Holiday Spirits - Episode #24 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 24th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the fourth week in December of 2010. This episode titled Holiday Spirits. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, your cloud computing expert. And I'm your host, Jason Atwood. Joining me today with his holiday spirits intact, I'm hoping, is Justin. Justin, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Can't wait for the holidays. It's a day away. Day away. Yes, it is. We're recording this the day before Christmas Eve, which basically is holiday. Christmas Eve, yeah. We have a lot of our clients who already have their out of office emails on. We probably have to turn ours on.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I got one the other day that was like, I'll be out till January 3rd. That's all it said.

Jason Atwood: I got one that said, I'll be out till January 6th.

Justin Edelstein: Ooh, 6, good for you.

Jason Atwood: So for the agenda day, we have a new blog post by Larry, talking about some of the holiday spirit. Who's Larry? Larry's our third partner here at Arcus.

Justin Edelstein: I thought he was to remain unnamed. Eh, now he's named. All right.

Jason Atwood: He is on the website. And actually, his name is on the blog post. That's true. Yeah, I'm not really giving much away. All right.

Justin Edelstein: That was going to be like a fun little game we were playing.

Jason Atwood: Who is the third person?

Justin Edelstein: Who is the unnamed man?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, he's now named. Salesforce wants a new help section. We'll talk about that and give our opinions, pro or not. I think we actually disagree on this one. We do. It'll be an interesting discussion. We have some other Salesforce news. They've bought another company. Small little thing. And they bought eTACT. We'll talk about who that is, what it means, and why it could possibly help or hurt Salesforce going further. So there's some Apple and Google TV news. We like to talk about our cloud entertainment. So that'll be a cloudy discussion. And then Google Apps Marketplace. They have some big news on who's installing them and the biggest and most important installed apps from the marketplace, which is in some ways a direct competitor of the App Exchange. So we can talk about what that affects. And then we'll do our Cloud Focus app pick of the week. To round it out, give you something to listen to. We will have a podcast next week, so let's get going.

Jason Atwood: First and foremost is Larry's blog post entitled, I actually want to get to the name of it.

Justin Edelstein: cloud companies making giving back as easy as their technology.

Jason Atwood: Which is something we've talked about. We have talked about it on the podcast that his talked about two things. One was Dreamforce 10 and the ability to do good at the event where you could actually go and spend 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes and do one of, I think, three different causes.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, so traditionally, Salesforce has their one-one-one model of corporate philanthropy. So 1% of their employees' time, 1% of their product, and 1% of their equity giving back to charitable organizations, or they have their own foundation that they run this through. In the past, at Dreamforce, they have held foundation events where you can show up generally the day before Dreamforce starts or that day where there's the global gala at night or the reception gala that night and go fix up a park in San Francisco or paint something or do something good within the city of San Francisco, but you have to go... I don't want to say it's a burden, but it sort of is. You have to go somewhere to do something.

03:56 Jason Atwood: You need to come early to the... Come early.

Justin Edelstein: You have to go, you have to do it, you have to sign up for it, etc. So they made it really easy this year by bringing those activities into the conference center. So into Moscone West.

Jason Atwood: I think in actually all of them. Was there one in each?

Justin Edelstein: I think the one that was most prominent was the one in West that I noticed. And is the one that both you and Larry participated in, which was Stop Hunger Now. And essentially they had a chain, a line of people creating meals. Right.

Jason Atwood: And Larry's point to the article, and I think was nice, that it was easy, right? I think I made this point in a podcast, maybe he's listening to a podcast. That's interesting. Doubtful. Was that you could walk up, stand in line, sign up within 30 seconds. They basically explained how to do it in another 30 seconds. And then you stood there with two other people and did this task. Just straight up did it. You didn't have to, you could take 30 minutes or 20 minutes. He said he did 40 packs. I think I did about either 30 minutes worth. And I don't remember how many we did, but we did a lot. And it was great. It was just like being put to work very quickly. And I could actually give, I could do something in what I consider, not spare time, but very crunch time. He told me I had to go spend five hours and leave the place and go do this and get trained for two hours, and I think that was the point of his podcast was, or sorry, his blog post, common mistake I make, that really using sort of technology to make charity easier will get more people to do it. Right. And I use actually, one of my picks of the week was One Cause, which is the almost, Again, talking about making things easy to give back, One Cause is a website, you pick a charity, I think they're all schools, although they might have other charities, I use a school, and you just go to One Cause first, click on any vendor, so like Amazon or iTunes or Apple or whatever, and then a percentage, which is basically the referral fee, or percentage of the referral fee, gets tracked and gets sent to One Cause, and then they send out checks to your school or your charity. I use it all the time, I've literally raised, I think this year I raised $120 for my school, just by clicking there first. So I didn't have to stop. I didn't do it. Just click, and then Amazon. Click, Amazon. Click, Amazon. So he actually mentioned one other, which were, I guess we could talk about.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, well, he mentioned Google Chrome for a cause. Another easy way to give back. This is really the point, is that these companies, Salesforce and Google have made it extremely easy to give back. And it's not a black hole. It's not, here's $100, Red Cross, and then where does that go? You sort of know what you're doing. You're making meals, or you're clicking on things here in Google Chrome for a cause. Essentially, a way for Google to raise adoption for Chrome and do a good thing at the same time. So Google, over the last week, the third week in December, anytime you would click and open up a new tab inside of your Chrome browser once installing the Chrome for a Cause extension, you would earn a point or a tab. And at the end of the week or at the end of the day, you can donate those tabs to different things.

