CloudSpokes brings the crowd to the cloud. It is the industry’s first community for crowdsourcing enterprise cloud development that brings together enterprise cloud challenges and cloud developers to earn recognition and (real) cash. CloudSpokes offers a competitive and collaborative environment for challenges, networking, discussions and jobs involving today’s hottest cloud technologies.

First and foremost, CloudSpokes will be a neutral community focusing on public cloud platforms and on members. If there’s an exciting cloud technology out there then chances are it already has a challenge on CloudSpokes or will soon. Challenges are already available on platforms and technologies such as Force.com, Facebook, Heroku, Spring, Twilio, Google Apps and AppEngine, Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Web Services and HTML5 with more coming soon.

Stay involved with CloudSpokes:

• CloudSpokes community site – register now as the first 500 registrants get $10 of CloudSpokes swag!
• CloudSpokes blog – add it to your RSS reader for all of the lastest news
• Twitter – follow CloudSpokes on Twitter
• Facebook app – coming soon!

The goals for CloudSpokes are simple and easy

• Reward members for great work
• Recognize members for their contributions
• Collaborate and educate members by working together
• Provide problems and work for the community

How do you get involved with CloudSpokes? Simply sign up and start browsing active challenges. When you find one that interests you, review the requirements and deliverables and get started developing. Each contest has an accompanying discussion forum so you can network, ask questions and bounce ideas off of other community members. Once a challenge ends, judges will review the submitted code and declare a winner. Prize money ranges from $500-$1500 so CloudSpokes should not only be fun but profitable!

CloudSpokes is sponsored by Appirio and we are putting our money where our mouth is. We believe that croudsourcing is the best way to tap the imaginations and creativity of the masses to solve modern business problems. We believe in it so much that we are guaranteeing $1M in prize money for CloudSpokes challenges. Yes… that’s $1,000,000.

Do you have an idea for an #awesome challenge? If so, enter it in our Create an Idea for a CloudSpokes Challenge challenge. The 10 best ideas win $50 each. Easy money, baby!

I’m taking an active role in the community so if you have any questions, comments or ideas, please send them to the CloudSpokes Team. We would love to have any positive and/or negative feedback. We have a lot of fun stuff planned!

My blog has been rather quiet over the past couple of months and for good reason. I’m working on a project on the east coast and a project on the west coast, Wes and I are finishing up our Salesforce Handbook (we are currently having printing issues with the publisher) and I’ve been working with one of my favorite new Salesforce.com Developer Evangelists, Sandeep Bhanot, on my Facebook Toolkit app and preso for our Dreamforce 10 session “Leveraging Public Social Networks” (Wed 12/8 @ 12:15pm).

I finally got the approval yesterday to make the announcement that I’ll also be presenting a VMforce app in the session “VMforce: The Trusted Enterprise Platform as a Service” (Wed 12/8 @ 1:45pm). I’ve been working with Salesforce.com and VMware for the last couple of months trying to put together a cool demo of an existing on-premise Java app to show how easy it is to move apps to the cloud.

I use Spring STS and Spring Roo to build and test my apps locally before deploying them (with one click!) to the cloud.  The app uses the Spring 3 framework with standard POJOs, JSPs and Servlets just like any other Java app. The best part is that whether running locally or in the cloud, I have the same access to the Force.com Database, analytics and collaboration with Chatter. I also love the fact that I don’t have to worry about my server stack, maintaining app server configurations or software to install or patch!

Based upon what I’ve seen in the alpha program and the progress that’s being made, I think VMforce is going to be an incredible way for enterprise Java developers to run their applications in the cloud.

Today Appirio is introducing CloudWorks, the industry’s first cloud broker technology to help enterprises unleash information from SaaS silos - a problem faced by a growing number of enterprises who are moving more of their applications to the cloud.  Unlike technology that just focuses on data integration or tying together lower-level infrastructure, CloudWorks delivers complete solutions for both business and IT.  Cloudworks is an extensible foundation for a wide range of cross-cloud solutions that can improve user productivity, data quality and compliance, and return on existing SaaS investments.  As part of today’s announcement, Appirio is introducing cross-cloud solutions built on CloudWorks that will be demoed at our first annual Cloud Leadership Summit (San Francisco) in front of 100+ people:

