to happen 5 years ago. Will they destroy Google Apps? Hell, no. But will Windows Phone get share? Just ask Nokia or Palm what they think.

The polemicists insist the iPad is a consumption platform. Sure it is, but does that mean it’s not a creative one? Hell, no. First get out of the way of the stampede of app developers and then make that case. No camera; I got stinking cameras on my iPad Nano as Scoble likes to call it, on my Nexus One, on several Flip cams, on the MacBook Air, on and on. Can I do realtime video conferencing on any phone right now? No, so why is that a limitation of the iPad? It’s coming, as is multitasking and universal bus adapters and everything except Flash which we don’t need.

In fact, every site that supports no Flash is one more advertisement and network effect multiplier for the new platform, a little reward each day or few hours that says: yes, you made the right decision, and no, you’re not going to regret it. Each app download confirms more of the same thing, that how we interact with these machines is in play, and that the only thing worse than the new OS is having to go back to everything we’re already sick of.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the MacBook Air as I sit here typing, but sure as sure can be I’ll be migrating to the keyboard dock the next time I take a trip to Starbucks. Bluetooth will become the virtual hub for creatives, with the corresponding battery drain distributed in a handy accessory. At some point, I’ll start leaving the Air home. It’s easier to invest in the new architecture; it’s a Clunkers for iPads program. iPadCare. I’m all in.

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It’s late Tuesday evening and the TechCrunch office is mostly deserted. I was finishing off a few things and preparing for tomorrow when Steve Gillmor, my friend, mentor and the founding editor of TechCrunchIT walks in.

“I’ve got some news and I had to talk to you in person about it.”

Damnit. I knew right then I wouldn’t like the “news.” And sure enough, he’s taken another job. Starting monday he’ll be on the senior team (senior as in high level, not as in old) at Salesforce. Founder Marc Benioff recruited him directly.

“You bastard.” (I tend to take these things personally)

Now I know why Benioff has been writing regular guest posts for us. It’s because he’s feeling guilty over stealing Steve from us, obviously.

Of course I’m also happy for Steve, and the new job is a terrific opportunity. And graciously Steve has agreed to continue writing every week or so for us, and of course you can follow him on Twitter at @stevegillmor. In some ways things will remain the same with us and Steve.

But it’s still a sad day at TechCrunch. I was listening to Steve on the Gillmor Gang long before I ever started TechCrunch. And I miss the old days when Steve, Dave Winer and I used to meet for breakfast in Burlingame most weekends.

You can read all of Steve’s posts on TechCrunchIT over the years here. He’s been a technology journalist for something like 30 years, back almost to the beginning of, well, tech reporting. And I’m not exaggerating when I say that Steve has forgotten more things than I’ll ever learn.

Steve doesn’t bother much with details, he goes right at the big trends. And he’s usually right. Way before most other people are. Controversial? Yes. Long winded? Yep. Occasionally non linear in his thinking? Understatement. But he’s also brilliant, and he’s always guided me towards rightness.

We recorded a short exit interview video for posterity. Good luck, Steve. I hope to see you around the office regularly.

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We’ve written about Roambi’s nifty iPhone apps and web platform that allows for data in spreadsheets and documents to be easily viewed on the iPhone in customizable charts and graphs. Today, Roambi’s developer, MeLLmo, is bringing its mobile application to the iPad, that helps transform business reports and data into interactive dashboards.

With Roambi’s new app, companies can turn their business data – from Excel spreadsheets, Google Docs, and premium reporting services like SAP BusinessObjects and Salesforce CRM – into interactive dashboards on their iPad, allowing users to transform complex analytics into easy to understand graphs, charts and images. Ater the data is downloaded, you can select a pre-designed template to deliver the data (i.e. pie chart, graphs etc.). Once published, the data transforms into interactive visualizations for the iPad.

With the iPad app, Roambi Trends will allow users to identify and visualize trends in their data. The Trends View offers data comparisons across whatever period a user chooses – years, months, even minutes; users can easily focus on specific time periods by sliding the dateline at the bottom of the graph. CataList view organizes data into hierarchical, categorized lists with the ability to drill down to into detailed summaries, as well as simultaneously compare or analyze different sets of data.

