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On the heels of my Top Cloud Computing Stories of 2009 comes (appropriately enough) my Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010. Let’s jump right into it.
1) There Will be Another Outage, and No One Will Panic
In 2009 there were two significant outages of Google’s Gmail service, which rendered it unavailable temporarily. The [...]

Did you know the federal government spends over $75B annually on IT? With that number in mind, you can imagine the enormous amount of manpower it takes to choose, customize, build, deploy, and maintain separate instances of applications to run the government’s operations. I cannot imagine a more perfect environment to deploy cloud computing, and [...]

 
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:
 
This happens [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 for [...]

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I was watching an episode of Ace of Cakes the other day. Duff and the crew were using a shot gun to destroy sample cakes they no longer needed in the shop. Each of them commented on how cathartic it was to purge the old to make way for the new.
Let’s [...]

Hundreds, or even thousands, of companies claim they have created Cloud Computing-based applications.  I don’t doubt that in the least.  However, almost all of these applications either a) use the company’s own platform or b) leverage one or two infrastructures, such as Force.com, Amazon Web Services or Google.  Very few applications leverage more than two [...]

On the second day keynote at Google I/O they unveiled something big.  This is new product is built by the guys who brought us Google Maps.  Remember how surprised you were the first time you saw interactive maps IN THE BROWSER and could zoom down and see your own house?  Well these guys asked themselves [...]

 
I have an iPhone and for the most part I love it.  I like the interface, the seamless access to music and all the apps on the AppStore.  I don’t like the shortcomings, such as the lack of cut and paste, no video capture, lack of landscape keyboard, etc… Many of these will be addressed [...]

The successful strategy for CRM implementation in your organization needs to be well thought out and aligned to your culture, business needs and problems. However, there is significant value to examining what has worked (and not worked) for others that have blazed this trail before you. This two-part post will address some of [...]

I recently listed the desktop version of CardLasso on Adobe’s AIR Marketplace.  If you haven’t heard of AIR, check it out on the Adobe site.  It is the “Adobe Integrated Runtime” which allows you to run RIA apps on your desktop and distribute them with the ease of a web app.  Our AIR version of [...]

Remember When Video Killed The Radio Star?
By now we should recognize the signs of a major shift caused by a new, “disruptive” technology. After all, we have seen it happen so many times before. The only difference is that today the shifts are quick and dramatic, catching off guard anybody that dares to [...]

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or email Scott: smccambridge(at)modelmetrics.com
I just finished listening to a Pod Cast of This American Life show #377 “Scenes from a Recession”.  In one act of the show they explained in detail the process by which the FDIC comes in and takes over a bank that has failed.  As a trainer, I was [...]

Have you wished your business process was highly automated with instantaneous workflow notification triggers sending a flurry of communication to all the appropriate people?
Have you thought implementing this stroke of brilliance in salesforce.com (or any other system) would cure the ailments of your current business process?
If you have not had the opportunity to test [...]

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 screen in [...]

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 Up for [...]

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 [...]

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 freed [...]

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 solution [...]

Follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter or contact him at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.
Dear IT Leadership,
Today, your business needs you more than ever.  The economy is weakening.  Competition is intense.. You’ve helped it navigate technologies for years.  But the business has immensely complex new challenges today.  It needs your help to operate more efficiently.  It needs your help to [...]

Follow ReidCarlberg on Twitter or contact him at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.
Hey Stumbleupon — welcome!  You might also enjoy "Import Your App from Excel".

Gmail experienced an outage in Europe overnight.  There’s some handwringing and frustration about it.  But you know what? I don’t care.  Here’s why.
1. The last significant Gmail outage looks to have been in August.  Four [...]

 
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 performance. With [...]

One of the main advantages to using Flex and AIR for development is the ability to rapidly generate interface prototypes which can be be directly utilized into development itself.
Another side of this aspect is that we can also use AIR to develop a simple interface to iterate against Apex web services. Apex [...]

 
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 to [...]

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.

With the introduction of Apex, Salesforce began enforcing unit testing for code deployment. For most people, this would be a Good Thing(tm) and for people running on a distributed cloud type application, it would be a Really Good Thing(tm) (or at least, the neighborly thing to do).
This is what shame looks like:

That is several [...]

In case you haven’t heard we announced CardLasso back in November of last year.  We have had a lot of interest and received some great feedback since it was shown in the Dreamforce keynote by Adam Gross, namely:

This is great, but I don’t have an iPhone
Could I use this for Tradeshows?
Do you have any Corporate [...]

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 [...]

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 have [...]

 
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 multiple servers).  EC2 [...]

Interesting times.  Yesterday the House of Representatives failed to pass the $700B bailout bill.  The Dow fell almost 800 points during the afternoon, the largest one day loss in its history.  The last time I remember hearing those words was back in 2001, when the Internet bubble burst.  Of course the NASDAQ took a relatively [...]

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. Second — [...]

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 the video [...]