Siri Does It - Episode #65 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. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:22 Jason Atwood: I'll,, and from the lost archives of last week's podcast that you did not enjoy because it was not recorded. Work, the true work, the one true work, AKA doing Salesforce stuff, kept us apart like two long forgotten needles.

Justin Edelstein: Justin, how are you doing? I missed you. So much. I missed you so much. You're off a having fun with. Client clients I was here waiting to do a podcast. I just just sitting here so About four seconds.

Jason Atwood: So there was the time to put together. The guys like snuggle? It was a 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. type type of day every day. Those are good days. Those are good days. Especially with paperback clients. So enjoy it. All right, we got an agenda today. We always have an agenda. We'll talk about the thing that happened last week set all sorts of things up.

Justin Edelstein: I didn't. I thought maybe you did it then for a reason. I did. I couldn't figure it out. No, I got it. I got it. That's funny.

Jason Atwood: And then little Salesforce Mark Benioff thing and we'll make our CloudFocus app pick of the week. So let's start off with the thing that you or I don't have. The other person, the nameless one, does have one. And really the big news is Siri. The new virtual sort of assistant or whatever. I don't even know her. but I love. Yeah, so you're really not that much to say in the line from up. you've never played with no yet in Syria or strangers. You are strangers. I can't wait to meet her. Yes. So I we were able to get a iPhone 4s for the wife, which was good. She was. just for those. She was one of the ones who waited for the white one for about, for the iPhone 4 white one for six months or so when they, then they never did it, then they did it six months later.

Jason Atwood: So as a payback for that, I allowed her to upgrade first, leaving us in the dust to be upgraded in the like, whatever, six weeks or whatever.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, about a month to wait for our iPhone 4S.

03:23 Jason Atwood: So, you know, it has, okay, new features, whatever, it's all hardware. We're not doing the hardware I show interesting thing and it is actually based is Siri which is basically a built-in voice command system understands things and I was playing with the wife's phone and playing with Siri and showing her and showing my six-year-old daughter how to use it which was Fun because the six-year-old daughter basically thinks it's alive. I mean she's like I love serious She says to the Siri over and over again. I love you Siri and and Siri will say she'll say funny things back she has like this they should like say She'd be like that's impossible or appreciate it or it's just she has some funny funny say just like Siri and I are gonna have a really oh, yeah, it is it is a fun fun relationship.

Jason Atwood: So Well, what's interesting is that... I want Siri to be a British man. There is a British man. I can't wait for that. You can put in as a British man. So the cool part is not just that it's voice recognition. That's been around for a while. We actually were driving someone the other day and I showed you how in my five-year-old car... I said your cars like should have that, but it was really crap. It was old school, right? It was like... And it was like, I do not understand.

Justin Edelstein: Dial number. Dial number. It's like, I do not understand. Then you had to click through a series of menus to figure out what you were supposed to say. Which is no fun.

Jason Atwood: So the, so the series does natural language. You don't have to train it. It basically understands things and understand. Two things that are interesting are context that it understands that if you say, if If you're asking about something. you know, send text to Justin Edelstein and then it writes it for you and then says, should I send it? You say yes. Like you have a conversation back and forth until the and task is done. The other thing is the waste phone so it wasn't mine but Like we were saying, call mom. And it said, who among these people is your mother? And it kind of figured out like one or two is weird. It had a list that made sense. What did it do? Names? It would pull them up out of your dress book.

Jason Atwood: And then you- How did it figure it out? Names? Well you then tell it.

Justin Edelstein: Well no, I know what you do to set it. I prospective, I'm getting at how does it guess. Like, the husband might be easy, right? The husband lists, yeah. Same last name, that's simple.

Jason Atwood: It can't have too many. When it come up with one thing, you say that's the contact. You either tell it and then it's. So there's that in the cloud. Like it knows me as Jake. So my wife calls me Jake. So then she just has to say send Jake a text right and it knows it's me So it was cool stuff like that really impressed it is The whole the thing does go up, so it records the voice, it sends it up to, the cloud, the cloud then transfers, transcribes it, and then sends it back very, very quick. So you have to do it over for and internet. So overall, awesome. I mean, I just really, you know, it's a great technology. It's one of those things that I think really demos well. day to day, like how much you use it, you know, we'll see how users, you know, talking to your phone.

