Consumer Cloudiness - Episode #14 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.

00:09 Jason Atwood: This is the 14th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the third week of October 2010. This episode is titled Consumer Cloudiness. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, your cloud computing experts. And I'm your host, Jason Atwood. Joining me today and for the last 14 times, co-host Justin Edelstein. Hey Justin, how are you doing? 14 times, that's phenomenal. That is a lot of times. It's a lot of times. So we have a big agenda today. We're going to talk about my new blog post about five ways networks can save email. There's some news out of Zimbra that might be interesting and connect with that. And then a big article that was tweeted yesterday by Salesforce posted, everybody in the world I know tweeted this. Not me. You didn't. From Fast Company talking about the consumer web basically invading corporations and enterprises. So we're going We're going to talk about that article and then how we handle the consumer web. And they actually talked more about consumer products and how they handle it.

Jason Atwood: And then we'll kind of lead into some new consumer products that were just announced by one of our favorite makers of consumer products. And then we'll kick it off with one little thing that just was launched yesterday as well in the Dreamforce portal. We'll talk about that at the end.

Justin Edelstein: I love the Dreamforce portal.

Jason Atwood: So let's kick it off. Of course then we'll do a Cloud Focus app pick of the week. Of course. Where do we say pick of, is it Cloud Focus app pick of the week? No. Yeah, okay. So first thing was the blog post. Did you, were you able to read my blog post? Yes.

Justin Edelstein: Of course I read your blog post. That's true, you edited it. I edited it. Or help edited it. I help edited it. Since we started on a wave, always.

Jason Atwood: Yes, we won't talk about wave, we'll try to make this a wave free episode. It's not going to happen. Impossible. It already, we already failed on that. David. So this is something that came about when I was sending an email to somebody about Salesforce and Dreamforce 10. And the tag for Dreamforce 10 in Twitter land is to hash DW10. DF10? DF10, that's right. That would be... That would be your wooden word. That would be someone else. Yeah. So I sent it out in an email and I hashed the email. In the email I put hash DF 10 and I thought, wow, why can't that work? Doesn't that make sense? I want to put the same things that I do in Twitter and in Facebook. I want to see them in email. This sort of got me down this path of where is email and why is it sort of stagnant in terms of its feature set? How come we've changed the social networks have created all these new sort of paradigms for dealing with communication, and email hasn't picked up on any of them.

Jason Atwood: So anyway, I outlined five ways, and just the basis where, one of the things I said was new protocols. Really the IMAP, POP, and MAPI, which are sort of the big protocols, MAPI's Microsoft's, IMAP is the one that stores on the server, POP is Post Office Protocol. They're sort of old, they're not sort of new, and I think they need to build a new protocol for email, and get people to move on to it. And it should incorporate things like trust. It should incorporate things like real time, like our Google Wave, real time. Emails should be almost real time now. Instead of inviting two people, maybe you are tagging them. I want emails to pull from all my address book. Why keep a localized address book? I want an address book that has modules that can pull from every single different social network or enterprise network I need. I drop in the Salesforce module, it pulls down Salesforce contacts. I drop in the Facebook module,

03:57 Jason Atwood: it pulls in all my Facebook contacts. That's where I do most of my talking anyway. Other things like, again, trusting. Spam is a non-trusted source. Someone who sends you a marketing message who you have no idea who they are. Can't do that in Facebook, right? You can't do that in Twitter. You have to follow somebody and sort of said, I made a connection to you before I'm able to get messages from you, at least personalized messages. I think email could run a lot from that. You read the article, you read the blog post, what do you think?

Justin Edelstein: I happen to agree with you on a lot of these things. The social networks have, as we've seen in a few slides from big presenters, that the social network usage has actually surpassed email usage over the last year or so, which is quite interesting. And I think it's because of the, I think trust is a huge issue, right? I can send stuff to you in Facebook, because we're friends and you've said I can send stuff to you. So it's not spam, right? It's not something that you don't want. It also, Facebook has email in it. So it's one of those weird things where in those statistics, do those count as emails or do those count as Facebook messages or do those count as both? It's sort of weird. But I think you bring up even a better point where you hashed something in an email. So you wanted to use features that exist in the consumer world of these social networks where you're used to playing and communicating with people in something that is old, in an email that's been around for 10, 15 years or so, maybe even longer for some people. It's interesting to sort of think about what would even happen in email if hashDF10 could have been a link. Like what would even happen? Would I click it and find all the rest of my emails that have that hash? That's pretty cool. Yes. How about this? I just thought of this. Should I put it in my blog post? Should I?

