Dreamforce 16: Live Blogging the Benioff Keynote #df16

The annual main keynote session here at Dreamforce in San Francisco starts today at 1pm ET in Moscone Center. I’m onsite in the industry analyst section just 50 feet or so from the main stage, so I should get good photos as for the live blog. The usual flair is on display with a well produced and colorfully lit stage as the crowd streams in early to try and get a good seat. This year security is much tighter than usual and everyone has to go through bag searches and metal detectors, leading some to speculate that a special guest requiring such security measures may appear.

The Largest Technology Event in North America

As one of the few can’t-miss events in the tech industry, the 170,000+ registered attendees have taken over downtown San Francisco and set a new attendance record along the way. The news here at Dreamforce so far has been unusually pre-announced, with Salesforce’s first significant artificial intelligence play, known as Einstein, as the most important announcement so far. There’s also been plenty of other news including broader integration with Quip, their recent workforce productivity acquisition, the advent of Lightning Bolt, an improvement on their Lightning UX technology announced a few years ago, along with a new version of Salesforce1 which can be customized to corporate branding and is more easily tailored and personalized, along with data processing improvements to the company’s new IoT Cloud, first announced last year.

The recently released Salesforce Economy infographic (below) shows how far the company has come, from a scrappy SaaS startup in the mid-2000s that was making a name for itself in CRM to an industry juggernaut that has made public cloud and SaaS a reality like few others while moving into the cutting edge of enterprise technology including marketing, customer care, digital experience, online community, big data analytics, cloud service provider, and Internet of Things to name a few. The company is projected for $8B+ in revenue, offers over 3,000 apps with 3.8 million installs, 751 partners, and over 24,000 workers.

12:53pm: Salesforce SVP of Research Peter Coffee is up on stage ahead of the keynote noting that you can watch the Dreamforce Benioff keynote live online and introducing various partners, including Bluewolf and Accenture.

1:02pm: Peter Coffee and is up with Julie still on stage talking about partners. Now talking about their relationship with military veterans, which they call Vetforce. Now introducing the first veteran to become Salesforce certified. “Dreamforce is all about trailblazing.” Trails and the company’s very successful Trailhead program for learning about about all things Salesforce is infused in everything here, right now do campground themes through the show.

1:04pm: Just introduced well-known musician and entrepreneur will.i.am onstage, talking about Dreamforce “as the most inspirational community there is today.” Talking about inner city kids and mentoring, not just in America but abroad. How to get them involved in computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics. “I’m a geek and Geekdom can change inner city kids forever.” (Big applause.) Now showing a video.

1:09pm: Video from will.i.am continues.

1:13pm: Video concludes and Peter Coffee is back up on stage. (Standing ovation.) Now making a forward looking statement. “Now I get to talk, not about the culture of Wall Street, but the culture of Hawaii. A beautiful culture and one that is in the DNA of Salesforce. We are privileged to welcome Ambassadors of Aloha.” Beginning the traditional Hawaiian ceremony that is a hallmark of Dreamforce.

Peter Coffee kicking off Dreamforce 2016

The Ambassadors of Aloha Opening Dreamforce 2016

1:20pm: The Ambassador’s of Aloha singing a song to set the stage for the keynote.

1:23pm: The lights dim and a video starts to kick off the keynote in earnest, talking about the Trailblazer. Montage of Amazon partnership, Demandware, Commerce Cloud, the Forbes cover article that Benioff recently was profiled in. Acquisitions, AI for marketing, mentioning Einstein and customer success.

1:28pm: Benioff himself comes out. “We’re going to entertain you. We’re going to thrill you. But the #1 thing I’m going to do is thank you. All of customers, all of our partners, all of our employees.” Thanking Trailblazer, MVPs, their Customer Success Community, and many others. Going over the size of the company, the trust he has in his ecosystem, growth, and innovation, organic and inorganic.

