Salesforce Chatter: Twitter-like status updates for the Enterprise

Today I attended Cloudforce in London: essentially the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference on tour. The platform marches on: CEO Marc Benioff says the company is growing at 20% per year, and in general the customers I spoke too seem pleased with their choice. Benioff was as usual full of jabs at the “old stuff” – things

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Salesforce.com partners with Adobe for Flash Builder for Force.com

Adobe and Salesforce.com have announced Flash Builder for Force.com, a special version of Flash Builder that lets you create Flex applications that interact with Force.com web services. The preview will be available for download today from developerforce.

I asked Dave Gruber from Adobe and Eric Stahl from salesforce.com what is really new here, since force.com has

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Web advertising goes outside: digital signage using force.com and Media RSS

In the last 10 years or so video advertising screens have replaced static posters in busy public places like the London Underground. This is known in the trade as digital signage or Digital Out of Home (DOOH) advertising; and I was interested to speak to a company at the recent Salesforce.com Service Cloud 2 launch

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Traditional IT is a scam, says Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, introducing Service Cloud 2

Yesterday I attended the London launch for Service Cloud 2 from Salesforce.com. A weary but still ebullient Marc Benioff showed off his new book Behind the cloud – sure to be a bestseller if only for the copies his own company has purchased – and introduced a demo of Service Cloud 2.

There are several elements

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The battle to be part of the emerging cloud stack: Force.com for Google App Engine

I was interested in today’s announcement of a new Force.com for Google App Engine. App Engine lets you build Python or, since April 7th this year, Java application and run them on Google’s servers. Salesforce.com already offered Python libraries for its Force.com platform, but these have now been joined by Java libraries which are more

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Salesforce.com = CRM + platform?

Organizations evolve; and that can be an untidy process. Salesforce.com started out as an online application for CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and that remains its core business, as suggested by its name. Seeing its success, observers naturally asked whether the company would break out of that niche to service other needs, such as ERP (Enterprise

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Cloud computing means exporting your IT infrastructure to the Internet

I’ve just attended my first cloudcamp unconference, held during QCon London. We ended up debating how you would explain cloud computing to a non-technical audience. The problem is that different people mean different things by the term.

The consumer perspective is to do with running applications and storing your stuff on the Internet. Gmail, Google Docs,

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Comparing digital snaps on a new camera and one five years old

I purchased a Canon IXUS 400 in November 2003. Good camera (for my purposes); but the battery life has dwindled to the point of nuisance and I figured it was time to replace it. I bought a near-equivalent, the IXUS 80IS, for around half the price the 400 cost 5 years ago. I especially like

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In which I ask Marc Benioff, CEO Salesforce.com, if his platform is a lock-in

Moving from Microsoft’s PDC last week to Dreamforce (the Salesforce.com conference) this week has been an interesting experience. Microsoft is the giant still trying to come to terms with the new world of the Internet; Salesforce.com is the young upstart convinced that it has the future computing platform in its grasp. Salesforce.com is a much

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Salesforce.com linking with Facebook, Amazon

I’m at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, where Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, and co-founder Parker Harris, are presenting new features in the force.com platform.

The first is a built-in ability to publish your Force.com data as a public web site. The service is currently in “developer preview” and set for full release in 2009.

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