Over the last decade, software as a service (SaaS) has taken the computing world by storm. By being able to deploy software over the web, people no longer have to download bulky software packages and it’s given businesses a lot more flexibility. Today, SaaS is used to power a wide variety of business applications: sales force automation, CRM, document management, financials and of course Chargify.

In honor of SaaS flexibility and the recent release of the iPhone 4, we review some of today’s best SaaS apps for the iPhone and iPad:

Salesforce.com Mobile

Long one of the market leaders in customer relationship management, Salesforce.com also offers an iPhone app that can perform most of the important tasks of the full, web-based service. Salesforce.com Mobile (which also works on the iPad) is a robust application which allows sales teams and managers to track progress toward targets or quotas, record the status of various deals and proposals, store contact information for key decision-makers, view closed sales to date and more.

We’re growing every day and we need help to keep offering good tech support in a timely manner, so we’re looking for someone who can work from home for 1-2 hours a day as a contractor.

We prefer someone in the USA, since most of our customers are here and our team is here.

It’s not required, but we prefer someone with Ruby and Rails experience, since that’s what Chargify uses internally and it would be especially useful if this person could go in and do development-type things that occasionally come out of tickets.

Support requests come mostly in the form of written tickets, but some come as phone calls and tweets.

A lot of questions come to mind when running an e-commerce business. You know you need a payment gateway but you may be wondering what a payment gateway can do for you and how you choose one. Basically, payment gateways enable you to accept credit card payments and transfer billing info to your bank so that payments can be deposited into your internet merchant account each month. Yes, that’s the basic version.

Here at Chargify, we have paired with four of the top-rated gateways to ensure ease and security for our customers. These gateways are Authorize.net, Beanstream, PaymentExpress, and TrustCommerce. Whichever one you choose depends on your company’s specific needs. To help you figure out the differences, here’s a brief description of each (note: each payment gateway supports buyers in any country):

Authorize.net

As a leading provider of gateway payment services since 1996, Authorize.net allows merchants to settle and manage credit card transactions for a number of e-commerce applicants.

Authorize.net is an ideal choice for US based companies since customers since the merchant account must be located in the US. Authorize.net is PCI compliant, and customer support and fraud prevention are included. There is a setup fee of $99 and a monthly charge of $39.95.

UPDATE Sept. 7, 2010—- There are now 2 videos with this entry. Check out both to see what you’re getting when you depend on Chargify.—- UPDATE

We recently did a significant system upgrade. Some of you may remember it - it was a few hours on a recent Saturday night.

The upgrade increased our capacity, which we could have done on many computing platforms, but the real story is this: We moved a long way up the ladder of financial transaction experience & security.

Our new transaction processing facility is focused on financial transactions. That’s the majority of their business. The rest of their business is related to healthcare and Sarbanes-Oxley. All serious stuff.

Our knowledge and experience at Chargify is quite good (especially through Grasshopper Group), but it’s not the same as having a large staff with 15 years of highly focused experience.

At our new facility, we’re surrounded by giants like MasterCard, Bank of America, and Toyota. We’re a small fish, and that’s good - we benefit from the standards that are demanded by the big fish.