Workday Rising: Speak softly and carry big, happy customers
Howard Street in San Francisco on Tuesday morning looked different. The tarmac was visible and cars were actually using it. Outside Moscone Center, a local folk rock band, Blind Willies was playing. Excellent, but nowhere near the brand recognition of say, Aerosmtih or Will.i.am. Inside Moscone, the rooms had plenty of empty seats. Welcome to […]
Dreamforce 2014: Announcements, Paradigm Shift, Crowds
Dreamforce has always been about many things happening at once — a three-ring circus in a good way. There are announcements about applications, platforms, philanthropy, entertainment and, importantly, parties. This year there was all of that and then some I was a guest with a ringside seat. Since most of the product announcements came out […]
Dreamforce 2014: Converging on cloud, apps, mobile, analytics, and community
The vision Salesforce has for market-facing engagement is the right one: Tear down data, app, and user experience silos between marketing, sales, operations, and support. But does their cloud measure up to this vision yet?
Salesforce at 15
Fifteen is an interesting anniversary. We tend to think about major anniversaries in ten-year increments with the five-year internode acting more as a gut check. Fifteen is close enough to the creation that all of the relevant parties are still around and most are still in place. But it’s also far enough in the rearview […]
Get them out of the building: Travel support from Volta
When Ben Yoskovitz moved to Halifax to join us at GoInstant he left the growing Montreal community and brought a lot of fresh perspective to what needs to happen in Nova Scotia to grow the startup ecosystem. The #1 thing he noticed was the successful startups were the ones getting out of the building and […]
Database Billboards: Times and Cars and Oracle Competitors Gone By
Driving up or down 101 these days, you can’t avoid the new SiliconView billboard – it’s a double-sided electronic billboard, so you can see it whether you are going north- or south-bound, and most of us on 101 are driving slowly enough that we get to see several iterations of the billboard content as we […]
What you need to know about starting a startup in Atlantic Canada
Building a product and growing a startup is a different experience no matter where you live. In many ways every startup experience is completely unique and totally predictable all at the same time. The goals, struggles, opportunities and outcomes are each different and geography is one other thing that can be thrown in the mix. […]
A Pictorial Tale of Two Conferences (and more)
Recently I’ve attended two conferences two weeks apart in San Francisco, and the difference in style is shocking. One did not even feel like a conference, rather a Festival – Woodstock, Mardi Gras, SXSW – your pick:-) The other a decidedly more “closed” traditional corporate conference, so much so, that fellow commentators actually compared it […]
Inception-Force
I had a stunning couple of days at the Dreamforce event. Gorgeous weather, amazing San Francisco sights, lovely company as I wrote here. And picked up all kinds of interesting angles from the event: David Cush, CEO of Virgin America, reached out to a member of his IT staff in the audience while he fumbled […]
Dreamforce 12 – Crazy Big, with Lower Barriers
Tweet Dreamforce is a big event. Crazy big. Nearly 90,000 people came to San Francisco this week for the annual celebration of all things salesforce.com. The city shut down Howard Street between the north and south sides of the Moscone Center so that the company could pack in even more people. Salesforce did a slick […]
