Buying Opportunities - Episode #38 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 38th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the last week and the last day of March 2011. This episode is titled Buying Opportunities. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, Cloud Community Experts, and I'm your host, Jason Atwood. Joining me today for this special rainy day here in New York City, the heart of Times Square, the broadcasting capital, co-founder of Arkus, Justin Edelstein. How are you, Justin?

Justin Edelstein: I'm doing wonderful. It is opening day of the baseball season, and I am happy about it.

Jason Atwood: Are you going to the game?

Justin Edelstein: No, I'm sitting here doing this podcast. Excellent. Good choice. Listen, you've got to have priorities.

Jason Atwood: That is a priority. So we've got basically three things on the agenda today, but I think there's going to be some deeper, darker conversation as we get going. Dark, huh? Yep. We have your blog post, which you'll just- Best blog post ever. Best art ever. We'll talk about Amazon's moving into the cloud player and some reaction to what they're doing there. And then Salesforce buys Radian 6. And we'll talk about some of the feedback off that since it's been a couple days since it happened. There's been feedback all over the Twittersphere as well as in the Dreamforce portal which I was partaking in. So we'll go for that. And then we'll wrap up with our Cloud Focus App Pick of the Week, which always rolls right off the tongue. off with your lovely blog post. Sure. Tell us about it. Absolutely. It's entitled

Justin Edelstein: opportunity to signed contract in the cloud. So this blog post is a story about a client that came to us and said, hey we have this. It's not too complicated but a process that we follow for our sales that requires some automation and some approvals and we want to make it very seamless for our sales people, our sales managers, and our clients to be able to sign off on agreements in a quick and easy manner. They want to go very paperless and automated so I wrote about what we did for them essentially using three different products, all cloud-based, to accomplish the end solution. So obviously they were using Salesforce.com to track their contacts, their accounts, their deals, their opportunities, and the opportunities would go through a process, an approval process, and they would, once they got approved, you know, the next step was to get the client, the person who they're selling this thing to, to sign a contract. So we wanted to get them to the point where there wasn't too much interference or interaction between a human having to do something and getting that thing out to their client. So what we did was we built an approval process Salesforce and once it got approved we sent a message out to Conga Composer, one of our favorite Salesforce third-party apps which has been a cloud-focused app pick of the week in the past. And we sent out an outbound message via the Salesforce workflow engine once the item was approved and that created a Conga document so essentially the contract. The merging in fields from the

03:42 Justin Edelstein: account and from the opportunity and some line items hanging off of the opportunity and then through the conga integration with echosign which I believe was another cloud focus app pick of the week it took the contract that was generated and created what's called an agreement inside of Salesforce which is an echosign product and sends the agreement out electronically for electronic signature to the end client. So really what we did was automate a bunch of steps the approval process so no email you know obviously kicks off an email but you know no like is this approved where is it here it is approved okay now I have a email that says approved now I have to open up my Word document copy and paste things into it save it as a PDF send it out for somebody to sign it, get them to sign it. We automated all of that in the process, also using Chatter to let people know where things were.

Justin Edelstein: And I thought it was worth writing about.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, it's actually very interesting. I mean, it is really automating the process when you see what they had from before, and how many steps, and where it went, and documents that were edited. And you can see literally hours, hours cut off the time. And ours means a lot. I would say, Conga has become something we use more and more. It's a great toolbox or a tool to use with clients. It does make me wish that Salesforce would buy it and just include it as a product. It's like Visualforce and Conga. Because it is something that I almost don't, when we talk to clients more and more, I almost don't want to have to say, oh, and there's this other third party product. I want to be like, yeah, it's built in. Oh, anything to PDF. anything to I'm sure Congo or AppXtreme doesn't want to be bought by Salesforce but whatever. It's a shout out to you Chris. So yeah great blog post and some great automation. You can read that at blog.argasinc.com is the first one there or the second one if you're listening to this podcast is that will be above that or search for it in our on the website. So the second news was sort of something we've been saying that Apple is going to be doing and Amazon jumped in and said we're We're going to do it first, first. First post, which is that they've launched two products, or a product and a service. So they now have a cloud drive, which is for storage of documents, storage of things, media things that you can buy off of Amazon, and their music service that allows you to download that stuff. And they put it on an application in their new Android app store, so this is getting very Android-specific, that allows you to play those songs or stream them from Amazon. It's huge news because it's taking where Apple bought a company called Lala that used to do this. It would read through your iTunes library and say, hey,

06:50 Jason Atwood: listen, if you own Milli Vanilli's album, then you can listen to Milli Vanilli wherever you are because you basically have the rights to it. This is a little bit different. It actually will go through, there's a tool for the Mac, it'll go through your files, pick them up, stuff them up into, stuff up the MP3s, any ones that it can play. Obviously can't play ones that are protected under Apple's iStore, and this is where iTunes, this is where it gets kinda interesting. And then it'll upload them to the five gigabytes they give you for free. If you were then to go buy an album from Amazon, and to put it into your, it would automatically get added your cloud storage or cloud drive and it would not count against your five gigs. Right. Plus it would give you another, I think it's 20, I think it totals at 20. So it gives you another 15 that you can then, so basically you buy an album a year, one Amazon album a year, then you can get an extra 15 gigs to then store all this stuff. And then you can stream it from any device that you have.

Justin Edelstein: And you can pay for another gig, like it's a dollar a gig. It's a dollar a gig.

Jason Atwood: So you can get a terabyte for $1,000 a year, if you want. if you want.

Justin Edelstein: And it ties them even closer to Android, like we were talking about last week, the Android App Store. Now, I personally think this is great for not really for the mobile, honestly. I think it's great for more for a laptop. That you might have your music stored like we have on our Drobos, but that's on my desk. And I have my laptop that's not always connected to my Drobo, and now I can play music that way. Now with my mobile, when I'm listening to music, I tend to be in the subway or somewhere where I don't necessarily have an internet connection and this doesn't really necessarily work for me.

Jason Atwood: Or I'm using that internet connection for something else. I'm thinking about driving, I might be using it for GPS. So I mean, I don't know if I wanna have five different things trying to pull down over my little poor 3G. I like the concept, I like the storage concept of it, But I also want to say, OK, great. First, Salvoi, Apple, your turn. What are you going to do? You're next. Because my guess is they're going to do the exact same thing relatively. It's all going to be based in iTunes, which will save me a lot of work. And it will do everything. It'll work on all my iOS devices. So like I have a shared library on my shared now when I have my iPad, I can look at shared across my network. I think there's going to be another one called iTunes library or cloud library and click it. And then I'll be able to see anything that I have up there and download and basically view all my stuff. So I'm interested to see where they go with it. I hadn't given it a try. I want to give it a try at home just to see. I love Amazon. I love Amazon Prime. I love what they're doing.

Jason Atwood: They're doing basically free movie rentals of your Amazon Prime, but again, it's only in the browser. This is helping out the world of Android and saying to Google, the makers of Android, listen, you've got to put content behind this thing if you want to get out there. So I think it's good for competition, keeps the ball rolling, and throws it back in Apple's court to see what they're going to do. So the last story is talking about Salesforce buying yet their, I don't know, sixth, seventh, eighth in the last year.

10:15 Justin Edelstein: third large acquisition in the last three or four months. If you include Heroku, eTax, and Dim-Dim as acquisitions, this would be kind of the fourth one.

Jason Atwood: So you bought Radian Six.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock.

Jason Atwood: Right? Raiden 6 is a social networking, monitoring, listening, replying. I saw the demos of it. Looks like sort of what they're trying to do with their Twitter but it brings it all together. Does things like tag clouds and basically can monitor a lot of different things, what people are saying about you. Looks cool. Again, not coming to a Salesforce release near you. You know, we'll probably...