06:26 Jason Atwood: I, again, as we said before, and I, I still think I'm more kind of excited for it to hit the desktop, even the iPad, because I could see me doing one thing. That's what I really want to be able to do, because the phone you're kind of doing one thing, and if you hit Siri, you're kind of over at Siri. But I'd love to be able to sit doing, typing something, and go OmniFocus, call Justin tomorrow, boom, and just keep typing and like it just does that on the side. Like I want it to happen while I'm not doing the thing I'm doing. Anyway. So that's a little bit of Syrian iPhone 4S. It hit records. It's like formed through 2 million in the weekend. Brought down AT&T again. Don't know how this company can't scale for something they know is gonna happen.

Jason Atwood: They're the worst. Well, it also brought down... Sprint and Verizon. It's just how can you not know? AT&T is the worst because they've had years. They got brought down the first weekend, they got brought down the second weekend. They've been brought down every single time and how can they, I understand that. And the other big thing, you know, there's the iOS 5 update, which we- Yes. which brought One of you know many new features the and we're kind of excited about and been using a lot is

Justin Edelstein: Still use it because it's cross-platform, and I have a bunch of friends who are using WhatsApp. but if you have two people both using iPhones and You are text messaging each other you are no longer text messaging each other. You are I messaging each other It goes from green to blue. It's fun to watch it go to blue. And it goes over, I believe it tries to go over the internet first, and then we'll go over the cell network. using your data, not your data. text out using other people who are using WhatsApp, but nice group features sending videos of photos or photos fast, lightning quick. Very nice 3 able to use iMessage, couple other... features in the new OS that I've come to enjoy is the The much improved. Yep, that's very good.

Justin Edelstein: It doesn't bother you anymore when you're doing something like you don't have to hit cancel It just sort of flips up at the top and then flips back from the home screen If you have like four or five different notifications, you can slide on individual applications to jump into that application. Yep, I like the whole thing down from the top, see all the different messages and slide it Kind of big brother-ish. It was weird because yesterday I have invited my father to be my friend and find a friend. that I have purposely actually turned my location off. I didn't want to be found. Because if you're on and you have friends friends,, you're on. Yeah. They will see where you are and that's it. Very unlike Glimpse,

10:35 Jason Atwood: Which was Glimpse was, and that's why it's called Glimpse, was you create a glimpse of time. And wherever you set it, you set it for 30 minutes or an hour.

Justin Edelstein: This one like you just turn on. But this one has that too. This one has it too. It has both. It has always find me. And then it has like events. Right. where it's temporary, like for this date and time, let these people know where I am. So it has both. So my dad said, oh, I don't see you. You must be in like a bad place or like a bad location or something. And I said, oh, no, I just turned it off. I'll turn it on so that you can see where I am just so you can see it working. And I forgot to then turn it off. So he goes to like look at it later on in the day and he's like. Oh, I see you're at the jet game. Yep, Big Daddy's watching.

Justin Edelstein: It was like, not Big Brother, but Big Daddy. It was like, alright, I'm gonna keep this off from now on, and never turn on the volume ever. And I'll just use the event ones for when I actually want to use this feature, because there's no point in allowing everyone to know exactly where I am at every given moment.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I mean there's a good time to use it when you're meeting with people, when you're meeting up, when you're traveling. If I was a 12 year old child and my parents wanted to know where I was, that would be a nice feature. You can turn in parental controls, you can say that they can't turn it off, which is nice. So, I was just one more thing about the iVestage, which has the two things I think I've been missing from... Well, three things about it. One is... You know for all those you're gonna complain well, it's just a Mac, you know, it's just a Mac thing It integrates so seamlessly and so brilliantly. There's no thought of it You just you're looking at a user and all of a sudden you're used to type green and now when you type it's blue Or yeah, and it just starts to happen and it says I messaged in a thing.

