Talk about a busy week! I had a great time at Dreamforce but I must say, I had enough of Moscone for a while.
Janine has been blogging about the show all week but I wanted to also give you my highlights.
Keynote by George Lucas - Everyone who was there for the notes can probably recall George's comments on how he has confidence that "bacteria will survive." He also made a great point about today's educational system and how it lacks cooperative and interactive learning. Edutopia's approach is to use curiosity as a learning tool. Instead of telling kids to learn Math, tell them to build an airplane. From there, they'll learn why they need to learn Math. Kudos to George Lucas on his foundation's great work.
Panel Discussion on Corporate Responsibility - Our CEO, Janine was a member of this panel. I agree with Janine when she talks about the impact helping others has with a company's morale. As an employee of VR, it feels good knowing our organization is involved with helping others. We're not out to save the world but it felt rewarding helping families within our community (St. Joseph's is located 10 blocks away from VR). Besides, good deeds are contagious. Just image if other companies adopts a similar program to give back to their communities like the Salesforce Foundation.
It's true that VR holds non-profits in a special light. They're out there doing good things and we love to help them be more successful at it. VR offers a 15% discount for non-profits and watch out for an even better deal in the near future.
Josh's Presentation on List Building - I talked to Josh a day before his presentation and I can feel how nervous he was as anyone would be who'll be speaking in front of a group of 200. But man, once he was up on stage, he made a superb presentation. He talked about the right way to build and grow a mailing list. How building a good list takes time. Shortcuts such as purchasing a list can do some lasting damage to your corporate branding and it more than likely will label your company as a spammer. So, if you ever come across a disc with 9M emails for $19.99, run towards the other direction as fast as you can (I stole that last line from Josh's presentation).
The presentation was so great, watch out for a future webinar on this subject.
VR Wins Best in Show!! - After all the suspense, VR was awarded Best In Show! Working mainly on the AppExchange version of our app, this was one of the proudest moments in my VR career. Congrats to the entire team and great work!
Meeting Our Clients - In my opinion, this is the best part of the show. I've talked to many of our clients on the phone. Nothing beats a good handshake and putting a face to the voice. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to say hi and give some real solid feedback. Your opinions and feedback are very valuable when it comes to developing our app. It may sound a bit cliche but the more successful you are with using our product, the better we become.
I think that's it for now. Post your comments. :)
--Chris
Having worked so hard for 5 years at the Salesforce relationship, having put so much effort into our product and integration, having a cube at the Salesforce Incubator, putting SO much effort into our music videos, being numero uno on the AppExchange forever...well, it all paid off last night when VR won...
BEST IN SHOW!!!!
But hang on to your hats, cuz they also played our video ON THE BIG SCREEN!! You couldn't have had a happier crew than the VR crew last night.
Marc, did you have to mess with us and start with this line?
"And the winner is...all the way from Minneapolis Minnesota..." Nine deflated VR heads hung low like "Robbed...AGAIN!" But the VR logo popped on the screen and we heard the big guy say "VERTICALRESPONSE!!!". Thanks for the roller coaster MB.
Shoutouts go out to all of our customers, partners and employees that voted and all of the employees that work hard to develop, support, market and sell our product.
WOOHOO!! For more pix go here!
The Lucas Notes
Well the morning started off with George Lucas being interviewed by Famous adviser to Salesforce Robert Thurman. This guy has written tons of books on Buddhism, very close to the Dalai Lama, and Marc takes it down to: "Mostly famous for his daughter, Uma." Good one. George dressed up for the occasion, he wore a jacket with his jeans and flannel, and being a huge fan of the denim, my booth-uniform was tired.
George talked about his own philanthropic effort Edutopia. Great concept. Instead of a teacher barking and yammering at you all day, make it more of a collaborative effort. Collaboration you say? It's the name of the game at this year's Dreamforce. So kids should do more of a group learning environment (especially to learn to work with people they "hate" as GL put it). "If they taught that in school we wouldn't be in Iraq right now" (Applause). This gets them ready for their potential future work life when they have to work with people they hate.
Kids today need to be challenged to think about things instead of a one way communications from the teacher, and it's up to the schools and the teachers to embrace it.
Weird? When he did say that the world will never be destroyed, and that it's not about saving the planet it's about saving ourselves. Wonder what Al G. thinks about that one?
He did however say he has faith in bacteria to survive. Ok. Positive note? We as a race have come really far in just 50 years and that we're starting to pay attention.
I did like to hear him talk about collaboration as it related to him helping other Directors and other Directors helping him, which creates a better "playing field" if you will, for everyone. He applauds when any summer movie blockbuster comes out because it gets people going to the movies more. We see this ALL the time with our winery clients. They work collaboratively to try to get more people in general to buy wine and travel to the wineries themselves. Great point George.
2nd Life
What was cool? I stuck around for the next panel and being a fan of anything Social Networking, Philip Rosedale of 2nd Life (who is a FANTASTIC customer of VR BTW) was up next. I took 3 "wows" away from this one: 
Other Notes
Pot shots and Microsoft - In George Hu's keynote demo the fake company was a software company in Seattle called "Dinosoft". In today's fantastic mini-movie the demo had a dropdown called "Scared of the Big Players" and one of the choices was MSFT. Nicely done.
I had a panel on Corporate Social Responsibility and what we do at VR here to help our community. I think it went well especially on the heels of the keynote as well as our participation with the Salesforce Foundation. Thanks to all who attended.
It got crazy over lunch today. No less than 8 people at our booth at any given time. Mob scene. And Furious Alf himself was able to shuffle a big flat screen TV in to play our videos over and over. Tomorrow we should be downright sick of them.
For those of you who want to join us at our Dreamforce happy hour at Roe tomorrow night, make sure you're on the list. 
