Start Your Dream Engines - Episode #39 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 39th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the first week of April 2011. This episode is titled, Start Your Dream Engines. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, cognitive media experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood. Joining me today, co-host for almost 40 times, Justin Edelstein. How are you doing, Justin? When you say almost 40, do you mean 39? I mean 39. 39.5. Next week you'll be able to say 40. I will. We've got a big agenda today. Not really. It's a slow cloud week. We have a blog post by me called Transparent is the New Cool in Customer Service. Talk a little bit about that. We've got some reaction on it. Dell invests $1 billion in the cloud, or cloud technologies. And then we've got some Salesforce news, including their Intel partnership, which will decide who's right about when it's coming out near you. And then Dreamforce. some Dreamforce news and the kickoff of the Dreamforce 2011 schedule and funness.

Jason Atwood: So let's get started with We're All Good Things Start, my blog post.

Justin Edelstein: It was a good one this week.

Jason Atwood: I think you said that last time, so I will take it as a...

Justin Edelstein: Can I set it up for you? Sure. Because usually you say to me, so talk to us about your blog post. So you had a couple of recent experiences with Call Center, customer support, various different channels of communication with a company that's trying to help you with one of their services. And you had some good experiences, some not so good experiences, and some in between. You wrote a blog post about it. Why don't you tell us a little more about it?

Jason Atwood: How was that? Yeah, I think this centers around that we have worked with a lot of call centers, building back end call center applications. So ticketing systems, and email the case, and web the case. And so in some ways, I'm a little spoiled because I know what goes on in the back end. I know the ROI of every phone call. I know that they want to get you into things like chat, because chat's easier. You can have a rep do five chats at once, while they can only do one phone call at once. So when I'm talking to customer service, I'm always thinking in the back of my mind, what are they using? Are they using Salesforce? Are they, you know, is this good customer service or is this bad? Have they remembered my ticket or not? So there's a couple incidents that happened and I won't talk about the whole thing. It's up on blog.argosync.com. But three really incidents, one was with Netflix, that Netflix has had some outage problems and when I called up, you know, they dealt with me in a very, again, it's a very opaque way.

Jason Atwood: And really, I think the thing that I went in on and talk to them about, and literally, as someone who's been using Netflix for 10 years now, as a 10-year veteran of Netflix, meaning I've paid them something every month for the last 10 years. I wasn't doing it as a customer who is pissed off and gonna just not subscribe. I was doing it like, you guys gotta start to, if you guys can become the big boys, not just this little startup, you have to start to think about, how do you make transparency about your service and outages? And I was giving them examples of Google Apps and Salesforce and Apple and their services.

03:34 Justin Edelstein: It's interesting to me that you had your not so great experiences with Netflix, because I just recently joined Netflix. I've been using someone else's Netflix account, my girlfriend's, so it's OK. But when I got a new MacBook Pro, and when I went to log into Netflix.com with her account, it was like, oh, you can't do this. You may have just recently got a new computer. You need to do something. It's like, oh, maybe they got me. Like, all right, I'm logging in with too many computers or something with her account. I'll start my own account. I use Netflix so much, I'm going to pay for it anyway. So I start up my own account. I log in. I get the same error message. It's like, you can't log in. It's like, you must have a new computer. You have to call us. And this was at like 1130, maybe closer to midnight. I was just going to watch something and go to sleep on my laptop. I call him up, get a person right away. I give him the error code. He's like, that's an easy one.

Justin Edelstein: Walks me through, literally step by step, he's like, are you on a Mac or PC? What browser are you using? Walks me through step by step. Boom, it worked. So I had a really good experience with Netflix. But this was a very, it was like, what's your error code? So it was very easy for them, which is a little different than the situation you're talking about.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, they were having outages when I called. And when you're at home watching, want to watch something, and there's an outage, I mean, you turn on and it goes, first of all, you try it on your Apple TV, it fails. Then you try it on your iPad, it fails. You think, well, is it my network? Do I need to call my cable company? Right, and you literally, it's not fail-like, we're having experience and difficulties, it's nothing. And again, when I called the customer support line, at that point, it literally hung up on me. It goes, lines are busy, click. And that's the worst. Wow, that does sound. when you call and you call and say, and it goes lines with it. So I went on to Twitter. So that was with Netflix. And again, I gave them some advice they didn't want to hear. And then I had AT&T, where I went and tried to do something online, I went to the online chat, thinking, oh, I can't find what I want to do. Let me go to the online chat. And after 10 minutes of just painfully waiting for this person to respond to everything I chatted with, basically, whoever the person was told me to click on a support tab to look up an article to find out how to do it. At that point, I'm like, I'm done.

