One day of hacks, REST and cloud: Salesforce.com Cloudstock

I’m in San Francisco for the annual Salesforce.com conference, where the pre-conference day is called Cloudstock and features a bunch of sessions on cloud development from vendors whom Salesforce.com considers more partners than competitors, and from Salesforce.com itself, along with a hackathon competition where you build an instant cloud app.

Why Cloudstock? The parallels with Woodstock’s peace love and music are obscure, but I think the idea is revolution of cloud vs revolution of free love, or something. Presumably nothing to do with mud, getting high or sneaking in without paying.

I’m guessing that the PR goal is to position Salesforce.com at the heart of cloud computing. Good PR, but there are many other ways to do cloud.

I’m in a session on Google App Engine and new Google platform technologies – an introductory talk by Christian Schalk. More on that in this separate post.