The Gillmor Gang -— Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — calmed down after a week of Dreamforce, the annual salesforce.com user conference. As the editorial independence of TechCrunch is questioned, let us be clear that Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBSNewsOnline, Robert Scoble is Chief Scobleizer Officer of Rackspace, and the rest of us are Salesforce.com employees. Let me be clear that I support and appreciate Michael Arrington and his evolution for a very simple reason, namely that the horse he rode in on is the very reason why TechCrunch exists and is so valued.
→ Read More
We’re hearing that Salesforce is investing in Seesmic’s next round of venture funding, along with other investors. We don’t yet know how much or at what valuation but the tie up is interesting.
Just a few months ago Mike was saying Twitter deciding to compete with developers had essentially killed Seesmic. That may be true for consumer chats, but enterprise is another matter. And between Yammer’s new round of funding and Salesforce’s Chatter product, enterprise chat is heating up.
Might Seesmic be a spoiler? The two have already been chummy, with Seesmic integrating into Chatter and Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff appearing on stage together multiple times. We’ll post more details when we hear them.
(Disclosure: This may come as a surprise since Mike is so hard on Loic, Seesmic and the French generally, but he was an early investor in the company.) → Read More
Editor’s note: Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, really loves Japan. And if you are a startup founder or tech executive, he thinks you should too. He explains why in this guest post, culled from observations from his most recent visit.
Thousands of people lined up last week to buy iPads. And, if you didn’t notice them, it’s because they were in Tokyo.
I’ve been living in Japan for the past three weeks and couldn’t miss the madness around the introduction of the iPad here. I couldn’t believe the demand for this new “magical” computer. After all, this is the country that developed and built some of the world’s most popular PCs—and now the iPad, which was designed somewhere else, is revered. It’s bowed to. (Reportedly, about half of Japanese business and technology magazines are featuring the iPad on their covers.) I expect that out of the 10 million iPads sold this year, at least 500,000 to one million will be sold in Japan.
Something else amazing in Apple-mania happened last week. Apple’s market cap passed Microsoft. I suggested in a post last April, “The end of Microsoft. A door opens to a new cloud”, that this seminal event was about to happen. Steve Jobs described it as being “Surreal”. I agree. It is surreal—both unbelievable and fantastic. This is a milestone that signifies a dramatic change of computing: Windows is on the decline, and new technologies such as iPads and iPhones, Android and Google Search, and Cloud Computing are on the way up. → Read More
The first piece of software I ever wrote was on the TRS-80 Model 1. It was called “How To Juggle”, and it had 4K of memory. It was my version of “Hello World”, what every programmer first writes on a new piece of hardware. CLOAD Magazine purchased it for $75, they distributed it to their subscribers on a cassette (there weren’t disks for the TRS-80 yet). It was 1979. I was 15 years old, and I was a software entrepreneur. I still am.
Just five years later, I was an intern at Apple writing some of the first native assembly language on the Mac and working in a building called Bandley 4 with a pirate flag on the roof. Guy Kawasaki hired me to help developers write software on the Mac without using its predecessor, the Lisa (something that had been required when the Mac launched). My first example of how to write for the MDS 68000 development system manifested itself in a video game called “Raid on Armonk.” It was an allusion to IBM’s headquarters. They were the anti-Mac and we clicked and destroyed them. (Turns out they eventually clicked on themselves.) → Read More
Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting.
Frankly, I’ve been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka “the ruckus across the blogoshere,” as Joe McKendrick calls it). It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever. Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever.
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. → Read More
Everyone has an opinion about the iPad, even at Davos. Michael is there this week at the World Economic Forum, grabbing video interviews with the people he is running into (like Michael Dell showing off a yet-to-launch Android device). In the video after the jump, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff talks about the iPad (what else?). Other people might be wowed by the touchscreen or the 140,000 apps or the iBooks, but not Benioff. He’s impressed by the battery:
“The most important feature is the 10-hour battery life. That he was able to get that kind of capability in such a robust device, I think we have a game-changer.” → Read More
On Friday, during our cloud computing event, Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?, Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary noted, “The cloud is the new dotcom.” He was one of the judges for the demo startups, and for good or for bad, he might be right. Cloud computing as a term is broad enough to encompass most internet startups and already is in danger of being latched onto as the next catch-all category. Yet there is also obviously something there. Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and even Facebook all want to become the cloud platform of choice for startups and developers to build their Web apps on.
And we are already seeing some impressive cloud-based apps that would have been much more difficult to build without these platforms. During the demos, for instance, Veodia showed an app for recording video in the cloud straight from a laptop’s camera—no uploading required. FathomDB is putting a relational database in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2), and Diomede Storage is offering its own cloud service with a twist: online storage where you can monitor the power consumption of each file and act accordingly.
Below are four video highlights from the roundtable that followed the demos. In the first video, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff argues that “we are on the threshold of fundamentally a new paradigm of computing.” He defines cloud computing both as as software-as-a-service and as platform-as-a-service (and judging by how many cloud platforms were represented at the event, it seems like everyone wants to be the latter).
In the second video, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains why Amazon is in the cloud computing business in the first place, and says that overall for cloud computing in general: “This is still Day One.” We talked a lot about how enterprise apps are starting to look more and more like consumer Web apps, partly because they are both being built on similar back-end cloud architectures. But in the third video, Google’s Vic Gundotra takes exception to the idea that enterprise apps mimicking consumer apps is anything new.
And in the final video, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini talks about the importance of video in the cloud and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit talks about how consumers don’t care where all the data and applications are stored, but that applications on different cloud platforms nevertheless have to be able to seamlessly interact with each other. (Videos after the jump). → Read More