Jason Atwood: I go over to Twitter. I then tweet that I was having problems. And of course, immediately, an AT&T rep followed me, DM'd me, said to follow her so we could direct message each other, and then spent about two hours, I mean, not consistently, but we were back and forth. I was doing other things, trying to help me out. What was interesting was, here's their online support chat that's supposed to be really good. These are people who are trained to do this, yet they're giving better support on Twitter. And my point in the article was, if you're going to do that, put your time and energy into the online chat. Don't do it and don't have Twitter be the place that's better, unless you're going to direct people to Twitter. Hey, I don't mind. And I think, as Arcus, we're considering doing some applications, which we've been hinting about. We dropped a hint on Twitter the other day. I did. And we're thinking about support mechanisms. Top secret. Top secret. We're thinking about support mechanisms. And Twitter is one of the things that I think we're just going to say.

06:55 Jason Atwood: If you want support with it, we will support you by Twitter, because why not? That's a support channel. We're not going to say that it's someplace we just watched to make sure. No, we really will support you there. So anyway. And in the end, I just basically gave a story about Rackspace and how I think every company in the world should look at Rackspace's model, figure out how they're doing it and try to do it. Because you can call up. As a customer, I can call up. I get a person on the line immediately. She asks for my ID number, customer ID number. She forwards me over to somebody else, and they will help me immediately. Not only that, they're online ticketing support. And I gave an example in the blog post where I put in a ticket for them to install a software package on my server. So it's not a hard thing to do in Unix. I just couldn't find the package I wanted to install. I didn't want to mess it up. So I had them do it. I put in the ticket. And within 11 minutes, I got the auto response. And this wasn't the auto response that said, we've got your ticket. We'll get back to you in 24 to 48 hours.

Jason Atwood: This was the response that said, done. Here it is. Here's everything we installed. Have a nice day, sir. 11 minutes later. To me, that's exceptional service. And that's what companies should be striving for. And it's not like Rackspace is some new company or new to the game. They've been doing this for 10 years. I think they have a 10-year company with that. So that was the blog post. It got some reaction because we got big hits on it on the website, so interesting. Maybe someone from Netflix. I did tweet at all of them, so maybe someone got a little upset.

Justin Edelstein: Maybe they passed it up the chain, and maybe things will change. Maybe it'll have an impact.

Jason Atwood: Maybe it'll have an impact.

Justin Edelstein: Maybe they'll call us and we'll help them out. Or maybe they'll trash us.

Jason Atwood: Possibly. Maybe my iPhone will stop working even less.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, customer number 12345. Yes. No service at 1501 Broadway.

Jason Atwood: So next one is from a story about Dell. We don't really talk about Dell too much in the cloud news.

Justin Edelstein: Usually when they're making acquisitions and such, they're planning on investing a billion dollars to over this fiscal year. So not like a billion dollars ever. billion dollars in one year, which is pretty decent amount of money. Stuff I have in my bank account, but we'll leave that for another story. And all of this billion dollars is going to be used to do R&D on cloud computing and virtualization products. And they're going to build out a solution center, global solution center, or 22 of them, to be exact. I guess these are like data centers, but they're calling them global solution centers, to provide virtualization services, cloud computing services, and convergence services. And it's a big investment for Dell. They bought Boomi, they bought some other cloud computing

09:55 Justin Edelstein: services and products over the last year or two, and now they're reinvesting in it, and they're going full steam ahead, is pretty good news for the whole industry.

