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Model Metrics has a long history of giving back to the communities that we serve, under the "Model Citizen" program. In a little over a month, Model Metrics will sponsor several employees and their family members to participate in this year’s AIDS Foundation of Chicago 5k Run/Walk event. Since its establishment in 2001, AIDS Run and [...]

Just yesterday, Engadget covered stories coming from both Gartner and IDC, two of the preeminent research and analysis firms in the country. Both agree that Android has exploded on the market, moving from a 9.6% market share last quarter to 17.2% market share currently. Google’s grand vision of running multiple devices across multiple carriers is coming [...]

If you don’t follow salesforce.com closely, it’s probably because you’re not currently a user. That will probably change pretty soon. Investors in old technologies are getting worried, with Kaufman Brothers issuing a "Sell" rating on Accenture for that very reason. Cloud computing and SaaS (salesforce.com especially) are taking a significant bite out of the old [...]

One of my favorite parts of being a marketer is how naturally social and outgoing the marketing lot tends to be. It’s why we in particular take to social media so easily. There are a lot of mediums out there, but thankfully there are a few great tools to make it all a bit more [...]

Today, Marc Benioff, the ever-vocal CEO of salesforce.com made a blog post over at Fortune on the end of Microsoft. In his post he outlines Microsoft’s latest ad campaigns, the ones spouting off about Windows 7 being "my idea." He pokes fun at one in particular where Windows no longer crashing was somehow deemed a feature. Is [...]

At long last, the oft-rumored VMForce has been officially announced. Huh? VMForce is a technology brought about by a partnership between salesforce.com and VMware,     the leader in virtualization technology. VMForce enables Java applications to run on Force.com infrastructure, the robust development platform built by the folks at salesforce.com. What does all of that mean? [...]

  Salesforce chatter has been gaining market buzz over the past month or so, especially after salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff posted a guest blog on TechCrunch on what he calls the "Facebook Imperative." His point wasn’t just to get people talking about his own social platform, but to make people realize just how far technology [...]

Got an interest in cloud computing? Wondering what all the hype is about? Listen in to CloudCast, a weekly podcast running anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes. We meander a bit from enterprise applications to consumer applications, but if you’ve ever wanted to get the inside story on what’s hot, find it here [...]

According to John Herlihy, Google’s vice-president of Global Ad Operations, the conventional desktop PC is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Between the explosive sales of smart phones and other mobile devices, netbooks, and laptops it appears the "traditional" means of computing are changing quickly. Google of course has a vested interest in this game, but it’s clear they [...]

  I hate cloud computing. There, I said it. OK, maybe it’s not cloud computing I hate, it’s the buzz and hype associated with the term. Whenever a technology acquires a sexy new term, companies that have nothing to do with it use the term in order to be associated with being hip or cool. [...]

  Today Amazon made a couple of interesting announcements.  First off they have opened a new region (Northern California) with multiple availability zones (analogous to data centers, but each on separate flood plains and electrical grids).  This further increases their computing capacity and also puts data closer to all of the start-up’s in the Bay [...]

There’s a known redraw bug in the OSX version of the Firefox Flash Player plugin that’s pretty irritating. If you do something that causes too many redraw events to get called in quick succession, Flash will fail to redraw the screen properly, and you end up with a mish-mash of phantom objects on the screen:   [...]

Companies taking on a CRM initiative, whether it a new concept or simply a new system, wisely leverage outside help for technical expertise and strategic best practice. Each situation, organizational culture, and level of readiness presents its own unique set of circumstances, but there are some universal truths when it comes to implementing CRM. One [...]

If there was any doubt remaining about the viability of Cloud Computing for enterprise companies, that doubt should now be summarily dismissed. The company (symbol: CRM) reported earnings Thursday night that were well above last year’s results, and beyond what analysts expected to see. Their shares leapt 16% yesterday after reporting earnings of $21.2m on revenue of [...]

For many companies exposed to sales automation tools for the first time, workflow is identified as a key driver of success. After all, allowing a system to monitor your data and intelligently notify appropriate parties that they need to take action is an attractive proposition. In this way, workflow puts the “automation” in Sales Force [...]

How the perplexed CEO achieved enlightenment The journey of enterprise technology advancements can be a real challenge for executive leadership. Questions arise around cost, return on investment, business process improvement, and once those decisions have been made – who will run the new system once it’s live? Companies don’t always have the internal resources needed [...]

Automated testing tools like FlexMonkey, RIATest, and QTP in Flex require you to add a few .swc files from Adobe to the compiler arguments in order to run. This is easy enough to set up in the project settings: -locale en_US -include-libraries "${flexlib}/libs/automation.swc" "${flexlib}/libs/automation_agent.swc" "${flexlib}/libs/automation_dmv.swc" But if you try to do this in version 3.3.0 [...]

Here’s a follow up to yesterday’s webinar.  I’ve recorded step by step how to add Cloud Converter as a web tab in your org.    Share this post:

An updated version of Cloud Converter is available this morning. It includes several new and useful features. Upload from XLS now allows multiple tabs in your source document. Includes both Simple and Advanced options for import.  Simple is the same as it ever was.  Advanced is all new. Edit Object labels and plurals in Advanced [...]

Contact the author at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com or @ReidCarlberg I’m on a quest to eliminate the term “resource” as a synonym for another human being.  Why?  Simple: everything I do is about people. Everything succeeds or fails based on the people involved.  The term “resource” feels like an attempt to whitewash this fact, to neutralize it.  And [...]