Jason Atwood: So it's like As read receipts, as well delivered receipts, and then read receipts, which is the great, it's just a little head and tells you when it was read, and has the type ahead. So as you I was going back and forth, I did right, I could see we're typing. And that's nice for text, because sometimes you don't know if they're Am I just sending this to nobody or are they actually getting it? Like, then you know I'm in a conversation. Very much like I am. Like, basically it becomes an I am message. Not the first to do this, clearly. I've done it for years. But building it right into the same app that does texting, so you don't have to go to some other app. It's right built in. There's no... Those who have it have it, those who don't don't, and it's none the different.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, and you don't have to think about it. So speaking of things you do have to think about, on a couple days of CloudWin, you know, I guess this is sort of a, we didn't mention in the agenda, just popped up on the Google Wave, brought it in there. Good one. Was that RIM, I think, was down for about four days globally. So meaning all, you know, the way that the... Blackberry works, my understanding is that they have literally these central places where all things go through, all things Blackberry go through their central servers, which I guess gives them scalability and all sorts of stuff, but it also gives them, this has happened before, they've gone down for 24 hours or so, and that means anybody who's a Blackberry user goes down with them. Literally, you go down.

13:42 Jason Atwood: And this one's been down for four days. Not great to have your system go down for four days right as one of the most popular phones on the planet launches. If I were a BlackBerry user and it was down for 12 hours, I'd be like, forget it, I'm off. And then go get, you know,

Justin Edelstein: If I didn't already own the stupid thing. BlackBerry still... I don't know the statistics, but I'm sure very highly adopted in the enterprise. Consumer wise, it's dwindling more and more. I you know a lot of people who've had blackberries and said, why would I have this anymore? I'm going to go get an iPhone or a droid. If your company's giving you a phone,

Jason Atwood: You're going to take the phone they give you. Well, you sometimes don't have a choice. Well, that's what I'm saying. You just take what they give you. But if you have a choice though, you... probably wouldn't even choose the Blackberry. Right, I wouldn't. I mean, at this point,

Justin Edelstein: Like I, three years ago I would have said, for a corporate, pure messaging device, give me the Blackberry. Right. Because it really does email very, very well. Very well, yeah. Now, I don't think there's much of a difference. Right.

Jason Atwood: So interesting, I don't really know the ramifications of it. It seems like it's bad for the brand. That's all. Four days a long time. Four hours in this. That's the thing. Used to be four hours was acceptable. Now four hours isn't acceptable. We were just talking about the winter actually moving on, nice, nice, segui. We're talking about winter 12 and how Salesforce has a thing where they can't go down for a certain amount of time. They have windows. To go down for four days is incredible. So obviously, you know, the health was at the outages, but four days is a long time to go down. You know, we've had the PS3 network, I think, went down right there. Online network went down for like four or five days.

Justin Edelstein: Everyone apologizes profusely, but it doesn't make up for the fact that... It was down. Yeah, I mean, it's gone down. And then you put in some extra redundancy and then, you know, again, I mean, it happens. But bad for the brand.

Jason Atwood: Certainly bad for the brand. And again, at a time where you're already taking shots, where people are coming at you know five years ago whatever went down fine because You weren't going anywhere else. Now there's a lot of options and it does show that if you're on one network, at least now with my iPhone, if Verizon goes down, we've had this happen. Verizon goes down, you know, we're on AT&T, fine. Or, you know, now there's three different carriers, so you can switch between the three. So I want to talk a little bit about, we'll do this and then we'll go back up. So a little bit about winter 12 winter 12 came out I don't think we mentioned I went back over the last podcast to listen to see to see if we talked about it, but basically there was a lot of stuff that didn't make it in No, we weren't aware of the situation.

Jason Atwood: Okay in our lap as we skipped a week Yeah, in our last podcast.

Justin Edelstein: All we really really I was the release notes And it was very odd because you have the release notes and then you have a couple of where can go play with Winter 12. You have your sandbox, or your sandboxes, and then you have pre-release where they set up, you can go set up a a pre-release org.

16:50 Jason Atwood: And they were different. And I would, yeah, I would tell you that I always thought, if you hadn't said to me normally, and again someone who's been in Salesforce for, I don't know, a couple days now, I would have said. pre-release and sandbox same place. Pre-release was for people to go look at stuff that, you know, that you couldn't, didn't have sandbox. But if your sandbox were, sandbox was refreshed, then it would be the same. Like, I would have thought that. Well, it's...