Jason Atwood: It is. I mean, we heard HP doing it. We've heard companies ... It seems like if you're not in the cloud now, where are you? You're somewhere else. You're nowhere. Dell, hey, listen, they have ... We've said this before. They have every right to be in this game. They make the hardware that runs half the cloud or a lot of the cloud services. So hardware is still hardware. It's not like this stuff can run on nothing. So for them, I think it's a good move. See, it feels to me like these are just these announcements. So we read the one about the EU was going to invest $14, or was it IBM, or maybe a partnership with IBM and the EU is going to be $10 billion over the next four funding to do. And you wonder, like, whatever comes of that? Like, what's the output that we get to see? So, but good for them, and appreciate them putting more money into the cloud, because we want that to be successful. So last two articles, or agenda items, are both Salesforce related. The first is something that I guess I missed, because I've been talking about this for a while. I guess the question is, did it come out very recently and I just have missed it? Because I tweeted it the other day after finding it, and I stumbled off of it.

Justin Edelstein: I don't even know what you're talking about. You're saying it.

Jason Atwood: Salesforce, an Intuit partner, to create an application that natively syncs QuickBooks Online with Salesforce.

Justin Edelstein: I don't think you missed it. just got announced very recently, within the last week, since our last podcast. I know we're moving at the speed of real time here on Cloud Focus Weekly, but you didn't miss it. This is something that belongs in this week's podcast. So Salesforce and Intuit are working together as a strategic alliance to essentially come out with a widget or a connector on the Intuit side that will sync Salesforce CRM product with Intuit's QuickBooks Online product, making it more seamless to do your sales and your finances in the cloud, and also allow for Intuit to be a reseller of Salesforce licenses. So you use QuickBooks online, they can sell you Salesforce, I guess get a cut of it, however that works. And the announcement said this summer.

Justin Edelstein: When was it? This summer? This summer. In the original article that I read, I could swear it said next summer. And I was like, why are they even announcing this right now? But I guess it's this summer, I was mistaken, and maybe we'll see something at Dreamforce, because Dreamforce is in the summer. They'll show us something on stage. Hey, here's the front office and back office all together.

Jason Atwood: So this is great news for QuickBooks users. It has one huge caveat. QuickBooks Online. Sucks. Now, again, this is a while ago. I actually just went, it's not my pick of the week, so I'll mention it. Indinero, which is a Mint, we've talked about Mint before, Mint is an online service, and I own by Intuit, that goes out and looks at your accounts and shows you what you're doing, right? But looks post what you've done. Indinero is one for the enterprise. So it does it for businesses. It'll go out and watch all your accounts and then do your profit and loss statements, show your income over your expenses, all this sort of stuff. So I went and looked at it today. But again, and you can put in invoices, so stuff that is going to come in the future, kind of like you can in FreshBooks. Well, FreshBooks is much more advanced. But I've used QuickBooks Online, and it's still not there. It's not there in price, because for what they want, you end up paying much, much more than the retail

13:51 Jason Atwood: version that you get on your, you know, they can go down to CompUSA and for literally on sale $99 or $119.

Justin Edelstein: CompUSA still exists.

Jason Atwood: I don't even know. That shows you how much software I buy from regular source, but whatever. You can go on Amazon, I've heard of Amazon, and buy QuickBooks or QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks whatever.

Justin Edelstein: Can't they just download it?

Jason Atwood: Or a couple hundred bucks, whatever. But again, then you own it for multiple years, and you can do your business with it. The online version.

Justin Edelstein: And you can back up the files to a cloud service if you'd like. So the files don't have to sit on your computer. That's true.

Jason Atwood: And you can call it a cloud solution because you're backing up your files. But the online version just was, it was painfully slow. They had all sorts of browser restrictions, like you had to be using, I think it couldn't use Safari or Chrome. It had to be Firefox.

Justin Edelstein: It's only like IE6 or something.

Jason Atwood: It was something like that.

Justin Edelstein: With an ActiveX control plug-in.

