Check out this post: Never before has news been gathered and spread so fast. Is it any wonder that trade magazines are doomed to extinction?

As a presenter at the SalesForce.com annual conference (DreamForce ‘09) I was given a $100 gift card for DonorsChoose.org , an organization that uses the web to match donors with projects in schools that require funding. From the project that I chose:

“Help me teach the language to my preschoolers! I teach public preschool in an inner city. I have 30 students ranging in age from 3 to 5 years old, 33% are special education students. Eighty percent of my students are Non-English speaking and come from low income families.”

“In order for my students to enjoy and discover a variety of music and literature, it is important to have a listening center. The listening center will allow a group of children to put on head phones and hear the phonetics of the language while at the same time listen to wonderful stories. Audio books provide students an alternative way to acquire knowledge and allow interactive learning to take place.”

You can read the rest of the info on this project here.

I thought this project was a good fit considering that I make my living in communications. A few weeks later I got a full size 8.5 x 11 envelope came in the mail. It had been a long day and I grumbled about being asked for more money (as I tend to get 2 or 3 DM solicitations a week – thanks for all the return addresses guys, I’ll never use them all), but when I opened the envelope it was a wonderful surprise – a thank you letter from the teacher, letters from the students and some photographs of the kids using the listening station.

I was really impressed with the service and the program, if you are looking for a place to make a charitable donation, DonorsChoose is worth checking out. I have to thank Brian from Salesforce and the guys at Manticore for their help with DreamForce.

Here’s one of the thank you letters from the kids:

Focus philanthrophy, showing what the Salesforce.com foundation is using around the word. Shout out to Witness.org (Peter Gabriel has done some work with them). Salesforce has a 1% program (learn about it at ShareTheModel.org) employees get 6 days a year to work with charitable organizations.

Dr. Larry Brilliant (co-founder of the Well if you are hardcore enough to remember it, and worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) that eradicated smallpox) is talking about the Google.org charitable foundation that is copied after SF’s. They monitor emerging diseases to prevent pandemics, Lyme disease is on the graphic he’s showing.

Brain melt: this initiative goes on the offensive stoping disease and can work against intentionally launched biological threats.

Working on renewalable energy, but only at a price cheaper than coal.

Megatrends: Increasing Populaton, Climate Change, Urbanization, Food Shortage, Disease

Africa consumed millions of pounds of bushmeat over the past year, this meat contains diseases not yet charted.

Brain Melt 2: The new rich are getting involved with philanthrophy while they are still alive, not after they have died and there’s a foundation named after them.

The good doctor can really speak, great presentation.

The Appy Awards are being given out. The Appy trophy is very cool, my words can’t do it justice. Google yields nothing, so I’ll post one when I empty out the camera. The Certified admin award gets a suit jacket with a flaming SF logo on the back. That’s sweet.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about capitalizaton – how much of human capacity is being used. His new book Outliers will be out in a couple of weeks. Talking about sports – an example talks about pro Czech hockey players being born in the first quarter of the year. Same distribution for Soccer (and in fact, all sports).

Message: Our own policies and rules can constrain human potential.

Throwing your heart and mind into what you do gets results. Story about young Bill Gates getting up at 2am for computer access at U of W for access from 2-6am. Kenyan runners dominate because their capitalization is strong – over 1 million teen Kenyan boys run 10-12 miles per day.

That’s the wrap for today, I’m off to the Manticore party at Azie.

Addendum photos here in my Flickr Dreamforce 2008 set.

The car is RSS enabled. Mileage and other statistics are sent out allowing this data to be integrated with the car’s website.

Ok, now for notes from Day 2:

We’re 15 minutes past the start and they are still asking people to sit, this is a packed house with over 9,000 attending the show. They started with a cool animation with some blues guitar behind it. The Safe Harbor statement rolls and followed by a video from fake George Bush. Showing his approval dashboard going down the drain is classic.

Going over the full product suite: Manage (Sales, Marketing, Website, Service, Knowledge, App Exchange), Share (Partners, Content, Ideas, Google Apps, Salesforce-to-Salesforce), Bulid (Infrastructure, Database, Application, Operations, Business – all on the multi-tenant kernel). Winter ‘09 is the 27th release in 9 years.

EVP George Hu is talking about the using Salesforce Ideas to listen to customers – over half of 200 new features came from the Ideas platform. If you are familiar with Digg, think Digg for customer service (if you don’t know Digg, check it out). It’s very cool, if you’ve ever suffered through gathering product marketing requirements through surveys and interviews, this is a game-changer.

Salesforce-to-Salesforce connections are now free. Could be very interesting if you have a partner that’s also on the system – a benefit of the tentant model.

A lot of product tour stuff, Google AdWords integration, split opportunities, hosted landing pages. Interesting – contact images in SF, have a picture of your customer. Whoa, click and drag the picture to the calendar to set up an appointment. Showing live collaboration with Google Docs spreadsheets.

