With Dreamforce 2010 behind us and Dreamforce 2011 fast approaching, the first ever crowdsourced conference application is publicly available! Chatter BINGO has been released as an unmanaged package, meaning that all the source code is open and ready for customizing to your hearts’ content. Chatter BINGO was conceived by Chris Shackelford and Brad Gross (@imperialstout) […]
Which has the most potential for enterprise-wide adoption: iPad or Cr-48?
This is a collaborative post with Nick Hamm (@hammnick), Director of Technology at Infowelders and David Schach (@dschach) from X-Squared On Demand. After a conversation via twitter, we decided to collaborate on a blog post (via Google Docs, of course) and are publishing it in our own blogs simultaneously. With all of the hype around […]
Email Inbox Version 2
Well, it took about ten minutes from the release of Email Inbox Version 1 for people to request additional features, screenshots, etc. Version 2 includes some neat icons, and this post has the multiple-times-requested screenshots we promised. First, a teaser screenshot. (There's a better one below the code.) Here's the updated Visualforce code: The Apex […]
X-Squared featured in Inc.com article on drop.io
Howard Greenstein of Inc.com published a story today(”Stop, Collaborate, and Listen“) on drop.io and asked us to comment on how drop.io can help SMBs in service delivery.
Zip to City & State Integration – Proof of Concept
Ubiquity Plugin for developer.force.com
Inspired by Gina Tripani’s release of a Ubiquity plug-in to search Lifehacker via Google, I used her code as a base (thanks, Gina) and created a Ubiquity plug-in to search developer.force.com.
X-Squared Featured in ITA Newsletter
This week, X-Squared On Demand was featured in the Illinois Technology Association‘s Industry Weekly newsletter ITA Member Q&A. Thank you to the ITA for featuring us!
Project: Lookup to Picklist
In the first installment of post-Dreamforce projects, I present a mechanism to present the user with all available Lookup options in a picklist. This should simplify some Visualforce pages. (Credit to the Developers Guide from the new post-Dreamforce Library.) The key to the code is the ability to customize the SOQL statement to focus as […]
Upcoming Plans
This blog post is partly an announcement of X-Squared’s upcoming plans and projects, and partly a way to hold myself to my list. It is said that while managing the Yankees, Joe Torre tried to quit many times, until someone bet him $1000 that he couldn’t quit… and told everyone he knew about the bet. Clearly, $1000 is small change to Torre, but the pressure of the whole world knowing his plan to quit helped him quite a bit. So here is X-Squared On Demand’s list of projects and plans (outside of the standard billing work for our amazing clients):
Zipcar: CaaS (Car as a Service)
A few weeks ago, I went on a Low Car Diet. No, I didn’t come up with the name; it’s the invention of Zipcar, a growing company with a product that, in these times of rising gas prices, is not only filling a growing demand, but is creating a market for its service.
After speaking to some people at Zipcar, and having rented cars a few times, I have come to realize the following:
In this age of Web 2.0 (and, according to some, Web 3.0), when Software as a Service is growing faster than ever, the on-demand model can be applied to other sectors, creating, for instance, Car as a Service.
OWN NOTHING
Ask anyone who drank the Software-as-a-Service Kool-Aid about in-house servers and you’ll be greeted with a face that looks like someone just took a bite out of a lemon, peel and all. In today’s quickly-evolving Information Technology world, ownership is nothing; rental is everything. How much does it cost to own a file server (including hardware, electricity, air conditioning, salaries for the in-house geeks, space that can’t be used for an office refrigerator, and more) per year? Compare that to the cost of storing files on Amazon Web Services! Compare purchasing a VPN appliance to the monthly cost of certificate-based Single Sign-On products like MyOneLogin by TriCipher. Pooling capital costs and being charged only for what we use is the new model. I don’t want to have to buy a 1TB NAS drive, and then to worry about if it is filling up; I’d rather pay per GB for shared storage, where my information is just as private, and arguably more accessible while being more secure (since nobody can walk into my office and steal my drives).
Cloud Computing is where it’s at. This is the solution to problems caused by using in-house systems and desktop applications inaccessible from any computer outside the office. And Cloud Driving seems to be just as viable a solution to the headache of owning a car and paying for gas, insurance, parking, and maintenance.
Let’s compare Salesforce, the top on-demand software application created by salesforce.com to Zipcar, a leading on-demand driving service created by, well, Zipcar.
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