Justin Edelstein: For a demo at Dreamforce, perhaps.

Jason Atwood: Yes, at Dreamforce this summer. But I think the more interesting thing is it brings up, which was at the start of the conversation, I saw Gary Twitter this, and he tweeted his post in the Dreamforce app, so I logged in the Dreamforce app and started up a conversation. And a lot of the sort of heavy duty Salesforce users, I guess, anybody who's in the Dreamforce app at this point is pretty much a psychophant.

Justin Edelstein: Or if you're a Salesforce MVP like myself.

Jason Atwood: Right, if you are one, but you weren't in there having this discussion. I wasn't, no. Maybe I'll be MVP soon. And you know, a lot of the discussion started off like, hey, that's great, but where are we going to start to see the core applications, the core features and functions get added to? And can Salesforce keep adding on these more and more and more of these products that then they're going to have to integrate and we know it takes time, tension, money, resources us to do the integrations. And does it take away from that time and tension that would go towards the core apps, the core objects, the core functionality? So I think we should have a quick little conversation about that. But what do you think? Is it great, great, great? Or is it like, I'm beginning to wonder if they can handle all this load?

Justin Edelstein: Well, I do like the fact that they spread their wings and say, well, we're a platform. to be a platform we have to have you know a lot of different services that people you know look to us and say well this is the platform of choice this is what I'm using at an enterprise level to do most of my you know development this is this is where I'm investing and in order to do that you have to have you know certain things that that sometimes you have to acquire and in this case I think that they're really investing heavily in their service service and support or service cloud three four whatever number you want to throw on it and saying look we think we're betting that the next generation of service and support is not somebody picking up a phone dialing an 800 number waiting on hold pushing a couple of buttons to get to the you know press one if you speak English, press four if you want to speak to a sales rep, press six if you want to do this,

13:31 Justin Edelstein: and then type in your social security number and then have the person pick up and say, hello, can I have your name and social security number? They're betting that that's not the future.

Jason Atwood: And I have a great example of that. So we've talked about service and Twitter and stuff. I will say I went onto AT&T website to add, to do something to our account. I then couldn't do it, couldn't find it somewhere in their bad online interface. I then went to their customer support chat, thinking, okay, live chat, let's go, help me out. Ten minutes later, the person basically told me to click on the support link in the app to look for the document myself, to find the document and tell me how to do the thing. I then was frustrated, so then I went on to Twitter and I basically tweeted up and said, hey, bad customer support, blah, blah, blah, blah. to have online chat, but make sure that they know what they're doing and not just pointing me to a tab that then has more support underneath it. And I did at AT&T. Within 10 minutes, someone followed me from AT&T, then tweeted me and said, follow me and let's have an offline conversation. We then went back and forth for about two hours.

Jason Atwood: I was out, I was doing other things, and her asking for numbers and asking for this. At the end of the day, I liked it in that they got back to me on Twitter, but at the end she actually just gave me a phone number to talk to.

Justin Edelstein: So I think what Salesforce is betting on is that that's the kind of customer support interaction that's going to be happening and they want to have the features and functionality that allows for the conversation that you had to occur, but also to get you the solution and not say here's a phone number to call at the end of the day. I mean, because that sort of defeats the purpose. But from one perspective, I think, yeah, they're betting on that, they're building that out for the future. They've always sort of been ahead of the curve as far as technology's concerned, so they're trying to stay there. But in another sense, you're right. There are features and functions within the core Salesforce automation application that people who've worked with Salesforce for years know and love, right? The opportunities, the products, the solutions, the contracts, things that have existed for years that haven't been touched in years.

