In The News: Appirio Digs Deeper Into Social Enterprise With Toolkit

Information Week - David Carr

...The toolkit is a collection of software assets accumulated through many integration projects, as well as a developer crowdsourcing collaboration with CloudSpokes, said Narinder Singh, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Appirio. "A lot of them are new, added over the last few weeks or months, because we've been adding to the asset library so quickly," he said....

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Winner - Update Embedded Docs for Google Sites

This was an interesting challenge for Google App Engine and Google Sites. The requirements for the  Update Embedded Docs for Google Sites challenge were to write an app that authenticated with OAuth for a Google domain. The user could then specify a collection of page IDs from one Google Site and have those pages written into another Google Site.

Once again, another great submission by Romin who takes home $1250. Check out the video of his nifty little tool. You may want to watch it full screen for better viewing.

Advanced Challenge Search with Ruby & Redis Winner

This is a really cool result for our Advanced Challenge Search with Ruby & Redis challenge. As part of our CloudSpokes.com site rewrite, we wanted to implement a fast, slick advanced challenge search. We thought that redis would be a perfect fit for this solutions.

Our requirements were what you might expect with an advanced search functions. We wanted users to be able to easily search for any combinations of open/closed challenges, by category or keyword and sort them by criteria such as challenge name, start date, end date and category name.

Peakpado was our winner and not only did you win $1000 but since it was his first CloudSpokes win, we doubled the prize money! Congrats!

His app is hosted on Heroku so you can run it here for yourself. Here's a quick rundown on its features.

Box Innovation Network /bin - Force.com Toolkit

CloudSpokes sponsor, Box, announced a pretty big initiative for enterprise developers, and we were fortunate enough to attend the launch event for their brand new Innovation Network last night [/bin]. It was a great event, our friends at Box are doing some amazing things with enterprise cloud development.

Key takeaways for CloudSpokers? Here's what we think you'll find interesting:

1. Box is investing up to $2 million to drive the development of meaningful apps on the Box platform
2. Box is offering high-touch consultation to app developers leveraging the Box APIs, and exposure to the hundreds of thousands of companies that use Box everyday
3. /bin already has some great partners as part of the program:

And with impeccable timing, we also would like to showcase some of the great ideas that came out of our recent Box challenge: Design Ideas for a Box Toolkit for Force.com. There were some fantastic submissions, here are some of the highlights - congrats to all the winners!

Third place: ashu15oc

• "The toolkit should have a tool which will allow users to decide their User Interface. Many times the positon/location of any tool is FIXED (i.e. as decided by the platform/tool/product developer). I feel that the user should have get the power to decide what & where he wants."

Second place: hirday

• "Add Document Button - Add Document buttons can be displayed on pages to initiate the creation of a new document, import existing documents from your PC, or establish a reference to a paper document, all filed in Box with corresponding attributes from Salesforce applied."

First place: vo1stv

• "Certainly, there should be an ability for any document present on the shared Box repository to be voted on using a simple rating scale. For more substantive documents, there should also be a capability for more substantial reviews: question and answers, with a tracking system similar to a ticket system to allow people to see how their concerns impacted the final product. This ties into the versioning control system, which should at a minimum allow milestone versions of a document to be tagged, thus providing a timeline for the document."

Email Photo to Chatter Results

Wow! Was this ever a popular challenge! Our Email a Photo to Chatter challenge had 13 code submission! We had to bring in extra judges to score the submissions.

Unfortunately most of the submissions had nearly identical functionality so the judging was a little tough. Some people went a little above and beyond the requirements but it actually didn't make an impact in the scoring. Judges seemed to agree that everyone met the requirements. All of the contestants tied on points so the ranking came in based upon who submitted first.

The top three finishers are chiragmehta84, lazybaer and botoscloud in that order. Congrats guys!! Here are some of the cooler videos that were submitted.

Groundwired

Botoscloud

Kenji776

Angelhack - Network. Hack. Accelerate.

