Today is just jam-packed full of acquisition-shutdowns. Just hours ago, word broke that Yahoo! had acquired both MileWise and GoPollGo, with plans to discontinue both. Next up on the happy-now-sad-users-later train: Clipboard, the web clipping service we covered previously here.
According to an email to its users, Clipboard has been acquired by Salesforce and will be shutdown in a bit over a… → Read More
Salesforce.com is expanding its social ad offerings today with a new product called Salesforce Social.com.
Thanks to its acquisition last year of Buddy Media, Salesforce already runs social ad campaigns for a number of major ad companies like GroupM and Omnicom. But today it’s breaking out its ad product into a separate entity that’s distinct from Buddy Media’s social publishing capabilities. → Read More
Tylr Mobile today announced WorkinBox, a new mobile email inbox for salespeople connected to Salesforce.com. WorkinBox matches incoming email with CRM data to help sales people prioritize and focus on messages from customers and prospects, access relevant information and files from CRM, and update CRM systems. The technology has two parts: A native iOS application and contextual engine with… → Read More
Gartner Research is reporting mobile CRM apps will grow 500 percent by 2014, another sign of a shifting market that has more to do with work getting done in the cloud more so than from a server behind the firewall. This is buttressed by Gartner’s news that SaaS providers will represent more than 50 percent of profits in the CRM market by 2016 and the steep decline in PC shipments that… → Read More
Dropbox is renaming Dropbox Teams to better reflect its change in business focus. The move comes in tandem with Dropbox’s new support for single sign on (SSO) and partnerships with Okta and other identity providers. Dropbox for Business will replace the old name, reflecting the company’s change in focus to be more on larger business customers than teams within organizations. In… → Read More
Suddenly all this backend stuff is hot. Who would have ever thought that data pipes and the spigots would get so much attention? Salesforce is getting into the game and now so is Rackspace with the launch of its mobile push. Rackspace does not call its new offering backend as a service (BaaS). Instead they call it a “mobile-ready” stack that pre-packages the backend for developer so… → Read More
Microsoft has opened its Active Directory (AD) to general availability on Windows Azure, giving developers access to the single-sign-on service for access to the suite of Microsoft services, third-party apps and SaaS providers. Active Directory is the long-time single point of access to Microsoft Windows technologies. The Windows Azure AD compatibility means customers can provide similar controls… → Read More
Badgeville today launched a toolkit on the Salesforce Platform that is designed to get people more engaged in using online apps. The new toolkit puts a Salesforce Force.com wrapper around Badgeville’s APIs that hook into behavior tools and are designed to affect how people use the customer’s service, said CEO Kris Duggan in an email interview. → Read More
Chatter will become the primary interface for Salesforce.com, CEO Marc Benioff said today at the kickoff of a national tour for the company’s new “customer,” focus.
Benioff, speaking in Boston, provided his usual context for discussing Salesforce. → Read More
Salesforce shares (NYSE:CRM) are trading today at their highest price ever — $181.46 a share. It represents a 7.23 percent increase compared to yesterday’s closing price. Today’s trend is directly related to Salesforce’s fourth-quarter earnings. With revenues up 32 percent year-over-year, the company could become a profit-making venture in the coming year. → Read More
Twitter just announced via blog post that it has launched an advertising API, which will allow brands to run ad campaigns through the company’s API partners, rather than having to buy them through Twitter itself.
This confirms a report by TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden saying that Twitter would launch its ads API sometime in the first quarter of this year. At the time, Ingrid noted that Twitter’s… → Read More
Toronto-based startup TrendSpottr today announced a new partnership with Salesforce that will see its product made available to the larger company’s customers directly through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. TrendSpottr will now deliver real-time, predictive analytics to Salesforce’s massive customer base, providing them with the tools it has developed to spot emerging trends before they go… → Read More
Editor’s note: Bruce Cleveland is a General Partner with InterWest Partners focused on software and services sector investments with an emphasis on cloud computing, mobile and analytical applications.
Most of us are familiar with the adage by George Santayana, who, in his biography said, ”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You may recognize it as, “Those… → Read More
Over the weekend, I wrote a post about Salesforce telling potential job applicants that one of its “desired skills” was having a Klout score of 35 or more. Needless to say, I found this to be a bit unsettling, as I instantly imagined other companies forcing this into their own job applications. → Read More
Let’s put it out there right now: I am personally not a fan of Klout, which ranks people based on their Internet interactions and engagement on services like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. I have nothing against the company whatsoever, and this is a vertical that someone was going to get into sooner or later.