Jason Atwood: And basic functionality, not just like, again, there's lots of stuff in there that if you're a big Salesforce user, and also talking to clients, and when, and this is sort of the that I start to worry about is we talked to a lot of clients, we talked a lot about Salesforce, generally there are people who are either on the verge of buying Salesforce or have or have been using it and always going to say, oh well that's a third party application or oh there's a work around with that or oh that's just not something that they do yet or going to look on the idea exchange and seeing ideas that are basically simple ideas, have voted up, they're four years old and they're still not implemented. So then you think, well, how much time and attention could have someone put on those ideas? So there's actually an idea on the idea exchange for paying attention to the core. And it has a picture of an Apple core, whatever. And it now has over 2,000 votes, which we both voted on. Which is, there are some things that just seem like they're being forgotten. And I know that my post inside the Dreamforce portal was, the

17:03 Jason Atwood: reason is because core updates don't make splashes. They don't make PR statements. They don't make good demos. They're just core updates. But eventually your competition will build out enough of their core and then they'll say, well look, Salesforce doesn't even do this basic stuff. So again, all of the company want to make sure that they're always paying attention to not getting too buy happy. You know, the other thing that doing core updates doesn't do is raise your stock price. But buying Radian 6 does. So I just worry, is raising your stock price the thing you want to do or is, you know, I don't know. Again, I know that they have a better and bigger vision than I do, which is always the case. But I know as me and other users are always concerned that, is there enough attention being paid to these internal things? All right, well that was the, I guess it's a throwaway other little Salesforce news. They now have a billion lines of Apex code out there written.

Justin Edelstein: I think they've had it for about a month or so, something like that. So it's just a testament to the platform that they built out that they can host a million lines of code that's live and running in production environments. It's fairly impressive.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I just don't know how to compare that to something. Like how many lines of code is in OS X? How many lines of code is in, what's it comparing it to? How many lines of code is in Microsoft Office 2010? No clue. Is it 40 billion?

Justin Edelstein: 76 million trillion.

Jason Atwood: Okay. Is that a number? No. Okay. Speaking of not numbers, why don't you give me your Crowd Focus app pick of the week? Oh, we're up to that already, are we? Yes, we are. Well, we have a little bit of a time crunch here. We do, actually. We do.

Justin Edelstein: So I'm going to ask you to make it quick. I will make it quick. I am picking a product called Shoeboxed that I saw, I think it was like the Nap Exchange pick of the week,

Jason Atwood: which was like the connector. Oh, so you're picking someone else's pick? Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, pretty much. So Shoeboxed is a service that you can send away receipts or business cards and have them like sort of scan them in. And then they have a service that connects it to Salesforce. So like I guess whatever the file structure is, it works perfectly. it can it can take whatever they send you and pop it right in as a lead or as a receipt like for reimbursements. So the the shoeboxed service is there's a free trial on all monthly plans which is 30 days you get either 50 50 receipts or business cards within those free 30 days. You can have a do-it-yourself option which is free, which I don't really understand because it's a send away service and you're sending away things like I don't get to do it yourself.

20:06 Justin Edelstein: You send it to yourself. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: You put it in an envelope, send it to yourself, you take it and then you type in the numbers.

Justin Edelstein: Maybe you just use their connector to scan it up into their service or whatever. They have the light, which is 10 bucks a month, which is 50 receipts or business cards a month. And then the average turnaround time is 3-5 business days and you get access to the iPhone app. The classic, which is their most popular, is $30 a month and you get a few more.

Jason Atwood: So what's the Salesforce connector piece?

Justin Edelstein: So the Salesforce connector bit is where you can take what they've done and pop it right into Salesforce. Okay.

Jason Atwood: Pop it, automatic, is it?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, so you basically import them. You take the file that they have for you, and you pop it right into Salesforce, and it has some duplicate flagging

Jason Atwood: capabilities.

Justin Edelstein: So if you already have it as a lead, and you scan this business card, and then they send it over to you, and you pop it up as a sales force.

Jason Atwood: So they have their own data integrator that comes from their data. You don't have to do it yourself. You just kind of click Add This Thing to Salesforce, and

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it's in shoebox then you say put it into Salesforce and then it puts it into Salesforce.