Marc Benioff Begins His Annual Keynote at Dreamforce 2016

1:32pm: Introduced Tony Prophet, their new Chief Equality Officer, who has come over from Microsoft. Talking about will.i.m telling him that education is the single greatest factor in helping the inner city. Talking about their 1:1:1 corporate social responsibility model, where 1% of their time, products, and equity to philanthropy. Says “it’s an incredible new, smarter world that we’re all creating together.” Talking about how his smartwatch is making him more intelligent and more connected. Mentions conversational UXs twice now. How GE is making smart cars, and Amazon Alexa. “How do we get closer to customers. That’s the power of customers. We can create a single view of the customer that’s so powerful!”

1:40pm: “Adidas is selling billions of dollars of sneakers on Salesforce. And of course Fitbit, we’re going to talk about them. And Uber and the customers they hold close. Closer to the customer. Uber’s customer is not just me, but the driver. You’re going to hear an amazing story about them today. Schneider Electric runs half the buildings in the world and their visionary CEO is here to tell you how they are changing the world. It’s the age of the customer. From Lightning, to Wave, and to Thunder. Without code. We want to bring this technology to everybody. An incredible new world of artificial intelligence has arrived, deep learning, machine learning. AI build into the deepest level of every app and in the core of our platform.”

1:44pm: “We’re here to bring artificial intelligence to the world, we’re going to give AI to everyone, just like we gave the cloud to everyone and mobile to everyone. Knowledge is limited, but imagination circles the world.” Now talking about the Lightning App Builder, their low code platform. “We’re all going to have to go a lot faster. It’s incredible how Lightning is going to help us go faster.” Talking about Salesforce Quip will make people collaborate better on spreadsheets, word documents, and put conversational. Download Quip on your phone, it’s designed or the phone service. Commending Bret Taylor for creating Quip. “It’s all about productivity.” Now talking about how the model for using our computers is changing: Voice interfaces, messenger apps, conversations. introducing Salesforce By Message.

1:51pm: Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris is on stage talking about artificial intelligence and conversational interfaces on Siri, and Facebook. Facial recognition is being driven by artificial intelligence. “We’re just going to bring AI to all of you. That’s now what you asked for. You asked for intelligence. We got to work. We found a bunch of data scientist. They were hard to find, there’s a world shortage of them. Then we realized that we had to get all the data together, integrate it, and model it. Many companies have tried to do this but it is hard. We want to make it easy. We want to take all the complex things in the world and make them easy.”

An Einstein avatar appears between Parker Harris and Marc Benioff at Dreamforce 2016

1:55pm: Parker now invites Einstein on stage, who appears virtually on the screen between him and Benioff. “AI makes you smarter. Customer data + AI + Salesforce platform makes it the smartest CRM in the world. We did not build a separate AI platform. It’s right in the Salesforce platform with your data. All of your apps are there too. This means Einstein is everyone’s data scientist. It’s going to make you a smarter salesperson, with things like predictive lead scoring. It’s usable in the app or if you’re a developer. Even our brand new cloud, the Marketing Cloud, has it built right in.”

An Updated View of the Salesforce Platform at Dreamforce 2016

2:00pm: Shubha Habar is being introduced as one of the key people behind Einstein. “Two years ago we were five people in a basement, and to see how it’s involved and be on stage at the largest tech stage in the world.” “Here’s the new Winter 2017 release.” Explaining how Einstein works, including with all Salesforce objects, as well as customer objects, plus calendar, e-mail, and other data sources. Einstein examines data and looks for patterns. Einstein can figure out who your competitors our, and will then surface relevant data and will even urge you to take action. It can even write the e-mails for you to take action. It can even go through the hundreds and hundreds of leads you have and assign a lead score, a single number that tells you how valuable a lead is. What will be interesting is that since every Salesforce customer gets this, there will be gains to be across the board, but it will be the companies that can actually educate their staff on how to use these very powerful capabilities to get ahead. In short, AI is another technology force multiplier that will separate the leaders and laggards apart.

Shubha Habar, one of the key people behind Einstein, at Dreamforce 2016

2:06pm: Shubha wraps by saying, “Now everyone will have a data scientist, even you Parker.” Parker: “We’ve built 500 new features [into the Salesforce platform] since the last time we met in this room a year ago.” Now talking Lightning and to get a 1:1 assessment about Lightning on the 3rd floor of Moscone during Dreamforce from their top engineers and architects.