07:35 Justin Edelstein: One of five different charities. I donated with my tabs, I think I planted three trees. I donated two vaccinations and three books. So I made donations just by surfing the web. It was pretty interesting.

Jason Atwood: It was, and again, it's a two-sided affair. I think both for Salesforce too. Salesforce does things that are truly for charity and for the foundation, but it also gives them good street cred. You know, another example of sort of the making charity easy is all the texting. So they have, you know, 10 years ago, or not 10, 3 years ago, if you wanted to give to a charity something that was coming up, you wouldn't just, you know, you'd have to go or write a check or go online. Now, a lot of these services, you just text something to some number, and then $10 comes out of your account, or $5, you know, and goes to the charity that you were texting to. Again, making it very easy. Of course, I think of abuse. We heard about the kid who raised $9,000 worth of his AT&T.

Justin Edelstein: Didn't realize that he was actually being charged the $10 on the bill.

Jason Atwood: I don't think he thought it was 10 per or something like that.

Justin Edelstein: Well, how can you not realize that when they say you're going to ... Now they have to make it explicitly clear. When you do this, it will be $10 charged to your bill. Right. Which makes it easy, though. Sure. Hey, if it was easy to donate $10, I'd donate $10. And I know exactly where it's going.

Jason Atwood: And I'll give you one more example. Again, not in Larry's blog post, but there's a lot of stuff on causes on Facebook. So I've had two friends of mine who actually, one who works for Salesforce, who might listen to the podcast, put up something saying, I'm raising money for x. I'm raising money for this foundation or this cause. One of them was raising money for a school in Africa. and was doing it through running the marathon. And literally put it on Facebook. It took me two seconds to go click, click, either Google checkout or PayPal, and I was able to say fine, no problem, done, I'll do it. Actually Mark Benioff asked for money for the chosen, and I did that too. Because it's just, if it's just easy, it's now where I put my charity money. I don't think at the end of the year I should give this money to this. Mine is, I will react. So if someone asks for money for this, sure. You know, it's as long as it's a good cause and I believe in it. Anyway, a really interesting, you know, again, using technology to help, and sort of cloud technology, we call it all cloud technology, to help raise money for charities. It's a great thing for the holiday spirit. All right, so we have probably a little bit of debate coming up here, mano y mano. So Salesforce, over last weekend, actually in the middle of one of our pushes for a client, we went to go check help on something. And there's a new help section that Salesforce launched.

Justin Edelstein: Doesn't seem like it rolled out for every pod. Because I've seen it on other, in certain specific instances like ours, we have the new help section. And others.

10:43 Jason Atwood: Do you know how hard we're on?

Justin Edelstein: We're on NA8. Oh, we are? Yes.

Jason Atwood: You actually know that because we got moved. Yes. But we are using the My Domain feature, which kind of hides the fact of what pod we're on.

Justin Edelstein: Hides that in the URL, but you can always find it on trust.salesforce.com, they have a little thing. Type in your URL and we'll tell you the pod. True. But I noticed one client we have is on NA4 and they did not have the new help. So maybe they're rolling it out.

Jason Atwood: Describe what the new help is and why you like it. So I... You have notes. I have notes.

Justin Edelstein: I actually went through the new help and saw some things that I thought were interesting about the new help. So as everyone knows when you, or everyone who's a Salesforce user knows, there is a help and training section at the top. You click a link and it pops open a new window and there's your help. And in the past, it's been very generic. It had tabs for my training, my cases, and help. And you can type a search, and basically you were searching up against solutions within the Salesforce knowledge base. They've reconfigured the whole thing to actually work with their Salesforce knowledge product. So it no longer works with the old solutions product, it now works with the knowledge product.

