Thanks for listening to my presentation.

If anyone would like to be involved in the beta, please leave a comment and I’ll contact you as soon as we are ready.

• Back in Auckland #

This should be helpful for Mac users who use Gmail and/or Salesforce. For various reasons, I sometimes use all of these apps/devices for accessing email and contacts.

• Address Book on Mac OS X
• Outlook 2007 on XP (on Parallels on my MacBook Pro)
• Google Apps - IMAP (Gmail)
• iPhone
• Salesforce.com - All our customer data is in this system

How do you get all your contacts in all these places?

Step 1

You have to use Address Book as the primary data store. I have contacts in here that I don’t need in Salesforce, because they are friends and family.

So the first step is supplementing this with all my customer data from Salesforce. No problem in Outlook 2007 as you just install Salesforce Outlook Edition and sync with Salesforce. However, there is no equivalent solution from Salesforce for Address Book on Mac OS X.

Luckily, these clever chaps are working on an open source tool that does this:

sfCubed

This is in beta, but it works fine for me.

Step 2

Now I just sync my iPhone via iTunes and I have all my customer information on my phone. Easy.

Step 3

Now I want everything in Gmail as well so that I can access all the contacts, if for any reason, I can only use web mail.

Download A to G

This simple utility exports your Address Book to a .csv file that can be imported into Gmail.

Conclusion

This is a satisfactory but still manual process for getting all contacts data everywhere I want. Ideally this would be all achieved via iSync on Mac OS X, however, I think this will probably be a little while away.

• In Wellington today. #

• Building widgets #
• Laughing at this http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/hou/590888944.html #

The cobbler’s kids are always the last to get shoes, or so the saying goes.

In my business, it is always our own design work that is left to last. 5 months after we moved in to the new Auckland office, we’ve finally got a sign on the building!

Thanks guys, this looks great.

• Thinking this USB drive would be a problem at the airport http://tinyurl.com/2vzqoa #

• Portishead return http://tinyurl.com/2v4hvq #
• Upgrading my iPhone to 1.1.4 - thanks LIfehacker http://tinyurl.com/227ewm #

Very clever. Although the irony is that this is Microsoft advertising their digital advertising products…using a TVC…developed by an above the line agency. Still, clever none the less.

YouTube has annnounced major new features for their API. These include:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

So what does this mean to you? Essentially this makes it even easier for you to leverage YouTube as a video platform. You can directly integrate YouTube into your own website. The key difference is essentially YouTube has to date only really offered Read access to their videos. You can pretty much do everything you can do on YouTube itself.

Example

You want to allow visitors to submit video content to your site for a competition.

• Visitor fills in the competition entry form on your site.
• Visitor uploads video on your site.
• You use YouTube to transcode the video to Flash and store it on their platform (for free!).
• You retrieve the videos and display them on your site in a customised player.

It now makes even less sense to try and build your own online video capability. What’s not clear, is what advertising might be delivered around your video content, however, I imagine they’ll introduce an advertising free albeit paid option in the future.

What do you think you could use this for?

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