After a brief hiatus (and recovery!) from this year’s Dreamforce Hackathon, we’re proud to announce that we’ve got at least one more hackathon up our sleeves before the end of the year: Angelhack! We’ll be providing the same hackathon framework that was used for the DocuSign E-Summit, the Box Mobile Dev Challenge, and the Dreamforce Hackathon at Angelhack on 12/3 and 12/4. Our framework provides a publicly accessible way to support teams, team leaders, team images, app submissions, judging, scoring, and has a dynamic scorecard to announce winners. Angelhack is the premier hackathon event where teams compete to impress a panel of Angel Investor judges for the chance to win $60K in prizes that include seed capital investments, entrance to start-up accelerators, and co-work space. The event includes founder dating / team building services, pitch improvement services, and mentorship to help you throughout the event. The team also provides food, drinks, and a couple other goodies. 

• What: Angelhack Hackathon
• Where: 625 Second Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
• When: Dec 3rd and 4th

Still looking for a reason to join? Well, San Francisco Mayor and Movember champion Ed Lee is supporting Angelhack, and he’s 2 legit 2 quit...

Stream Realtime Salesforce Support Status with Jetstream Challenge Results

The results of our Stream Realtime Salesforce Support Status with Jetstream challenge are in (don't miss the video at the bottom!) and the results couldn't be cooler. The challenge was to write a Java app using the Force.com Streaming API and Jetstream toolkit that displays a Google Map showing open salesforce.com support cases. As new support cases are opened and closed, they should appear and disappear from the map.

Sgurumurthy was the clear winner for this challenge! Along with his video below he submitted some super documentation. He even went so far as to reuse some of his code from his Cloudspokes Office Relocator challenge submission. A great use of componentized software if I may say so. Here is a small over of the technology and features of his submission but make sure you watch the video at the end.

The following software components are being used:

1. Salesforce streaming API
2. Jetstream: Streaming proxy for salesforce streaming API
3. org.json Java JSON parser
4. Salesforce REST API to get account information for a case
5. OAuth to authenticate and authorize to Salesforce. This is required for Salesforce REST API call and for native Salesforce streaming API connection. Jetstream uses a FORCE_FORCEDATABASE_URL environment variable to get Salesforce connection information. 
6. Embedded jetty webserver
7. Google maps API to geocode an account address. I am reusing my Cloudspokes officerelocator challenge code for this purpose.
8. Google Maps Javascript API to render Map, markers and info windows.

The application has the following features:

1. Application can use native salesforce streaming API or Jetstream proxy. The mode is selected via environment variable STREAMING_API_USE_JETSTREAM. 
2. streamingCases.jsp is the main application UI. It can be accessed at <application path>/streamingCases.jsp. It can also be opened in debug mode using the URL <application path>/streamingCases.jsp?debugMode=true. The debug mode can be used to test out the Javascript map api.
3. Once the application is up and running and you have navigated to streamingCases.jsp, any case creation or update is shown on the browser as follows:
• A Case with status New is indicated on the map with a yellow marker.
• A Case with status Working is indicated on the map with a blue marker.
• A Case with status Escalated is indicate on the map with a red marker.
• The marker (hover) title depicts the subject of the Case.
• The marker infowindow (on click on marker) depicts the address of the Case billing account.
• If the Case is not associated with an account or if the account does not have a valid address, a text is displayed on the map indicating the case creation/update.

Awesome Results for the Veterans Hackday 2011

We launched our own Veterans Hackday 2011 challenge last Thursday in support of LinkedIn's Veteran's Hackday 2011. We wanted to provide a little extra incentive for our members to participate so everyone that submitted received $100.

The submitted apps were as diverse as CloudSpokes members that submitted them. We had applications submitted using Cloud Foundry, Force.com, Heroku and Google App Engine. Development languages included Grails, Ruby, Apex and Java. A very exciting mix of both platforms and languages.

Here are the top for entries in no particular order:

Smart Vet Job Search

WCHEUNG - Canada
URL: http://smartvetjobsearch.cloudfoundry.com
Technology: Grails hosted on Cloud Foundry

Smart Vet Job Search is a job finder for veterans. The search is powered by the National Resource Directory Veterans Job Bank and adds the enhancement of returning the job details (not just one-line summaries). Saves you mouse-clicks, shows all job details on one page.