Jason Atwood: I wonder how they transferred those solutions over to their own.

Justin Edelstein: I wonder how they did, I wonder if there was a utility or something that they used. Anyway, it has some cool things with search. So it has good type ahead with search. So you start searching and it starts bringing back potential hits for you, which I always like with search, like suggestions, things like that.

Jason Atwood: It's almost ubiquitous at this point. When you go into search box and it doesn't type ahead, you almost ask, why are you not going to type ahead?

Justin Edelstein: So now it has that. It has facets for drill downs. And when I say facets, I mean things where you can say, oh, based on this, like I'm an admin, based on function, I'm a salesperson, I'm an admin. And it can help guide you, like a guided navigation through the search, and get you to the right answer at the right time, which I thought was good. And it also has, like I mentioned, role-based help. So you can say, I'm an admin, I'm a developer, I'm a sales person, I'm a marketing person, and the help could be sort of tailored towards you, more personalization. So it brings the help page up to the current web standards, like personalization, type ahead, drill down, searching, that kind of thing. It has gadgets. It has little components within the help page that you can completely get rid of, meaning if you don't want to see this, well, completely get it off the page. Like if this section is not helpful for you, you could completely remove it.

Justin Edelstein: You can hit a carrot and have it collapse so that it's all collapsible. It has drag and drop. It honestly has things that the Salesforce homepage should have. Any user can drag and drop these sections of the page around to their liking and they stick. They're persistent. I imagine down the road that they'll roll this into other products on regular Salesforce, but I like the fact that over time they're going to continue to build more gadgets out and you can drag them and drop them around. There's multiple different ways to contact support now within the portal. You can obviously open a case. With one click you can create a case. You don't have to click around to get to the point where you are able to create a case. It also has the ability to go right into the answers community and the ideas community and it has a live chat. So all those things I thought were good one clicks away that used to not exist.

14:38 Justin Edelstein: When you hit help you wouldn't have the option to go head over to the answers community and ask the rest of the community a question. You didn't have the live chat option. So these are all good things. And they also, on that one screen, give you some advanced reporting and analytics on your usage of your org. So if you're an admin and you have a large org that you're administering, you can look at that monthly metrics email that Salesforce sends out. Well, now you can look at a subset of those metrics just within the help section that I thought was, oh, that's rather useful if you're doing adoption reporting and you want to do it on a weekly basis against those metrics, it's right there for you within the help. And I think the look and feel is just a lot more up to standard with both the new look and feel of Salesforce and what the web looks like today and what you would expect from a help portal. So I thought it's a really good improvement. I think you have an opposing view, but I think I just made a strong argument.

Jason Atwood: Well, this isn't a debate because you'd lose. But I think it's, listen, revamping the help section, really good, needed to be done. It's clearly one of the oldest sections. I like that they're using the new products. I like that they're integrating with things. I like that they've added new tabs. A couple things I take issue with. One is the launch of it. So as someone who trains users, more often than not, I end up doing some training for users. Whether it be training like I'm actually training them on their system or whether it be training for sort of explaining Salesforce in the, here's Salesforce for the first time, you haven't seen it, but maybe you're gonna use it in the future. And someone who's pretty connected to the Salesforce community, I wouldn't say I'm the most connected person, but I'm pretty much in there. I didn't know this was coming. I mean, I knew that they were doing a revamp of it, but I didn't know when it was launching and when it was hitting our orgs or the orgs. So it was a surprise to me and I was on with a client talking about it, talking about help and saying, oh, you can go here and whoa, oh, they must have launched the new help. So that kind of, I think there should be more help about the new help. That's issue number one. Number two is, think you like the design? I think it does look more web 2.0 or 3.0. I think it's all over the place though. Cause help is really, I think they should have gone the other way. I think they should have gone help as a search box. That's it. all these gadgets and widgets and wizmos and donner and blixen it's just too much it distracts from what you're trying to get to ninety nine percent of the time i need help with fields i need help with a formula i need help with whatever and to have to look over all these three columns of all these different things and answers and blogs and features and help and contact support and add widgets and social

Justin Edelstein: that's not what that should be. Is the search box not the most prominent thing on the page?