Jason Atwood: When you went into it, yeah, it would do all this weird stuff, it just, I literally used it for about four weeks, and I thought, no, no, no, I'm going back to QuickBooks. Because QuickBooks starts up in two seconds, I can do it. So anyway, if they get that better, that would make that plus the syncing, the native syncing with Salesforce, if it's not some huge pricing. I think that's great. I think it's a lot of companies we know start with QuickBooks and immediately go, how can I sync? I think companies like Pervasive, who make a Quick Books sinker, were probably like, oh, wait, what? Yeah, we make this. Yeah, we make this. Thanks for taking away a piece of our paper. It's supposed to be available in the Intuit App Center, which I took a look at and was like three things. And it'll be available this summer. So can't wait. That should be interesting. I want to see how they. I just don't. I have lost my faith in Intuit to upgrade their software.

Justin Edelstein: Let me ask you a question. We use QuickBooks here. Is this enough to push you to try QuickBooks online again?

Jason Atwood: Yes. It's definitely enough because it's been a while since I used it. So again, my problem with Intuit is I've been an Intuit customer for 10-something years. No, longer. I've Quicken ... I think I started using Quicken in 95, so 16 years. their ability to innovate and to produce new software is horrible. People still talk about the oldest version of Quicken being the best. And that the new stuff is just crud. So they've bought some things like Mint, but they never seen, they even built their own QuickBooks online, Quicken online, which failed miserably because it just stunk compared to Mint. So they went and bought Mint. So it's like they just haven't, I don't know if they don't have any dev, I don't know what it is, but they're just one of those companies Companies that just can't get out of their own way. So while I'm interested in seeing this, and it would save me some time, if it takes 17 clicks to do something, it takes me two clicks, then the sinking of the contacts and accounts is not gonna be enough for me to be like, yes. Or if I really wanted to do it, I could figure out a different way to do it, or use something like Intact, which can do it too. So anyway. So having said a lot about QuickBooks, the last story you mentioned it, Dreamforce.

16:57 Justin Edelstein: Dreamforce 11.

Jason Atwood: Dreamforce 11, which will be in August, the end of August.

Justin Edelstein: End of August, right before Labor Day weekend.

Jason Atwood: Registration opened today. This morning. This morning. Yep. You're already registered. I am. Excellent.

Justin Edelstein: I registered this morning, as soon as I was allowed to. Nice.

Jason Atwood: Little quirky, I hear.

Justin Edelstein: Little quirky. If you're already existing Salesforce or Dreamforce registrant, so if you've attended any of the last three or so since they've had like the online portal thing. You have to sort of tell them yes, and I would like to use my existing, and then you log in using the login credentials, but you can't already be logged in to the Dreamforce portal. There's a couple of little, you know, little quirks there. You know, they remind you, hey, make sure you're not logged in. Make sure that you use the same email or same login, this, that, and the other. When you get logged in, the registration process is really great, it's very simple. Four step wizard, boom, boom, boom. Put me in these things, like the special events, like put this on my calendar, I'm going to the partner meetup, I'm going to the community conference called ComCom.

Justin Edelstein: I'm going to the VIP or Birds of a Feather, this, that, or the other. And then I want to do a hotel or not. I chose not to at this very moment. That's fine. And then the odd part is it pops you into the Dreamforce app, the Chatter portal. And it asks you, do you want to go there or not? And I said, of course, yes. I'm already in there. And it sort of really freshes your user a little bit. So it doesn't change everything. I guess it kept my contact information, like my email and my address and my phone, if that's even in there. But it refreshed my About Me. I got a couple emails that said, you changed your email address from that org. I got like three of them. Then I got a welcome email. So I got like four emails right after I registered.

Justin Edelstein: Three of them were kind of crud, and one was thank you for registering. And then when I logged in, I had to redo my About Me on my profile page. But everything else was there. I'm in the same groups, I'm following the people I was following, people are still following me. The sessions are up. I started following a couple sessions in the app.

Jason Atwood: Sponsors up yet?

Justin Edelstein: You know, I didn't notice that the sponsors were up. That's a fail. I should have looked. I can look right now.

