ReadWriteWeb

One thing you can plainly say about Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: You know where he stands, and he's never on the fence. Over the past two years, one of Benioff's key themes at conferences and speeches is how software design, as part of the inevitable journey of all software to the cloud, is embracing the concepts of social networking. Facebook, he professes, is a lesson in itself.

Then last August at the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce kicked the evolution of its Chatter platform into overdrive. Chatter is the communications layer that's integrated into its cloud-based CRM platform, but which is open for other developers to utilize as well - not freely, mind you, but by way of extending the Salesforce ecosystem. In a demonstration for RWW, Salesforce's director of product marketing for Chatter, Dave King, revealed elements of the platform that showed the direction Salesforce is intending for it - as clear and unmistakable a direction as a theme in a Marc Benioff speech: Chatter has already become a social network for business, and we're just now waking up to that fact.

Former chief information officer of the United States Vivek Kundra is joining Salesforce as its executive vice president for emerging markets. Kundra, who was the first ever CIO of the U.S., left the position in the summer of 2011 to join Harvard's Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society with a six-month fellowship. He joins Salesforce at a time when cloud computing is ready to be pushed across the world, a job he is specifically suited for.

Tools provide leverage for people to get work done; in many cases they enable us to do new kinds of work. Now consider robots in the workplace. They seem like bad news but do they have to be? What if robots weren't a threat to humanity, only intended to steal human jobs, but were tools that enabled all of us to do new things and live life differently? We may need to start seeing things that way, for our own sake.

The iPhone and iPad tablet manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million human beings around the world. (They produce other electronics as well.) The company said last month that it plans to cut that number in half with the enlistment of 1 million new robot workers, a 100X increase in its robot workforce, over the next 3 to 5 years. "An empire of robots," the company says. Human workers? They will move up the value chain, the company says. How might that actually happen? People say that education is undervalued, what if robots saved us from that?

It seems like just like summer, Bill Murray used to sing, and that's because it was. This year, for the first time, ReadWriteWeb expanded its coverage of the technologies that change our world through the Web, with new emphasis on cloud-based services to consumers and cloud technologies for businesses. Cloud services are more than just hosts for apps. They're resources that you can provision for your changing needs, and which you can scale up or down as necessary.

Certainly 2011 was dramatically different from 2010 for businesses for one critical reason: In a very short time, suddenly true scalability for every IT service appeared within their reach. A market that was almost non-existent by the end of last year, has grown past what many analysts would consider the point of adolescence, with the shakeout subsiding and brand dropouts declining. Someone should remind these cloud service folks there's a recession going on.

It has been called in these pages a competitor to Microsoft Outlook, even though Do.com is not an e-mail client. It warrants the comparison is because it could potentially deliver collaboration and connectivity on a scale that Outlook has been trying to reach for well over a decade, by pairing itself with Google's Gmail.

This morning, Salesforce.com cut the virtual ribbons on Do.com, ending its beta program and accepting new applicants.

This is a new one on me. I've heard of tree huggers, but Patrick Thibodeau's piece in ComputerWorld today is the first time I've run into server hugger. What's a server hugger, you ask?

According to Thibodeau, it's a term coined by Forrester analyst James Staten, for IT folks who "have significant concerns about their ongoing value to the company if they don't run [IT systems] themselves." Does the term fit, or is it perhaps a wee bit early to be labeling IT folks who haven't put all their eggs in the cloud basket?

This week two cloud-based services opened their doors. (Can a cloud open? Whatever.) One, myERP.com, purports to replace the likes of Quickbooks and Salesforce. The other, EazyBI.com, offers low cost analytics on a wide variety of metrics. Both are worthy of further study and are based on freemium models.

To a rapidly increasing degree, Salesforce Chatter is becoming the communications platform for essentially all classes of business, in both the public and private sectors. There was a time when Salesforce tools were considered to be leveraged against Twitter and Facebook as social platforms, but for certain segments of the user base, that leverage is reversing itself.

Now the mobile application framework provider Appirio, which ReadWriteWeb introduced to you last June, is opening up a kind of persistent contest for the open source community, with a channel for distributing a new class of tools that would effectively leverage these consumer social tools on Salesforce's business social tool.

So what's the next step, I asked? Do people start wearing biometric tokens that send signals to devices in the neighborhood, letting you know when you're in their vicinity so they can respond by tweeting you to please buy them?

Sure, why not, comes the swift response from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Last August, as regular ReadWriteWeb readers will recall, Benioff astounded his audience at the Dreamforce conference with the mind-alteringly imminent notion that Coke machines should become aware of their customers' presence, and respond through their iPhones with bargains and loyalty points. Of course, Benioff's idea at that time relied upon the customer always having his iPhone with him. This time, at the Cloudforce conference in New York this morning, Benioff one-upped his own idea with the notion that a biometric bracelet could supply interested products and devices in the wearer's immediate vicinity with a kind of identity signal.

For a company whose secondary logo is the word "Software" with a big slash through it, Salesforce.com may have already become the nation's leading producer of software conferences for businesses. A huge crowd has assembled at the Jacob Javits Center in New York to hear Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff deliver one of his already-legendary keynote speeches. The theme is expected to be another extension of his "delivering on the social enterprise" motif.

In recent months, Salesforce has been making inroads in building a business software ecosystem around its Chatter system of communication, developing and enabling the development of tools that could potentially wedge Outlook and SharePoint out of the enterprise. Expect a stronger message on the subject of reducing and/or eliminating middleware and message queues, a topic that Salesforce marketing has been chattering about in recent days. ReadWriteWeb is delivering a running summary of Benioff's speech as it happens.