Please vote for an Appy Award, Best in Show! Log into the Idea Exchange to do it.
Michael Sippey from TypePad is here and speaking tomorrow. We love our TypePad. We also bumped into Chris Baggott, who founded Exact Target, his new gig is Compendium Software for Corporate Bloggers.
We also ran into Kirk Crenshaw from RevCatalyst and Jason Stewart and Chris Golec from Demandbase. We just did a press release with each of them, check them out here and here. These guys do a killer job on filling the lead pipeline so that when the leads become contact a user can use VerticalResponse as the communications tool.
Rob Lamb from Clickability stopped by. He used to work at Salesforce now he's flogging content management and website analytics all in one. A very cool package for tons of salesforce users.
Cast Iron systems is here in "force" (argh, argh). They have a cool hardware solution enabling you to connect up data from one source to another, without having to be a rocket scientist. However, they actually have their booth set up as a disco ballroom, and they have their sales team in John Travolta-like white leisure suits. Wow. Love the Cast Iron and love Disco but...huh? I told my staff I would never make them dress up in disco suits or onesees. Nuf said. 
Our uniform of choice? Taking from the ever popular Furious Alf "Get it Now" bling, we have T's made up and a few of them are actually be-dazzled. Yes we bought a Bedazzler.
I'll be back shortly after trolling the show floor some more.
So here we are at Dreamforce and it's a ZOO. More attendees and Partners than ever before. I think they said around 7000. And boy to we know, we have the longest running partnership that Salesforce has to date. 2002! That year it was in a tiny room at the Salesforce offices at Landmark with 6 other partners. Boy have things changed.
I'll blog about the show floor since I won't have too much time to attend the sessions. If one of us does, you'll hear about it.
The keynote this morning was great. The Marc and Parker show. Seriously the new stuff is very cool, Force.com. Good on ya Salesforce for coining yet another acronym, PaaS, Platform as a Service. Truly design your salesforce not only to fit your business needs but now you can use it on any device be it laptop, tabket, kiosk, handheld, you name it. I thought that was pretty cool. I'm excited to use it for our own business needs since so many of us have those nifty iPhones. Contacts and Accounts together on one screen? Shut up!
Also, George Hu talked about the new winter 08 version addresses some nice issues that the customers have. Salesforce is the only company I know that can get huge applause for bux fixes. (Oops was that outloud?) One nifty feature is editing a field directly on the screen you're on, without having to click through to do it. Nice especially if you're on a slow connection...much like I'm on now. (Dreamforce wifi a teensy bit slow, the pw is 800nosoftware by the way.) Another few? Hover help, nice again for the slow connection, and more campaign reports which us marketers cannot live without. 
Got to get back to the show, I'll blog more in a bit.
What a day Saturday was. There were about 16 of us that went to St. Joseph's Community Center on 10th and Howard here in San Francisco. Check out the pix!
Half of us were assigned to painting and half of us were assigned to moving dirt from one area to another (seriously).
There was a great lunch, there were really great people, even basketball VR on VR ensued.
Here's a video Ciaran from the UK Sailing Academy, a very cool non profit in the UK took of JP, and here's a video of the overall program.
Thanks to the Salesforce Foundation for letting us participate as a sponsor for the 2nd year in a row and thank to the VR employees, we did a great thing and had a great time.
We're gearing up for another amazing Dreamforce show this year, complete with product enhancements, special appearances by Furious ALF of course, and something I'm really excited about the -- The AppCrawl!
The AppCrawl is a grass-roots effort that was spawned out of a group of Salesforce Incubator Partners. The Incubator Program allows SFDC partners to access SFDC resources within their own building. If you're local, you may be familiar with the building, it's at the juncture of 101 and 92 in San Mateo. VerticalResponse has used this space as a way to get closer to SFDC team members to strengthen our relationship. We have also been fortunate enough to strengthen our relationship with some of the partners -- enough so that we've banded together to form "The AppCrawl".
The AppCrawl will be conducted at Dreamforce and allow SFDC prospects and customers to learn more about a select few incubator partners and how they can enhance their core SFDC application. We'll be passing out "bingo" style cards on the tradeshow floor. We'd like you to stop by each of the booths of the participating partners. Once you made the visit and learned about the offering, you'll get a stamp. Getting all of the partner's stamps (i.e. completing the AppCrawl), gets you entered to win one of many prizes that we have. Be sure to stop by one of our booths to learn more and start your AppCrawl!
Below is the list of participating partners:
VerticalResponse
Dreamfactory
Centive
Open Air
Clicktools
Convenos
InsideView
Ribbit
We're looking forward to meeting all of you at the show. Start off with VerticalResponse, Booth #129!
- Alex
VerticalResponse is speaking at two sessions during Dreamforce. Check them out!
List Building and Email Marketing
The Power of Us: Share Your Strength
Are you heading to city by the Bay this year for Dreamforce? Did you catch the Journey reference in the previous sentence? We're getting close to that time of year when all things saleforce.com converge upon SOMA, including that classic Bay City band - Journey!
If you haven't been to Dreamforce yet, or are on the fence, I highly recommend checking this show out. This is THE networking event of the year, with like-minded people looking to grow their businesses with an eye toward corporate philanthropy. It is great example of what makes San Francisco an amazing city and center of innovation. Plus, have you been to San Francisco in September? It is easily the best time to visit our great city.
If you plan on joining us, use the below code to buy your passes and you'll receive $100 off the fees courtesy of VerticalResponse. Details are below, see you there!
As one of our valuable customers, we invite you to come by our booth #129, see our latest solutions, and meet with us one on one. Please come to Dreamforce as our guest at a $100 discount on your Dreamforce registration!
To redeem, please enter promo code VSDGPHV. Register now!
We look forward to seeing you!
--Alex
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