Jason Atwood: How about the idea of, I kind of said this in the tagging tattoo, but how about the tagging in terms of internal to the message? So one of the problems of email is you send a message to somebody and you send it to somebody and you cc some people or maybe you bcc people if you're devious. A question is where am I supposed to be paying attention? If I'm two, basically I feel like it's my message. I should be reading all of it and it's sort of content to me. And I try to make sure that I don't two a lot of people because if you two, but two, three, four people, okay, so are they all supposed to be the number one on this message? about the idea of tagging parts of the message with people. So let's say in the section of the message, a paragraph, you know, I've done this in the past with you and I've said, you know, I said, Justin, pay attention to this or this is for you, Justin. What happens if I tagged it with some sort of identifier at either your email address or your Twitter address or something and then when you receive it because it's your message and you know

07:02 Jason Atwood: it's coming to you, it kind of highlights that section of the email and says this has been tagged for you, kind of like Twitter highlights people if you've been, if you've been ated, you know, if you've been tagged in a Twitter or when you're on a photo in Facebook. What happens if that showed you in your message where I wanted you to look?

Justin Edelstein: This whole conversation is pissing me off.

Jason Atwood: Because it doesn't exist?

Justin Edelstein: Let me tell you why. Well, it doesn't exist now, but it can exist if some brilliant engineer is listening and wants to build this. But Google Wave really should not have been called Google Wave. Email too. Gmail 2, Gmail 3, whatever you want to call it. The next Gmail. The next Gmail. Because it does a lot of these things. Gmail Plus. It has inline replies. It has...they so could have built in the ability to do these inline hashtag searches. They had it. It was all there. It's bugging me now. Thanks for bothering me this morning. You're welcome. Anyway, I think some of the other good ideas that you had in the blog post were the universal address book, something where you can say to your email service these are my contacts here, these are my contacts here, these are my contacts here, these are my contacts here. They're all my contacts. Don't make me have a big address book stored in your thing. I have my contacts everywhere. They're all over the place and I have them for business, I have them for personal, I have them for in my CRM, I have them everywhere. let me use them. Don't make me, you know, have to remember them or go somewhere and grab it and then put it here. I think that that's another big example of sort of integration that could happen if email did become more social one day.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. So, thank you. I think it's a good article. Interesting, there's two things that sort of came out. out you you emailed me one of them which is that Zimbra which is a they're a competitor to Gmail sort of well they definitely are the Zimbra is a company that's making and they're not owned by someone else they're owned by Yahoo at

Justin Edelstein: one point did they get sold again I think they're owned by they were Zimbra then they got bought by Yahoo I thought and then maybe spun back off they

Jason Atwood: basically do a lot of different stuff they I think they don't they don't take some of the advice that we read in the book Rework which is just do one thing really well and don't kind of go crazy with features. Zimbras says we're gonna do Docs, we're gonna do email, we're gonna do desktop clients, we're gonna do offline, we're gonna do chat, we're gonna do CRM, this is a CRM product. They have a lot of features. I don't think any of them are killer. I play with them every once in a while. Anyway, the new version, Zimbras 2, which is both a service but it's also something you can download. They also have an open source aspect to it. They're They're going to include some social networking things. I think that the online versions of software are going to be the first to jump. Because while we use, and I love, Apple Mail, it usually comes out with the next version of the OS, which we'll talk about in a second. The features are going to always lag. Gmail puts out new features almost once every two months. Whether you like them or not, like the new Priority Mailbox, which I've been kind of playing

10:16 Jason Atwood: with and I like, right? It breaks your, it breaks your, looks at your contacts, looks at what emails you actually respond to and then builds a three-pane priority mailbox. These are things that are top priority email. These are things that are sort of semi and these are things that you basically always ignore.

Justin Edelstein: I use it for my, I use it for my personal Gmail. I have yet to turn it on for my, uh, Arcus email because I'm, I don't use the Gmail interface for my Arcus email. So my professional email I use desktop client, Apple Mail, and I'm afraid of what it might do. So I don't even really want to turn it off. It doesn't, no. It's gonna like put some new folders somewhere.

