Salesforces’s Dreamforce is a full on festival for the new tech cloud giant. Software vendors, developers, business executives, and a wide range of other tech minded people take over a few block in San Francisco each fall. The event features breakout sessions, coding workshops, vendor booths, and party after party among other things.
Venture cap
My first session reviewed how to fund a new start-up company. A short but insightful presentation on the options of funding companies. Lessons learned: there are proven time lines and requirements when Venture Cap is the only viable option, and situations when Angle and Bootstrapping are your only options.
Hacking the Human Body
I wasn’t sure what to expect with this session, but they quickly started to review their new technology. The software models they are building are predictive analysis from large sets of data points that help predict risk factors, and corrective actions, for diseases like diabetes. They have invested a great deal of resources into building these models. The actual process was a little complicated and only briefly covered. They rely heavily on wearable data and some blood work to plug your data into their models to help you see your risk factors, and build a plan of action to improve your health. They have found that sleep deprivation frequent has the biggest impact for the least amount of effort in lowering people’s risk factors for future health issues. This is a technology still in the lab, but something that we might see 5- 10 years.
3d printing
We bought a 3d printer a few years and and have played around with it a little bit. Today I got a quick crash course on the latest and greatest in the world of 3d printing. I was even more convinced of the importance it will have over the next 20 years in transforming our world. Some of the new advancement include large scales printing. More on the line of the “additive manufacturing”, companies are building large scale printers, and started printing entire houses in China! Second, the speed of the printers has made major advancements, what used to take days, takes hours, what used to take hours, takes a few minutes. They can print a small house in a few day. HP built a new multi material printer that has 30,000 jets!
Printing Food
Printing food is nothing new, but the industry continues to grow. There is now an entire restaurant where almost everything was built with a 3d printer, including the food. The new trend is to integrate 3d printers with the Internet of Things. In the case of food, the concept is to hook up your wearable data, then print out your healthy snack bar custom built for your health needs for that day. A team is also working on building a printer that will not use exiting food stock to print food, but create the food itself. They are trying this with mushrooms.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The session ended up on a little bit of a tangent on Artificial Inelegance and how this will integrate with 3d printing and the Internet of Things. The most shocking of these demos was the robot controlled by a worm brain. They figured out how map the 300 neurons in a worm brain and hook it up to a robot. The worm brain would wiggle around the robot body. Finally, they are getting better at printing bio material like skin grafts.
The After Party
The after party was pretty cool featuring free food and beer in a nice downtown park setting. The band was a “Salesforce Coding Cover Band”. They re-wrote the lyrics to popular classic rock songs with Salesforce and coder lyrics. The ended the set with a remake of Panino man called Solo Admin, singing of all the pain that a solo Salesforce admin can face in a small company. At first I thought this was silly, but after a few clever computer jokes I was a fan.