Do You Have Chatter Swagger?

One of the newest trends in social media is to measure a user’s “influence” within a social network based on the content they post and their interactions with other users.  This measurement is typically summarized as a “score” that makes the logic easy to comprehend as one number. We thought to ourselves, "Why not do the same thing with salesforce.com Chatter"? So we did.

The results of our Chatter Social Influence challenge were posted yesterday.  The challenge was to develop a native Force.com application to measure and display a Chatter user’s social influence in the org.

It took longer than expected as we were waiting for a Winter '12 org to do the testing. We had two really great submissions from hirday and kenji776 with kenji776 coming in first. Congrats to both contestants!

Kenji776 (full screen video)



Hirday (full screen video)

A wave of new Box challenges are coming...

We have a few new Box challenges upcoming in the pipeline.  But to kick things off, we just launched a new creative challenge, to help design ideas for a Box Toolkit for Force.com.

Here are the details:


Tell us what functionality you'd like to see in a Box Toolkit for Force.com. We are looking for both technical and functional ideas for our next challenge to actually build out the toolkit. Here are some ideas to get you started.....

• Should the toolkit include integrate with Documents, Attachments or both? 
• Does it need to have a sample, working demo or is Apex code that you can use in your application enough? 
• Do you think there should be some sort of Box management UI and if so, what should it look like?
• How should the integration be fired? Should it all be manual, batch or some other way?
• Do Box documents need to be displayed on standard page layouts and if so, how should this be accomplished?

Think you've got the insight to make this toolkit top-notch?  Submissions are due this week, so register now!

QR Code Scanner - PhoneGap & Native Android

We had a number of submissions for our Android QR Code Scanner challenge but we decided to select only the top three.

While it seemed that everyone used the ZXing QR code library not everyone went the native Android route. Akkishore slipped in a really cool PhoneGap version but was beat out in the end by a really slick app from Romin that was packed ful of extra functionality. Ritesh999 finished third with his first CloudSpokes entry. More PhoneGap challenges are sure to be coming down the pipe.

Ritesh999 - Third Place

Akkishore - Second Place

Romin - First Place

The CloudSpokes Team is heading to Defrag!

The CloudSpokes team is headed to Defrag!  We had a great time at Gluecon earlier this year, and are really looking forward to this one. Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge and accelerate the “aha” moment.

We have two speaking slots:

1. Wednesday Nov. 9th discussing in more detail our move from Azure to DB.com at 2:35PM
2. Thursday Nov. 10th discussing Gamification at 11:30AM

Considering joining us there?  Use the discount code "sponsorcode1", it will take 20% off of the defrag registration price.

This year's conference is focused on a whole slew of major technology topics, including:

• Big Data
• Analytics
• Business Intelligence
• Enterprise 2.0/Social Computing
• Semantic Web
• Social Media 
• Cloud Computing
• Mobile applications
• Community Management
• Next Level Discovery
• Social Marketing & CRM

See you there!

Video - Introduction to Cloud Foundry

A great presentation by Dekel Tankel on Cloud Foundry and Micro Cloud Foundry. The majority of the video is Dekel building apps using Ruby, Java, Node.js and Redis. Pretty slick set of demos.

Video - Google+ to Chatter Winner

Here's a quick video of sgurumurthy's winning submission for the Google+ to Chatter challenge. I had some problems running the code in my developer org but it has to do with the JSON parser being issed by salesforce.com and not by sgurumurthy's code. My guess is that with salesforce.com's Winter 12 release in a couple of weeks, the issue will be fixed.

Double Prize Money for First Time Winners!!

Yes! The title of this blog post is correct. We are doubling the prize money for first time winners until the end of the year.

This "bump" in prize money applies to all contests that are announced before January 1, 2012 and have a submission date after October 6th, 2011. So if you submit for a challenge and it is your first time "placing" in a CloudSpokes challenge (see below), you will either receive double your prize money or $500, whichever is greater. The maximum payout is $5,000.

For example, if a challenge awarded first place prize money of $500 and second place prize money of $150, first time winners would receive $1,000 for first and $500 for second (since $500 is greater than $300).

Check out our open challenges here and get started!

*"Placing" means finishing first, second or third place in a challenge and receiving money. Some challenges may offer first and second place only while other may just have first place. It all depends on the challenge.

Salesforce Opportunity Leaderboard Winners

We had three great submissions for our Salesforce Opportunity Leaderboard challenge. Kswiggum took first while hirday and sunnysharma85 tied for second. We originally intended to pay out for first and second place but decided to award sunnysharma85 second place money as well.

The challenge was to create a real-time leaderboard for a high volume selling organization. The organization is broken up into multiple divisions and there is competition between individuals as well as between divisions so create a Visualforce page with four (4) tabs across the top to display:

1. Overall Leaderboard
2. Top Ten
3. Leaders by Division  
4. Division Totals

Here' kswiggum's video submission.

Video - Twilio Client for Salesforce Customer Portal

There's no doubt that Twilio Client is slick. It allows you to do realtime collaboration between users on web browsers, iPads, Android phones, and even traditional phones. We wanted to make it easier for salesforce.com Customer Portal users to speak with a live person so we spun up this Twilio Client for Salesforce Customer Portal challenge.

The challenge was to use Twilio Client to enable browser to browser voice communication with the salesforce.com Customer Portal. Using the new Twilio Client for Force.com (Beta) create an application using Twilio Client that allows a user in a salesforce.com Customer Portal to make a voice call to a customer service rep logged into salesforce.com. The customers will be able to initiate a browser to browser call to the customer support rep.

Here's helperyadav's winning submission.

Change Salesforce Labels By RecordType -- Open Source

Vinayendra won our Change Salesforce Labels By RecordType challenge with a cool little jQuery submission. We liked the results so much that we've open sourced the his code and you can fork the project from our GitHub repo.

Record types are an extremely powerful feature of salesforce.com that allow you to offer different business processes, segment data and personalize the UI based on user profiles. However, one feature that is lacking is the ability to change a label for a field on a standard page layout based upon its recordtype. For instance, let’s say you have two types of users each with their own recordtypes. On a standard page layout, one set of users want to see an Account lookup field with the label “Account” while the other set of users want to see the same field with the label “Organization”. Vinayendra's submission uses some jQuery and a sidebar component to make it easy to present the same field with different labels.

Take a peek at Vinayendra's video submission for a quick overview.