However, I still feel like the whole concept is bunk. → Read More
HootSuite has carved out a position as a popular way for businesses to manage their social media profiles on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but in its quest to become more of a one-stop “dashboard” for all social media interactions, it is adding a new feature: Conversations, an integrated, real-time messaging service, which goes live today and is available in a beta version for all… → Read More
No one got just how powerful it was that Facebook recently said it would allow ad targeting to lists of email addresses. Today it became clear as Facebook ad chief David Fischer formally launched “Custom Audience” ads and how they tie into CRM at the Dreamforce conference. I’m convinced they’re going to be hugely profitable for advertisers and Facebook. → Read More
Today Facebook awarded the 12 best social marketing tool and service providers with a new “Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer” distinction. The exclusive sPMD list will help brands sort through the 300 B2Bs in Facebook’s PMD directory and find trusted Facebook Page and Ads optimization providers.
Facebook’s VP of Biz and Marketing Partnerships David Fischer announced the sPMD today at… → Read More
Here’s an example of awesome technology working, but potentially at the wrong time. The Salesforce/Dreamforce keynote was interrupted during its Ustream streaming due to copyright protection. → Read More
Last week during TC Disrupt Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff referred to how the company was planning a Box-style competitor called Chatterbox. Today, the company has officially announced it. It is name-dropping Dropbox in its promotional description, calling it “The Dropbox for the Enterprise”, as part of its bigger push into cloud services and “consumerizing” enterprise IT. → Read More
Salesforce has made some pretty hefty bets on social monitoring, engagement, content and advertising with the acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media. As you may remember, the CRM giant shelled out $326 million for social media monitoring company Radian6, and most recently, social media marketing giant Buddy Media for $689 million. Today, Salesforce says it is bringing the best features from both… → Read More
Nearly a year ago, Salesforce acquired social performance platform Rypple, and revealed that it will be entering the human capital management (a.k.a. employee and talent management software) market. Earlier this year, Salesforce rebranded Rypple as “Salesforce Rypple,” but today the CRM giant is debuting a brand new Rypple, under the name Work.com.
For background, Rypple is a social performance… → Read More
At Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce, the company announced a number of new improvements to its Sales and Service Clouds. First, the company is launching Salesforce Touch, which is powered by HTML5, and brings Salesforce to any mobile device, allowing reps to collaborate on sales deals on the go. The company is also debuting a Data.com Social Key that will provide a link between contact… → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said that Google chose to use his company’s productivity app Do.com over Asana, which was founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Googler Justin Rosenstein. → Read More
Salesforce.com is a major force in the CRM space (it even managed to nab CRM as its stock ticker when it went public on the NYSE) for the trailblazing they have done in taking enterprise services into the cloud. It’s also made a big effort to acquire new services to incorporate them into its platform (the biggest of late being Buddy Media for $689 million). But today, at TC Disrupt, Marc Benioff… → Read More
On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO and founder, only had good things to say about Facebook. “They have a great CEO, they are a great company,” he said. But Michael Arrington tried to get him to say what Facebook could have done better. According to Marc Benioff, Facebook should have done its IPO two years ago.
But he believes that the company is still… → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt SF today, Mike Arrington talked to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff about the future going forward for Salesforce, and how the company is taking on Asana, Box and Okta, and why the company didn’t end up buying Yammer. The CEO also talked about how he thinks Google has “squandered its enterprise opportunity.” In fact, the CEO sees quite a bit of opportunity for many companies… → Read More
So much for that. In a victory for all of us who find the idea of trying to trademark generic-sounding terms tedious — and a victory, too, for those who actually work in the world of social enterprise — Salesforce.com has announced that it has withdrawn its applications to trademark the term “social enterprise,” originally filed earlier this year in the U.S., UK, Australia and Jamaica. It’s also… → Read More
Salesforce.com reported its second quarter earnings today, showing revenue growth at $732 million brought in, up 34% compared to last year. Earnings per share were 42 cents. The company beat analysts revenue estimates of $728 million.
Salesforce raised its outlook for the third quarter, and is expecting third quarter revenues between $773 million and $777 million, an increase of 32% to 33%… → Read More
Salesforce has officially closed its acquisition of Buddy Media, but it looks like it is far from closing the door on what it intends to do in the space of enterprise and social communication. Today the company announced Social Communities, a private social networking service where users can engage with customers and partners using some of the features that have largely become commonplace in this… → Read More
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