2:12pm: Video playing about disadvantaged children and HIV, and the efforts of the Salesforce involvement with RED (you can get involved here.)

RED’s Ebony Frelix talking about using Salesforce to fight AIDS

2:16pm: Ebony Frelix comes up, saying “Dreamforce is more than a tech conference, it’s a family reunion, a rock concert, and a great place to network. We have an opportunity to change the world.” Talking about the non-profit RED organization, with a mission to create an AIDS-free generation.” Uses the Wave analytics platform to drive actions with insights. RED uses Salesforce’s Community Cloud to give a global giving community, which they do almost instantly in a demo onstage.

Additional Reading: My analysis of Community Cloud, Salesforce’s flagship full-spectrum online community platform.

2:23pm: Ebony explains about RED trying to raise $1M for AIDS today, with Bill and Melinda Gates double matching and the Benioff family providing another $1M. Now the CEO of RED, Deborah Dugan, is up on stage with Marc, talking about what the organization does. Talking about Bono, her “hard charging” boss. Will.i.am is up again talking about the vital importance of public education and notees that Moscone Hall has the same color tone (of the audience) as it would have had in 1916. Suggests that making sure everyone has an education would change the competitive and entrepreneurial landscape in the tech industry.

2:35pm: Marc: “We’ve heard a great story about RED, and now we’re going to take a look another company, Schneider Electric, that is changing the world.” Rolls video about the company. Constellation’s Alan Lepofsky, who is sitting next to me at Dreamforce, notes that Schneider Electric has been shilling for a long list of technology companies lately.

Salesforce Chief Product Officer, Alex Dayon, Unveils New Products at Dreamforce 2016

2:38pm: Marc now welcomes Alex Dayon, Chief Product Officer, of Salesforce. Alex says they believe that electricity is a basic human right. Introducing a new Salesforce product, Salesforce CPQ, or Configure, Price, Quote is a type of applications that helps companies accurately resolve the price of goods across a large and constantly changing spectrum of variables. Before I can write this, he introduces another product called Field Service Einstein. Alex continues a whirlwind overview, noting how the Salesforce platforms features such as Wave all combine to deliver a highly productive and data-driven business experience. Now showing how Einstein is powering a predictions dashboard in these new apps. Demonstrating how it calculates the percentage of all the leads flowing into a company turns into business. Now need to involve a data scientist to help you, it’s built into the platform with Einstein. Demonstrates how Einstein can read your e-mails and score leads for you based on background information. It’s interesting that we’ve gotten to a point where people are probably comfortable with this type of intrusive technology, because it will save them so much time and effort.

An augmented reality demo at Dreamforce 2016

2:50pm: Demonstrating an augmented reality helmet, presumably powered by Salesforce, to guide the repair of a Schneider Electric transformer. Now Marc is talking with the CEO of Schneider Electric. David Blaine was just referenced by Marc as being in the front row here. Marc: “How many people have a Fitbit here?” A lot of people raise their hands. Now he rolls a video about the company and their partnership with Fitbit.

2:59pm: Fitbit is on stage talking about Health Cloud and creating a 1:1 customer journey, touching them every step of the way, using Journey Builder and Service Cloud. Mentions something called Analytics Cloud Einstein. Has predictive capabilities. Mentions that customers have urged the company to open Fitbit data up, and they are now going to do that. Kudos to them, as it was one of the big reasons I gave them up. Now they’re talking about Marketing Cloud and the Krux acquisition. “Think about as marketers, the proliferation of channels you have to with. Krux does all the segmentation and analysis. Now switching back over to Service Cloud: “Take service from being transactional to conversational.” Demoing the Journey Build canvas, a pretty cool looking view that provides overall control of the digital customer experience and journey.