Jason Atwood: would you have looked? Because we're going to be one. Because we are a sponsor. All right, well, there you go. So I'll do it and let you know next week when I do it to see if it's interesting or not. I also noticed that the new Chatter release, the new Chatter desktop, has the ability to log into the Dreamforce portal. Does it now? There's two choices for it. I couldn't get it to work, but it's there. Well, then it doesn't work. I didn't say it was work. I said the choice was to fail. The choice was.

20:09 Justin Edelstein: So you can't be logged into both, though. No. They have to figure out how to expose that to Seesmic so that Seesmic desktop can work with that. Cause Seesmic allows you to go into multiple orgs for chatter. I just couldn't figure out what like this server URL was to give it. Cause it always, you know, it's, I doubt it's dreamevent.my.salesforce.com. It could be, but who knows? I didn't try it. Let's see if these sponsors are up.

Jason Atwood: All right, well, let's, while you do that.

Justin Edelstein: Well I'm doing that, you do something else.

Jason Atwood: Let's do Cloud Focus Pic of the Week.

Justin Edelstein: Don't see sponsors, but they'll be up there soon enough.

Jason Atwood: Cloud Focus at Pic of the Week, you want to go first?

Justin Edelstein: Sure, I'll go first. I'm going to talk about a product that one of our customers uses that was installed and configured by this product company. And I've now taken over, or we have now taken over the support of an app called IDA apps. This is a integrated 100% native force.com e-catalog or e-storefront and allows you to sell products online with integration to back-end payment processors like PayPal or Authorize.net. There's a couple different versions. There's a catalog which is kind of light not too many products and then there's a store which is really in-depth and deep and can have multiple like menu items and banners and all sorts of fun stuff. So it's called Ida Apps, I-D-A-A-P-P-S, their websites IdaApp.com, maybe the S wasn't available, and it's kind of interesting when you go to their store and you click or when you go to their website you click buy now you're in their product because they're selling their product with their product. So you can go ahead and see what it looks like. You can see the pricing. The e-catalog is $100 a month. You have to buy a one-year subscription which would be $1,200. The store is $200 a month or $2,400 and then And then the adapters for like PayPal and Authorize, and they have a couple other adapters. They have like a Google Checkout one, a Chargent one. They also have like a tax calculator, a freight cost calculator. All those are $25 a month, all the little add-ons. They're add-ons. Yeah. Interesting. And you can just build up your cart and then check out using their own product.

Justin Edelstein: If you wanted to buy it, you'll be using it, and you can see how it goes. The setup's pretty easy. On the back end, it uses Salesforce custom objects. You can have it insert your orders to either cases or opportunities, and it uses products as the things that show up on the front end. And it's actually a pretty neat product.

23:16 Jason Atwood: Oh, cool.

Justin Edelstein: All right. Very nicely integrated.

Jason Atwood: I have an apps, eStore, and eCad, well mine, I know you're first gonna say, first of all, this is not a cloud pick.

Justin Edelstein: I always look at you. No, I saw what you did here. I saw what you did. And now it's a cloud pick. I get on you sometimes when you pick client software that has nothing to do with cloud, or like an iPhone app or an iPad app, like a game or something.

Jason Atwood: I have a game pick this week as well. My game pick of the week is Atari. The Atari for iPhone and iPad, it has 99 different Atari games for like, you can buy them in packs, you can buy the whole thing for 15 bucks. It's free, but then you buy the packs. 15 bucks for 100 Atari apps. I'm just saying, that's awesome. It's pretty cool. That's awesome sauce.

Justin Edelstein: That's not your Cloud Fools app pick.

Jason Atwood: My Cloud Fools app pick of the week comes from my obsession with calendars. So I love, love, love, love calendars, and I have multiple of them.

Justin Edelstein: I'll say, after you told me about this, and I said, oh, you showed it to me, I bought it immediately.

Jason Atwood: But both you and an unnamed partner both bought it.

Justin Edelstein: As soon as I saw it, I said, I need that.