Justin Edelstein: They are different. Yeah. And it's if your sandbox isn't refreshed. Right. It is refreshed. What I'm saying,

Jason Atwood: If it gets moved to the next version, like, if I go again and I see winter 12 in there... No, they are not the same. The pre-release edition is...

Justin Edelstein: Winter 12 complete, this is what winter 12 will look like when it's completely after the series of rolling patches and whatnot as it the sandbox is winter 12 day one when you get winter 12 in your production instance this is what it will, in no sandbox did anyone see social contacts, in no sandbox did anyone see private chatter groups for customers. Some of those big dashboard filters, a lot of those big time forecasting features, although I'm going to say in my crew lease work.

Jason Atwood: I did not have dashboard filters there either, which was a little weird.

Justin Edelstein: Which was for new customers only. So I did have it in my, in my pre-release org, but not in my sandbox. Right. Which is in my pre-release. I'm a new customer customer. It's a new org. no nothing tying me to anything. So, just a little weird, need a little bit more of a... streamline communication, transparent from Salesforce in their release notes and all the other places where they put these release topics, their Salesforce Facebook page, where they started the community sites, the resource pages. They all need to be, I think, a little clear about how these rolling releases work the rolling release for the last couple of releases and everyone was very excited by winter 12. Winter 12 was the biggest release with most features that we've seen in a year or two and it turns out that we don't have those features just yet.

Jason Atwood: And I think that's sort of the issue is that you know as a sales force user. I've always been used to it. I've been through literally countless now upgrades and it's always been. You get everything that comes out. You get it in that release and you move on. This new rolling release. they released it after it had its I'm pretty sure.

Justin Edelstein: I don't know. I was in an org at that point that did not turn chatter on.

Jason Atwood: So, you know, I think that's fine. I just, you almost have to, this is my thinking of it, we started talking about today, calling something something But, it's really over spread over over months I don't know. Like, I think you're kind of... You've moved away from what that meant into what it means now It means now like... You might as well call it fall ten a Because, that's when you're going to see it. Out of a Dream Because we've seen it now, we've seen it now almost a release.

21:19 Justin Edelstein: Yeah. I have to imagine they're going to have to bump it out.

Jason Atwood: Because you can't do it. You can't do it. There's too many people not focusing on that. And you can't have it in. The pre-release stuff because then you have to show it. It'll probably be in November. There you go. That's just a guess. We're going to throw that. We're going to throw that. 13 will be November.

Justin Edelstein: November. for a second. I mean, Winter 12 is now out, and we've been using it now for a week or so in our production instance. I have a couple favorite features now that I've been able to play with them, just to give some positive spin. Give me one. My fate, well, my one., A- I a. a the So you have to click on it, and then now you're gone. You're out of the chatter camp. Now you can just hover over it. You see some stuff. You can hover over people and see some stuff and take actions from there. I hover over Jason Atwood, and I can hit you with the private message.

Jason Atwood: So are these the same hovers that are for side link hovers?

Justin Edelstein: I can't answer that question, because I don't know the answer. But I imagine so. I mean.......

Jason Atwood: So it's just, yeah, you know what, I hadn't even noticed. I just am looking at now and I can tell in I I and....s....... So one other little thing, two other little things, and then we read them because they're there they're there to be ready one title device apathy.

Justin Edelstein: Yep The. Yeah, this one is written about cloud helps to sort of free you from making devices. to disagree with him. Totally disagree. And that's okay.

24:24 Jason Atwood: You can look at his post and

Justin Edelstein: I maybe would have This blog post is written by the partner who shall remain nameless the and talks about Netflix quickly- quickly drops and this is a topic we talked about in the podcast a couple weeks ago Netflix and Quickster breaking out Netflix from the the physical media side from the streaming media side, and then backing away from that, and saying, oh, that was a bad idea, we got some pretty bad feedback on that.

Jason Atwood: So for a company that has done, you know, three price increases in a year, price changes in a year, and then was gonna do a full name change and relaunch of two different websites, plus outages for their services. No good. No good. You know, the blog posts, you haven't read it,

Justin Edelstein: Go read it because it talks about a the new approach to security in Salesforce using Permission Sets. My favorite Permission Sets.