Jason Atwood: It is, but with all the other millions of items on the page as a UI, not a UI expert, it's the one we used to build UI, it's distracting. And you immediately start to look down like, oh, okay, training, fact, documentation, recent items, highest rated, social media, and you're gone. I think it should have been simplified more than it even was. I thought the old one was a little bit too much as well, simplified. So those are sort of my, and I'll take issue with just some of the basic stuff. Again, it drops what's important too far below and it plays a little bit too much to let's make fun, let's make pretty colors and things as opposed to functionality. Having SASE in the search, on a big search bar with a SASE there, what does that have to do with help? I'm in help, I need help now. I don't need to see pictures of SASE, right? That's marketing, not help. And my thing is help should be very directional, very targeted, not pretty and SASE-like. So that's just, again, I applaud the direction. I think they missed on a few marks.

18:37 Jason Atwood: And whoever designed it, sorry, that's just my opinion. Again, it's a little too marketing blitz. Look at what cool stuff we can do. Not so much, oh great, here's the real stuff you need. Okay, so, oh, and by the way, they don't single sign you into Answers. They don't single sign you into Ideas.

Justin Edelstein: They do a terrible job with that anyway. Like if you're sitting in the Ideas community and then you click over to Answers, you have to log in. It's not a, that whole thing is not very well done, in my opinion.

Jason Atwood: I think, personally, the Chatter portal, for the Chatter Dreamforce portal, was a better, was a better implementation of help than this is.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, with the Challenge Us group, and just all the people that are in there.

Jason Atwood: Bing, I'm pointing at my notes, I'm doing the bingo, like the two syllables, one word. That was a better implementation. If they had taken the lessons, I know they probably built this way before, but if they'd taken the lessons of what they learned that Dreamforce portal and ported that into help, that would have been better. Anyway, my opinion, we can move on. And again, sorry to anybody who I've offended. Next up is another purchase. Wow, this is going to be, I guess we got off Salesforce for one week and now we're back with a full Salesforce scene.

Justin Edelstein: Well, we have more stuff later on. We can breeze through this one.

Jason Atwood: So Salesforce buys somebody.

Justin Edelstein: It's their sixth acquisition of this calendar year. Good stat.

Jason Atwood: They bought eTax, which... E-T-A-C-T-S. You don't have to memorize it because they're shutting down in three days. Ah, okay. Or in seven days. Don't even bother. Don't even bother.

Justin Edelstein: It was just launched this year, by the way.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, it had angel funding from people like Ashton Kutcher. Weird. Basically, it was a interesting, it's just a product. They had two pieces. They had one you installed into Gmail, another one was, I guess, separate. you gave your username and password for, and I never used the product, I just went and read it up on it, as much as they said they were shutting down, they left a lot of stuff open, you can still see, you gave your username and password to your email, it would then go in, it would read through all the headers, not the bodies, all the headers of your email, and basically create a social contact list, and then based on when you sent to and from people, would start to create a, I'm trying to think of what it would call it, some sort of you've been contacting these people on this frequency. Let's say you and I, for example. I email you once a week. Not true. Not true at all, but I'm saying, I'm giving you an example. So then, if it then goes by a month that I have an email, eTax would say, hey, looks like you used to email Justin once a week. You should email, you haven't contacted him in a while.

Jason Atwood: I'm watching your interaction with people and I'm reminding you that we're obviously partners in a company.

Justin Edelstein: Well, the reason why is because we oftentimes use Google Wave instead.

Jason Atwood: Nice way to bring it in. Got it. Pound it out. So this is a way to say, it's meant for clients, leads, think about that. Right. If it's reading through all my stuff and then I don't know what they're doing with it, Salesforce, but I'm gonna-

21:43 Justin Edelstein: They're gonna shut it down and integrate it somehow. Here's my projection. Go on.

Jason Atwood: They'll use the technology and the algorithms for rating who you contact to go into your contacts and leads and accounts in Salesforce to do that metric analysis. So then the logic behind it will come in as either reports or as a module in Salesforce to say, you have not, I mean, I built the list and I actually-

Justin Edelstein: Right, it's not- It's not built in. Instead of like using last activity date- Well,

Jason Atwood: you could build the one that says date since last activity, you can build a formula.

Justin Edelstein: Right, instead of doing that, you could potentially have something like this tell you or even say, you know, leads you having contacted in X amount of time.

Jason Atwood: 60 days, 30 days, 90 days. Or you had a heavy frequency of these people, of these contacts in July, you fell off with them, why? Right. And sort of self-nominated.

Justin Edelstein: And even look at other things that are related. Like you have an open opportunity for a large amount of money and you haven't contacted these three people who are contact roles in the opportunity for three weeks.