Jason Atwood: It puts one new folder in your IMAP folder on your mail. It's fine. It doesn't do really much. And since I've sort of been using mail for so long in smart folders and flagging, I've created this sort of anyway. Emails come in. If it's email from me that I don't want to read immediately, I just flag it. And then I have a couple of smart folders, one called inbox zero, which just shows me all unread emails from all my accounts, and I have like seven accounts.

Justin Edelstein: I have a smart folder that is email from you that just says don't read. And you just don't read it all. Don't read it every day.

Jason Atwood: Or just mark as read and delete. Delete. Flag it, delete it, and unflag it.

Justin Edelstein: I have this little script that runs when the emails come in from you. It's just.

Jason Atwood: If I thought you were smart enough to write a script in, in, in, in OS X, I'd be impressed. All right, so let's move on to the second part of the agenda, which is a.

Justin Edelstein: Well, why don't we, why don't we talk about what Zimbr does? Cuz I don't think, I think we went off on a little tangent. What this new Zimbr. Okay. what this new Zimbr product is. So it does some of the things that we've been talking about. If you're familiar with a product called Zobni, inbox spelled backwards, it puts a little plug-in in Outlook that puts some contextual information into your sidebar there. And it can, you know, I found out about it because it connects to Salesforce. So if an email comes in from a contact from Salesforce, it loads their Salesforce information in this little side panel plug-in to Outlook. So Zimbr desktop is promising to do very similar things, but connecting to your social networking accounts. So it'll connect to your Facebook. It'll connect to your Twitter. It'll show you, maybe you have a message that comes in from Jason. And Jason's my friend on Facebook. And Jason and I are connected on Twitter. And it can show me different things that you've either commented on or done inside of those areas as well as the email that you just sent me. So it tries to connect the dots a little bit more and put information in context, much like what we talked about, I think, two podcasts ago with that product from Aperio. I think it was called Sales Works that puts Salesforce content in context inside of your Gmail inbox. So people are starting to move in this direction. And it's just a matter of time before the apps start talking to each other well enough where we get this unified vision of our communications with a person.

13:17 Jason Atwood: And really I think the big problem is the unique identifier. You know, the database model, there is, you need to have a unique identifier to then, or some really good algorithms, to look towards these different sources and go, is JSON.net with the Salesforce contact, JSON.net with the Twitter person, JSON.net with the Facebook person, Jasonet with the LinkedIn person, Jasonet with the Foursquare person. How are they connected? Are they all the same person? Are they different people? And what's unique identifier to get to them? I have so many different email addresses, you couldn't even use email addresses as my unique identifier because I use one on Facebook, I use one on, you know. So that's I think is going to become the, is the problem. You can do a lot. You could say, does it share this Twitter and this Facebook then, this email address then yes. Is it spelled this way? Is it from this city then yes. You could do a lot to say they are the same person, but that's sort of where I love to see this go because I have address books. I'd love when I follow someone on Twitter, I'd love that to show up and then pull in their address if they have their email address and their picture and their profile.

Jason Atwood: All that stuff should just kind of happen in the cloud.

Justin Edelstein: Anyway, good stuff.

Jason Atwood: So the Consumer Web article on Fast Company, highly retweeted and reposted and Facebooked yesterday. I thought we'd bring it up. It talks about, basically talks about very quickly, I thought it was going to be a big article. I started this, okay, let me start into this article and get right in.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, seriously, it was like a line.

Jason Atwood: Just as it started to get going, it kind of tweeted out. It had one line to talk about a line from someone at Salesforce. That's why I think Salesforce retweeted it a lot, talking a little bit about chatter. But basically... That's the demo guy. Craig, right?

Justin Edelstein: Isn't that his name, Craig? Yeah, Craig who demos everything everywhere. Demos all things. He's just the demo guy.

Jason Atwood: The gist of it, and again, it's a quick read, is that companies are struggling with... I had an example of something we used to do, and I actually did my past job, which is that people are now moving to consumer devices and web applications instead of using the corporate ones because corporations can't stay ahead of the times. Not ahead of the times, I can't even stay two, three years with the times. So the devices I have at home, my Macbook, my iPad, my iPad, my iPhone 4, even my screen, everything I have is so much more advanced than anything I'll get in the enterprise. I have a MiFi, you know, a wireless network. It's all so much more advanced than anything I have at the office that companies are struggling with people just saying, well fine, I won't be on your network. I can work outside of your network and I can still be as productive. I can use Gmail, I can use a Mifi, I can use my own computer, I can bring in my own monitor because I can buy a 24 inch monitor for $190 from Dell and pop it on my desk whereas I have to go through 17 rounds of management sign off to get a 19 inch, 5 year old monitor. So, I think it's really interesting. Again, we're kind of in a newer company, newer startup, so everything we have is sort of put together, we get what we want, right? You want something, you get it. What else did you think about the article?

