Hop on over to http://popart.appirio.com for a chance to win $1000. Here’s how it works. Enter a caption in the pop art image of your choice and submit the entry. It will create an image and send it over to our Pop Art Picassa Gallery. Get people to vote for your images and you can win tickets to our invite only Dreamforce SFMOMA party or even $1000!!!

Check out some of the submitted artwork. Pretty funny stuff.

Popart was created from the Art Meets Text Mashup CloudSpokes contest! Created by the Force.com community for the Force.com community.

Last Friday at Appirio we held our 1st Annual Future of the Cloud Day where we pull all 200+ employees out of the field for the day to give back to our communities across the country and globe. If you are interested in some of the projects and charities we contributed to, please check out our Silver Lining page.

I spent the day building a new website for the Sarasota County Foster/Adoptive Parent Association. My wife is the President and she’s been bugging me for awhile to put up a new website. Since I’m currently messing around with Ruby and Rails, I decided to do it in Rails and host it on Heroku (for free!). Heroku makes it super-stupid-simple to get a site up and running in no time. I’m still putting some finishing touches on it but you can take a peek at it here. The site was fairly easy to build with Rails and it uses a single controller to pull the upcoming events from the database. Nothing too fancy.

My next step is to hook the site up to Twilio. While all of the foster parents have a phone, not everyone has internet and therefore has a hard time getting information. I’m working on a call-in info line so that my wife can enter her questions and answers into the site and Twilio will read the text to the caller automatically based upon their selections.

Yesterday was a big day in the history of CloudSpokes as we hit 2000 members! We officially launched the site six weeks ago on Valentine’s Day and honestly didn’t know what type of reception we’d receive.

At a pre-launch meeting we tried to set a goal for the number of members before the end of the quarter. Narinder asked for a SWAG and a number of people said 250 or 500 or possibly even 750 members. However, if you check the meeting notes, I believe I was the one that said 2000 members. Everyone chuckled and Narinder chimed in with 1000 just to make me sound less crazy (typically not possible but he is Narinder).

The competitions so far have been fun, exciting and challenging on broad range of topics including code obfuscation, Force.com, Facebook, Twilio, XSLT, Heroku, JavaScript, Firefox and Ruby. We’d paid out over $20,000 so far with more to come! We currently have 8 open challenges with 110+ registrants on such topics as iOS development, Force.com, Twilio, Evernote and general development.

If you have an idea for a cool challenge, submit it here. We are paying out $50 for each winning idea.

Narinder has promised a small party to celebrate. I think we are all going out for ice cream and unicorn rides!

No… I’m not leaving Appirio … but I will have a new role starting next week! One of the great things about Appirio is that, like the cloud computing industry in general, the only constant is change and new opportunities are always being incubated within our company. Since I started with Appirio I’ve been on the delivery team working 40-60 hours a week on client projects. I absolutely love it! In between my “normal” working hours I squeeze in blogging, tinkering with new technologies, developing demos and writing articles for developer.force.com. It’s always a blast and never a dull moment.

About a year ago we started what is now called our CloudSpokes community. We ran it internally for awhile to flesh out the concept and work out the kinks and finally launched it last Valentine’s Day. CloudSpokes allows developers to participate in challenges, build a diverse portfolio of technology skills, learn something new, and even earn a little cash on the side as well (btw… take 15 seconds and join the commuity so you can see what cool things are going on). We’ve completed some pretty great challenges in our first month such as building out OAuth2 support for Ruby to authorize Heroku apps for Force.com, a Firefox plugin utility for developers, a “Cloudy Code Obfuscator” and some XSLT transformations for customer projects. We currently have challenges for HTML5, an iPhone app for salesforce.com Admins and a Google chat bot. There’s more fun to come as we will be announcing as series of related challenges to really energize the community site. We’ve pledged to give away $1 million in prize money so we have to get crackin’!

CloudSpokes is off to a great start but Appirio wants it make it #superfrickinawesome! So beginning next week I’ll start my new position as Developer Evangelist for Appirio and CloudSpokes. Half of my time will still be down in the trenches of Force.com client projects but the other half will be devoted CloudSpokes and the developer community in general. What does this mean for me and hopefully the community?

• Part of my job will be helping the CloudSpokes team develop new challenges, judge contest submissions and manage the day to day operations of the community.
• I’ll get to concentrate on blog posts and demos to help enterprises accelerate their adoption of the cloud. Since we focus on technologies such as Force.com, Google, Heroku, VMforce, Amazon Web Services, Workday, Twilio and mobile, you should expect to see more coming your way.
• I’ve always been not-so-secretly jealous of the Force.com Developer Evangelists, so now I’ll get a chance to (hopefully) work with them more closely. We are also fostering relationships with evangelists from Heroku, Twilio, VMware and AWS so our goal is to include them more in the community. We may have an exciting announcement on this front soon.
• I’m a little ADD (actually, my wife says I have ADSO… Attention Deficit… oh! Shiny Object!!) so anything new is fun for me. I’m really excited that I’ll be able to work with new and emerging technologies that I typically am not exposed to. I’m really getting my hands dirty with Ruby and Heroku and I think that will be a focus for awhile. I’ll also be getting into mobile stuff for iOS, Android, Sencha and HTML5.
• My new role should also prevent my wife from divorcing me as my working hours shouldn’t be as crazy.