Jason Atwood: So it is called Counterbar. Now, there are actually lots of these available. This is for OS X. It's only available that I know inside the App Store. So you have to be on Snow Leopard and the App Store. That's my first part of it that's cloudy, which is that it comes from the App Store, which is in the cloud. That's lame. That's awesome. Keep going. Awesome sauce.

Justin Edelstein: Well, that does refer to my blog post from way back when.

Jason Atwood: the end of the disk. Goodbye, disk. Hello, world. There you go. So I like calendars. So we have Google calendars. We have Arcus calendars. I have Mac calendars. I have family calendars. And I love in the Mac world, and I think in PC world, too, you can overlay different calendars on your child to see where, because I might want to put personal events in one. And I have birthday calendars that read from my address book, I love all that stuff.

Justin Edelstein: What's the hook here, though?

Jason Atwood: There's the best part about this thing. I use an iCal all the time. But you have to start up iCal, and then it gives you these different views. But it really doesn't give you just a quick view of what's coming down the pike. So Calendar Bar sticks a menu in your menu bar, a little icon in your menu bar, when you click on it. And I will click on mine now, just so I can see. It drops down, and it shows you what's happening today, tomorrow, just your events coming up. Color coded, by the way, you colored. So it's pulling all the information from your calendars. You can then subscribe to a bunch of other Google calendars, multiple. Very cool. You can change the look and feel. Fine, it'll sync. Fine. But the hook. But the hook is. The hook. This is what got me. I know. The hook is you then give it a Facebook account. It logs in and pulls down Facebook birthdays. Bingo. So now you don't have to go to Facebook to see these birthdays. And in fact, what's nice is it shows upcoming ones. So you can click on this little thing.

Justin Edelstein: This is how I know all my friends' birthdays. Of course. Seriously. I don't know them. I don't know my girlfriend's phone number.

26:20 Jason Atwood: Who knows? So you can just quickly go, and it will pull down their birthdays from your Facebook account and put them inside of this view, inside this little menu app, tell you what's coming up. It's great. It could use, it's $1.99. So it's like one of those just buy it just to buy it. There are a couple free ones out there if you want to try them first. I found this one to be sort of the nicest. Works great, reads calendars. You can configure it, look and feel. It's called Calendar Bar by Clean Cut Code. I think it's on the top of the list of things making money now in the App Store. I at least have made them another $6 this week, so hopefully maybe one more, maybe another. Someone else out there?

Justin Edelstein: For our Mac users out there.

Jason Atwood: Calendar Bar by Clean Cut Code, very nice, well integrated, and you can just sit there kind of quietly in your menu bar.

Justin Edelstein: One thing about it that I'll say is I have Google calendars that I'm subscribed to in iCal, and it doubles them.

Jason Atwood: There's a setting to say undo them. Yeah, well I didn't put in, I just used the ones from iCal. I don't have to put in the other ones because it's already got them in iCal. That's what's nice. You don't have to, it's not doing anything else. It's just pulling in the stuff. But as you know, you can subscribe to other calendars like Yankee calendars, or Jets calendars, Hollander calendars, all sorts of great stuff. So, that's it. Calendar Bar by Clean Cut Code. And that wraps up another Clean Cut episode of Cloud Focus Weekly. So to keep up with us and all the things that we're blogging and posting about and tweeting about, you want to go to blog.arkasync.com. You can subscribe to that by RSS. Go to twitter.com slash arkasync which is the company, A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. Twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood would be me. I'm tweeting now and again about stuff. Mostly once or twice a day about something. Justin here is at twitter.com slash justedelstein And then we're on Facebook, facebook.com slash arkasync. In fact, someone asked us a question on Facebook the other day, or today, which I kind of liked. So it's nice being known in the Facebook world. That's facebook.com slash arkasync. And then for the podcast, subscribe on iTunes. Best way, quickest. Again, we're doing it a little bit later on a Thursday today. So if you were subscribed, you'll get it almost the minute I put it up there. I think it takes almost like 20 minutes to propagate across the interwebs. And that's it. We'd love to see a review up there if you could. If you're in iTunes, subscribing, leave a great review. Otherwise, we will see you next week. Until then, enjoy those cloudy days.