16:33 Justin Edelstein: Well, I think it's interesting where you connect it to the cloud, where the cloud brings that possibility of not being on old stuff. Now, it can't help with the hardware stuff, right? Obviously the cloud can't help you with having a six year old monitor on your desk.

Jason Atwood: It can't help with having a bad monitor, but it can help in that the cloud doesn't take as much resource. So Outlook 2003 on my desktop, or 2007, or Word whatever, Word million, will take a lot of resources to start up and gets kind of chunky. Cloud services since they are web based don't take as much. So you can use an older machine and still get the benefit of.

Justin Edelstein: This is true, but in the enterprise you also then have to think about different things like okay, maybe we don't have as powerful machines on people's desks, but we have to have super high powered, super fast bandwidth and connections to people's desks. So it actually shifts that a little bit within the enterprise. But what the cloud really does is it allows for the end user to have the experience of being on the latest and greatest version of any business application that they're using. They're not using Outlook 2003 because that is now seven or eight years old. Why should I use something that's seven or eight years old at work when at home I use something that is today's version? Why is Facebook always innovating and keeping up with the times and being this thing that I'm addicted to and use constantly to connect with people and do things and schedule events and all sorts of stuff, and at work I have a seven-year-old thing.

Justin Edelstein: That's sort of the promise of where the cloud sort of wins in this case, because enterprise software, first off, anytime you're building an app of any sort of complexity, it could take a year or two or even more. And by the time you actually build it and pilot it and test it and design it and get it out in front of users, it's two years in the making, it is old. It's not that thing that they're used to using at home that has upgraded 12 times since you've thought of this idea of what to build. So that's sort of where I think this article hits at, where things like CRM systems or ERP systems or HR systems can benefit from using cloud services because they'll always have these new features and they'll, when you use the cloud, you learn from the millions of other people that are using the same service and you get the usability of having to be able to service a couple million people.

Justin Edelstein: It's gotta be usable. So you don't have to go through your own little usability study or pilot or what have you. You sort of inherit that. So I think that's where the article hits the sweet spot, although it really could have been a little beefier. I guess maybe you'll put this in the notes for people to read.

19:39 Jason Atwood: Sure. It didn't really get, I think it didn't get to that point. I think the other point that sort of missed, that just sparked by what you said, is that cloud computing now with the sort of consumer based cloud computing model of people using these features from all these consumer web has raised the expectation level. Whereas 10 years ago, if I was at office, I was at the office and I had a year old Blackberry, well I probably had a year old cell phone and I probably had a year old computer and my email at home was a year old because I wasn't using cloud computing services so I wasn't always expecting to be on the latest version. Now almost everybody who's on something at home whether they're using a Gmail or whether they're using Rackspace or Facebook or Twitter they're on the latest version. They expect to always be on the latest version. They don't even, they stop to think about versioning. They think I want to use that and I don't care what version it's on. I want to use that and I want the new features. Of course, people complain a lot about features and new features and that's where the struggle goes from how to keep people updated to how to stay with the pace of these consumer web apps or enterprise apps all based in the cloud. So a couple of things talking about consumer web and consumer applications. Apple had an announcement yesterday, announced a few things. I think we could talk about a couple of them because they have some sort of cloud connection. one that... So MacBook Airs, two new ones, awesome. Interesting they don't have Flash installed in on them. That's a little ping off to Adobe. So they don't include Flash.

