One day, we’re going to have hover boards, robot butlers, and even smarter apps. We’re going to be flying jetpacks willy-nilly and drinking water on Mars. The future is bright, and it all starts with groups of smart people getting together and having smart thoughts. Such a thing happens every year at DreamForce in San Francisco, a yearly SalesForce conference for users, developers, and geeks galore. We attended just a few weeks ago, and we even learned a thing or two (or five, if you want to get specific about it).
1. It’s massive. For real. San Francisco normally has a population of around 900,000, and the attendee count at DreamForce this year was around 150,000.
2. The logistics were impressive. To shut down a major street in downtown San Francisco, cover it in AstroTurf, throw in roughly 150k people plus stages, chairs, couches, bars, and outdoor games? And it didn’t feel crowded? I mean, how?
3. Here’s the real beauty of the conference: you can get whatever you want out of it. Whether you’re an admin, sales exec, developer, c-level exec, etc., there’s something there for everyone. Our very own CTO went to a number of sessions that reviewed coding practices and other sweet technical things that are beyond my comprehension level. He also attended talks hosted by Andrew McAfee (professor at MIT and author of The Second Machine Age) and was thoroughly geeked about it.
4. The future is very cool, and somewhat creepy. We got to play around with devices that connect to SalesForce (example: your car—for salespeople, the device can track miles traveled, upload the data to your sales profile, and calculate expenses automatically). There were also activations where people interacted with grills, showers, kegs of beer, etc., to demonstrate the benefit of tracking and tallying data in real time so that you can see what your customers are doing with your product.
5. There weren’t any robot butlers. Not exactly. But whatever. We’ll get there when we get there.