Additional Reading: The bar for digital experience is rising in exponential times

An overview of Fitbit and Health Cloud at Dreamforce 2016

3:05pm: Fitbit will empower you to use your data in new ways. Can have a data-driven conversational with my healthcare position. I can jump into myHealth app, built on the Salesforce Lightning platform. Bring patients and providers closer together. Can access a nutritionist, personal trainer, doctor, and an intelligent bot that is a virtual care coordinator. It can suggest softer trails to run on, integrate with the calendar, and schedule meetings, and live video embedded into apps, can access physical therapist right in the app. In my opinion, this kind of integrated digital health experience is going to revolutionize preventative care and clinical treatment with telehealth. Talking about “Einstein Inside”

3:11pm: Marc introduces James Park, the CEO of Fitbit. James says they’ve shipped 50 million Fitbit devices so far. Mission has always been to how to take data from sensors to help people become healthful. Sleep better, eat better. Latest products are designed to help people deal with stress. We want to impact more chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes. Fitbit is now involved in over 200 clinical trials.

Marc thanks everyone and says it’s the biggest Dreamforce ever. And that’s a wrap. A good keynote but lacking a bit of the pizzazz and major announcements of previous years, especially given the pre-announcements have taken a lot of the thunder. My full analysis on ZDNet soon.

Dreamforce 14: Live Blogging the Benioff Keynote #df14

The enormous crowd here is streaming into the main keynote with Marc Benioff here at Moscone Center on Tuesday. it’s nearly 1pm PT and the main hall is filing up quickly. I’ll live blog the event here as much as possible given that the Ethernet for industry analysts isn’t working, but the private Wifi is, so hopefully we’ll get most of what goes on here.

The biggest announcement so far, out of many, has been Salesforce’s entry into the analytics and big data space, with their new Wave product. You can get a overview of the details on Wave from Larry Dignan on ZDNet and I’m sure we’ll hear about it much more during the next few hours.

I’m also expecting the following during the keynote today: 1) A roundup and year-over-year update on Salesforce1 and its ecosystem, with lots of customer examples, 2) an overview of Wave (or its “Analytics Cloud“) and the many 3rd party relationships they’ve already established, and 3) an even clearer and bigger vision for the Salesforce cloud. And plenty of philanthropy, maybe some politics, and of course, perhaps some colorful Christian Louboutin shoes.

Additional Reading: My analysis of Salesforce’s announcements and strategic direction this week.

1:11pm: The main hall doesn’t look full yet, but there’s definitely a lot of people vying for the desks in the analyst press area.

1:13pm: Now the always-excellent Peter Coffee is up doing a preamble on the keynote. Talking the usual bit about “amazing customers doing amazing things and bringing you in the next generation of technologies.” Introducing the CIO of Telstra, who is talking about “creating a brilliantly connected future for everyone.”

1:18pm: Just introduced the CIO of Eli Lilly talking with how Deloitte Digital is “helping them architect faster and faster.” Talking about helping in compliance, manufacturing, inventory, and HR processes and gets the ROI faster using the Force platform. Coffee now talking about health and life sciences, where customer experiences for pharma apps are going right to the doctors.

1:22pm: Now have the a Hawaiian band on stage conducting a musical interlude. Didn’t catch the band name.

1:26pm: Coffee: “One of the great things about Dreamforce is that you run into amazing people in the hallways.” He says he just ran into George Zimmer in the halls (the famous voice and founder formerly of the Men’s Wearhouse), who is now talking about his new business. The new business will be “high touch and high tech. Just like Salesforce with 1-1-1, and we’ll make sure we value our customers, shareholders, and communities just like Salesforce.” Coffee asks when we’re going to hear about it. Sometime in the next few months, he says watch his Twitter account.

1:29pm: Now the Group CIO of Caterpillar is up, along with his Accenture sponsor. “Have been using Salesforce for many years, but has been fragmented across many operating groups.” Accenture is providing the frameworks and processes to sort out a more consistent CRM implementation. Coffee: “New ways of things for a company doing what’s it been doing for a long time.” Says, “people want new ways to re-engineer what they’re doing”. Paul Daugherty, CTO, Group Chief Executive of Technology at Accenture is now talking “taking things to the next level, and industry solutions they bake onto the Salesforce platform. Connected products and connected dealers that they’re helping Caterpillar ‘bringing to life’ using the Force.com platform. A good management consulting quote from Coffee: “Turning from a products focus to an outcome focus.”