Justin Edelstein: Do you have to install it yourself when you land on a website? Like people aren't just

Jason Atwood: going to install it right away. Of course they will. But it's just that little bit of like, well, Flash is not the thing of the future. I'm not going to have it pre-installed on your OS. It's a little... Does it come with Java? I think it does, yeah. It sure should. Java's a much more, anyway. So Macbook Air is great. Talk about Lion, which is the new OS coming out summer. There's a couple features in there. They're basically taking a lot of the interface stuff they've learned in the last versions of, in the iOS and putting them onto their new OS. I think that's cool. The one that I kind of, if we're going to wrap it into the Cloud Focus Weekly podcast is the new application app store, which brings the same thing they had in the iTunes store, then went into iTunes apps, then went on to the iPhone and the iPad where you have to, I don't think they will make it have to, but you have an application store that checks for your application that you can download from that has a list of them you can see reviews on. It's centralized, it's trusted, it goes through a review process and they're going to bring that to the OS. So, and developers can put their stuff into it, it helps developers, there's still going to be that 70-30 cut. I think, I mean as a user of iPhone and iPad, I love the App Store, I go into it all the time, I buy new stuff, I buy more in applications on my, in terms of quantity not price, but in terms of my iPhone and iPad than I do on my OS because how do I find out about OS software? I don't, right? I used to go to a website called Version Tracker and look at that all the time, but that kind of stopped doing that. So this I think is great, I think it brings to cloud apps, right? All these apps, yeah, they install on your desktop, but it's always making sure it's checking, it's giving you the ability to double click and download the new version of even iLife last night. Why couldn't I download that and install the new version of iLife that came out? What are your thoughts?

23:17 Justin Edelstein: I don't really have too many thoughts on this one. It is what it is. It's an application store. Instead of having to find out about something on a blog or on a review that you read and have to go find it at some random website somewhere, it's a centralized place to go and find software. I'm not the biggest software person. I like to use just the things that I use. I don't go out and buy a whole lot of software, so it's not that huge of a deal for me.

Jason Atwood: How much software do you buy on your iPhone and your iPad?

Justin Edelstein: I buy a lot more apps on my iPhone and my iPad, but then I find that I don't use them. So I've stopped sort of doing that. So to me, it seems like it's a good deal for developers. Now they're going to have to give up a cut, but I think if they did an analysis, they'll find that they'll probably sell a whole lot more. So I think it'll be good for them. It's a good way of getting the community together and saying, look, we have this app dev community and everyone's going to publish the same way and it'll be somewhat fair, I guess. The only thing I can see is the grumblings and the gripes of getting your app into the store that we've heard, and maybe they've knocked these growing pains out because they have so many apps now that maybe they're just so good at it that it doesn't even matter. I can see someone being like, why do I want to go through this arduous review process when I can just put this thing up on my website.

Jason Atwood: Because it's instant marketing for you. Right.

Justin Edelstein: I mean, they're going to put it up on their website anyway. So I mean, right? I can't imagine that Apple saying, you can sell it this way or you can sell it this way, and that's it. I mean, that would be bad.

Jason Atwood: I think it'll be very interesting to see, since they probably will not stop the way to install them on the other side, that what happens with pricing. So if I can see an app called OmniFocus, which we use and like, and I look at it and I go, ooh, it's on the App Store for $59.99 for the desktop version. And they have a website. And they have a website and it sells for $49.95 because they don't have to give a 30% cut. And they actually make more money. And then do people drive traffic there by putting instructions? It's great here, but go over here to buy it? I think it becomes really interesting. The bigger piece is really not us. It's not us who know how to download DMG's, open them up. Not even installing software on the Mac is tough but you have to drag and drop it into your applications folder. How many times with your parents, who I'm sure don't listen so we can make fun of them, or my parents who don't listen at all, how do I install that? Where do I get that app? Can you install that for me? If I say it's just like on your iPhone, you go, you click, you hit buy, it installs and done and it keeps updated by itself, meaning it tells you every time. I think of my wife who, who, who, you know, I don't have to tell her how to install applications on the iPhone more than once. I told her once and now she knows and she knows to go in weekly and to check for updates. Imagine the power of that for all the consumers out there and to be able to control that for educational institutions, to be able to push them out through this app store, through private app stores. I think there's a lot there. We're just kind of seeing the top of it. So I think that's the most interesting news coming out of it. And then In the last piece of interesting news, little tiny thing, you sent me your agenda yesterday. I did.

26:44 Justin Edelstein: I built my agenda right away.

Jason Atwood: So the agenda builder was released for the Dreamforce portal. We've talked about Dreamforce portal. Let's back up a little bit for Dreamforce is a annual conference for users, prospects, friends, partners of Salesforce. It has become a bigger and bigger event. I think it almost had 20,000 people last year. It's become, it's held once a year in San Francisco. It's coming up in December. This year they launched a portal which is sort of a community portal with chatter and files and groups and it's become kind of a fun place I will say. It's a closed environment for people who registered. You can follow people. It's basically an online collaborative thing before the conference even starts. So we're in there and they now have an interactive agenda builder which they've always had an agenda builder of some sort. They announced it and they launched it inside the portal and it's gotten a lot of sort of people in there chatting about it and tagging it. You used it yesterday, I used it this morning, what did you think?