For enterprise users, Roambi offers both a Pro version, which is a secure, hosted service that connects mobile; and Roambi ES , a secure, on-premise server solution. As we’ve written in the past, the view of the data within Roambi’s app is impressive and is even more compelling on the iPad. Data-filled spreadsheets are automatically turned into interactive graphs and charts which allow you to easily understand the information that’s being delivered. Within graphs, you can also delve deeper into certain data points by simply touching the screen. And the app itself intuitively stores various charts according to subject matter and category, making it easy to access various visualizations quickly and efficiently. For any enterprise user of an iPad, this app is a winner.

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With the apparent lack of Flash on the iPad, video hosting platforms like Brightcove, Ooyala and Kyte are throwing their support for HTML5 playback on the device. Encoding.com, , a SaaS video encoding platform, is also announcing its support for HTTP streaming, to enable streaming of its video on iPhone and iPad devices.

HTTP streaming allows publishers to continuously adapt the video stream in real-time to match the user’s available bandwidth. Launched in September 2008, Encoding.com provides a cloud-based, video encoding SaaS offering to let users host and encode user-generated and premium video. The company encodes an average of 30,000 videos per day for a variety of well-known media and technology companies including MTV Networks, WebMD, Nokia, MySpace and the CarDomain Network, which is currently using Encoding.com’s HTTP live streaming support.

Encoding recently raised $1.25 million in Series A funding, led by Metamorphic Ventures and included angel investors Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan, and Allen Morgan.

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During his keynote at SXSW last month, Twitter CEO Evan Wiliams announced an upcoming new platform called @anywhere, which would allow third party sites to integrate Twitter features (he also showed off some of the partners who would be featuring the platform, which you can see in the image at right). Twitter didn’t give a launch date for when sites would start integrating the new platform, but it looks like we’ve just come across the first site to feature @anywhere. Meet Eggboiling.com.

The site, which will almost certainly be pulled down soon after this post is published, is clearly a testing environment for @anywhere, but it’s currently open to the public. It features the following (all shown in the screenshots below): various variable states; a button to ‘Connect With Twitter’; buttons to follow twitter users @jack, @biz, and @ev; a test hovercard that allows me to see @wendyverse’s latest tweets and follow counts at a glance, and a test box that lets me tweet. It isn’t particularly easy on the eyes, but it works well enough.

Editor’s note: What does the iPad have to do with cloud computing? Glad you asked. In this guest post Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, explains how liberating the iPad will really be.

The first piece of software I ever wrote was on the TRS-80 Model 1. It was called “How To Juggle”, and it had 4K of memory. It was my version of “Hello World”, what every programmer first writes on a new piece of hardware. CLOAD Magazine purchased it for $75, they distributed it to their subscribers on a cassette (there weren’t disks for the TRS-80 yet). It was 1979. I was 15 years old, and I was a software entrepreneur. I still am.

Just five years later, I was an intern at Apple writing some of the first native assembly language on the Mac and working in a building called Bandley 4 with a pirate flag on the roof. Guy Kawasaki hired me to help developers write software on the Mac without using its predecessor, the Lisa (something that had been required when the Mac launched). My first example of how to write for the MDS 68000 development system manifested itself in a video game called “Raid on Armonk.” It was an allusion to IBM’s headquarters. They were the anti-Mac and we clicked and destroyed them. (Turns out they eventually clicked on themselves.)

I’m sentimental this week, and thinking about the past, because I have seen the future. The future is not a Mac, or even a PC. Its father created a lot of the computers I’ve loved: Apple IIe, Mac, and iPhone. There have been others I have loved, even some PCs and yes, my Blackberry, but none of that matters anymore. Looking ahead, I am energized, a door is opening, and we are all going to walk through it. We’ll soon enter a new world of computing accelerated once again by the industry’s creator Steve Jobs, and amplified by someone conceived after the PC, Mark Zuckerberg.