Jason Atwood: And one of them is the decision maker. Right. Look at all that. We just built it. We just built it. Done. That's not always going to come out and be. But maybe the 17th round of it. Dreamforce 2013. Done. We just built it. So that's ETACS.

Justin Edelstein: That's got its own cloud. Done.

Jason Atwood: It'll get its own cloud. We're not bitter, though. So next up on the item.

Justin Edelstein: Why don't we move off Salesforce? Let's.

Jason Atwood: Let's not talk about Salesforce anymore. Salesforce.

Justin Edelstein: Let's move on to some cloud entertainment.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, so two kind of pieces of news. I'm kind of combining them because we've talked about them in the past. And again, I know our listeners are fans of these types of things. I'll throw this into the cloud entertainment section of our podcast.

Justin Edelstein: The module, if you will.

Jason Atwood: So the two competitors, we've talked about these two before, Apple TV, which has been out for years. I own two of them, the old one and the new one. And then the new one, which is Google TV, both trying to make a play for, let's call it cloud entertainment. Stuff that exists somewhere else, meaning on the internet, that then gets integrated into your TV in a seamless and entertaining way. Apple has taken the approach of a dual approach, saying yes, you can rent movies, you can buy movies, you can rent TV shows for $99.99, and we'll stream it to you instantly, and it'll be great. We'll integrate things like Netflix, which I've actually been using a lot. I've been watching Parks and Recreation, the series, on Netflix to the Apple TV, the new Apple TV. It's great. Well done.

Justin Edelstein: The only thing that my girlfriend, whom I bought the new Apple TV for, really uses it for is streaming Netflix.

Jason Atwood: It's worth the 99 bucks, because Roku's 99 dollars. It actually is.

Justin Edelstein: And she has a Wii, and that can stream Netflix, but it's a terrible experience.

Jason Atwood: That is one of those things of two devices doing the exact same job, and the user interface makes one of the experiences absolutely horrible. In that you have to take the Wii remote out, which you can

24:51 Justin Edelstein: point at the screen and move it around. No.

Jason Atwood: No good. It's a great game design. It's a really bad anything else in the world you want to do design. So that's sort of Apple TV. Now, the cool thing with Apple TV is that it's based on their iOS platform, which is the same platform, the same OS that's running on the iPhone. mobile devices. iPad, which means that, and we are predicting, everybody's predicting, so it's not us, that they will open it up and allow for applications to run on top of Apple TV.

Justin Edelstein: And they already have the Netflix app, right? It is not.

Jason Atwood: That is built in the OS. It's not a Netflix app. It's not.

Justin Edelstein: It's built into the operating system. It's totally different. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, totally different.

Jason Atwood: Because the Netflix app that's on the iPad stinks. That's not true. It's basically a web view of it, and it's slow. It pauses. It stinks. It does what it does. I disagree. I think it does very well. It's just the website. It's not different. If you use the Apple TV, it's actually different. It feels different moving around. It does all the stuff that the rest of the Apple TV does. Let me move on. Let me move on. Move on. All right. So then Google TV is coming out with their version, which is sort of they're going to have a standalone box. They have standalone boxes made by third parties. They're not going to create any hardware themselves. And they have it built into the new Sony TV that they've doing lots of things around. So those are the two competitors. Apple TV is just about to hit a million, a million, which people are saying isn't really a huge number, but it is for maybe a second breed product. For a hobby. For a hobby. Google TV is actually struggling, and they've pushed off some of the updates, they've pushed off some of the next versions of it, and I don't think people are adopting it as fast as others. I've looked at it a couple times, I still can't put my head around why I want it.

Jason Atwood: Apple TV is an easy, it's $99, it sits outside, it does a bunch of stuff, including air streaming internally, which I think is what makes it even 10 times better. Google TV's like, okay, so it's Google, and I can do YouTube, and I can surf, and put things in the corner, but yeah, I love this.

Justin Edelstein: I don't wanna watch YouTube on my television.

Jason Atwood: I don't really wanna watch YouTube.

Justin Edelstein: But that's what I mean, YouTube is like good for funny little two minute videos that you watch when you're got nothing else to do, I don't want to put it on my television because my television's 42 inches or larger. It's going to look like crap anyway. Oh, it does. So, yeah, I don't want YouTube on my TV. Like I never use YouTube on Apple TV. You can get to YouTube on the Apple TV. You can get to it everywhere. I never, never, ever go to it. Never.