Justin Edelstein: It was alright. It was good to be able to actually put sessions on my calendar, because for the last month or however long it's been out, you've been able to follow sessions and talk about sessions through chatter, but you haven't been able to actually build your calendar. And they have a My Calendar, but it was essentially empty. So now you can use the agenda builders search for different sessions based on different criteria like advanced, intermediate, beginner, this day, this day, or that day, in this track, you know, financial services or what have you. And it brings up a list of all the sessions that are taking place within your search criteria and then you can click on it to get a little more information and then added to your calendar with a click. It's a little slower than I think it was last year, which is interesting, but I'm sure that there's a lot more going on in there. There's some logic that I actually wasn't a huge fan of, that last year I would put like four sessions at the same time on my calendar so that I knew that they were there, and then when I was at the conference I'd look at my calendar and I'd say, okay, I'm going to choose that But this year since they're actually adhering to reservations for sessions, so if you...

Jason Atwood: So you think you're not going to be able to get into a session you want to go to unless you're

Justin Edelstein: registered? If it's full, then you're not getting in unless you're registered. But then they're

Jason Atwood: gonna let, they're gonna literally check at the door? Yeah, they did that last year anyway. For

Justin Edelstein: some of the big ones. For all of them, they scanned you in. So they're actually connecting this... I

Jason Atwood: never registered for any of the sessions last year. Because it didn't matter last year. This year,

Justin Edelstein: you actually, if you register for a session and you're registered and it sells out and then you, Jason, try and go into that session and you didn't register for it, they're not letting you in. Because last year they had a problem with people registering for as many sessions as they wanted and then, like me, and then the sessions being sold out, you know, not sold out but no seats left, too full, and they had to say that you can't go in or, you know, there's standing room only along the back wall or something. So they're actually only letting you register for one session at a specific time slot, which I wish they let me register for a couple just so that I could throw them on my calendar so I know that they're happening.

30:09 Jason Atwood: Right. I agree.

Justin Edelstein: That's really it. I just want to know that they're happening so that, you know, I'll cancel my reservation a minute before and go to the one that I want to go to, but if I can only put one on my calendar at one time, then I'm missing out on, oh, Oh, maybe I don't feel like going to the clicks not code beginner session. I want to go to the FinServe session that is at the same time. I don't even know that exists anymore because I'm not walking around looking at the wall to see what sessions are. But I get it. They don't want to have people who register for a session not be able to actually go to it. So I get it.

Jason Atwood: I thought the builder was nice until I had the same problem. I registered for a bunch of stuff. Basically what I do is I look over the different sessions and I go, I want this, this, this, and this, and this. And I started to do that and it accepted everything I wanted. And then I went to get the next one and said, well, you already registered for something on this. It didn't tell me which one I was registered for. I'd like it to say, you already registered for X. Do you want to get rid of X and replace with Y? Yes, great, I'd like to do that. Because what I, again, it's a limited period of time. Show me my calendar and then kind of have me look at all the stuff and I can drag and drop over. I can see I'm registered for force.com app builder at 10 o'clock on Tuesday. Oh, there's another session I want to go. Okay. And again, is there another, sometimes there's multiple sessions of the same thing. Show me that. Like I think there's some complexity of it. I also like just to walk around and sometimes I don't want to go to a session. Like I'm tired. I've done three sessions in a row. I'm kind of, you know, I need coffee. I need to go to the bathroom. I want to go out and have a drink.

Jason Atwood: I'm not going to go to this next session. So to me, to lock me in a little bit more, I don't think that's helpful.

Justin Edelstein: I don't think you're locked in. I mean, they're not going to slap you on the wrist if you don't go. But they're going to know that you went. They're going to know that you've registered, and they're going to know that you showed up.

Jason Atwood: And I think the descriptions have to be much, much better and really talk about what's going on. I found that I was looking at it, and I was going much more for roundtables, because I'm actually more interested in hearing people talk and just to talk about things than to get up and do decks. I find the decks, I've seen the decks. I'm more interested in, and I can go see the decks alone. I want the conversation. They're going to put the content out there so you can see the decks. I can see all the decks. So that was interesting. Alright, so let's wrap it up this episode with the Cloud Focus app pick of the week. Rolls right off the tongue. I cannot believe you're going to pick yet another I think you picked this as the third type of this, but go ahead and tell me your cloud focus. I love surveys. So... Yeah, we use none, but we... But I love them.