1:36pm: Now the chief strategist (I think) of Salesforce is talking with Coffee about how the Salesforce platform is evolving into many new disciplines, including supply chain. Coffee asking about what areas to focus on and follow up on later, including a Mystery X product that keeps being referenced. Says to be sure to watch what’s going on with the marketing cloud, Internet of Connected Customers, analytics products (Wave I assume). Now welcoming the Ambassadors of Aloha from the island of Hawaii.

1:44pm: Now welcoming the (for real) Beach Boys, who are playing live, on the musical stage.

1:47pm: The band is a wrap, and they’re getting a big hand from the crowd. And the whole center goes dark, ominous music playing.

1:48pm:  Voice in the dark with lasers coming out: “In the beginning it was simple. Few things were connected. Individual voices were silenced. And you could buy yourself to a leadership position with traditional ads. Then it all changed. Every industry is being disrupted, and everyone and everything is being connected. It’s the single most powerful, innovative time in the history of technology. Worlds of opportunity are begin created daily. billions of products and devices are being created. Everyone has a super computer in their pocket.”

1:49pm: “Introducing the customer success platform.” Clearly some optimistic new product branding. Talking about creating custom scaled 1-to-1 customer experiences, team empowerment, build mobile apps for every aspect of your business, and deploy “instantly” across “every single” device. Talking about watches, kiosks, and other new devices. Sales, service, marketing, community, analytics, and apps. “The New Salesforce”, again mentioning it as the customer success platform.

1:52pm: Marc Benioff just walked onstage and said “Aloha” to the whole crowd. “We’re here to excite you, educate you, entertain you, inspire you.” Thanking everyone at the conference, especially customers. Walking around the crowd, saying 1,450 sessions and 145,000 people registered. 400+ companies, and 5 million people joining the event online. Mentioning that Tony Robbins and Hillary Clinton having spoken yesterday. Notes that Grammy winning music star, Wil.i.am, will launch his company here tomorrow.

2:05pm: Just did an extensive video  about Salesforce’s philanthropic activities. Now has the Superintendent of San Francisco Schools, and the Mayor Lee of San Francisco. Lee is thanking Marc for starting Salesforce in San Francisco, and setting the gold standard for philanthropy, and setting the bar for business and government working together. A pretty good inspirational overview of how the public schools, city government, and the Salesforce Foundation.

2:14pm: Just welcomed Will.i.am onstage. Marc is asking him what his insights into public education. Will.i.am says how he was disadvantaged, says his schooling was critical to understand his situation in life. Says that after he “made” it, he realized there was a challenge with magnet schools in California and wanted to help. Talking about meeting the Waiting for Superman maker, and asking about robotics programs, students using ESRI, about kids going to China with the State Department and learning Mandarin, and other commendable outcomes. Now talking about paying in forward, and his new company, which apparently has an API and SDK. Appears to be an app on a new wearable device. Says it will be credible and will present it here tomorrow, though media predictions are mixed. He says he funded it, founded it, and surrounded himself with engineers. Says it’s critical that we aren’t hypocritical when we ask others to do something hard, that he is learning science, mathematics, and engineering for the product, and ‘I’m from the projects’, saying anyone can do it too.

2:20pm: Beach Boys playing Good Vibrations.

2:25pm: Marc talking about his first mainframe terminal. How the work of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates turned into millions of PCs around the world. Now those millions are turning into billions of computers. 5 billion mobile devices already exist. Talking about cards connected, toothbrushes connected, wearables. “Everything is getting hooked up.” And that is turning into “trillions of customer interactions.” There is now an imperative of engagement, to connect. Our vision is to build that platform for our customers to connect. “If you connect deeply, build a 1-on-1 relationship with your customers” in scale, then that leads to success. Talking about bringing all of customer information together.

2:30pm: Talking about the Berluti store when Marc moved to Europe recently. Salesperson comes up to him with an iPhone. Salesperson figures out who he is by using an app, which was Salesforce1. Asks him “does he have a suit for Dreamforce?” Which Marc is currently wearing onstage. “It wasn’t just a suit he sold me, but it was a whole relationship.” Talking about going to visit Philips and their new ultrasound machine. Screen over the stage says there will be 75 billion connected products by 2015. Talking about how services and partners are so deeply integrated. Now saying how much he likes hit Fitbit, and his community rankings.  Talking about a community of users for Home Depot at community.homedepot.com that is “inspiring us on what we can all do to bring together our customers, partners, and employees.”

2:35pm: Now talking about Neil Young’s Pono high resolution music player and service. It will apparently be launched here at Dreamforce on Thursday. And Neil built community as an integrated part of the product. Now talking about going to Berlin and Coca-Cola, and talking about being out with the customers. Said to Marc “everything in my company is mobile, all my employees, customers, and consumers on mobile.” And did this with Salesforce1. And it struck Marc that Coca-Cola has become a software company, a cloud company. “Everyone is in our business now. Its great.” Saying the 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years. Saying there is a “data divide.” Data products of the past, mentioning companies like IBM, SAP, and Oracle, and it’s “no surprise they are turning over all their CEOs.” Says, “what we need is a ‘Wave.” (Marc is walking amongst the crowd as he says all this.)

2:40pm: Talking about Wave, as an analytics service that is “for everyone.” Note: That big data services must be enabled for everyone is something I’ve emphasized for years. And it’s a mobile-first app. And for the developers they work with, “we want to build a platform where we have all these analytics apps.” Says its “analytics for the rest of us.” Going to profile a company that they’ve worked with for 10 years, who was a partner. The partner is General Electric. Now showing a video about what they did. Voiceover: “We don’t have a luxury of weeks to months to create a new products. To try new things in the marketplace. That’s where innovation comes from. Being a builder, not just a banker.” Taking about shortening cycle times from months to seconds using Analytics Cloud. “Analytics is not longer just the domain of experts, but is now in the hands of everyone.” Very simple, very fast. “This is the platform that lets the business start to use information that matters for them and their customers.” Made a very careful statement about how it’s all secure as well. “Mobile right out of the box.” Wherever you may be, you can pull up the analytics that you need. You can mark it up and comments, and everyone can see it immediately. Beyond banking, financial serfices, “should be key for every company in the world.” “Operating at the speed of thought.”

2:46pm: Marc is back on now that the video is over. Going over Service Cloud and business objects. The visionary behind Wave: “Please welcome Alex Dayon, President, Products.” About to unveil Wave, to “bring all your data together in one central place.” GE Capital is the case study they will examine. Starting the demo. Going over the features of Wave, saying “analytics has to be fun to use.” They built Wave on tops of Salesforce1. Lots of detailed demos of Wave, including building dashboards and sharing analytics.

2:45pm: The Wave demo continues. Now doing a scenario with Brunswick, and there is an actual powerboat with the CEO of Brunswick, and they are playing out a scenario, projecting Wave data using Airplay on a TV to make a mock case for why they need to make more boats. “Wave has been designed for everyone. Every sales person, every services person, every executive.” Has the whole Wave team stand up. Has been working for two years on this project.” Alex wraps up the Wave section by jumping on a surfboard. Now the Beach Boys are back up singing “Catch a Wave.”

3:01pm: Marc has returned. Says “everything is going mobile. Everyone knows that. I run my whole business on mobile. Everyone knows that too.” Says, however, it’s not enough. “We need to build mobile apps faster. Build more apps.” “The story of Coca-Cola inspired me that it could be done.” And now giving us a video tour of Coca-Cola Germany, and how they accelerated their mobile app creation process. Talking about connectivity, scalability, and collaboration. “Everyone has to know everything about the customer. This is only possible with a fully connected platform.” Says, “we can see everything at the same time, using Salesforce.com.” “If a shipment goes wrong, the customer will see it, the salesperson will see it, and I will see it.” Theme: We are only limited by our ideas now, not the technology.

3:07pm: Marc now talking about stats on Salesforce1: 10X APIs, 4M+ apps built, 84K companies using the Salesforce 1app. “But it’s crystal clear, from talking with many of you: We have to move faster.” New devices coming next year, like the Apple Watch, will further drive demand. “Wave was the first product we announced.” “The second major product we announced is Lightning.” “Please welcome, my co-founder, Parker Harris.” Parker is coming out in a Lightning super hero costume.

3:10pm: Parker Harris is now up and talking about Lightning. Platform services like Force.com, Heroku, and Wave are the bottom of the Lightning model. Lighting is three things: Tools to build mobile apps “lightning vast.” Includes visual builder. Don’t have to figure out iOS and Android. And includes an all new type of user interface, including the tablet in November, and the desktop next year. Will support watches, including Will.i.am’s new watch, which we’ll see here at Dreamforce tomorrow. Giving developers Lightning Components, Lightning Framework, and Lightning Builder. Using the creaky old “lego bricks” analogy for building applications. The new Lightning UI allows you to write and deploy applications once on any device, apparently with a responsive user interface that is suitable for the device’s form factor. Giving a product demo that shows situated business analytics using a fictional company called Westlane Cafe and managing its Coca-Cola supplies with a “red score” from the application. They are showing how fast you can develop apps, by editing it and add a virtual reality component to the application on the fly (for identifying where  the merchandise cooler should be physically placed in the store.) If it all works, it’s really pretty impressive.

3:21pm: Now Parker is going to actually build a Lightning application right with the audience live. Using the Lightning Builder, which has a palette of Lightning components. Says they are going to continue developing many new components, and developers can create their own. Making mention of AppExchange, such as pulling in a DocuSign component, which you can drag to your application, and “add document signing without writing a single line of code.” No app store review. A soon as the app is saved, everyone with Salesforce1 automatically has access to the application. The app is now built. Have shipping options, an navigable map, and interfaces for phone and tablet. Now says they are going to confirm a drone delivery of Coca-Cola right in the convention center directly in the newly built app. Sure enough, an actual drone comes into the convention center and delivers the coke directly to Parker (pic now below.)

3:31pm: Marc is back onstage and introduces a video about Honeywell and their connected devices. Discussing home monitoring, appliance control, real-time monitoring, dashboards of data for contractors. “Not as much about as connecting the home, as connecting the person.” We’re able to provide a much higher level of accurate diagnostics and customer service. It changes the whole relationship.” Every connected device puts together a contractor and a customer.” “Now we’re on a journey, we can create new software and services that we sell as subscription to contractors. Now we don’t just get revenue from hardware, but also software.” All supported with Salesforce platforms and apps.

3:36pm: Introducing Linda Crawford, EP & GM, Sales Cloud. Going to talk about the “customer success platform.” Lines between sales and marketing are clearly blurring. Key for these applications to work together on the customer success platform.” About to show us the Journey Builder, where you can map out your end-to-end engagement process with your customers. Showing us an onboarding journey. “As a customer, what we want when we do business with a new company?” Showing the welcome message from Honeywell. Invites you to download a customer app. Showing upsells. Continuing to do a detailed tour of Sales Cloud.

3:47pm: The detailed demos are proceeding. Linda now introduces us to Service Cloud1. Has personalization, any device, any time, anywhere. Now also introducing the Community Cloud. Optimized for search engines, personalized community content 1-to-1 to every member of a community, moderated feeds in a new console, and has visual design tools to “spin up communities faster than ever before.”

3:54pm: Now Honeywell is up talking about their connected home products strategy, with thermostats. Marc says we’re at the keynote. Talks about Bruno Mars tonight and the Will.i.am keynote tomorrow. “Thanks everybody.” It’s a wrap.

Additional reading:

Is the Internet of Things strategic to the enterprise? | ZDNet

My Dreamforce 14 presentation on the strategic use of Internet of Connected Products | Slideshare

Salesforce.com realigns Sales, Service clouds for connected apps | ZDNet

My previous Dreamforce live blogs:

Dreamforce 12: Live Blogging the Benioff Keynote

Dreamforce 11: Live Blogging the Benioff Keynote