Veterans Helper Bot

ROMIN - India
URL: http://veteranshelperbot.appspot.com
Technology: Java on Google App Engine

Veterans Helper Bot is an Automated Google Talk Bot that will help Veterans through some of their common tasks such as finding helplines, looking up Military Operation Codes and finding open jobs listed in the National Resource Directory Veterans Job Bank.

Veterans Job Search

SGURUMURTHY -  India
URL: https://shashig-developer-edition.na12.force.com/veteransJobSearch
Technology: Apex on Force.com Sites and Heroku

Veterans Job Search is a simple job search application for Force.com Sites that uses the National Resource Directory API  to do the job search and return the results. The results are proxied through Heroku due to some issues with the NRD's certificate.

Chow Finder

JEFFDONTHEMIC - United States
URL: http://chow-finder.herokuapp.com
Technology: jQuery Moble, Ruby on Rails and Database.com on Heroku

Chow Finder is a mobile application for services members to easily locate dining facilities aka "chow halls" on any military installation.

Extended Challenge Deadlines

We experienced some intermittent performance issues with our site over the past 12 hours so we are extending the deadlines for the following challenges for an extra 36 hours.

1. Advanced Challenge Search with Ruby & Redis
2. Salesforce 2 Salesforce "Data Dumper"
3. Social Enterprise Toolkit Ideas App
4. Salesforce Quick Links
5. Chatter Photos Bulk Importer
6. Chatter Image Auditor

We apologize for any inconveniences.

Veterans Hackday 2011 -- Get Involved!!

Tomorrow is Veteran's day and this is always a special day for me as I'm ex-Army and have sons in the Army and Navy. If you want to give back to our Veterans, we highly encourage you to participate in LinkedIn's Hackday 2011.  LinkedIn and the White House are joining forces to encourage developers to hack together projects that improve veteran's lives.

We’d like to provide some extra incentive for you to become involved. In addition to the cool prizes from LinkedIn, simply submit an app for the Hackday and we’ll reward the first 20 submitters with $100. See our challenge for more details.

The Hackday starts tomorrow and winds up on the 14th so get going now! I've already started on my project (a mobile app on Heroku and Database.com) but if you need some ideas on what to build, take a look at these ideas or join the LinkedIn group. If you decide to build something on Force.com, check out this blog post for a way to get a free "i code" hoodie from the developer evangelism team.

CloudSpokes Rails Challenge Results == Awesome!

Our rewrite of our CloudSpokes.com site in Rails and database.com is in full swing with a number of Rails challenges wrapping up lately.

Akkishore won our CloudSpokes Challenges (on Rails!) challenge and took home $1750!  The requirements were to replicate the look and functionality of our current site as closely as possible with our new rails app using the Apex REST APIs that we'd developed from previous challenges. Great job by akkishore building out keys part of the new site.

Vzmind, a new competitor, absolutely rocked the CloudSpokes Members (on Rails!) challenge! The challenge was a companion to the one above to build the "member" sections of the site. Not only did vzmind meet all of the requirements with some really slick code but he threw in some Haml and Sass for the display as well!

Since "members" are such a critical part of our operations we were grateful for the amount of time and effort vzmind put in on this challenge. He laid out some architectural pieces of the site and even started us down the right path by creating an extensible "cloud_spokes" module that we can plug additional functionality into. BTW, not only did he win the $2000 for first place but since this was his first win that prize money is doubled! Awesome job!

Video - Member Search with Redis Winner

The results for our Member Search with Redis challenge are in and mbleigh took home the top spot. The requirements of the challenge were fairly simple: Use Redis to write a simple search interface with ruby that searches the Redis data store by keyword and returns matching members. Users can click on the returned records to view the actual member’s profile page on CloudSpokes.

The app is running on Heroku so you can test it for yourself or you can fork the GitHub repo.

We are really excited about Redis and will be running more challenges with it in the near future. We plan on using Redis for the new CloudSpokes site and the results of these challenges will be rolled into the new site's code.

Congrats to mbleigh for his 6th of 7 wins!