Justin Edelstein: I love surveys for customer service. I love surveys that connect data to actual contacts and things within Salesforce. It's something that when we were in a previous life and we built out a service center for for 150 or so users, one of the big asks was can we send out post-resolution surveys, and there was not a great way to really send out that survey so that it connected back to the data within Salesforce. So I'm giving people a lot of options for how to do this, and I'm gonna pick Timba Surveys. Timba Surveys is a free product on the AppExchange. You can go and download it, put it into your Salesforce instance. is for free. I know my pricing for this one. Good job. And it has a great interface for dragging and dropping and building surveys and connecting surveys to different pieces of data within Salesforce. It's very well built, very clean interface,

33:59 Justin Edelstein: probably one of the best interfaces I've seen as far as building surveys within Salesforce. Now, there are other tools. Some of them are a little clunky. This one's really nice, simple, straightforward.

Jason Atwood: Nice! Timba survey by Timba Software. Mine is a consumer web app because that was what the podcast was about.

Justin Edelstein: Oh! Should have thought of that. Probably.

Jason Atwood: So, it's actually something that has new features today, so it kind of brought it up to me. Throwing out there that in a long, long, long time, I think 1995, 1994, started using of Quicken for the Mac. They have a new version every couple of years. It's really turned into just this old, horrible piece of software. It's a POS piece of software that exists on my... that I'm beholden to because I've been using it for 15 years. The new version that they released is terrible. I had to backtrack out of it. So along comes something, a company called Mint that actually got bought by Quicken, which does not planning in the future because that is what Quicken can do that these things can't do and I hope someday they figure that out. Which is that if I write you a check today, I go put it in my Quicken, it'll deduct from my account and I'll see that I don't have that money in my account as opposed to if I write you a check today, I wait for Mint to pick it up, it's waiting until you cashed it. So I look at my account, I have $3,000, I wrote you a check for $1,000, it still says I have $3,000 until you cash it. Anyway, so it's mint for what it does and this is based on even an old technology that Yodlee was very good for, which is that you give it a lot of usernames and passwords to all your financial sites and you just get over the security of that. And then it goes out and pulls in all of your information and categorizes it and gives you graphs and then sends you alerts if you have fees or if you've gone overdraft. I have a lot of budgets set up, just kind of funds. You can set up a budget and say, I don't want to spend more than $50 a month in fast I actually got one the other day because we've been going to Subway a lot. So I got an alert saying, you spent more money on fast food this month than you said you wanted to, or coffee. But it pulls from all your accounts, so you don't really have to do anything other than go in and look. And they also have an iPhone version that does the same thing. It's cloud based, clearly, because it's on the internet. It's Mint, and it's owned by Quicken now.

Jason Atwood: I hope they don't destroy it like they've destroyed Quicken, which is owned by Intuit or Intuit. I hope they destroyed many pieces of software. It was a competitor to their Quicken Online which they then killed and replaced with Mint. So try it out. It's free. Mint.com. Really cool way of sort of looking at your expenses. I've turned a lot of people on to using it. It's a great kind of tool. Just doesn't give you kind of forward thinking stuff but it's a great way to look at where you're spending your money and at least think about that. Okay. That's my code. Focus. Pick of the week. What we're blogging about, what we're tweeting about, what we're podcasting about. blog.arkusinc.com is the place to go. at arcusinc, twitter.com at arcusinc or twitter.com at jasonmattwood or twitter.com at justinedelstein or facebook.com slash arcusinc. A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. We're also on LinkedIn. We have a company profile on there if you want to search and follow us there. Just throwing it out there. out there. But the best way to follow the podcast as always is to go to iTunes, type

37:28 Jason Atwood: in Cloud Focus Weekly, hit subscribe. Every time we publish a new podcast it will come flying down over the interwebs from CacheFly, which is where we host it, very quickly to your computer. You can then sync it up with one of the million devices that you have to listen to your podcast on, which is great. And you can always leave us a review there. We'd love that. Nice reviews would be great. So until next week, thanks for joining us on Cloud Focus Weekly. And until next week, we'll see you in the clouds.