Jason Atwood: So it doesn't give you a file that you have done once? No. Okay. That sounds pretty good. That sounds neat. There's so many OCR products out there, like one that we use, Neatworks, and there's so many others that I'm surprised people would still send things off, but I guess if you don't have the time. I guess it's for executives. You literally just hand it to your secretary and say, send it. Your time is too valuable.

Justin Edelstein: You go to a, you go to a drain forest and you pick up hundreds of cards and.

Jason Atwood: In that case you just get a scanner and scan them all in. Well that's if you're an exhibitor. If you're not an exhibitor. No, I mean you can, there's card scanners and card scan makes a lot of noise.

Justin Edelstein: Or you just send them away to a service and have them do it for you.

Jason Atwood: Alright so in my last remaining two minutes or three minutes I have to wrap this up. I'm going to give my pick of the week which is something we actually used the other day. I've used a couple times since, something I think that should be built into all phones. The use case is when you're meeting up with one or two or many people and you're trying to get to a central location or show them where you are, you can't really send them something. So this product called Glimpse is an iPhone app, Android, Windows, it's free. What it does is you say, you install it and then you say, send a glimpse. And it's a glimpse, it's spelled G-L-Y-M-P-S-E. But basically it's to send the ability to them to track you. So it leaves, so it then sends them, you give a time period. So I say 30 minutes, allow Justin to see where I am. It then gives him a view of exactly where I am, literally tracking me to occupy my GPS, which is great for meeting up. We used it the other day, we were trying to meet up to go somewhere and literally I sent

23:12 Jason Atwood: it to you, it opened up in your browser and then you could sit there and watch me get closer and closer so you know when to go meet me or when to meet me at the corner. I've used it a couple times. It is a great product. It just works the way it works. You can re-save them. You can save them again. You can have them as favorites. So if you're always doing the same thing, just a great product. You know, I've been using it more and more. I used it the other day. I was meeting with a client and I was letting someone else know when I was going to be there. I was running late, so I literally sent them so they could track me right up to the point where I got there and not have to keep texting me back and forth, which is not good when you're driving either. I mean, what do you think? You used it? I did. Have you used it since with other people?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I used it like three days later because I was going to a soccer match at the new Meadowland Stadium and there was a lot of traffic. And the person I was meeting, he got there and he was like, where are you? So I just sent him the glimpse. I was like, here, you'll know when I get there. Yeah. And the one thing I noticed, it's great, it did drain my battery pretty hardcore.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I mean, it's basically, not only is it sending data, but it's also using your GPS at the full tilt. So it does do both. And it sits and it runs in the background.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it was draining my battery. So I really like it.

Jason Atwood: Again, I could see a lot of scenarios. Even we go to a lot of sporting events in the fall, be like, just where are you? I can send them where I am, they can see, meeting up. It's a great glimpse, by glimpse. It's for the iPhone, Android, Windows. It's nice that you don't have to have Windows. Windows Phone? Windows Phone? Whatever. I've heard they have a couple out there. Must have a couple installs in. It's free, and you only have to have the thing to send it. You don't have to have the thing to see it. So you can send to somebody. Sends a link. It sends a link. And if they have it as an application, it opens up the application, which is great. And then you can do more information. Alright, so that's our Cloud Focus app pick of the week. Always go to blog.arcasinc.com and subscribe to the blog there via RSS, you can do that. You can follow the company at twitter.com slash arcusinc, A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C, or I'm at twitter.com slash jasonmattwood, and Justin here is at twitter.com slash justedelstein. We're on Facebook at facebook.com slash arcusinc, and iTunes is always a great way to subscribe to and leave great reviews about the podcast if you like. That way whenever we put it out, we almost push this off to tomorrow, but we put it out on Thursday which is our normal time, you'll get that. And until next week, from the very cloudy New York City, enjoy this and the other cloudy days that you have.