Salesforce Mobile Lite: great value for non-profits (free!)

If you are part of a non-profit, you should know that you can get ten seats of the "Professional" level of the Salesforce CRM application for free. Just yesterday they launched "Mobile Lite", a free version of their application for Blackberry and iPhone that gives you mobile access to all your data stored in Salesforce--contacts, organizations, tasks etc. Although you can only edit tasks from your mobile (versus being able to edit everything in the for-fee version) it's a wonderful application on both platforms and a great boon to non-profits. (It's also a great boon to anyone who's paying for Professional level Salesforce and above, because this Mobile Lite application is free for them too.)

Waterfield case for Kindle

I never realized until yesterday why Waterfield Designs--the San Francisco briefcase and bag company that sews everything right in San Fran, where the "labor and rents are high"--was called "Waterfield". It's named for Gary Waterfield, the founder. If you have a Kindle (or really any other electronic device) you should take a look at their offerings. Here's their slipcase for Kindle 2 in brown. Just a simple thing, really, but beautifully made.

Kindle and brewing coffee

I've had my Kindle now for about 10 days. For someone who likes multi-tasking, who likes capturing those tiny moments--like waiting for the coffee to brew, 10 minutes on the subway, 5 minutes waiting for a meeting to start--the Kindle is an amazing device. Instead of flipping through e-mail on a BlackBerry, reading a free newspaper, or staring into space, you can be picking up where you left off with Thomas Friedman, Thomas Hardy or whoever is top on your list.

For those who don't like using up little slices of time, ignore this note! But for those who do, the Kindle allows great thoughts, great language to insert themselves into your life in a way that I think significantly improves the flow of your thoughts and the firing of brain synapses that make life pleasurable.

Voicemail transcription compared: Jott vs. Google Voice

Original text:

Brian Sheppard, the computer scientist who created Maven, described Scrabble, in the journal Artificial Intelligence, as "a game of imperfect information with a large branching factor," which means that no one can precisely control or anticipate the changing shape of the word tree.

Jott transcription of voicemail to text:

Brian Shepherd, the computer scientist who created Maven, described Scrabble in the journal, Artificial Intelligence, as a game of imperfect information with a large branching factor, which means that no one can precisely control or anticipate the changing shape of the word tree.

Google Voice transcription of voicemail to text (most significant errors in bold):

brian shepherd the computer scientist to created made and describe scrabble in the journal artificial intelligence at eighteen looking perfect information with the lord ranching factor which means that no one can precisely control or anticipate the changing shape and upward free

Further proof that Lenovo is the anti-Apple

Lenovo just announced a new service that will create integration between BlackBerry's and Lenovo laptops called Lenovo Constant Connect (LINK). The first feature of this service is interconnection of e-mail between the two devices. Via Bluetooth, a user's BlackBerry will automatically update a Lenovo laptop's e-mail, even when the device is off, allowing synchronization of e-mail without use of WiFi or cellular service on the laptop.

But what's most interesting to me is the step that Lenovo takes with this product launch towards strengthening its position as the "anti-Apple" by making use of what has got to be the most amateur-looking corporate launch video ever.



The extreme geekiness of that video, the complete lack of attention to any style cues, is remarkable and in a bizarre way admirable and attractive. So post bubble! So depression sensitive. Scratch: nice clothes, nice background, nice furniture, nice camera angle. And don't even show the product in operation!

good, detailed explanation of BlackBerry Enterprise Server

CrackBerry.com has a good, detailed overview of how a BlackBerry Enterprise Server works and what its features are. LINK

GMail nails it. Everyone else is wrong.

I love Microsoft's Vista (hey, it's worked great for me). I like Word. I especially love Excel. OneNote is a little beauty. And even PowerPoint isn't so bad, despite the story that Steve Jobs hated it so much he just had to create Keynote or he was going to refuse to do his Apple keynotes ever again.

But Outlook is simply awful, at least for e-mail.

Searches are excruciating. The thing crashes frequently or hangs up. And there are a limited number of ways that I've found to customize the program--and many of them cost a bunch of money and make the thing even more crash-prone.

As Farhad Manjoo says in a recent Slate piece:

If you're still tied to a desktop app—whether Outlook, the Mac's Mail program, or anything else that sees your local hard drive, rather than a Web server, as its brain—then you're doing it wrong. (LINK)

You are. You're doing it wrong. And I would also sweep into that coffin other online mail systems too, like Windows Live or Yahoo Mail, and even Thunderbird for all you open source aficionados. Two reasons, and now Google has added a third, the final nail.

1. GMail uses tagging, not folders. You don't place a piece of e-mail into a folder to categorize it. You tag it. Which effectively means that any e-mail can be in an infinite number of folders. How can you live with that old way of organizing e-mail, the way that Outlook, Yahoo, every other program that I know uses? And in part because of this tagging, searches for mail have the beauty, speed and simplicity of a Google web search.

2. GMail threads your mail, always, all the time. What's great about that? You see all your mail, both the incoming mail and your responses, as part of a beautifully presented, threaded conversation. And that's what e-mail should be. It's not "messages". It's a conversation, asynchronous to be sure, but still a conversation. Once you've embraced that new reality, any other mail program feels like using a typewriter.

3. The final nail: offline. Google has just announced this week its offline feature, in which you can take your GMail offline from the Web and use it anywhere without an Internet connection, within a browser, just as you would if you were using a program like Outlook or Thunderbird.

The only use I have now for Outlook or Thunderbird--and I use Thunderbird for these purposes--is to backup Google's GMail servers. I am one of perhaps 17 people in the world who actually pay Google $50 a year for the privilege of having an ad-free GMail and with that they have a special up-time guarantee. But still, it makes me nervous that there is no GMail backup and so from time-to-time I'll download a copy of my GMail to Thunderbird so it sits on my computer. But with this final nail in the coffin, I'll probably remember to do that less and less.

PS: I do still use Outlook as a conduit out to my BlackBerry for contacts and calendar, but that's because I have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server that makes such over-the-air sync easy. The only thing that Outlook-BES really provides that can't be found elsewhere is contacts sync from Salesforce through Outlook and out to my BlackBerry. If Google/Salesforce filled that hole with a relatively low-cost option, I'd never have to use Outlook again.