Jason Atwood: I do use it on the iPhone occasionally.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, the iPhone or the iPad when someone says, hey, here's a funny video and it's on YouTube and it's two and a half minutes long.

Jason Atwood: Or your daughter's having a freak out in the car and you need to give her something to play cater and you just throw on Care Bears off of YouTube.

Justin Edelstein: There you go. Awesome. Never thought of that. Don't have a daughter.

Jason Atwood: So we should call this the personal episode. We've broken some new personal ground here. So let's move on to Google Success. Yeah. Which is the Google Marketplace. That's right. They have two pieces of, two announcements really. One was that over four million users have downloaded at least one Marketplace app. And then the other one was at least a list of the top 10 downloaded ones and what people were using them for. A little background, Google Marketplace is the ability to install applications built by third parties into your Google Apps place, so where you have Google Docs, Gmail, Calendar, et cetera, et cetera. So Wave, Google Wave, see we could have brought it right there. And they sometimes are free. I think the free ones are probably doing better than not. And then there's pay versions. And they extend the functionality. functionality, they do have some connectivity. So they will do things like maybe sending things to Docs or putting things into spreadsheets. But generally, the big to-do is that you can enable people within your Google Apps environment to see it.

28:43 Jason Atwood: Meaning you can say, these three people get this app, and these don't. So it's kind of got that enterprise class feel. And that it's a single sign-on. That's really the thing. That's really it. It's a single sign-on. So then the authentication is taken care of. And so I don't have to say, use this app versus go to this website to do this project management. No, no, no, it's built in. It's a click away. There's other ways that could have made it easier to sort of go in between. So that's what Google Apps Marketplace. Again, a big competitor in a lot of ways to AppExchange except for these things are not running on Google.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it's a little different. It's not a native app that's sitting inside of a platform. It's sort of a single sign-on to an app that could be running anywhere.

Jason Atwood: And for the real enterprise, meaning big enterprise, they're not going to use this. They're not using this. This is good for small companies who need to add product management or drawing.

Justin Edelstein: Very good for small companies. And some of the apps are built on, some of them are just souped up Google Spreadsheets.

Jason Atwood: They're built in the Google App Engine. So the top list of top recently installed apps of 2010 was MiniMoon, Insightly, Zoho CRM, Aviary Design Suite, Mavenic, OutRight, MailChimp, RapidTask, InSync, and MyERP.com were the top 10. And then again, over 4 million people, at least I think, what was it? 4 million users, at least one app have downloaded at least one app. Right. It's interesting because you don't download it, but whatever.

Justin Edelstein: Well we've installed a few.

Jason Atwood: We've installed a few and used none. Right. Well, I mean, I look at it too. I mean, now we're back on my Salesforce hat. I look at it and I go, oh, that's a great app. That does some really neat stuff. But I've already made such an investment in my platform of choice, and I know that, A, I can go over to AppExchange and probably pick something similar, and B, I can build most of this stuff. So, oh, you're tracking time off. Okay, I'll just go build that. Oh, you track tasks. I already have things that do that. Oh, you track CRM stuff. I have a platform that does CRM, pretty sure. Let me go back a little. Oh yeah, it does, right. So for me, it's not really getting a whole bunch of net new stuff. Plus, my gut feel is a lot of this is fly-by-night stuff. Right, if I'm going to, I'll love to play around technology and I'll go play around with anything, but when I'm gonna invest a ton of time, I mean, again, we're gonna talk about Google Wave forever, but I feel burned by Google Wave. I've invested a lot of time and energy into it. We're gonna talk about Google Wave forever. forever until it's infatuated and we're on it.

Jason Atwood: I've invested so much time in that technology and that platform and it's going away. It's one of the biggest companies on the planet and it's still going away. So all these little ... I looked at a mini moon and in sightly ... A mini moon looked like project management Facebook style. Zoho CRM I've played around with before, one of these other ones. MailChimp. So great apps. Interesting. I don't have a feeling that if I started using them and really built them into my process and built my company around them that I could rely on them in six months or a year. That's just my gut feel. What are your thoughts?

31:59 Justin Edelstein: No, I feel the same way. I mean, I'm not 100% sure where the marketplace is going. I think it does follow the model of the AppExchange, the Apple App Store, that soon to be Mac store that's going to be sitting on your Apple. It's a new paradigm for buying software and in that respect it's a good thing because you're already a Google Apps user, you have a login, you have authentication and it makes it really easy to distribute and authenticate users into other apps that might be useful for the business. But that being said, if you've already made your platform choice and said Salesforce is what I'm doing for CRM because it's best in class CRM and I'm not going to use some other CRM system because it has a Google login, so be it.