For CRM users and strategists, the inherent value of centralizing customer data for the purposes of collaboration and presenting a single face to the customer is well understood. The goal is to break down functional and individual silos to bring value to the customer relationship and encourage an open means of communication, management, planning and [...]

CRM implementation strategies are often decorated with goals like establishing “Holistic view of the customer”, “360 degree view of the customer”, and “One-stop shop”. These are ambitious goals when you consider everything that is required to effectively identify, secure, service, and maintain a customer. Ambitions should not be squelched by the enormity of the effort, [...]

What do Siebel, RightNow, Oracle CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce.com all have in common? The answer is that none of them will change your business and further your CRM effectiveness all by themselves. If you are looking at any of these systems as being the savior for your organization, you are going to find yourself [...]

Calendar2GO Lite for Salesforce CRM on the iPhone   We just found out Calendar2GO Lite was approved by Apple.  This is a free little application that allows you to easily see your Salesforce calendar on your iPhone and shows all the events for the current week, broken out into days and is very similar to the home [...]

We have had a lot of great interest in Cloud Loader, so the next question is "How do I start using it?"  Well, here is a simple 5 Step guide to get going with Cloud Loader to start doing integration for $0.10 an hour (or less with a reserved instance).   Step 1 – Sign [...]

CRM Kicks SaaS!!! Why CRM Optimization Is Your Future Optimization, Optimization, Optimization!!! I am amazed at the number of optimization projects that we are being retained to perform these days. Amazed and very impressed with what our clients are targeting as their objectives. They are taking CRM way beyond the borders of sales, marketing and [...]

One of the things I like about Salesforce.com and the Force.com platform is that they enable people to do more while talking less. Let me clarify: people still get to talk, but they get to talk less about what they’re trying to do on the platform.  They’ll probably talk more about other, unrelated stuff, once [...]

Follow Reid: Twitter.com/ReidCarlberg. A few people on my team contributed to this at different points.  Props to Shoby Abdi for getting it all together.  Twitter.com/ShobyAbdi. I recently ran into a challenge regarding a Salesforce-to-Salesforce mashup.  We didn’t want to move the data (traditional integration, S2S/org to org sharing), but we also wanted to keep the [...]

  I’ll start by saying that Clang is a must-have tool for every iPhone developer. It’s easy to use, and it does a fantastic job of profiling the memory usage of your apps. The iPhone is a powerful hand-held device, but the memory constraints are tight enough that they can cause serious problems with application [...]

  Adding a contact to the iPhone’s address book isn’t horribly complicated, but it’s not the most straightforward process in the world, either, because the documentation leaves a bit to be desired. There is an Address Book Programming Guide published by Apple, but at 28 pages, it feels a bit bloated when you’re just trying [...]

Following are some lessons indented for developers who are well versed in any number of other programming languages, but who are coming to the iPhone for the first time.

You can follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter.     …along with a pretty decent fleece. This Force.com First 500 Certified thing — it’s like the gift that keeps on giving.  (First the pin & hat, the certificate and now this.  A bonanza!)   Share this post:

You can follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter. My prior ground-breaking* work on "dirt computing" has proven it’s worth!  "Dirt bound" is now insanely popular.  Or, if not insanely popular, it has appeared in at least one blog post outside of mine.   Although I should probably admit that even that blog post is about my [...]

Has anyone else noticed the Facebook explosion over the last 6 weeks?  I’ve been mulling over the reasons why it’s happening now…..right now, and have only a couple very subjective conclusions.  It can only be that the holidays represent a time for people to catch up on the things they’ve been meaning to do for [...]

Article briefly outlining tools a CMO can use to get the job done faster. Includes brief descriptions for Google Sites, Content Management Systems such as Wordpress and Joomla, Salesforce CRM’s Web to Lead functionality, and CS4.

I was fortunate to present a couple of our Flex and AIR based solutions at Dreamforce with Dave Carroll (Salesforce.com Evangelist) and James Ward (RIA Cowboy and Flex Evangelist) while at Dreamforce.   The feedback from the audience was great and it is exciting to share the message of Flex and AIR with more developers to [...]

We just closed down our booths at Dreamforce and are all heading back to our respective cities.  Based on credible sources Dreamforce attendance was just a few people shy of the expected 10,000.  That is a very interesting number considering some of the economic news as of late and companies that have travel bans, spending [...]

I’m at Dreamforce in the keynote. And the focus is all about the cloud computing convergence. Everyone is excited about the new force.com Sites product. With Sites you can now use the power of Visualforce to create a public facing website. The Site is dynamic and content is delivered directly from custom objects. You can [...]

It’s just two days away.  No, not Dreamforce, although that’s definitely important to me and to Model Metrics.  What’s two days away is the Presidential election. Last month I commented on the first big drop in the financial markets.  Since then it’s been a bit of a stock market roller coaster and the Presidential campaigns [...]

  Amazon has made some interesting announcements lately around their cloud computing environment that you should be paying attention to.  This platform has really come together and is a viable alternative to offerings by other companies.  Let’s break down what Amazon offers: Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) This is essentially “a server in the sky” (or [...]

Intuit founder Scott Cook’s "The Contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business" (Harvard Business Review, Oct 2008) tells business owners they should harness the power of user contributions. However, it’s missing one important ingredient: how they should do it. Cook writes: First, you must learn how to spot opportunities for creating value from user contributions. [...]

Dreamforce 08.  It’s coming, and I’m excited. Yeah, it’s over election week, which is a little irritating, but I’ll register for the absentee voting and that will be that. Then there’s the traveling to SFO, being away from my wife and young son.  I’ll probably miss him doing something totally cool.  My wife will have [...]