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Dreamforce Morning Keynote Day 2

The notes from day two (pictures to follow when I get everything posted over on Flickr). One other thing I didn’t mention in the last post – Neil Young took the stage showing off his new hybrid car project LincVolt. It has both an electric and a compressed natural gas (CNG) engine. The CNG engine is a generator that can rechange the battery on the fly. The engine is so powerful that a construction team could use it as a generator on site. It’s a modified rotary engine that apparently is much more efficient with CNG than regular gasoline. The motor can generate over 500 horsepower allowing the ’59 Lincoln to go up to 160 mph (I don’t know if that’s actually been tested though).

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…

2 replies on “Dreamforce Morning Keynote Day 2”

FYI, the Tesla Roadster does the RSS thing already. Every car comes with a USB Key which downloads all car data for you to view and upload to their website. They are working on transmitting this via Bluetooth as well. i.e. park you car in the garage, sync your car. My old Empeg in-Dash MP3 player could be hacked to add a bluetooth chip and do the same thing with your music.

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