• SalesWorks - A packaged solution that drives results by giving sales teams better, more accurate information from across their business. SalesWorks delivers relevant customer-related data (including Chatter) to sales teams in their email, calendar or to their mobile device — adding context to customer interactions using valuable information that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.
• PeopleWorks - A packaged solution that securely delivers context-sensitive HR-related information inside a manager’s inbox so they can more efficiently manage employees without the risk of exposing data to insecure environments.
• CustomWorks - Custom solutions created by Appirio’s experienced services professionals for a specific business need using CloudWorks as a foundation.
• CloudWorks extensions from other SaaS providers - Partner solutions from other SaaS providers that tap into the CloudWorks platform to extend the value of their own solutions. Today Appirio introduces three extensions from D&B, Marketo and Xactly that bring additional financial information, marketing insight and sales compensation data into SalesWorks.

For more information you can read the entire Press Release, Appirio Introduces Industry’s First Cloud Broker Technology to Power Cross-Cloud Solutions that Unleash Information from SaaS Silos, or visit the CloudWorks page for more detailed product information.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNoTY0DcqdU

Our customer RehabCare is currently being featured in a really nice video on Apple’s iPad in Business website. I just finished up this project with a lot of other great people from Appirio and RehabCare on the team. Very fun and challenging work integrating with Google Health in addition to writing tons of Apex on the Force.com platform.

You can watch the video here.

Last night at Google Campfire One we demonstrated PS Connect, a new extension to our PS Enterprise product that allows service professionals to run their business directly from their Gmail inbox. We were the closing presentation for the night and you can view the video of the demo below. It’s roughly a 5 minute video and is really great!

So what is PS Connect? PS Connect allows you to use Google Apps as a front end to cloud-based business applications. With our Gmail contextual gadgets you can take actions from inside your Gmail inbox instead of logging into multiple systems.

You can read the full announcement on our website or get more info on PS Connect. If you’d like a deeper dive, you can even sign up for a 30 minute demo.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO0gSFBlhrI

Kyle Roche posted this video for the Appirio Cloud Computing video challenge. It has an amazingly funny and incoherent interview with an IBM employee from their vendor booth at last year’s Dreamforce. I think Kyle’s strategy to win the contest is to overwhelm the judges with the sheer number of his videos.

Appirio is giving away $5000 for the best cloud computing video!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s5MFRiS2Qo

Box.net just announced the launch of their integration service with Salesforce but only for enterprise customers. So now in addition to sharing content in Salesforce via Google Docs, you can now use Box.net to quickly access documents, media, and other files from directly within the Salesforce UI.

The functionality in the video below looks pretty slick but you’ll want to check out pricing before you get too excited.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqbka1dtHOY

I started running Chromium (the Chrome browser for Mac) yesterday and it’s pretty nifty. It’s fast and functions alot like the Windows version. The only issue I’ve run into so far is its lack of support for Flash.

For more info you can checkout the Chromium blog or download the latest build. TechCrunch also has a pretty good article with a number of screenshots.

In my never-ending quest for the perfect PPM tool, I downloaded beta 5 of Colabolo a week or so ago. I’ve been running it on a small project and have to say it’s not bad.

Colabolo is an Adobe Air app built for team collaboration. You can use it to assign, track and resolve task assignments, business issues, sales leads, approval requests, document reviews, support requests, defects or any other collaborative task that requires a coordinated team effort.

TechCrunch has a pretty good article on Colabolo if you are interested.

Dust off your SAP logins! SAP’s NetWeaver Product Manager Thomas Jung introduces a new section for eLearning, blogs, and other learning materials from both Adobe and SAP regarding development of interfaces with Flex/Flash and SAP.

This post discusses the Web Dynpro for ABAP framework in SAP NetWeaver 7.0 EhP1 and how it provides new libraries that make it easy to add rich data visualization to applications using the Flex framework.

The Adobe Flash capabilities in Web Dynpro allow a custom-developed Flex or Flash control to be integrated into SAP’s Web Dynpro applications with minimal effort. SAP provides a set of libraries that handle the mapping of data sources, properties, events and event parameters, as well as a way to bind the SWF files into Web Dynpro as a standard UI element.

I may have to talk to the SAP team and see if I can get a login….