Jason Atwood: I'm in love with that. Could be your middle name at this point. It's funny talking about your favorite features in Winter 12, not mentioning Permission Sets. Well,

Justin Edelstein: I... No. If you noticed, when I said it, I giggled, because I knew I would get to Permission Sets later. But Permission Sets are my favorite. admin feature, not like, an end user. permissions model and how we went about doing that and how you might want to

Jason Atwood: Do that as well. Worth the read at blog.arcasync.com. That's probably the most worthy ever read. Probably not. Since I wrote it. And the last thing we'll do, I don't know if there's really much to talk about it. You put this link on the way to put it. So Mark Benioff in, I think, it's cloud to one of these tech conferences. What is 2.0 Summit in San Francisco? basically that Facebook is leading the direction for where all enterprises and cloud computing technology is going.

27:35 Justin Edelstein: He's pretty much up there but... He's all in on social enterprise. He's all in on that is the interface for getting stuff done.

Jason Atwood: Funny in a time that Facebook is being beaten over the head for a lot of changes that they're doing and being sued now by a company called Timeline who they say they built the thing Yeah, I don't know. Facebook to me is, you know, I love some of the concepts. I'm not sure. I'm not sure it's all the leading You know thing. I think there's the companies out there doing more leading edge. Edge stuff But here's why,

Justin Edelstein: I mean, just to take the, depending off the side a little bit, I mean, when he tells the story of Salesforce.com, that little startup that could, He always mentioned and talked about the vision of having enterprise software be as simple to use as Amazon.com, which was at the time the site that it really is. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: It still baked so far into my vernacular that I was doing training last week and I couldn't, I started to say it and then I thought, wow, that's not really true anymore. No,

Justin Edelstein: It's Facebook. Well, because Amazon actually looks like a pile of poo. But as a time it was It was, right You go on Amazon.com, you click around, you click the tab You click the tab, you hit buy, you hit buy. So he's on to the next thing, which is the thing now. And it was innovative and certainly thought provoking at the time to say, I want enterprise software to be like this consumer website. And that's virtually the same message, just a different consumer website and a different way of doing it. Here's a challenge for Mark Benioff and so forth.

Jason Atwood: If he chooses to accept it, and I know he listens to this podcast. I know he does. Number one listener, number one fan, friend of the podcast. I challenge him to be the person who sets. Who sets the next next to Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social networks out there, then go. Our next direction is like what sales forces told you done that in the enterprise? No, technology wise, he's saying that the interface hasn't he done that though,

Justin Edelstein: In the in the enterprise to say, you know, the model, the cloud computing model is the model, right? And he said that,

Jason Atwood: And then others have followed in terms of cloud computing, but in terms But that's what he does. interface. Well, he has taken that lead. I think from a cloud computing standpoint, he has. I would love for him to, I feel like sometimes it feels like for interface stuff, while they're doing it, sometimes it fits, sometimes it doesn't. Chatter is a good example where it, it fits. I don't think, I still don not, I still don't feel it fits exactly. I think there's still concepts around business work and productivity and doing work that don't fit and sit with Facebook. Those are. Those are things that I So anyway, that's my challenge Let's get right into our cloud folks, I have the pick of the week because you're easy.

30:58 Justin Edelstein: Mine is easy speaking of Facebook. They came out with the universal app. Yay. Yay for Facebook. So Facebook is now available on the iCad. If you didn't know it, I know this. If you already didn't know and if you didn't have Facebook on your phone and didn't upgrade it, well, guess what? It's gotten upgrade. go to the App Store, download it, and it'll magically appear on your iPad. If you have both. In my case, I did the reverse sweat, downloaded it on the iPad. It updated itself on the iPhone. And it's new in both places. Works really well. It's very similar to the web interface. Has the chat. You can slide things around. sliding windows, it's made for an iPad and it works.

Jason Atwood: That's it, it works. And it's a very good copy of one of your... MyPad. MyPad, so I'm sure there's a... And all of a sudden MyPad became sort of useless for me. iPad, the Facebook for iPad is great. I wonder... looking at the app and actually looking... It's kind of buggy, there's some things that still don't work for me, like messages.

Justin Edelstein: Messages doesn't work on the iPhone.