Justin Edelstein: But there might be things in there to come that are interesting and certainly the Google App Engine takes a hit with all the announcements that happened at Dreamforce, right? like being able to write Java on the force.com platform, being able to write Ruby on the force.com platform, certainly takes a chunk out of the Google App Engine market share, per se. So we'll see where it goes. It's still an infant. And it seems like they're doing OK so far. Four million downloads or four million installs or whatever they want to call it.

Jason Atwood: I guess it's hard to compare it against what. So 4 million installs. I mean, if you look at installs.

Justin Edelstein: We installed things and never used it. So great.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, usage would be something I'd like to see more of. And I think that the thing, if I'm, I'll put it on my consulting hat, if I'm advising companies of what to look at, one of the things I'll say as a concern for Google Apps that you don't have as much concern for with the AppExchange is where your data is. So if you take a Google App, for the most part, and again, you have to be careful about this. So there are products that we know and love, Conga, right? Conga Composer, love it. It does use their service, their external service. They actually send data away from your server. So you have to know that. It installs in Salesforce, and it becomes a button, and does all this great stuff. But your data, or some percentage of your data, goes away to another service and then comes back. Same thing with all these Google Apps. They're not on any one platform that you know or trust.

Justin Edelstein: And you've done your security review on Google Apps as a large company and said, okay, they passed the sniff test, they passed the ethical hack test, whatever they let us do to them, they passed. Well, that's great, but did a VIRI design suite pass that same test? Nope.

Jason Atwood: Hack test, security, and I think that's something, we always say big companies should be worried about that. That bar needs to be started coming down. And we work for companies that I know and friends of ours who would actually be the people who went to their servers and literally knocked on the doors, looked at their security, looked at what their admins had access to, did they have chat or not. I mean, the big hardcore stuff. As a small company, you don't have the time and energy resources to do that. Nor do you need to. Well, that's not true. I think you need to have it in the back of your mind that when you're making these platform plays, you should at least have a sense of is it transparent, is there uptime reported, are there certain things, yes you're not going to do an on-site business.

35:42 Justin Edelstein: But there are certain things that as a small business are worth more to you than, obviously your data is extremely important, but are you going to go through the time and effort of doing all of these security things to a service or Or are you going to build up your own internal platform to do those things? Odds are you're going to choose, OK, I'm going to go with that service. Right.

Jason Atwood: But as you grow, I just think it's something they should always keep in the back of your mind. It doesn't matter how small you are, because your data and your customer data, if you have five customers or five million, you still don't want that to be compromised. So always something you should think about. Right. All right. Well, I think that wraps up our news for the week. We're kind of going along on this one to give you some of the lessons. It's a holiday. It's a holiday.

Justin Edelstein: On your travels to the in-laws. That's right. Pop it on. Listen to the Cloud Focus Weekly.

Jason Atwood: So, we'll go to our app pick of the week and I'll let you go first. Great.

Justin Edelstein: So since this was a giving back, charity focused episode, certainly at the very beginning, I'm going to pick DonorsChoose. So I've used DonorsChoose a number of times to donate money. It's another very simple way to donate money to specific, in general, education causes that you want to donate to. And generally, DonorsChoose will give you a, you go to the website, donorschoose.org, you can donate any amount of money to a specific thing. So it's like Mrs. Jones' classroom in Brooklyn needs a new projector. They need to raise $900 and you can give money towards that specific need, right? Or a classroom in Manhattan needs new desks. They need $1,000 and you can donate whatever you want towards that specific item.

Justin Edelstein: So DonorsChoose.org, a really easy way to donate money and they've teamed up actually with Bing, Microsoft, the search engine, to Microsoft's, I'm sorry, it's not a search engine, their decision engine. Please tell me about this, Microsoft.

Jason Atwood: This sounds like an interesting company.

Justin Edelstein: This company, Microsoft, they have a search engine. It's called Bing, but they call it a decision engine. So if you go to bing.com slash gives, plural, gives, they've teamed up with DonorsChoose they are looking to raise a million dollars to give away to schools and by simply just you know Clicking through you give a dollar and then if you once you click through and make being your homepage you give another five So it's sort of a quick and easy way to give six dollars To donors choose and and I thought that that was a good Pick of the week for this week

Jason Atwood: That is actually good. I like it. I just did it and I raised a dollar.

38:45 Justin Edelstein: Great. Yeah, I've already done it.