10MM+ Google Apps Business Users, 5,000+ shared Salesforce.com customers. New funnel application for Google Apps. Users can subscribe to documents in Content to get updates. Saved Powerpoint decks are available and can be edited inside a SF.com editor (I believe he said this will not be out until the spring release).

Michael Dell talks about cloud computing, now being the time to upgrade infrastructure. Some interesting tips:

• Focus on Hard Returns (they are forecasting 50MM in savings on virtualization)
• Consolidate where you can – vendors are in deal making mode, time to consolidate purchasing
• McKinsey says turning off technology investments in a downturn is counterproductive, when a rebound comes, you may be under-capacity

That marks the time for me, I have to go prep for my next session…

I’m at the first keynote for Dreamforce, I just saw Robert Scobel hanging out in the blogger section. Fred from the Chronicle is in front of me sporting about 10k worth of camera gear. I’m not looking that cool with my Canon Rebel XT…

As the rock fades down the light show comes up. Projection screens on the ceiling.

Native apps for SalesForce being shown of, the major push for this show has been cloud computing. With their massive infrastructure this is a great transition for them.

Covers evolution of computing – mainframe, client/server, cloud, platform as a cloud. Windows Azure (he makes the vaporware call). Marc is a changed man, he doesn’t just shake down enterprise companies (he wants every size organization as a customer). The idea of customers as tenants is a new one to me – literally showing the chunk of the cloud as a database cylinder with cubes cut out for each of the tenants.

Force.com Sites: Many corporate websites are “teetering infrastructures”. Hosting now included with your SF.com subscription. Useful for both corporate sites or Intranets (other instances of “buying software” creeping in). Very cool – make updates in your Force application – it immediately propagates out to your website. 500k page views per month included free with Enterprise Edition of SF.com

Brain Melter: Using this functionality so that each sales rep gets a microsite, they make a change to their profile in SF.com and the website is automatically updated. Webinar registrations come right in to SF.com

Brain Melt #2: Write Facebooks apps in force.com – data objects are in Force.com and you use VisualForce to serve up code on Facebook. Showing off a recruiting app that updates Facebook automatically.

Starbucks using Ideas (Digg funtctionality from within SF- showing off Ideas app running on one enterprise, data fed to SF.com – results and closed loop over in Facebook. Arrrghhhh – brain melting again (#3).

Brian Melt #4: Force.com for Amazon Web Services – showing Card Lasso. Take a picture of a business card and it shows up in Salesforce.com very cool…

I’m speaking today at the 11:30 session on campaigns, right after the second keynote with Michael Dell (and supposedly an election day surprise). I’m also really excited by the 3rd keynote this afternoon with Malcolm Gladwell talking about his new book.

If you are attending Dreamforce, I’ll be speaking at this session (full list of Marketing track):

Campaign Management for Experts
Ready to take your campaign management skills to the next level? Join us to hear from customers and our internal experts on how to leverage the Campaigns module to the fullest. This session will cover best practices on using campaign hierarchies, campaign member status values, and our latest Winter ‘09 feature, Campaign Influence.
Speaker: Scott Harris, Omniture, Inc.
Speaker: John Wall, Accurev Inc
Date: Tuesday, November 4
Time: 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

First was a few weeks ago when I installed VMware Fusion on my wife’s Mac. The sight of windows booting up (and running better than it does on most PC’s was something I never expected to see firsthand (nor even ever own a Mac for that matter, now there are 3 in the family so far).

Second was getting to check out some Solid State Disk Drives (or SSDs as you’d call them if you were in the know, and now you are). Having a hard drive with no moving parts changes the game in a lot of ways, as soon as a media player and a laptop hit my price point with an SSD, I’m in. Things like reducing the boot time from a minute 40, to 35 seconds is right where I want to be.

This week I’ve been doing some data analysis. The labor has changed now that I have access to the SalesForce.com API. I’m starting to move beyond CRM – the idea that the best you could do is a database that contains all the information about your customers and prospects. I’m now thinking about exploring how the database changes as time passes. Questions like “Is the sales process improving?”, “What data am I missing, and is it important to fill in the blanks”, “What does the normal suspect to prospect to customer lifecycle look like?”

The crazy part is that these questions have been discussed for years, but we’re finally reaching the point where almost any business can get access to the tools to answer them.

Just a few other things I read that are always great:

I’m a salesforce.com insider by reading SalesforceWatch.

On the small business tech font, and for Tales of Chicago check out Chicago Mike.

Most readers know I’m still going through Sex and the City withdrawal, The Pink Shoe Diaries help me cope.

As a comic fan (aka – Fanboy, aka – dork) Title Undetermined makes me laugh.

I’m also giving a second plug for Mike Champion because he needs a dose of the Google Juice, and mentioning GameSpot which is not a blog but still full of great info.

Google is cracking down on search arbitrage

I was unable to hit the WebInno event yesterday so I’m looking for a good writeup on what I missed.

Some rumors about Google acquiring Salesforce.com but I think those are just rumors.

A new Marketing Over Coffee will be out tonight.