Jason Atwood: And iPad. And the iPad? Yep, says stop, reflode, whatever. It still doesn't work. So it's just kind of weird, it's like, why taken so long? This is almost two years in. Yeah, it's so weird that it took them that long. Considering they were very... Maybe there was some underlying... time.

Justin Edelstein: Platform things that they were doing, but the iPhone app came out like very quickly.

Jason Atwood: Yeah So I know from developers that turning an iPhone app to just a basic universal app It's not that difficult. So like it must have been something anyway good pick although a little easy, but anyway, it was very easy.

Justin Edelstein: I Cocked out yeah cop that a little bit. So I'm gonna go with actually asked me for you know, I'm gonna put you on the spot Yeah Yeah, because someone asked me... Why not? Why not? I like putting you on the spot. Someone asked me on Twitter, privately, for a CloudFocus App Pick of the Week. And I just didn't have time to come up with it. Wait,

Jason Atwood: Asked you for one? Ask me if I could provide one for him. He needs the app code. Listen to the podcast.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, I see. Like, just sort of suggest software. Hey, I have this problem. and Justin, do you know of anything? Which one was it? CloudFocus App of the Week for auto publishing to social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, business app. Doesn't Ping FM do that?

Jason Atwood: I think it does it. The one we've actually talked about before. what's this called i'm trying to hover over the thing buffer buffer buffer buffer posts to multiples no just just to twitter right now oh do i go to all of them oh the other one ping fm is but the one that tumblr doesn't tumblr when you post up to pombert it sends out to a lot of different places yeah yeah there's the one that that that gary v talks about a lot I think might be Tom Bork.

Justin Edelstein: Well don't some of those other apps do this like I don't know if season I think season

Jason Atwood: Like you can Choose I'd love to know what the use case is is it but automatic and then too many different places Yeah, auto publishing to social networks

34:00 Justin Edelstein: Like Twitter Facebook LinkedIn done business apps I don't know if he means auto publishing like I publish this thing on my WordPress blog and all of a sudden it just proliferates.

Jason Atwood: Or, I want to publish it once and have it go to all three places. I need more information. Here's the thing, and I know this is kind of... We've looked at those tools. Here's my challenge back to you. I think each network really deserves its own look. Because hashtags don't work in Facebook, and mentions don't work in Facebook, and Facebook can put in a lot more than Twitter can, so you can say more on Facebook. I actually think there's a reason, especially with those two networks, they're so important. Spend the extra five seconds to go and do a real post. I don't know, that's just me. Alright, my pick of the week is actually, I thought about two things. One about, I thought about from Siri. because of the idea of taking stuff and uploading it.

Jason Atwood: I'm gonna download yours. This is really fun. And I'll tell you why, the new feature is awesome. And the only reason I'm picking it, I've used this since the iPhone came out. Oh, I've never heard of it. This is awesome. There's two of them. There's SoundHound and there is another one called Something Jam. I've always used SoundH you SoundHound. So here's what it is, it's an app that you can take while music's playing in a bar or whatever. You start it up and you click. Thank you. Listen and it takes like, you know, 20 seconds of a song It then recognizes it and then comes down and tells you what song it is what album whatever it gives you a link to buy it on that you can ping it you do also some millions of stuffs great app and Now includes iCloud support meaning it will then sync what you've then looked up from your different devices kind of cool I'm a big deal Two things it does really awesome And I was in Bolemore, a party, and I and they were in line.

Jason Atwood: They were going, as the song was going, it was showing me the lyrics and it was writing them out.

Justin Edelstein: I was looking at your little description, and I thought it was going the be something else.

37:02 Jason Atwood: And now it's lyrics and iCloud support available on Apple for free. All right, that's gonna wrap it up. Go to blog.org. and subscribe by RSS if you want to read all the blog posts. Hey comment comment on our blog. Oh, I have that as the last thing. Yeah,. So discuss there and you just got a comment on yours. You can go right now while I Follow the company at arkasinc.com or arkasinc or if we don't do it, it won't come to you like we did last week. Sorry about that. We're back, we're back in the groove things. We hope to keep them coming. Until next week, you know, enjoy those cloudy days.

Justin Edelstein: I'll see you next time.