Jason Atwood: So I would say DonorsChoose, I've used it before. What's nice about it is that not only can you go and you pick a project, and it's very specific, like you said, I raised money, helped raise money for my... Oh, I know what it was. I got a gift certificate from somebody for doing something. And maybe it was Salesforce for speaking at Dreamforce.

Justin Edelstein: I got the same thing. And that's where you use it. Yep.

Jason Atwood: I went in and I saw that it was something in the school in my building. It was for a classroom and it was for, I think it was a musical instrument. I think it was an electric piano or something they needed to teach. So I went and I had the whatever gift certificate and I matched it or I made more to get it to where they need to get to. Great, nice experience. Great, you do it, you sign up. But I got a note, I think a month later, whenever it got funded, then it got sent to them from the teacher through DonorsChoose, so it wasn't to me like, you know, Dear Jason, saying, I mean it was to me but it was through them meaning it wasn't, you know, it didn't come to my house, saying thank you very much, we really appreciate it, we're really using it in the classroom and I thought that was great. I thought, again, the connectivity of what technology can bring to a charity is great.

Justin Edelstein: know exactly what you're giving, for what purpose, and to who. It's not the black hole of here's $100, and maybe 12 of it will go towards textbooks. Absolutely.

Jason Atwood: So what a great, great one. I'm going to make mine quick, because I primarily want to just put it so everybody can get to it. But I want to make mine the Google Cause extension for Google Chrome. It is no longer active, meaning that the promotion has come and gone. But I would say install the extension anyway, because what I'm hoping they do is they have the extension kind of reactivate itself. So if you install the extension now, it basically installs a little button in your Google Chrome extension. It'll get you to use Google Chrome. They'll like that. It'll get you to download an extension. They'll like that too. And then when a new cause comes up, my guess is that that thing's going to pop up. And they're going to say, we have a new cause for this week. Because again, that cause was only for, I think it was four It was from the 16th to 19th.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, like 15th through 19th.

Jason Atwood: We got on on the 16th, so we could only release whatever. But I would say install it now. So let's say I could see them, and again, maybe I'm overthinking what they're thinking, but I could see them when the next big problem happens, a tsunami or whatever. They could then go enable that, remotely enable the extension and say, we're raising money for the relief of whatever. For the next three days, whatever you do, we will then send $1 towards that cost. I think that would be a great thing.

Justin Edelstein: I think Chrome did too. They did themselves a favor for adoption. They got people to use Chrome, and once you use it and you like it, you keep using it. And then they did a good thing by donating money based on just people clicking on things.

41:45 Jason Atwood: Yeah, no, again, I don't mind if you mix your marketing with your causes as long as it really does give. And so the Bing.

Justin Edelstein: There's also a social component to it all, right? All these things now have the, once you've done it, post it to Facebook. Once you've done it, post it to Twitter.

Jason Atwood: I just tweeted the Bing one that you talked about. So yes.

Justin Edelstein: I Facebooked it just because. Facebooked it. Is that a thing? That is a thing.

Jason Atwood: You know where you can find us on Facebook? Tell me. Facebook.com slash Arcus Inc. You know where you can find us on that other social network? Arcus Inc. So Twitter.com slash Arcus Inc. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-M-C. And Justin here is at twitter.com slash justedelstein. I'm at twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood. Threw him the initial there. We are on Facebook. We said that. And if you really want to follow the podcast, the best way, because again, we change the dates and times with this almost weekly. We put out one a week, but we might do it Tuesday, Monday, Friday, is to go to iTunes and to subscribe. And we've actually had six reviews in iTunes. We would really love more reviews. It's a great way to see. We do love reviews. It keeps us going. Show us that you're listening. And tweet us when you want to hear something. You want some news, someone tweet us, ETAC News to us two days ago. Oh, really? Yeah. And if you're interested.

Justin Edelstein: Who'd that come from?

Jason Atwood: Keep them Roger Mitchell. Oh, that's cool. Thanks, Roger. So if you want to hear stuff on the podcast, give us that kind of feedback. Twitter is a great place.

Justin Edelstein: We'll even mention you.

Jason Atwood: And we might even mention you. And then on iTunes, that's a great way to leave permanent feedback. Like, I really like this podcast, it's the greatest podcast I've ever heard. I would stop living my life if I had never heard this podcast again.

Justin Edelstein: And give five stars. Five stars above others. Or five stars.

Jason Atwood: Right, or there's also five stars if you want. Or five stars. Exactly. Those are your options. Have a happy holidays. Yes. Until next week, take five, baby.