So if you have any ideas on what you would like to see or what you think I should do, the please drop me a line!

I’m going to be out of pocket for the next couple of days as I head off to the Appirio Company Meeting (Sun-Wed). Everyone is flying out to Napa for roughly 4 days at The Meritage Resort to discuss the upcoming year, get to know all of the new hires (50+ this year??) and to generally “make merry” with all of the local vineyard around. We have alot of “stragegery” to make for 2011 as it’s gonna be a blow-out year!

I’m really excited to get my hands on my new Cr-48 Chrome OS Notebook. We are on the pilot with Google so everyone in the company gets a free notebook! We are going to try and not only develop for the cloud but develop in the cloud. We’ll see how it goes.

BTW… if you want in on any of this action … we’re hiring! It doesn’t matter where you live as we’re entirely virtual.

During Cloudstock we had a tack truck outside the event to not only give away free food but to attract potential candidates for our 20+ open positions. The taco truck even made the evening news on three local news channels!

If you are interested… we are hiring so check out our open positions.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJBzw3hzYE

If you are at Dreamforce today here are the sessions that I am speaking in. I’m really excited to be part of both of them as the topics (VMforce and the new Facebook toolkit) are really cool.

Leveraging Public Social Networks – West 2005 @ 12:15

We’ll be showing off the new Facebook toolkit and building a few applications.

VMforce: The Trusted Enterprise Platform as a Service - Force.com Theater @ 1:45

I’ll be demoing an app built using Spring STS, Spring Roo and Spring MVC connecting to the Force.com Database using JPA and running on the VMforce servers. I’ll show you the code, pick it apart and talk about best practices.

Since we started Appirio in 2006 we’ve centered our efforts around salesforce.com, Google Apps and Amazon Web Services, and are now thrilled to add Workday to our select list of partners. We just announced over at the Appirio CIO Blog that we’ve officially partnered with Workday and have formed a dedicated Workday practice.

You can read the actual announcement, Appirio Partner with Workday – Moving the Core of the Enterprise to the Cloud, for more details.

At Appirio we routinely hold customer-exclusive webinars to talk about features, trends and the latest technologies in cloud computing. This week I’m hosting a webinar to some of our existing Salesforce.com customers on the new features released in Summer ’10.

This is how the marketing team “effectively” markets the event.

BTW since someone asked… jeffdonthemic is in homage to “Mike D” from the Beastie Boys. I picked it up in the late 90′s and it’s an easy login that’s always available. I tend to fight with the other Jeff Douglas for logins.

Salesforce.com invited me to attend Cloudforce last Tuesday to demo my Salesforce Chatter for Android app. The reception was incredible and there is a big push to get a Salesforce.com app running on Android. Parker Harris (Co-founder & EVP, Technology) even made the statement in the keynote that, “I do have a team working on a native Android Chatter application that will be out later this year….”. At that point, Narinder promptly tweeted:

Well that created a lot of buzz so over the last couple of days I’ve had an amazing number of people email, tweet and post chatter asking me how people can run the Chatter for Android app on their own phones. I checked with Kris Muller at salesforce.com and we’ve decided to let anyone install the app and try it out. The functionality is limited (you can only view the Chatter feed and post an update) and it is connected to a DE org so you can’t really screw anything up. If you install the app, please drop me a line and let me know what you think of it and if you have any suggestions.

So here’s a little background and how it get started. The application is combination of the Force.com platform, Google App Engine and a Google Android mobile handset. It utilizes Force.com Remote Access Applications with 3-legged OAuth for security allowing App Engine to fetch chatter feeds and post new status updates using the Force.com Web Services Connector running on App Engine. The Google App Engine app runs at https://chatter-android-demo.appspot.com.

The Android client makes a request to refresh it’s chatter feed and makes a call to this endpoint on App Engine. The WSC queries Salesforce for the chatter feed and returns the feed as a series of JSON objects. The Android client consumes the JSON objects and stores them in the local SQLite database. When the feed list is displayed on the Android client, the images are download lazily from App Engine when needed. You may see a slight lag while new threads are spawned and the images are downloaded. If the images do not display quickly, try scrolling through the list back and forth for them to display. Part of the roadmap is to store these images in the local database instead of downloading them each time.

Installation Instructions

To install the app on your own phone:

• Download either the original 2.1 application or a 1.6+ version that runs on older handsets to your desktop
• On your phone, install eoeAppInstaller from the Android Market.
• Mount your phone to your computer via your USB cable so that you can access the SD card on your phone from Finder.
• Drop the .apk file into the root of your SD card
• Unmount your phone and disconnect your USB cable
• Go to Settings -> Applications and check “Unknown Sources” to allow installation of non-Market applications
• Launch eoeAppInstaller and it should display the Salesforce Chatter app
• Long press the app and select “Install this apk”

When you launch the application, simply click anywhere on the white Android/Chatter logo to display the chatter feed. The first time you run the application there will be no chatter updates. You will need to hit Menu -> Refresh to populate the local database with updates. The app is currently set to only return the last 15 updates. The app runs as the user Scott Thompson and you cannot switch to a different user.

If you want to see Salesforce come to the Android platform, please vote for this idea.