VRP Joins Jobscience for Salesforce’ $1 Million Hackathon

VRPs Dmitry Savinkov joined the team at Jobscience over the weekend for Salesforce’ $1 million hackathon winning 9^th place and $10,000!

The challenge was to develop a mind blowing, functional, mobile app using Force.com, Heroku, ExactTarget, or any of the other developer tools and APIs that make up Salesforce Platform.  

Using the Salesforce1 platform the team developed an app to simplify the bar experience for consumers. 

“. . . dataBarz allows Consumers so look up bars in their neighborhood, read reviews, examine the drink menu, and purchase drinks which will trigger the drink-bot to pour you a drink of your choice! This extremely intuitive and easy to use application on the salesforce1 platform will simplify payments, reduce lines at bars and give users all of the information they need to know about a bar. And a robot pours you a drink! That’s pretty awesome. 

dataBarz also allows the Bar Manager to manage their inventory, define what drinks are available through the drink-bot, and monitor quantity levels, orders coming in, and reviews… all from the salesforce1 app! The drink-bot is an extremely affordable and easy solution for any of the few hundred bars you find in San Francisco, or any city for that matter! . . .”

The team created the app to solve issues like, cash only bars, long lines, or not knowing what to order at a bar you’ve never been to. They also wanted to show off the plethora of abilities you can do with cloud based automation.

To read more about what the team did with the Salesforce1 platform you can visit: 

http://challengepost.com/software/databarz

Salesforce Foundation & roundCause Release NGO Connect

Being connected in today’s market is vital to an organizations success. With tasks such as fundraising, event management, volunteer management, nonprofit relationship management, and program management it’s hard to find a program that does all of these successfully and efficiently.

After evaluating the applications serving the nonprofit marketplace Salesforce made an investment in roundCause in early 2014.  The rebranding under the Salesforce Foundation completes the endorsement of roundCorner as the premier software for NGO’s on the Salesforce platform:

“. . . NGO Connect is a new app that helps nonprofits connect all of these things to transform how they build and retain lifetime relationships with their constituents. And because it is built on the world’s leading Salesforce1 Platform, NGO Connect is built for the social, mobile, and cloud era. Leading nonprofits like Sierra Club, Girl Scouts of the USA, and City Year are already using NGO Connect to help them transform.”

With the NGO Connect app working for you organization you can take the time to focus on what truly matters, achieving your mission and accelerating your nonprofits’ ability to deliver more impact.

The Salesforce Foundation has extended the seeding of Enterprise licenses to this platform making the deployment of this solution even more affordable.  They have further introduced the BIOS license to allow the entire organization to take advantage of NGO Connect data model that allows both traditional commercial account and nonprofit household management within the same environment.

As a Salesforce Product Development Organization and Salesforce Foundation Partner VRP Consulting, Inc. is well positioned to deploy this solution for your organization.

Our experience in the Blackbaud and MicroEdge environment allows you to stay on those valuable platforms and exchange information between the NGO Connect environments.

For more information on the NGO Connect software and how to get it for your organization contact Niels Andersen at (415) 871-1855 or visit: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/introducing-ngo-connect. 

MongoDB map-reduce recommendation implementation

Challenge: 

Modern applications often require extended storage spaces and real-time processing of large amounts of data. In the traditional storage, data is spread across multiple related tables in SQL database. This database is queried from server application layer where additional calculations take place. Salesforce, even though it can be customized in detail, provides similar architecture. As a result, the performance may lag behind, because the database collects data from multiple tables and sends it across the network. These time response delays may negatively affect real-time features.

Solution:

NoSQL solutions meet the requirements of modern software development and deal with the limitations mentioned above. MongoDB is the leading NoSQL database, which gained popularity among the Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies. NoSQL database is a document store and its key features include: dynamic schema, horizontal scaling, replication and MapReduce support.

Case:

In the following example of Mongo DB usage, VRP developers created a recommendation engine capable of searching for similar opportunities from the pool of predefined opportunities. We used a collection of 500k predefined opportunities. A sample implementation of recommender request is simple: compare input opportunity with all opportunities from the pool and count the number of matching products for each pair of opportunities. With the help of this algorithm, we can find related products to recommend together with the main product. The traditional implementation of the same functionality in a relational database may take hours to complete.

MongoDB recommender implementation: