I’ve been on stage, heckling participants on the marketing panel, I’ve been Tweeting from the audience, I’ve been following the live-blogging of the panels. Generally I’ve been living the real time dream – which probably explains why I haven’t done any actual work all day. And now I’m twenty minutes away from my deadline, and I still have to read a week of TechCrunch and figure out everything that’s happened this week.

Oh, and to make matters worse, Arrington has filled my work room with dogs.

Welcome, then, to a completely – and appropriately – real-time edition of This Week On TechCrunch.

From first glance, it seems that the entire site has been outsourced to India, with both Lacy and Vivek reporting from the ground. And at one point on top of a camel. On Friday evening Sarah kicked things off with a useful primer on why ecommerce has been slow to take off  in the country, and how travel sites like MakeMyTrip.com are acting as a gateway drug to get Indians shopping online, starting with ex-pats.

Vivek went one stage bigger, asking whether India has the potential to ‘take on’ Silicon Valley. His conclusion: yes. He’s wrong of course, but it’s an fascinating discussion. As Vivek headed back to the US, Sarah headed to Delhi, and the slums made famous by Slumdog Millionaire. But what she discovered couldn’t be more different from what we saw on the big screen: surrounded by grinning children, she met NIIT, a for-profit company that’s introducing the poorest children to computers by, well, leaving kiosks lying around and letting human curiosity take its course.

Meanwhile, back in the Valley, Arrington was starting his working week with rumours that MySpace was on the verge of buying iMeem; a rumour that he gleefully confirmed two days later. A million dollars in cash, with half of iMeem’s 55 employees (27.5 people) moving to MySpace – and the others looking for new jobs.

Speaking of people looking for new jobs, Robin reported on AOL’s appeal for 2,500 employees to voluntarily hand in their notice as the company heads for IPO. The alternative, according to CEO Tim Armstrong? They’ll just be fired. This just a week after the company announced 1000 involuntary layoffs. Cast aside like so many unwanted sign-up discs.

Hey, but at least Don Dodge got a new job.

What else?

In real-real time presidential news, Obama admitted that he has never used Twitter, but – as MG puts it – he’s adamant that  people in China should have the right to.

In real-time celebrity news, Shakira used UStream to stream her new album to 95,000 live viewers and a further 400,000+ watching the reruns over the next 24 hours. (Incidentally this story saw Jason narrowly missing out on the Headline Of The Week award for: “Shakira’s Stats Don’t Lie“. I mean, seriously Jason? “Stats?”. The correct title of course is “Shakira’s Hits Don’t Lie”. Better luck next time.

In real-time things that I’m already bored of even though they’re not launching until at least next year news: Google previewed their new Chrome OS and rumour has it they’re on the verge of launching a new Google phone. It’s ‘very real‘ says Mike. And it may even be VoIP-only. Splendid.

Which brings us nearly to the real-time event. It’s still going on right now, so it’s too early to say what the highlights are – tune in next week, etc – but newsworthy segments include the creator of GMail admitting that he hasn’t used Wave, an interesting discussion on how to monetize ‘real-time’ and, of course, MG’s Headline of the Week: Google And The Amazing Technicolor Search Options.

And that’s just about it. The after-party is calling, and I’m eager to talk to Scoble more about his ‘Super Tweet‘ idea. I have no idea what it is, but it sounds like the future.

Have a great week!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

What does Speedi.ly do? One thing, very well and at scale. Speedi.ly takes a piece of content, or grabs the content from a URL, and analyzes it. It does this very fast and it outputs some key data. Speedi.ly tells you the language of the content, categorizes it (topics, keywords), and additional metadata. This metadata payload is exactly what Robert Scoble is talking about with his SuperTweet idea.

Here’s what Speedi.ly returns for this story we wrote on the Skype/eBay sale:

Speedi.ly successfully categorizes the story as about technology. Not bad for on the fly and human-free categorization. You’ll see the field for entities as well, which is currently blank. Speedi.ly will soon turn that on as well.

Now check out the results for this article from the SF Chronicle, properly categorizing it under sports:

Why is this useful? Most URLs passed around today on Twitter and Facebook are completely metadata free. Search engines like Topsy are forced to look at the text in the Tweet or status message, if any, for context on what the URL is about.

Even Digg and Delicious rely on data entered in by humans to categorize URLs. With a service like Speedi.ly, those services can create a sort of real time page rank on the fly.

If you want to try it out yourself, go to http://classify.speedi.ly/fun and us login:customer and password: logmein. Note that this isn’t going to be a huge wow moment for most users, but potential partners will be able to see what Speedi.ly is capable of.

There are a couple of other services sniffing around the same space as Speedi.ly. Factery, which we wrote about earlier this week, looks at shared URLs and pulls out key facts. And Thompson Reuters has OpenCalais, which has 18,000 customers.

I interviewed Keith this afternoon about the service on video. It’s embedded below. He also mentions that Speedi.ly is already working with a partner to categorize URLs on the fly.

Disclosure: I’m friends with and have had business relationships with both founders – Keith Teare and Louis Monier. And Keith is a shareholder in TechCrunch.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Extracting meaning from the Web is a difficult undertaking. Keyword search skims the surface of contextual meaning that is locked in Web pages, Tweets and feeds. That’s where semantic search comes in. The semantic web deals with looking beyond simple links that make up the web to understand a deeper meaning and context behind that content. The Ellerdale Project, which launched in alpha this past week, is hoping to add context to search by using semantic technology to power a real-time search platform.

Ellerdale mines the real-time stream, including Tweets, RSS and the, to identify topics, messages and articles that link together based on content, not keyword. So If you looked up Sarah Palin on Ellerdale’s site, you’d see a semantic graph of related content, such as Oprah Winfrey (Palin just appeared on Oprah a few days ago), The Republican Party and John McCain.

The data on the site is mostly collected from Wikipedia, Freebase, Twitter, RSS, and by crawling the web. Ellerdale then analyzes and index the data to identify topics in text. Using this information, Ellderdale will show you the latest tweets, RSS articles and trending URLs, organized by topic. The site also analyzes trends in Tweets and feeds to display trending topics and topic clusters organized by categories (i.e. politics, sports, style).

For now you can only see topics on the site and cannot actually search for any keyword. While Ellderdale’s platform is still a work in progress, it’s already caught the eye of notable angel investor Ron Conway, who has made an investment in the startup. Startups and companies using the semantic web for search is steadily growing. Microsoft bought Powerset for $100 million to gain semantic search expertise. Hakia, NetBase, Textwise, Twine and other startups are also working on semantic search.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.

So can we kill email?

Well if Buchheit’s quote didn’t tip you off, the consensus was “no.” Though there are some interesting things coming out that are helping to expand our communication, we’re just not at the point now where we can live without email. And in fact, for many of these services like Twitter and Facebook, you still need email to be notified about new followers or new messages.

Threadsy (which launched at TechCrunch50 this year) is trying to help the transition away from email by integrating it with other services like Twitter, but even Goldman acknowledges that the email notification problem remains an issue because people keep relying on it. At one point, a question from the audience asked about Google Wave, another would be “email-killer,” and Schonfeld noted that he was having a hard time getting into it because he wasn’t getting notified via email when there is a new Wave message. So you can see the problem.

Speaking of Wave, when asked about his thoughts on it, Buchheit noted that he hadn’t actually tried it yet, while laughing. “The invite is sitting in my inbox.” This is significant because Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google. But Buchheit doesn’t consider Google Wave as a replacement of email or even Twitter or Facebook. Both him and Goldman agreed that it seemed more of a collaboration tool. And both felt that despite some great technology it was still a few years away from having a polished experience.

When asked if there would be a mashup of social and private streams, such as email and Facebook with Twitter, Buchheit said that he felt rather than one thing killing off another that we would just keep layering on new things. Goldman noted that the next step for Threadsy is to provide better context about the messages you’re getting and who you are talking to. He also noted that being able to search across all your messages is key.

So, no. Email isn’t dead yet, but it may be changing.

[photo: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com]

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Video by Ustream

ES: We talk a lot about the overflow of information. Lots of interest in geo-stream. Where do the money making opportunities lie here? We have lots of consumer use cases.
GZ: That’s a broad question. We’re investors in three companies now starting to accrue rev. in this space: Twitter, Yammer, and SMSGupshup (Twitter of India). Regarding Yammer: In 0 for marketing, over 10% conversation of the install base for Yammer. The company has around 550k installed enterprise seats in 14 months.
MA: It’s this insidious product where it’s very sticky and you hae to start paying. It’s a good thing.
GZ: It’s a good thing for the company, and investor..
DL: Good for customer too. Company stays around.
GZ: In response to Marc Benioff copying Yammer, we got lots of calls saying Chatter copied Yammer.
MA: There’s 550k installed enterprise seats, over 10% of new seats convert. There’s below 100k paid seats. Near 100k paying users.

GZ: Marc Benioff setting price at 50 per user gives us some room…
ES: What’s yammer’s strategy to ingest other enterprise data systems.
GZ: I think yammer is going to be the future of enterprise messaging. There’s going to be serious competition and we know that.

ES: FriendFeed was the first sig. acqusition in this space. Wasn’t the size of what people were talking about with Twitter, but it’s a milestone. From a founder perspective you were building this system, can you tell us about, what you thought was obviously the future.
PB: Facebook kept talking to us, they were very persistent. We were never looking to sell, even when we did. What happened is we started talking to them more, learning where they’re going. As we put more thought into the future of Facebook it started seeming like an intriguing possibility. The opportunity at Facebook is very substantial. Nobody has ever announced the deal. The biggest component is what is the value is Facebook. I think the value of Facebook is going to be huge. It is going to get more successful.

ES: Brian can you talk about what you guys are interested in?
BS: We’re also in Yammer. We’re also interested in where real time can go in non consumer/enterprise. There’s lots of room in devices, biotech. Lots of cool companies being able to figure out on the fly if there is E Coli in a substance. You can leverage tech to do lots of stuff that used to take a long time.
…
AB: We’re taking a wide approach.

MA: Kimball Musk this morning said there are gobs of money in search. When Twitter bought Summize, I think they gave them like 8% of the company, not sure if that’s been reported, it was a huge part of the company. I think they realized it was still very hard and passed it to Bing/Google. The places where the money is with Yammer, which touches on things like Echange. And search. But where else are people making money. Where are startups making money if not one of those two buckets?

RC: Those are good buckets. I agree, what you’re seeing with the programmable web. Some business is going to take off, we’re seeing things that haven’t been created yet that are going to see a huge amount of value in things being created.

RC: Coupons alone to inventivize users to go to a nearby place, revenues from that alone could be massive. This is going to happen in 2010.

BS: We’ve seen a huge amont of traffic on real-time coupons/offerings.

ES: How does microsoft look at this.
DL: he first thing for us is to build the infrastructure out, and look at the big information flows, like we did for the Twitter relationship. Some of these things will be things we’ll be interested in. We have been and will continue to be inquisitive. It’s been around 20 companies a year on avg. about 10 of those are bubble up like this and become important parts of a broader strategy. RealTime goes way back to the very beginning of data exchange. Who carries the flow, where is the value at what moment in time of the flow of information. These are all indications of inevitability of realtime. What we’ve done with Twitter/Bing those are foundations for much bigger connections. There’s a little company doing math in the cloud, seven guys optomizing POS information. 5k retail points, 20k units inventory in a warehouse.

SG: What do you know about deal with Twitter.
DL: Which deal?…
MA: What’s the other deal?
DL: They did one with us.
SG: Question is licensing of feeds?
DL: Why would I offer details on this.
RC: Yon can tell Dan’l likes this job.
MA: I feel like panelists know the answer to this.

RC: The companies we’re investing in today that TC writes about are indiciation of where the market is going. COtweet. Retime search companies. That’s going to be a hell of a horse race. I think one of the real time search engines that exists today will win out.

AB: Realtime search is a tough space. I think Google does a pretty good job at information retreival. Facebook has search in a different way (more discovery serendipitious). I look at it, if you go back 4 years ago, most of the companies you would see that were web enabled, you could see the same traffic refeeral chart. 30% google SEO. 40% SEM. the rest direct. Today out of nowhere Facebook/Twitter have become huge reffers.

ES: Paul, you’re both a buyer and seller because you’re an active angel investor. To what extent do the companies you invest in fall in this theme.
PB: I don’t know if I’ve invested in too many real time. I think real time is valuable because… basically the word relevance. Search is valuable because it’s relevant. Realtime enables that across a lot of other domains. If right now I say I am sitting right here and I get a coupon, it works because it’s relevant to me. If I got it tomorrow it would no longer be relevant. One of the companies I recently invested in. They do car sales/car business. They look for intention are you looking to buy a car, are you having trouble, that’s a good opportunity to contact them.

MA: There’s another angle to FB search. Forget where you are, what you’ve done. I found when I look people I know, search results are really good. Reason is because they are ranked based on people who have mutual friends. Google doesn’t address that at all. Applies to more than just people. Who you are is really relevant to almost all searches.
PB: Relevance has multiple dimension. Google got keywords. There is time relevance. All are opportunities.

ES: As we look forward at where all this is going. Seems like there are a lot of different approaches. Is there danger of confusion here. Do I build on top of Twitter/Facebook, quasi open systems Google is pushing.

MA: Stocktwits built on Twitter and now they’ve moved almost completely off it. Zynga is doing it with Farmville now.
BS: If you need to move off, all startups pivot. They can pivot. But I suggest starting with something, pick best thing for the job, and don’t be afraid to pivot.
RC: Start with one with cheapest cost, highest number of users, off you go.
AB: I think good entrepreneurs will find their way. Omar at AdMob.. even before iPhone launched he was focused on that as an opportunity for a business. They’ll find their way.

DL: Big question is whether company that rises as a company like Twitter. Or one like Facebook becomes core platform. Pick starting point but it’s hard to argue that anyone can anticipiate which one is going to get lift like a Twitter. Why Twitter and not someone else.

ES: George, maybe you can answer that. Twitter, Facebook, Google each platforms taking different approaches.

GZ: The concept of a social network has been around for a long time.The one difference is twitter is unlike geocities etc. Twitter is an example of a horizontal network. They own namespace, let third parties build it out.

ES: FriendFeed was ultimate twitter client. Paul, you built it partially on back of Twitter. But then when you sold to FB you bet on FB model.
PB: I think both companies have promising future. I don’t see it as once vs other. I don’t know how the future will play out. They’re both incredibly well positioned. I’d love to own either (or both). FB had all these features, for API had to allow access to each, more complex. Twitter only had a few features so it was very easy to build a Twitter client. Set up this whole ecosystem of twitter apps. Everyone filled in the little pieces by themselves. I’m curious if anyone else can do this. They’ve managed to outsource this.

SG: Does anyone have an opinion if lists, RT, etc are going to be plus or minus.
RC: Huge plus. People have been screaming for ecosystem for lists for a year. Whole ecosystem of companies built off lists themselves. Twitter is building a platform. in the next year there will be 100 apps built off twitter lists.

DL: I think most of the money will be made in enterprise communications.

ES: What will be the biggest real time exit next year?
DL: I think a number of things sub 100, 50. One thing that will be a billion dollar thing. Not even sure there will be exists. It think opportunities for big things will be able to stand alone.
GZ: I can’t even predict what’s going to happen next year. I think most of the companies in this space in terms of revenue are fairly immature with the exception of FB. I think more likely for big exists in 2010/2011.
RC: This market is in its infancy. I think a couple max in 50-100. Acquisitions in 2010 will be for IP and great teams.
MA: Do you think Zynga is doing more monthly rev than Facebook?
RC: Interesting question.
PB: I’ve heard rumors of Zynga IPO.
AB: I agree with the panel.

Q: Who is Twitter disrupting?
RC: Dick Costolo had some fascinating adjectives. “non tradional” “unique” “organic” “people will love it”. That’s a pretty interesting drum roll.
The next wave of disruption in technology will come and disrupt the big ones.

DL: I think Michael has a POV of our position on the web. Not sure if anyone paid attention to what we announced at our dev conf.

————

Full transcript:

>> So this is the last session that we’re about to start.

And let’s stay here and we can get this one wrapped up on time.

>> So if everyone on the final panel, if they’re not behind there, are they all back there?

Should we give away the

okay.

So at the end of this panel, we’re going to give away the sailing trip again.

So I’m not going to do it now because everyone left.

If everybody who is on this panel can come up.

Brian Singerman, Ron Conway, Dan’l Lewin, Paul Buchheit and Andrew Braccia.

If you’re back stage, come on up here.

>> All right.

We’re going to get started.

Can you find the other panelists.

We’ll have drinks afterwards.

So we’ll get started.

Okay.

Yeah, George, are you giving a demo?

>> He’s around.

>> George Zachary.

You want to come up on stage, guys.

All right.

Ron Conway.

All right.

Someone find Ron Conway.

He’ll show up.

Okay.

>> Let’s have everybody introduce themselves and say a little bit about why they think that

They have an opinion about real time or not.

Let’s start on this end.

>> Andrew Braccia, Accel Partners, have no opinion.

>> Paul Buchheit, Facebook at the moment, I guess, previously Friendfeed, and

>> Facebook, I guess, at the moment?

[LAUGHTER]

>> That came out wrong.

[LAUGHTER]

I was trying to decide whether Friendfeed or Facebook part was more relevant.

They’re both very relevant since obviously I think realize is a big time where we’re headed

In the future.

And in particular not just the technical aspect but the human aspect of how we relate to each

Other.

>> George.

>> George Zachary, Charles River.

I’m known to have opinions.

I missed the question.

I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention.

>> As it goes, who are you.

>> I’m Dan’l Lewin, I’m with Microsoft.

I’m here in Silicon Valley, and oversee our outreach to the start-up community in general.

>> Great.

Brian Singerman, I’m at Founders Fund.

>> Okay.

So we kind of want to use this panel to, A, wrap up some of the themes that we’ve been seeing

Today.

And really kind of focus on what both the business and investment opportunities are in the

Future.

So we’ve seen talk a lot about sort of filtering this overflow of information that’s being

delivered in streams.

If you would like.

You can be Ron Conway.

We’ve seen that there’s a lot of interest in geo stream information, lots of start-ups working

On that.

>> By the way, the doors were locked and there are a bunch of people trying to get in, they

Couldn’t get in because the doors are locked.

>> Could somebody open the door.

>> In real time, please.

>> All right.

And we’re seeing these streams becoming sort of new distribution mechanisms for both private

And public communications, media content, etc..

So where do the money-making opportunities lie here?

We’ve got a lot of consumer use cases.

Where is the money?

George.

>> That’s a pretty broad question.

Well, we’re investors in three companies that are now starting to accrue revenues in the space.

One is Twitter.

The second one is Yammer a third in India SMS group shot, people in India call the at which

Twitter of India, which is kind of a Twitter and e-groups blend.

>> Can you talk about how well Yammerer is monetizing, it’s unclear.

It would be good to understand.

What percent of customers turn into upgrade into a paid account and what are they paying on

Average?

What’s total revenue?

>> I won’t tell you that level of detail.

But I will tell you

>> Their advantage is being a private company.

>> I will tell you that with a salesperson who is promoted from customer support, no other

Sales infrastructure, in zero four marketing we have over10 percent conversion of the install

Base.

>> They’re paying it

is it $12 a month per user?

I forgot what is it they charge?

>> I can’t remember right now.

>> George

$1 per use per month.

>> You told me in the hall once salesforce announced chatter you started getting a lot of

Calls.

>> Just to partially answer your question without getting a raft of crap from the company.

The company has about 550,000 installed seats up from zero in 14 months.

[APPLAUSE]

So I think

>> Was that David Sacks.

>> Has anyone

who here has used Yammer and uses it

more than what I thought.

>> We started using it after TechCrunch after they won the event.

At some point we moved the paid.

We have to move to paid.

Cleared out old accounts and got control of it.

It’s an insidious product where you get very sticky.

You’re like we have to start paying.

And so it’s a good thing.

>> It’s a good thing.

It’s a good thing for the company and me as an investor.

So to answer your question

>> It’s good for the customer because you’ll be around for a while, then.

>> That’s correct.

To answer your question, you know, post Marc Benioff getting up saying we’ve blatantly copied

Yammer but I’m not going to tell you because we claim everything.

We started getting calls from investment bankers saying since salesforce has chatter I bet

All these other companies are going to want Yammer.

But we haven’t responded to the calls.

>> There’s an interesting thing we’ve noticed at least I’ve noticed in terms of Yammer, as

They keep broadening their platform across different devices, like, for example, when the iPhone

3.0 software came out it supports push notification.

And all of a sudden if you send an at Steve or at Mike or editor, it shows up, if you have

An iPhone still, which Mike doesn’t, it shows up on the, it alerts you.

Literally it pushes to the top of the stack.

>> It synchs across devices which Twitter hasn’t come close to doing.

>> You said there’s 550,000 seats.

$1 a month.

>> 550,000 installed enterprise seats over 10 percent of new seats convert every month.

>> So it’s like 20, 30, 40,000 paid seats.

>> No, it’s below 100,000.

>> And that’s

below $100,000 in revenue per month.

>> Near 100,000 paying users.

>> It’s $1 per month per user.

>> Actually, it’s three to five.

>> Okay.

So it’s actual revenue.

It’s not huge yet but it’s proving it’s a business model.

>> Marc Benioff is setting the price, his price at 50 bucks per user gives us some you mean

Umbrella for

>> But he ties into all this other CRM data, right?

So are you saying that you’re going to

what’s Yammer strategy to kind of ingest other, you

Know, enterprise data systems and make those, you know, alerts within Yammer?

>> That’s correct.

That’s correct.

And just to pick on Marc a little bit, salesforce is a company with more P than E in their

P to E and existing off of CRM is not a good way to maintain the company.

So he has to spread into the space.

And my belief is that the core of all enterprise IT is going to be messaging.

I mean, huge franchises have been built off of messaging, specifically e-mail and Dan’l you

Would know this well, and I believe that Yammer is going to be the future of enterprise messaging.

So I’m very excited about it.

There’s going to be serious competition, we know that.

>> So, Paul, Friendfeed was the first really kind of significant acquisition in the space.

You know, definitely wasn’t in terms of size of what people were talking about Twitter, but

Twitter never sold.

But in terms of the impact you guys are having, within Facebook, I think that it’s a milestone.

And $50 million is nothing to sneeze at.

So to what extent, from a founder perspective, right, you’re building the system, can you tell

Us a little bit about what extent were you sort of off in the woods doing what you thought

Was obviously the future, and at what point did sort of the bigger companies, the acquirers

Start sniffing around?

>> You know, Facebook kept talking to us.

Like from the very beginning.

They’re very persistent.

And so pretty much always there were people looking.

But we were never looking to sell.

Even when we did sell.

It was a surprise even to us.

So but really what happened was that we did start talking to them more closely and got to meet

More of the team and learn more about where they saw things going.

And you know as we started putting more thought into essentially the future of Facebook, it

Started to seem like a very intriguing possibility.

And ultimately that was obviously what we did.

>> So your motivation for selling was primarily what?

>> The opportunity at Facebook is very substantial.

You quoted a number which we’ve never

no one has ever announced the deal, but obviously

The biggest component is the question of what is the value of Facebook.

And I think that the value of Facebook is going to be huge.

It’s a very successful company.

It’s going to get more so I think in the future.

There’s really a lot of opportunity in the whole area of all the social and the real time and

Everything.

And they’re in a somewhat unique position which I think will prove rather lucrative.

>> Brian, can you tell us a little bit about your involvement in real time, what kind of real

Time companies have you invested in?

>> Yes, we’re also in Yammer along with George.

And supporting David for a while.

But I actually think.

>> What kind of revenues is Yammer doing.

>> Last time I saw Mike he asked me exactly what the Facebook revenues were.

I gladly volunteered that information as well.

No.

We’re interested in that kind of stuff.

But we’re also interested in where real time can go from nonconsumer or enterprise apps.

We think there’s a lot of room for real time in devices, and there’s lots of room for real

Time in biotech applications, and everything else.

>> Biotech, like what?

>> Like for instance there’s lots of cool companies doing things like being able to figure

Out on the fly if there’s E. Coli in a given substance.

And stuff like that.

So I know it’s not the exact same type of real time that we’re talking about, but technology

Is able to

you can leverage technology to do lots of cool stuff that used to take a long

Time.

Like how news before

>> It’s real time in the sense that if you find out before you eat the hamburger, that’s good.

>> That’s right.

It’s a lot better to find out beforehand.

>> But there’s an application in India right now, there are huge issues on global health where

People take medicines, drugs, which are purported to be clean and prescribed, but they’re actually

Counterfeit.

And a third of the time you have a chance of dying from taking the drug.

Because it’s not real and it’s not clean.

So there’s a public/private key.

Real time example of you scrape off a little piece of hidden thing like you do on the prize,

And you SMS the code and you get a real time check, is this a real drug or not.

And then you choose to take it and live.

So there’s a ton of examples outside of many noisy things that are real world applications.

in healthcare bio, life sciences, simple things like that.

Lots of opportunity.

>> I agree.

Absolutely.

>> That’s one of those things, it’s one of those areas that’s really exciting to us right

Now.

Just basically taking stuff that used to take a long time and require a lot of capital, making

It not require a lot of capital, and having instant gratification.

Like in general that’s the theme of real time, and we’re huge fans of that.

>> Andrew, can you talk a little bit about in terms of what percentage of pitches that you’re

Seeing now either they use this term or that you

I mean, is this becoming the new Web two

2.0.

Are people using it as a branding mechanism?

Is there something real here?

>> It’s a very popular part of a lot of the presentations.

Both from the perspective of new companies, presenting their ideas, with that lens, but also

With existing companies, you know, pivoting around the trends of what’s happening around real

Time information.

And I think we have a bunch of different thoughts on the space, and I think like Brian was

Talking about, and Dan’l, we think that real time has an impact in just about every business

That we invest in.

You know, whether it be a business that is, you know, in the data storage space, where more

Information, you know, is only growing the need for the next level of data center infrastructure

Around information retrieval and we have a company that we’re investors in with Ron called

Cloudaria commercialization of Adoop, important for the data infrastructure.

If you look at a lot of the advertising business and look at the importance that real time

Is playing in terms of targeting you look at the rise of demand side platforms that are using

Real time exchanges, like right media, double click, Google, OpenX.

Those are areas we’re interested in.

I think you look at the real time communication aspects of social networks, and you look at

Those businesses as next generation platforms for commerce.

If you think about Google, you know, Google organized all the world’s information.

If you look at Facebook in many ways Facebook is organizing humanity, and in many ways people

Are exchanging information and businesses are being built off of that.

If you look at social commerce and you look at the frictionless nature of getting offers in

Front of people and the virality of that and you see it in social gaming and other applications

As well.

So we’re taking sort of a wide purview and wide approach to investing.

>> I think Mike has some ideas about the offers.

>> Social gaming offers?

>> I’m not necessarily talking about those types of offers.

>> If you look at Kimball Musk from OneRiot in the panel this morning said that there are

Gobs of money in search and I think when Twitter bought suchld ummize last summer I think they

Gave them eight percent or something like that of the company.

I don’t think that was ever verified.

I’m not sure if it’s ever been reported.

But there’s a huge chunk of the company that Twitter gave to do search.

I think they realized that it’s still very, very hard and sort of passed it off to Bing and

To Google.

But it seems to me like the only places I’ve seen, maybe you disagree, I’d love to hear if

You do.

The places where the money is a little bit like with Yammer where you’re selling something

To the enterprise and you’re convincing they want it and touching on exchange and that huge

Potential pot of money, and in search where people are, as Kimball said, using his words, people

Are expressing intent right now what they want and you can throw ads against and clearly there’s

Lots of money to be made there, too, but where else are people making money.

You put Facebook in another bucket and they’re so huge now they’re able to make money more

Traditional ways.

But for your start-ups you’re investing in, where are they going to make any money if it’s

Not in one of those two buckets?

>> Those are two pretty good buckets.

Those two buckets are going to be a couple of billion dollars a year.

But they’ll be new buckets as well that are unique.

>> So what are the buckets?

>> I completely agree.

I think what you’re seeing with the whole programmable Web out there with all these APIs out

There and you’ve got a bunch of people on your panels, some business is going to take off that

Uses some of these APIs and very interesting unique ways and we’ll see things that haven’t

Been created yet that generate a huge amount of traffic and a huge amount of value in that

Space to people who are creating these building blocks for the programmable Web.

>> Just the location based opportunity with Twitter doing the location API, which is going

To help people like Foursquare Goola and Hot Potato, these are companies in their infancy,

And they’re huge, huge markets.

>> Can you talk a little bit more about that?

We just had a geo panel.

I know you were in another commitment.

We tried to talk a little bit about this.

But what’s your sense of how

once we get geo data into all these apps, what are the, some

Of the business opportunities that that makes possible?

>> Just couponing alone to incentivise you to go in and replace a business that you’re within

Two to three blocks of, just that in and of itself and the rev share from that could be mass

Ive.

>> And newspapers used to be the Sunday paper was the home of coupons.

And that’s gone.

So there’s an opportunity to be replaced.

>> And it’s a huge opportunity.

This is going to happen in 2010.

You’re going to see it on gooala and Hot Potato and Foursquare and five other companies that

We’re talking to next week.

>> We’ve seen a huge amount of traffic, deal flow traffic on people doing the real time where

You are-based coupons and offerings and doing intelligent targeting based on location on the

Coupons.

>> How does Microsoft think about this in you want to buy companies that are sort of invent

you wait for companies to get critical mass to prove it up?

>> The first thing for us is to build the infrastructure out, which we’ve been doing.

And looking at the big information flows like what we did with the Twitter relationship.

But I think that the inevitability is that some of these things that are bubbling up will be

Things that we’ll be interested in.

I can’t obviously comment on specifics but there’s no question that we have been and we’ll

Continue to be inquisitive.

Generally speaking, if people don’t know, it’s been about 20 companies on year on average,

Probably 10 of those, half of those deals are bubble up like this if you will and become important

Parts of a broader strategy that we’re clearly building out as it relates to the infrastructure.

The enterprise infrastructure is really important to this.

Location, as Ron points out, is fundamental to it as well.

But to me, I think, the biggest picture for the company, I know Lili was on a panel earlier

Today, probably mentioned some of these things.

I’m sorry, I personally missed it.

I had to be off site this morning.

But real time, it goes way, way back in my mind to the very beginning of data exchange and

EDI where who carries the flow?

Right?

Where is the value at what moment in time in the flow of information.

Whether it’s money, or inventory, which equates to money, etc..

So what we’re seeing with the real streams and user-generated content for the most part today

Or from what I’ve heard since the noon hour, these are all indications of the inevitability

Of real time in a broader customer hall sense.

How much will be monetizable and absorbed into infrastructure like a Facebook infrastructure,

Which I think is fundamental as Andrew pointed out, and is mapping a very important space,

Humanity, if you will.

And all of those organizational dynamics around big, broad systems of record, whether it’s

Information that Google organized or Facebook has done or we’ve done with Bing etc., those

Are foundation points for much more rapid connections and the monetization will come about

Where there’s a commercial opportunity.

Create a advertising base.

>> Do you agree it’s those two buckets, the search and what was your other bucket?

>> Search and personal identity and flow, and information flow.

There’s huge opportunity in the

>> Commerce.

>> Huge opportunity in the enterprise.

There’s a little company that we’re working with right now that’s building out seven guys doing

Math in the cloud using Asher we just worked with them at our developers conference this week.

Seven guys optimizing for point of sale information.

5,000 retail points.

20,000 units of inventory in a warehouse.

There’s massive inventory opportunity.

>> Does the coupon thymine as I’m driving by a mini mall 18 coupons are going to pop up.

>> In an ideal world you’ve presented it in a natural way.

>> You want to put the filters in place.

>> You’re already starting to see this with Foursquare, where

>> Exactly.

>> In your hand well since you’re here, go in the store, get this.

>> I would absolutely add commerce to one of the buckets, to one of Mike’s buckets.

I think you have to.

>> Can I go through my top 10 list again?

>> We did that last time.

>> Is it the same.

>> Ron’s going to go through his top 10 list.

>> Lead generation.

Analytics.

I’m going to pass over the repeats.

CRM.

Payments.

User authentication.

Licensing of feeds.

And acquiring followers.

>> Licensing of feeds.

Dan’l, what do you know about the deal with Twitter?

>> Which deal?

>> Wow, they did more than one.

>> You paid a certain amount of money, allegedly.

>> I don’t know

>> Let’s go down this which deal.

>> Well, you’re asking about a deal with Twitter.

>> That deal.

>> I think she answered that question.

>> Ron Conway is like ask him, ask him, what’s the other deal.

Am I disrupting the panel again.

>> It’s your prerogative.

>> I was asking a simple question.

>> Which deal did Twitter do?

They did one with us, right?

>> Right.

The question is licensing of feeds.

That seems to be a pretty big license of feeds.

What are the details of that license?

>> Why would I offer details?

[LAUGHTER]

>> To a conversation that was a private conversation.

>> Okay.

I can try.

>> You can tell Dan’l likes his job.

[LAUGHTER]

>> I feel like the panelists up here know the answers to the questions but it’s like, well,

They don’t want to share it because they’re venture capitalists and this one company we’re

Not going to talk about the fact that they’re

>> We kind of got ourselves into this by putting venture capitalists on the panel.

>> Exactly.

>> So does anybody want to say anything?

[LAUGHTER]

>> The companies, the venture capitalists are investing in today are going to be, you know,

The $100 million companies of tomorrow, or we wouldn’t be investing in them.

So the companies we’re investing in today that TechCrunch writes about are an indication of

Where this market’s going.

You know, we have CoTweet in the corporate space.

We have a whole raft of real time search companies.

And that’s going to be a hell of a horse race, because they’re going to have to integrate more

Relevancy and intent so they deliver better results.

But there will be a big winner come out of that.

>> How many real time search companies do we need?

>> We have quite a few right now.

So I would encourage people to go elsewhere.

>> Nobody’s won the space yet, though.

>> Yeah, there’s room.

>> I think one of the ones that exists today will win out.

Because their IP will mature.

>> Is it going to be Bing or Google?

>> No, no, I’m talking scoopler, topsly, Eller Dale, the scrappy ones.

>> This is the man that invested in Google.

>> Andrew, do you agree with that?

>> Real time search is a tough space.

I think it’s

Google does a pretty good job at information retrieval.

And I think a lot of the real time information that’s being exchanged where relevancy is no

Longer page rank, it’s the people you know.

Facebook does a pretty good job of enabling that.

So

>> Facebook has search?

>> Sure.

>> I think search in a different way, in sort of more of a discovery sArn dip to us way, but

I think I kind of look at it from the perspective of if you go back six

go back three or

Four years ago, most companies are companies that you would see that were Web-enabled and business

Their businesses off the Web.

Literally, you could see the same traffic referral chart for just about every company except

For a couple of well-known destinations.

It was 30, or 33 percent Google, SCO.

It was 35 or 40 percent SCM and 20 percent or whatever the number that’s left over there direct.

And referrals to the website.

You look at today, most of the companies that I see, whether it be existing companies or new

Companies that are popping up, out of nowhere you know, Facebook has become sort of the number

Two or number three referral source for those companies.

Twitter is all of a sudden become a very significant resource for those companies.

So that to me is a lead indicator in many ways of how people are discovering information on

The Web and how that’s changing.

>> So, Paul, you’re both a buyer and a seller, right, because you’re very active Angel Investor.

To what extent the companies that you invest in, fall within this same kind of theme, or do

You diversify away from like what you’re doing?

>> You know, I don’t know that I’ve invested in too many real time companies.

But I think it’s a component of probably most businesses going forward.

In that the reason that I think real time is really valuable is basically the word “relevance”.

Like, the reason that search is valuable is because it’s relevant.

Someone does a search, you can give them a response that’s relevant to what they’re asking

For.

And what real time does is that that enables that across a lot of other domains.

Like if right now I say I’m sitting right here and I get a coupon for the restaurant next door,

That works because it’s relevant to me.

If I got the coupon tomorrow, it would no longer be relevant.

So I think that’s the thing that made search really go.

And I think that same dynamic is going to drive real time.

>> So when we talk about real time search and monetization of it, how much of that opportunity

Is tied to location versus other types of real time.

>> Certainly location is the easier one because of the example of coupons.

But I think if I’m sharing what I’m thinking right now, if I’m thinking about

whatever it

Is I’m thinking about, there’s probably a relevant, some relevant information that could be

Provided to me.

One of the companies that I recently invested in is

I can’t remember if they launched so

I won’t say who.

But they do car

they’re in the car business.

So one of the things they do is look at like, look for intention of are you selling, are you

Looking to buy a car, are you having car trouble, and that’s a great opportunity to contact

That person and say, hey, we can help you get a new car.

>> There’s another angle to Facebook search, in particular, I find really fascinating.

Forget what you’re searching for and maybe even what you’ve recently done on Facebook or even

Where you are, when you query.

I found that when I’m looking up old friends from high school or just people I might know that

The search results are really, really good and the reason they are, even though there’s so

Many people with the same name, is that they’re kind of

they’re ranking it based on people

That maybe have mutual friends or somehow they’re figuring out who I’m probably thinking of

Based on that.

And Google clearly doesn’t address that dimension at all.

But that applies to more than just looking for people, you know.

Just who you are and who you know is really relevant to almost all searches.

>> They do it.

>> Relevance has these multiple dimensions.

Google got it on like the keywords.

But there’s time relevance, what I’m thinking of, social relevance, and all these other elegance.

>> Personalized relevance.

>> Time.

>> So all those dimensions I think are opportunities for revenue.

>> We’re going to start to wrap this up in a few minutes.

So if you want to ask some questions, please come to the mics.

>> So as we look forward where all of this is going, it seems that there are a lot of different

Approaches.

There’s sort of a lot of different platforms that developers can build their apps or their

Businesses on top of.

Is there

is there a danger of confusion here?

Do I build my

do I build my business off of Twitter or on top of Facebook, do I build it

On top of quasi open systems that Google is pushing?

Like stock Twitter todays they built off of Twitter but they’re still called stock Twitter

Todays but they have their own system.

They use Twitter to get all the systems and then moved off.

It’s fascinating.

And Zinga is doing it with farmville.

>> Because they have more control.

>> You can take advantage of these platforms, get being enough and then ultimately, right,

The most value, you can capture enough attention, people to come to use your application or

Come to your website.

You know, ultimately that would be the biggest win, I would think.

>> I would suggest having a pretty good idea of where you want it to start.

Then researching what’s out there to help you.

Like some of these geo APIs that we looked at today.

I know I’m doing a side project right now I’m using one of the geo APIs just because I needed

It and it’s very useful for me.

And if you need to move off. You need to pivot like all start-ups pivot and figure out this

Is what is really working for me they pivot.

But I would suggest starting with something pick the tool that’s best for the job right then

And don’t be afraid to pivot.

>> Start with the platform that gives you the most leverage for the cheapest cost for the

Highest number of users. Build your own brand and off you go.

>> Exactly.

>> I think if you’re fortunate enough to work with great entrepreneurs, they’ll find their

Way, right?

You look at Omar at addmob and it was built off of sort of a WAP.

As soon as the iPhone launched before iPhone launched he was very focused on that as another

Opportunity for that business.

And they took resources.

They moved things very quickly to go and take advantage of the iPhone ecosystem.

Very early on.

And they benefited from it greatly.

So I think when you have great entrepreneurs, great ideas, I think they find their way.

They’re scrappy.

>> Question: Peter.

To me it’s really not a question at all if those platforms like Twitter and Facebook or partner

Companies that built their business on it are going to make money.

The really interesting thing for me would be is it going to be the first route to take the

Low-hanging fruit and in licensing deals, for instance, with Google and Bing and so on, and

Are they going to become co-dependent on those, or are they going to in parallel build out

Their own direct revenue streams, and to see this through, sort of through the end as their

Own companies.

>> I hate to be flip.

But it depends on how long those contracts are.

I hope they’re short.

But who knows how long they are.

>> It’s a very good question.

Very good question.

>> I think that

I mean, that there is money that’s not the question anymore.

I mean, the question is are those companies going to be able to become as big as the ones that

>> Some things are catalysts and they continue to exist and reform.

And other things are catalysts they instigate connections and dissipate and go away.

There’s a big question about whether a company that rises very, very rapidly as a connection

Point between two things and builds their platform up like what Twitter is doing in placing

Their particular bets and someone like Facebook that turns into a phenomena, that it becomes

A core platform around which someone can do something like what ad mob did with a platform

They bet on it in some form and leveraged that point.

You pick your starting point, but it’s hard to I think argue that anyone can anticipate to

Ron and the other investors who place a broad array of ads.

Anticipate which one is going to be the one that gets to live like Twitter.

Why Twitter and why not someone else.

>> Yeah, why Twitter.

Maybe George you can answer that from a perspective of, Twitter, Facebook, even Google, they

All have platform ambitions but they are platforms, taking different approaches, Twitter lean,

They want to take the communication layer and everyone to build on top of it.

Whereas Facebook is more feature-rich on its own.

Tell us from like in your investment in Twitter, so you have a point of view, but how do you

See these different approaches playing out and what’s at stake here?

>> It’s a very fascinating question.

And I’ve thought about this quite a bit.

You know, the concept of a social network has been around for quite a long time.

You could posit that geo cities was a cromagnon version followed by e friends and Facebook

And followed by Twitter.

The one difference with Twitter all the networks are vertically integrated.

They owned the name space for the users and then the messaging and then the features above

Them.

Twitter is an example of the first horizontally distributed network, where basically their

Goal was to own the name space and the messaging and control of that.

And then let third parties take the risk of basically building out products on top of that,

To basically fill out the entire stack.

But it’s a horizontal plane.

And I think it’s a very cost-effective play from an investor perspective.

And as well as user risk perspective.

>> Paul, why does Facebook win?

You’ve got an interesting perspective because in a sense Friendfeed was the ultimate at which

Twitter client.

A lot of people kind of said that.

Half jokingly, but it was also true.

So you built Friendfeed partially on top, on the back of Twitter because that was a very big

Portion of the feed that was going through Twitter or through friend feed.

And but then with the

when you sold to Facebook, you bet on the Facebook model.

So why?

>> You know, I think both companies have very promising future.

I don’t see it as one versus the other.

Obviously I don’t like know exactly how the future is going to play out.

But they’re both incredibly well positioned.

I think that

I would love to have

or both.

>> Right.

But can you contrast the platform like

>> I think there’s a lot to learn.

They have taken very different approaches.

But I don’t know that it’s entirely like a conscious thing.

I think it’s to some extent like a historical accident, the approach that Facebook took original

Ly I think was they looked at

obviously I wasn’t there at the time.

They looked at the apps that they had already built themselves and said how can we enable other

People to do the same thing that we’ve done.

So they basically tried to open up all of the capabilities that the native apps like photos

Or whatever had to third-party developers.

And Twitter, I guess, to some extent did the same thing but they only had a couple of features.

So consequently it was extremely easy to build these Twitter clients who grow the site.

So they didn’t really make any accept to occasionally remove features.

And that

I think that worked out very well for them.

It’s like a wonderful

it’s a great example of like how things can play out differently just

Depending on the initial conditions.

But what that did was it set up this whole ecosystem of Twitter apps, where you have all the

Clients, you have tweetty and Twitter today pick and everybody filled in an amazing example

I’m curious if any other company is able to replicate that, because they’ve managed to essential

Ly outsource the innovation.

>> Does anybody on the panel have an opinion about whether the new stuff that Twitter’s been

Building out lists, retweets, etc., is that going to be, a plus for them, neutral, or a minus?

Ron?

>> It’s going to be a huge plus.

People have been screaming for lists for over a year.

In the Twitter community.

And there’s a whole ecosystem of companies being built on top of the Twitter lists product

Itself.

So people were saying, oh, is Twitter going to go into the list space?

No, they’re building basically a platform and in the next year they’ll probably be 100 applications

On top of

>> It’s kind of a Microsoft play, isn’t it?

>> Twitter lists.

>> It’s kind of a Microsoft play where they build the infrastructure and then let people party

On it.

>> I don’t know

I think of Office and the operating system.

I don’t know the infrastructure products.

>> There’s various ways

people talk about platforms in loose ways, and I think that the

Early stages of the business, Microsoft, I was not there then, but I was at Apple working on

The Mac stuff.

And it’s one thing to build a lower level platform on which for the first generation people

Built content-less productivity tools, office automation things.

E-mail which was talked about earlier as an communication exchange.

Things didn’t take off until there was an appropriate standardization, you could then interoperate

And move mail around effectively.

And then the newer platforms that we’re talking about today in this context, I think, for the

And then either bolting on to infrastructure that exists like what Yammer has done in the enterprise

Infrastructure for monetization, or very high risk, high return bets like what the at which

Twitter guys are choosing to do to partner but at the same time build out and totally open

Up the ecosystem for others to add value on top.

This is a new

it’s a new phenomenon that’s happening in real time and we’ll see the results,

I think, as Ron says, year over year, with some interesting brand new winners that have probably

Already been funded and then many things that will get absorbed into the platform plays like

What a Facebook would do or what Microsoft or Google or anyone else would do that has infrastructure

Upon which this stuff connects and moves.

So it’s happening ever faster.

I think personally, though, to my earlier comment, I think most of the money is going to get

Made in enterprise infrastructure.

There’s just too much money in enterprise to be as inefficient as enterprise communications.

>> To wrap up with predictions.

What’s going to be the biggest real time exit in the next year, in terms of just dollar value?

Where do you expect, like where are we in this stage?

Are we going to see more $50 million deals?

$100 million deals, billion dollar deals?

What’s your expectation and what’s the time frame?

>> You just look at past performance in these areas.

I think there will be a number of things that are sub hundred million in the 50 million dollar

$50 million range, and I think there will be, if everyone’s lucky, one thing that will be a

Billion dollar kind of thing.

That’s typically what

and it’s happening faster, right?

But not even sure there will be exits.

I think the opportunity for the big things will be to stand alone, if they’re really going

To be big.

And witness Ace Book, you were questioning what’s the value of Facebook.

It’s big.

What’s the

who knows.

>> George?

>> Well, I can’t predict what’s going to happen next year in terms of exits.

I think most of the companies in the space are, in terms of revenues, are still fairly immature

With the exception of Facebook.

So I think it’s more likely that big exits will occur in 2011 and 2012, than 2010.

>> I wish that company that you and Ron are putting together could have launched here today.

The one that I tweeted out yesterday or the day before that was going to enrage half the audience

And make the other half want to basically invest, because that’s the one I think

well, it

Either completely fall flat and go nowhere or it will potentially just has such a huge mon

Etization opportunity.

>> This is the one that replaces the U.S. Government.

>> That eventually will.

Amazing.

>> Everyone’s got an option on that.

>> I have to clarify.

I’m trying to invest in that particular company.

George has done all the lifting on that company.

So I don’t want to take any credit.

Exits in 2010.

This market is in its infancy.

I think from 15 to $100 million range.

Teeing up exits, in 2011 and 2012, there could be a billion.

But we have to remember, this is a market in its infancy.

The acquisitions that get made in 2010 will be for intellectual property and great killer teams

Of people.

>> That’s exactly right.

>> And Paul Buchheit’s company is a great example of that.

>> ZInga is doing more monthly revenue than Facebook right now?

>> Wow.

>> I’m not privy to either company’s financials but it’s an interesting question.

>> Paul?

>> Hesitant to make any predictions.

I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard rumors of Zinga’s IPO.

That would be exciting.

>> Andrew?

>> No, I agree with the panel.

[LAUGHTER]

>> He wants to go get a drink.

>> One question from the audience here then we’ll wrap it up.

>> Question: I don’t know too much about, have too much insight into Facebook and at which

Twitter’s monetization models, but it seems to me that Facebook fundamentally disrupts double

Click impression ad model and their dollars come from there.

What market will either be disrupted or created by Twitter, do you think?

>> Who is Twitter disrupting?

>> Well, we don’t know yet.

But Dick Costolo this morning, I thought, had some very fascinating adjectives.

And one of them was that they’re going to

their business model is going to mature in 2010.

It’s going to be fascinating.

Nontraditional.

I took lots of notes.

Unique and organic.

And it was going to be very, very cool and people would love it.

>> Who was it that said that

that’s a pretty interesting drum roll that 2010’s going to

Be a very interesting year in this space.

>> Who said Microsoft is afraid of Google

maybe

is afraid of Facebook, is afraid of

Twitter.

There was somebody that said that quote last year.

I wish I would have thought of it.

It’s sort of true Twitter disrupting Facebook, disrupting Google, I think that’s very real

Facebook disrupting Google and Google disrupting Microsoft because Microsoft still trying to

Figure out the Web stuff.

>> Sprinkle all the little start ups underneath that and one of them is going to

one of

Them is going to disrupt that crowd, the big crowd.

Three years from now it’s going to be

there’s going to be another company.

I hope I invested in it this year.

>> [LAUGHTER]

>> That is the next wave of disruption in technology.

>> You invest in several of those people on that list.

Google.

Twitter.

>> List right there.

>> I missed Microsoft.

>> All but Microsoft.

>> So Dan’l, you were shaking your head.

>> I was shaking my head.

I think Michael has a point of view about our position on the Web.

And I always respect Michael’s opinions, but I don’t know if anybody was paying attention to

What we announced this week down at our developers conference, but I encourage you to take

A look.

>> I think we were still reeling from the Don Dodge layoff.

Hire him back but he’s gone now.

I think that generally we loved him.

So he’s going to be hard to replace.

>> We’ve got to liven up the ending.

[LAUGHTER]

>> So please give the panel a big round of applause.

I’m going to give away a sailing trip, I think, maybe.

[APPLAUSE]

Maybe not.

If nobody is here I think I might give it to Dan’l as a consolation prize.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Participating in the panel were:
Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo
Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter
Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare
Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato
Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs
Moderators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler.

Video by Ustream

Early in the panel, the conversation turned to SimpleGeo, the new infrastructure for location that was revealed earlier this week. Shaffer spoke about how excited he was about the new service. When asked if anyone could copy what Foursquare was doing, Walker talked about Foursquare’s efforts to filter content (which is harder to reproduce).

MG then steered the conversation toward bridging the gap between social networks and the real world, noting that mobile devices are paving the way for this change. But he wondered how services other than Foursquare (which has a game mechanic) would entice users to share their location on a regular basis.

Lee addressed concerns over Latitude’s continuous location sharing, explaining that you can share your location with certain people who you specify, but that Latitude’s approach to constant tracking leads to the ability to offer interesting services. He says that without continuous sharing nearby alerts wouldn’t be possible (or at least as effective). He says that the check-in model and the continuous model will likely coexist (and that check-in can even help give more context about where you are) but that there’s things you can’t do without continuous tracking. Regarding Checking in verus continuous mapping, Elad Gil says he’s seeing about a “nine to ten” relationship between them.

Galligan chimed in by saying that there will be a point when we know where everyone is, but that the context won’t necessarily be known. Galligan then revealed a new technology they are working on involving four dimensions of geolocation that SimpleGeo has created, which allows them to compress location and time stamps into a datapoint, allowing apps to look into the past for the same location.

Sarver talked about why Twitter was interested in location, describing how it would help filter through the noise. He mentioned TrendsMap.com as a great way to visualize geotagged tweets.

Shaffer said that HotPotato is looking to integrate location into their service, but that another key element is what brings conversation together. He says that just location data isn’t necessarily enough (he points out that people watching a baseball game may actually be at the game, or watching on TV.)

In terms of advertising, there seemed to be a broad consensus that geo-based advertising had the potential to be extremley successful. Galligan brought up the potential of special ads and deals, pointing to Yowza as a great example. Saffer later commented that there’s a fine line that these services have to work with — it would be a negative for ads to actually feel like ads (instead it would be better for them to feel like deals).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From there you can browse through various genres to look at recommended videos

But the site also has a social component, allowing users to identify each other as friends by importing their social graphs from services like Facebook and Gmail. You can use Facebook chat to talk with these friends in real-time. And today, it’s launching a new feature: Friendcasting, which allows users to share a interesting video in real-time with your friends on the site. There’s also a ‘global view’ that lets you see a stream of videos that are being watched by other users on the site, which helps surface content your friends haven’t come across.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

At our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles “Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?”

Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

ES: What are celebrities doing to leverage the social streams?

RB: I oversee Britney Spears’ digital properties and we are using Twitter to build up buzz around her concerts. Using Twitter, we were able to get 8,000 people to Times Square all by herself.

PN: Fans can feel like they are an intimate part of your lives. For example, Heidi and Spencer did a live webcast, that we did, from the Bahamas from their hotel room. They had over 50,000 people watching that.

ES: To what extent is Twitter a Marketing vehicle and to what extent is it an entertainment and marketing vehicle itself?

RB: One thing that’s interesting is that we work with Facebook to sell virtual charms for Britney. We just Twittered that we were doing and it was in the press within a matter of hours.

JE: Twitter is the focal point where a lot of elements come together. Twitter is a focal point to stay connected to the public.

ES: To what extent can ads and promotions appear within the Stream. Sean?

SR: Publishers in Ad.ly don’t feel like they are just marketing their own message, they feel like content producers.

ES: But more often than not, that’s just promotion.

SR: With Ad.ly we monitor what content is appropriate for consumers. If you are tweeting things that is not valuable to your audience, your value as a content creator goes down. We limit to one ad per day to each publishers. The cool things about Ad.ly and Twitter is that when it comes to advertising, you can get creative and experiment with it.

PC: Retweets don’t seem like a metric of success, it seems like a metric of idiocy.

SR: If you look at Twitter as an ecosystem, its about sharing information and discovering information.

ES: What are the types of content that works?

RB: It has to looks like it isn’t an ad, that’s its real.

PC: Twitter is unique because its a conversation which makes putting any advertising in the stream hideous.

ES: Marketers are experimenting with different ways to use this channel. Until we hear about how Twitter is going to advertise, there’s definitely a feeling that Twitter doesn’t want to pollute the stream.

Video: Recording can be seen here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Urban says that while some other services offer embeds, you’re generally responsible for building your own branded site to insert those in. That’s where VideoLobby comes in: the site helps you build your own custom video portal, and then allows you to include streams from services like Qik, Ustream and Justin.tv. The company calls itself the “Blogger for real-time video”.

The service doesn’t just make your page look nicer, though — it can automatically pull in comments from Twitter and Facebook, and also allows users to submit questions directly from the show’s page. Stream administrators can use a management system to heck off their questions as they answer them. And the service is completely free.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

This new iPhone app unveiled at our Realtime CrunchUp event in San Francisco today essentially scans Twitter for what people are saying about a movie and shows you a rating based on that. It can return a general score from across Twitter, or the tweets about the movie from people you follow on Twitter.

But the key is the filtration. Plenty of people say things about movies on Twitter that are worthless, but FlixUp has what it believes to be the perfect algorithm to sort out the useful movie tweets from the not useful ones. They call it the “Twitter Noise Assassin.” And the results seem solid for how the collective views the film.

It’s been said that early buzz on services like Twitter can now make or break a movie, so a service like Flixup is the next logical step. They not only show if people are liking it or not liking it, but you can see how much people are talking about it.

The company behind FlixUp, Bazaarlabs, also has plans to extend this idea to other entertainment categories beyond movies. And eventually they plan to use more than Twitter as their data source, such as Facebook.

The app should be out in a couple of weeks.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content.

The idea seems like an obvious one for the company. It’s similar to what Digg is doing with its Digg ads, where users can vote on advertisements just as they would with regular content. The difference here is that you would be sending an ad to your contacts on Twitter. Is anyone really going to want to do that? And if they do, will their contacts start unfollowing them?

But the idea here is clearly not to share just any ad, but rather ads that have the potential to go viral — particularly video ads. And TweetMeme already has a big partner on board. They’ve just announced that they cut a deal with Federated Media in two weeks time. With this partnership, their button can be added into any standard advertisement that FM allows.

The tweeting out of ads or sponsored links has long been a controversial thing. Some are convinced this is a great way to make money, while others consider this absolutely pure spam. It’s an interesting play, to say the least. If TweetMeme is able to spread this idea the way they’ve spread their button, they’re going to make a ton of money.

AdTweets will launch in 2 weeks.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

As they noted on stage, it’s hard to demo something that is API only, but one implementation that we’ve written about before is Excla.im, which we wrote about recently. This allows for the realtime tracking of keywords on Twitter via IM. But this idea works for all content.

And one of the most interesting thing about SuperFeedr is their promises. One is that if you don’t get your content served in less than 15 minutes, it’s free. Another promise is that they will meet or beat the cost of your existing system for monitoring feeds.

If you monitor less than 1,000 feeds, SuperFeedr is free. If you go over that, you must buy credits (but it’s pretty cheap).

Coincidentally, SuperFeedr just 3 days ago raised a seed round of funding from Betaworks and Mark Cuban.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

With services like Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Kyte, and Qik bringing live video streaming to the masses, the web is turning into a viable competitor to television for real-time content. But while all of these services are great for bloggers remotely broadcasting footage,or streaming live events, but they come with a few problems: video content isn’t optimized for search engines, and unlike TV, there’s no closed captioning. PlyMedia is looking to change that.

The company is launching a service that will offer real-time captions and super-fast transcriptions to suit the needs of live streamers. Transcriptions are performed by a human (capable of typing quite quickly, naturally) who listens in to the feed and transcribes in real time, anywhere in the world. To help achieve a true real-time experience, PlyMedia is actually teaming with some live streamers to integrate a slight delay (say, two or three seconds) to give the transcriptionist enough lead time to generate captions in time with the video. Those transcriptions can then be sent to the site hosting the video, where they can be posted to help with SEO (and to give readers a chance to skim through the content to decide if they want to watch the movie).

PlyMedia transcribing the Realtime CrunchUp in realtime in our Ustream video. The realtime transcription service will be used by UStream, Livestream, and the Wall Street Journal.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

At today’s Real-Time CrunchUp, Mozzler launched its real-time search engine based on Twitter. Mozzler, which has real-time functionality, searches Twitter for the most popular content in the last six hours based on retweets.

You can search Mozzler by keyword, similar to searches you can do on OneRiot and other search engines that include Twitter results. Results can include videos and images as well. Mozzler has also created numerous categories of searches under technology, entertainment, sports, business and more.

What differentiates Mozzler is the ability filter the stream. You’ll be able to create customized streams by keyword, which are updated in real-time. You can share links to streams on social networks and users can also subscribe to streams.

And one particularly compelling feature is Track (which should be sure to make TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor happy), which is like Google Alerts for Twitter. Twitter has yet to implement Track yet, but it’s a very desirable feature to help filter and “keep track” of the stream.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

In effect, Status.Net is to the StatusNet platform as WordPress.com is to WordPress. Status.Net will offer a free package for very basic use, and will then offer a number of premium packages that give access to premium features. We first heard about the upcoming product last month when StatusNet raised $875,000, but until now they haven’t introduced the platform to the public.

Status.Net remains in private beta for now, but we’ll let you know when it’s available to the public. Also worth pointing out is that Status.Net is launching a new real-time search feature powered by Collecta powered by that company’s recently-released Site Search platform.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Today, Google has begun testing a new look for Search Options. This offers more visual approach to this sidebar, including colors and graphics (oh my). As you can see in the screenshot, “Everything” (regular Google results), “News,” and “Blogs” are a few of the newly visual tabs. There is also a “More” area that shows other things like “Maps.”

Yes, these look quite a bit more like Yahoo search results.

But the most significant thing about this new look may be that it’s showing up as the default view for those seeing this test. Yes, it’s no longer as just an expandable option. Could this be the future of Google Search?

[thanks Kevin]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Angstro, a 2008 TechCrunch50 startup, launched with a product that socialized the content on the web by tapping into your social graph. At the Real-Time CrunchUp today the startup is launching Knx.to, a real-time search engine capability and API that looks up most recent social information about any of your friends, from their LinkedIn profile to their Flickr account to their Facebook profile.

In order to understand Knx.to’s virtue, it’s best to see the technology implemented in an application. Ribbit Mobile, a Google Voice competitor and cloud-based VoIP telephony service, recently launched with the capability of integrating any calls to a contact with your social networks, which was powered by Knx.to.

To enable the application, you sign into your Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr accounts via oAuth, Facebook Connect and more. When a friend calls you (or you call a friend), the technology will automatically scan all of your social networks, identify if the contact is a friend, and will pull all the most recent photos, Tweets, status updates, and more into its search pane. The idea is to give a social context to all of your contacts, which is definitely useful information for both professional and personal contacts.

Knx.to’s is officially launching its API to allow a variety of applications to tap into this new way for adding additional social information to contacts. It’s a innovative idea and something that many applications, whether it be email or VoiP/phone based technologies.

The startup also has a standalone consumer facing search engine that lets users easily tap into the most recent information about a friend or contact from one platform. After logging into your accounts via oAuth, Facebook Connect and more, you simply type in a friend’s name and the real-time results of your friends’ latest acitivity on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Yahoo Mail will show up. Additional social media sites will be added in the future.

One issues with tapping into social networks for this information is security. But Knx.to’s founder, Rohit Khare, says that all of the results and information are stored in your browser, and don’t break any social network’s terms of agreements. Similar in some ways to email plug-in Xobni, Knx.to adds another layer to your contact list which in the age of social media, is very useful.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Qwisk, which is launching today at the Real-Time CrunchUp, is an innovative new way to add a social twist to your browser. The site, which is a product of Y Combinator-funded company Socialbrowse, connects with you with your friends on Facebook and Twitter in real-time as you browse the web. We have 500 invites exclusively for TechCrunch users. You can redeem these invites simply by clicking here.

It’s important to note that Qwisk is a browser extension, not a plug-in to a browser. On the site’s page, you sign into your Facebook and Twitter accounts via Facebook Connect and oAuth. Qwisk will then add a sidebar to your browser that will show a feed of Facebook status updates and Tweets. You can also share any link or content to Twitter and Facebook from the sidebar itself.

Qwisk also includes its own built in social network, where you can share content from your browser with your friends via a drag and drop technology. When you drag a site into your friend’s profile, Qwisk will automatically send him or her a shortened link to the site, You can then conduct real-time conversations around any content on the web.

The fact that Qwisk is doing this via a standalone application as opposed to a plug-in is impressive. The upside is that it works on all browsers but it’s not easy to do. Powered by FriendFeed’s Tornado technology, which was just open sourced by Facebook, Qwisk is adding an real-time sharing element to browsing that helps all of us lazy folks who don’t want to jump to our Twitter or Facebook client to share a link. It truly does make sharing very simple. Qwisk is similar in theory to Reframe It and Google’s Sidewiki, which both add a social element to browsing.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The BlackBerry App

The BlackBerry app, which works with the devices running OS 4.6 or higher, has a extremely sleek nice interface, which is optimized for BlackBerry users with all sorts of efficiencies. You can quickly change from different timelines, easily switching from your inbox, to mentions, to direct messages. Plus, you can monitor various Twitter accounts within one appp. When you send a Tweet, you can shorten a link via Bit.ly, and upload pictures or videos via yFrog. One compelling feature is the ability to email a Tweet to a contact directly from the Tweet.

The app also includes search (Seesmic stores all the info in cache) and will also feature notifications of new Tweets and DMs while you are scrolling through email (a little raccoon will pop up with a number of new Tweets, says Le Meur). And hands down the two best features of the Blackberry app is the ability to see your Twitter lists directly from the app and geolocation, so you’ll be able to tweet your location directly from the app. Seesmic just added geolocation, as the API was released yesterday. Facebook integration will be added in the near future.

The Android App

The Android App also features a very sleek design and a user-friendly UI. The most noticeable advantage is how fast the app is. Le Meir says the app is native to the Android and claims its the “Tweetie for the Android.” Via a touch interface, you can easily navigate though threaded timelines, direct messages, different accounts, and @replies. And you can email Tweets as well as easily switch to landscape mode.

When you Tweet you’ll see options for Tweeting publicly or via a DM and shorten links through Bitl.ly. You can easily attach a picture or video via yFrog. And here’s the kicker-you can also upload videos directly to YouTube via the app. You can also access other users profiles, see his/her Tweets, who he/she is following and then follow the users. In addition you can also block or unfollow a user.

While Twitter rolled out the geolocation API yesterday, Seesmic hasn’t integrated its API into the app. But the app still features a geolocation tool that lets you embed your location in a Tweet via the Android’s GPS, which will show your location on Google Maps.

The app works with all models of the Android and was optimized for the newly launched Verizon Droid. While the Android app doesn’t have list functionality or Facebook integration, Le Meur says these features will be added in the near future.

The iPhone App

A few months ago, Le Meur informed me of Seesmic’s iPhone app. But the app is still being tweaked. While we don’t know the in-depth details of the iPhone app, we do know that it will have functionality for both Twitter and Facebook status updates.

Seesmic’s BlackBerry app will face competition from UberTwitter, OpenBeak (formerly TwitterBerry), Tweetcaster and perhaps even a RIM-developed Twitter client. But Seesmic’s app is chock full of nifty features, such as lists and perhaps even Facebook integration in the future. It will certainly be a viable contender in the space. The Android app will face competition from a smaller group of Twitter clients for the Android, which include Twitdroid, Swift, and TwitterRide. But like the BlackBerry app, Seesmic’s Android app is fast, sleek, easy to use and will also have Facebook built in soon, making it very attractive.

As I wrote above, Seesmic is now full throttle in developing numerous offerings for the web, mobile and desktop. Le Meur says the Windows clients had 10,000 downloads within 12 hours. I fully expect the the Android and BlackBerry apps to receive the same response. As the startup continues to develop new and innovative products, it is slowly encroaching on rival Tweetdeck’s market share and attracting a whole new set of followers as well. But a little friendly competition is never a bad thing between technology companies.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Yesterday, Twitter changed its organizing question from “What Are You Doing?” to “What’s Happening?” But if you want to know what’s really happening now, check out Hot Potato, a startup launching right now at our Realtime CrunchUp. Hot Potato is releasing an iPhone app which lets you create a stream of conversations around events based both on your location and what your friends are doing.

Hot Potato is a micro-messaging app that organizes the conversation stream by events. For Hot Potato, an event can be anything that is happening right now: a basketball game, concert, party, street fair, buying a new car, or even just two friends on a bike ride. An event is whatever is happening that people want to share.

The app uses the GPS in your iPhone to show you events people are talking about near you. If you are at a concert, you can see what other people (who also have the app) are saying about it. You can “check in” to places just like with Foursquare, but you can also post a note or photo. All the notes and photos about a particular event are collected on the same page, which is also available on the Web.

Hot Potato uses events as its primary filter, and adds a social and geo layers on top. You sign in with your Facebook account so you can connect with existing friends easily. You can also add your Twitter account. When you send out a note or put up a photo, it can be shared on Facebook, Tweeted out, or shared via email with a link back to the original content. The link goes back to a Hot Potato website where all the links are hosted. Or you can simply share your Hot Potato status (attending, watching, following).

So you can talk about something that is happening to you, share some pictures, and pass it along. Other Hot Potato users can chime in, and you can see what is happening around you. Hot Potato is yet another example of a location app that marries social networks with the real world. You’re at an event. Someone you follow is at the same event. And you find each other through Hot Potato. Or who knows, maybe you meet someone new—because you are both at the same place at the same time and talking about it on Hot Potato.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

To win one, just tweet out your favorite moment of the RealTime CrunchUp so far, and include the hashtags #CrunchUp and #Cloud in your tweet (#CrunchUp is the conference hashtag, and #Cloud will let us know who’s entering the contest).

We’ll announce the winners in this post later today, and you’ll be able to pick up your signed book at the front table. Obviously you’ll have to be present to win.

Here are the winners:
Christianhobbs

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.

Here’s why this matters. With services like Seesmic (Desktop) and Brizzly importing data from both Twitter and Facebook, the social graph for those services is starting to get messy. If there were a way to merge Twitter Lists and Facebook Friend Lists, third-party services could provide a valuable new service: Easy-to-make Facebook and Twitter social graph mashups.

Granted, it seems unlikely at this point that either Twitter or Facebook will ever sync these lists with one another on their respective services. But as long as they’re willing to provide that data to third-parties, other companies should be able to do interesting things with it.

The Lists, it seems, are starting to merge.

[Photos: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Salesforce.com co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff is sitting down with TechCrunch IT editor Steve Gillmor and TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld to discuss the socialization of the enterprise. Benioff recently unveiled his own social strategy for Salesforce: Chatter. Debuted at the company’s Dreamforce event, Chatter allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups within the platform, enabling them to be connected via a unified stream. In addition, developers will now be able to tap into Chatter’s API to build social enterprise apps off of platform. While Chatter looks and feels like a social network for the enterprise, Benioff is quick to nix that moniker, preferring to call the platform a collaboration tool.

Below find my notes (paraphrased):

ES: We’re here with Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, he’s had a few announcements the past couple days.

MB: We’ve had 19,000 people for our Dreamforce convention. We had a successful announcement for a new product called Chatter. It takes this thing Steve Gillmor calls real-time and combines it with the enterprise. It brings in the power of real enterprise computing. I’ve brought in Steve Fisher, Chatter’s product lead from Salesforce and I’d like to do a overview of Chatter.

—-video of Chatter—-

MB: Steve and I started a software company together, he taught computer science at Stanford and worked at Apple.

SF: The core idea behind Chatter is bringing real-time nature to enterprise, where its sorely needed. This provides the context for information in the stream. It not only delivers a social application but also a platform for people to innovate off of. Chatter takes a database object and turns it into a person and profile.

MB: Chatter is a social extension to the Force.com platform.

SF: Any applications built on Force.com now had feeds associated with it. When you are interested in an application, you can see the feed for information. An application can talk to a person, and people can comment on this.

MB: As key tasks and activities happen in applications, all are enabled with all features to access Chatter.

ES: Chatter will be the new homepage?

MB: yes, it will be integrated into the new homepage along with a dashboard of reports and approvals, workflow, tasks and calendar. You’ll also be able to see filters as well. Chatter will let you see updates from people, files, applications, HR, and will integrated other Feeds (Dow Jones, Thompson Reuters). A standard object, like a possible sale or opportunity, is alive. You can comment on that and also builds in relationships with other people on the deal.

Because it’s built on Force.com, security models are high-tech. The idea behind realtime enterprise is to leverage what we are learning from consumer world, ie what’s in Facebook and Twitter, and then take the data of what’s in the enterprise and make it relevant.

You can also group users, and those groups can have a profile or wall and set up Twitter feeds to track.

SG: A couple of years ago, I’d get strange Facebook messages late night from you. You really use this stuff. Somehow you’ve taken something that you are fascinated with and translated it into a product.

MB: I have 5,000 friends on Facebook. But why do I know more about these strangers than I do my own employees. I am smarter about people I don’t know about than people who are my most important employees.

Robert Scoble: On that point, Salesforce is only used by a small # of people inside corporations. Why aren’t you ripping this out and make this more low cost?

MB: We are. All Salesforce users can use thus for free. We also have a low cost separate product. And we will be rolling out a free version. We are working on figuring out what that is.

ES: What is that going to called, Chatter Lite? This is a new type of Stream?

MB: This is a deep integration of the fundamental transactions. We are exposing fundamental audit trails. And we provide linkage between content and apps and the people; it adds contextual information for users. It’s adding metadeta.

ES: Enterprise social networks have always been about getting real-time social data to users.

MB: I feel that I’m a slave to email, to Outlook. But my content management system is its own island of data. Twitter and Facebook has shown that we can provide more context and meaning to this information. Because there is an API that you can plug into, if you are a data provider, you can plug into this. I love software and I love technology. Chatter gives you metadeta and integrated data. Salesforce is becoming a type of distribution network, not just an application provider, so any app can plug into us to provide content to Salesforce users. We can bring content to people via Chatter.

MB: We’re not that far into it. We’re looking for feedback. We have a general strategy. We think this a unique strategy. We need some new things besides Mircosoft Sharepoint. This is our fourth cloud.

ES: Do you think there’s going to more User interaction with this application?

MB: We are looking to the consumer world to the things that have been popularized like feeds, profiles and then adds computer technology, to create this for the enterprise. We’re trying to implement real-time on our platform. We’re passionate about SaaS, but collaboration is the next thing. And why should this only be on the consumer side. Why can’t a follow my PowerPoint presentation.

—-Q&A—-

Alex Williams: What about moving contact information in Facebook and connecting this to Chatter?

MB: You can integrate it as a feed. We are a metadata driven server.

MB: I’m not bashing Microsoft, I’m just explaining why its a monopoly. I paid to upgrade to Windows 7 and I got no new features. It’s insane that we tolerate this.

Question: Do you want to buy Zoho?

MB: there are so many companies out there, we have 4000 employees there are lots of conversations. We’ve only looked to buy a few companies over the last ten years. I’m not that familiar with Zoho. It’s very hard for us to bring a company in. Our architecture is very sophisticated. I’m not saying that we aren’t going to make acquisitions.

ES: the fact that you have so many APIs means that you don’t have to make acquisitions?

MB: We’ve completely integrated with Google Apps, Gmail, and more. When you update your Google spreadsheet, it will show up in your feed. We need to have deep relationships with Google, and other companies.

SG: Congratulations! You are two years ahead of your competition.

MB: Chatter is deeply integrated into our core. We have completely reworked our architecture to become more real-time. I want to thank Steve Gillmor for this.

Video: Recording can be seen here.

Transcript: Provided by PLYmedia.

> We have a world famous author here.

>> He’s a world famous author.

Marc Benioff.

Everybody has his book.

>> We’re going to get started.

So Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.Com.

You might have heard he’s had a few announcements the past few days.

You had a little event, what, the past few days, right around the corner, right, a small affair?

>> Next half an hour, because alter your reality, often, but we’ve had 100 people, over the

Last three days for our

people from all over

it’s a long way to go, I understand.

But it was very successful announcement of major new product and chatter, basically takes this

Thing, this thing that Steve calls real time.

I’m still trying to understand what it is.

>> We call it real time.

>> We.

>> This real time idea, combines it with social and interpresent and really takes and you’re

Going to see it for the first time here, this very idea that we’ve seen popularized and the

Users use in Facebook and Twitter but brings in the power of real enterprise computing.

Because I have hot tea because my voice I woke up with no voice and it’s slowly coming back.

But I brought with me my head of engineering.

Who is responsible for all development QA and tests.

And who is responsible for overseeing the chatter development and also Dan Darcy who is one

Of our keytologists and what I’d like to do is I’d like to show you a quick three minute overview

With you, if this is okay.

Is I’d like to show you a quick three-minute overview of the video.

And then what I want to do is I want to

I want to have Steve do a technical overview of

How we did it, what it is, and so forth for about maybe five or ten minutes, and then that’s

Going to include a live demonstration under the development server.

And then we’ll take 20 to 15 minutes and we’ll do the questions.

>> You’ll be out of time.

>> Let’s jump into it.

>> Terrific.

This is chatter.

>> Let’s roll the video.

The problem with business collaboration today is that you have to go to one place to create

And manage content.

Another place to use your business APs and finally somewhere else for e-mail and instant mess

Enger, just to collaborate with the people using all these different technologies.

What if you could join all these separate activities in one place.

Salesforce chatter combines the latest collaboration trends in social computing with robust

Sharing and security controls of enterprise cloud computing to deliver break through levels

Of creativity and let’s take a look this is the chatter application home page.

Right away we can see how chatter brings your business applications to life.

At the top, you see your own picture and your latest stat usesup date.

When you click on your picture you’re brought to your own work profile.

Here you can upload your picture and write a quick blurb about your expertise.

Now you and everyone in your company can easily learn about each other’s talents and how you

Can help each other get things done.

In the middle of the page is where you post your status.

Just like you would in your favorite social networking sites.

This is where you let everyone know what you’re working on, whether you’re at a conference

Looking for new business or asking anyone in your company for advice.

Chatter keeps you connected to your colleagues by letting you follow their activities.

And provides a private social network for your company where you can share information secure

Ly and discover new insights.

Chatter lets you do a lot more than follow your colleagues.

Here on the home page is your main feed of real time updates you can see people responding

To your status.

But you can also keep track of everything that’s happening in your applications, including

All the data, and the content you care about most.

You can see real time updates to your customer service cases being closed.

Your account data changing, and your sales deals advancing.

And since chatter is also a social platform, we can even bring in updates from nonsalesforce

Applications like your back end and finance or HR systems.

Your feed puts all your content apps and people updates right in front of you, all in one place,

All in real time.

Plus, chatter makes it easy to filter your feed to find the most relevant information.

You can create any kind of filter you want.

You can filter on just your team, or filter by your top sales deals.

Here we can see that a new competitor has been identified one of our technologies opportunity.

Right from the feed we can drill into the deal and take a closer look.

On the opportunity page, but your deal also has its own feed.

Now you can collaborate on this deal in real time.

When someone or some event updates this opportunity like this stage change, it automatically

Shows up in your feed, and in the feed of anyone else who is following this opportunity.

Here you can see someone is recommended you join this competitive group to get some more product

Insight.

Here’s the competitive group page.

Chatter lets you form groups instantly collaborate on anything.

Whether it’s a sales competitor, an HR project, product team or whatever you need.

One of the great things about chatter is that you can also pull in information from other social

Networking sites like Twitter.

Here you have a Twitter widget that’s pulling in real time tweets about this competitor.

People in groups on chatter can also collaborate on files like photos, documents, spreadsheets

Or presentations.

Here’s a presentation someone on the preview group posted about our competition which you can

Preview right.

Plus, with chatter, you can also access all your application content and data on your mobile

Device.

With the iPhone or blk berry.

No matter where you go chatter makes sure you’ve got your real time updates right at your fingertips.

Chatter is the new way to collaborate with your content, apps and people.

Securely and in real time.

It will make you and your company more productive and give you real time insights that lead

To smarter decisions.

To learn more visit salesforce.Com/chatter.

>> So, anyway, just a brief history on Steve.

Steve and I have started software company together in 1979 called Liberty Software we wrote

10 entertainment titles.

We were in high school.

And then we went to college.

Steve went to Stanford.

He taught computer science at Stanford then he worked at Apple for many years, working on a

Number of their projects, including started a lot of their early Internet work then went to

AT&T and he’s been with salesforce for five years.

So I’d like Steve now to just give you a little technical behind the scenes on exactly what

You just saw and how it works.

Steve.

>> Thanks, Mark.

So the core idea behind chatter is really seeing all the fantastic innovation happening on

The consumer side, really bringing the real time nature to the way people lead their lives

And recognizing that the enterprise, the enterprise is just not real time.

You’ve got your applications.

Databases.

We provide a suite of applications, many of the people provide applications, people adding,

Changing deleting, updating information on these databases lock within these databases.

You’ve got your content living on your file servers, and you’ve got people living inside of

Outlook, there’s no context or real time nature.

There’s no rapid communication, collaboration.

It’s really just, the consumer world has just left the enterprise behind.

And so the idea behind chatter is to bring those together, introduce the real time nature into

The enterprise where it’s sorely needed so that as change happens that I care about I know

About it.

I can collaborate.

I can come back to it.

And also extremely importantly, provide the context so that if I happen to not be paying attention

while it’s happening I can go back to the particular area that I care about and see what’s

Going on.

And doing that all in, not only delivering a social application, but delivering a platform

To allow the entire industry to innovate and bring that real time aspect to the enterprise.

Ly.

We’ll have the opportunity that we have but more importantly, that the entire industry has

To really innovate and improve and bring the level of innovation we’ve seen on the consumer

Side into the enterprise.

I’m sure a number of you have seen this.

So this is the new look and feel.

I’m curious, how many of you have seen salesforce our salesforce automation applications or

Any custom applications or users of salesforce.

So a few of you.

So a look and feel for our core application that would be available sometime early next year.

And you can see on here, it’s personalized with Marc.

In this case I’m acting as Marc.

People get us confused.

So there we go.

So now we’re bringing, picking what was the user, the model the data object behind the scenes,

Is really been unfamiliar in the enterprise world.

So if we can go and take a look at Mark’s profile

you’ll see all the familiar, all the familiar

Types of interactions that you see on the consumer world with this is effectively Mark’s wall

And you can see what’s going on right now.

Talking about chatter or maybe he’s congratulating me on my new promotion or something like

That.

Maybe not.

.

And so this is very familiar.

The typical style of interaction that we see in Facebook on Twitter, where people are commenting

>> I’ll talk before you move on past this page.

We really haven’t used the word “platform” yet.

>> How this whole thing is built on our force.Com platform.

While you’re seeing the fixed application, the whole thing I wanted to add, HMRS information.

I wanted to add more fields to this page.

I wanted to add information about me like I was an expert in certain areas, we’re working on

Certain projects.

Those all of a sudden become keywords or search terms or part of my groups and all that that

We fully extended our platform and that is really what’s what chatter is.

It’s a social extension to the force.Com development.

>> It’s a core extension of the platform at two levels.

If we go back to the home tab and take a look at the overall feed, which is of course where

We expect people really go to find out what’s going on and that feed is available either on

The browser but also on the desktop or on your mobile devices just like you’d expect.

This feed is really the core.

But any object in the entire force.Com database which they, an open database that people have

Built 135,000 custom applications on, recruiting applications, expense management applications,

Financial applications, just about everything you can imagine we might use at salesforce.

Now all those applications have things associated with them.

They have fees associated with them.

When I’m interested in a certain object or a certain person, or a certain piece of content,

Or even to find a rule describing I’m interested in all bugs related to the next release, and

I want to know when they’re being closed.

Now all of that will come to the feed.

Not only the people and people actually talking to each other, but as you can see here we’ve

Got the allied technologies opportunities.

So that’s a deal in the system.

So this is an example where an object is talking to me, an application is talking to me, not

Just a person talking to me.

And people are commenting on that.

>> And as just an extension of what Steve said, he lightly touched on this.

But while we were at dreamforce Computer Associates announced they’ve created a application

Natively on our salesforce.Com around the scrum development methodology which a lot of our

Customers we use and so forth and many others use, but managing scrum is an incredibly different

Thing.

Not only have we built the software development around scrum but the whole idea now is that

That is now just because they’ve built it natively in our platform, it now is basically enabled

By chatter so that as bugs as sprint teams do their work, as key tasks and activities happen,

In that application or whatever application it is, we have over 135,000 custom applications

On our platform, all of them are enabled by the objects that Steve is now referencing here

Which is that we have basically given all aspects of force.Com and all applications that we

Make as well as the 850 apps on the app exchange are now all enabled with all the features

That you’re seeing.

>> So developers can build on top of chatter and their applications can become information

That feeds into chatter.

>> And existing salesforce customers are 70,000 customers.

This happens automatically.

And we are not charging them any additional money for this capability.

This will just turn on in the release that is happening in early 2010.

>> Is this going to be the new home page?

>> That’s what Steve just said.

He just showed you the new home page.

If you go back to home, go back to home.

>> Can you show us what the current home page is?

>> Thank you for asking me.

Thanks for paying attention to the presentation, Erick.

This is the home page.

>> You didn’t show it.

>> This is the salesforce home page.

I’m glad this is on video.

We will review with you later.

>> I’m glad I’m not the only one tired.

>> This is going to be the new home page.

>> This is going to be the new home page.

And then you can see my status update.

You can see the chatter feed but it’s closed.

Dashboards are real time analytics coming into our system.

A lot of our customers.

We deliver over 700

700,000 dashboards for our customers a day, and two million reports.

Many of those customers ask for real time feeds from those into their dashboards as

into

Their home page as they log in.

If you go down, we also have an approvals and work flow engine in our system that’s giving

Us real time approval requirements where we can now prove on our home page which is our calendaring

System or can also be real time integrated with other calendaring systems like Google and Outlook

As well as tasks that we need to complete, you know, I need to either go call this person or

Get this done.

However, now if Dan scrolls all the way back up, all of those things are on the home page today.

What’s not on the home page today is two things.

Left, the things on the left, which are these filters, and the thing on the top that says chatter.

Me Mark says this, George says this.

Parker says this.

And Steve says this.

But not just that.

It says: Your purchase order system says this.

Your scrum application says this.

Your CSL system says this.

Your marketing system says this.

Your PowerPoint presentation just told you that it got updated.

You look at the customer and he says it sucks but he made changes and now it’s better and he

Upped, and the Oracle HR system says to you.

And oh, by the way, other feeds are coming in from other outside vendors as well.

Tom son Reuters is feeding information to you.

Dow Jones is feeding information to you.

You know, maybe you’re hooked into other news providers.

TechCrunch.

>> Is there a Twitter feed in there.

>> We showed the Twitter.

We’ll go back and show you the Twitter

I’m glad

this is great we can go back.

Thank you for setting it up for me.

And I needed the energy, really, Erick.

So so now I have the whole feed, and I have the ability to go through this.

Now, for example, when I’m working on like this Allied Technology

all of our objects are

Just generic, you can rename that object.

You can change all these fields.

Can you change these page layouts but what we’ve added to all our core database objects, you’ve

Got these feeds.

So the database is talking to you.

So now when you click on chatter, that database

the table, kind of what was almost an audit

Trail is alive.

And I can comment on that object.

The object is commenting on itself.

Bearing the privacy model that’s in place by the 30,000 users who use this at Merrill Lynch.

The 25,000 users at Cisco.

The 30,000 users at Dell.

You know, the thousands of users, the 70,000 users that Japan posts at Tokyo.

The sharing models and privacy models and security models to make sure that private data stays

Private.

And only the right people see the right things.

It’s in place.

And that is the combination.

Because the whole idea behind enterprise is key.

But deliver the real time prize, we have to leverage what we’re in the consumer world because

That’s what the action is.

>> You see Facebook are half a billion on these new met fors if we can leverage, take the

Data that’s in the enterprise to these enterprise users, and that’s really what this is trying

To

>> But the companies that are using it.

>> That’s exactly, or whatever the projects, you know we have project management systems.

We have over 800 applications on our App exchange.

Group that you see there, you know, and we bring up the competitive group, of course, you can

Group users into groups.

And they can be your account team.

And they can be your product team.

These are people who are now working together and they themselves have a profile.

And they, of course, have a wall, because they’re a group, and they can set up Twitter feeds

As well.

So that’s what’s right on the right there, that this

tracking.

>> What are they tracking?

>> Actually coming out of

this is not

this is our live development system.

This is a SharePoint.

This is SharePoint on Twitter.

The search term that we’re tracking is SharePoint fail.

And it says Ger, why won’t the OWA documents feature accept an external URL for DIF points

For SharePoint location.

Would you unzoom, Dan.

Go into the back end.

Zoom freezes it.

Zoom back in, Dan.

Dear IT why implement SharePoint as a collaboration tool but not enable ability to have accounts

Collaborate with external clients I wonder whose fault is that SharePoint 2007 NITX, XMF.

>> Don’t call it salesforce for nothing.

>> You didn’t plan that?

>> This is live.

>> This is live.

>> It’s real time.

>> There’s this thing going on, I gotta tell you about, when we get a chance, have lunch.

>> You take it from SharePoint 2010 doesn’t install at all on windows 2008.

>> Notice he can read it now.

>> You would have thought that you would be tested

well, it’s going too fast.

>> Can we just

now that we see

I just want to tell a little story.

>> Erick had to get me going just a little bit.

Scobold will try to get me going, too.

>> Before we get Scobold into this then we’re really in trouble.

>> Cut him off.

>> Gee, who knew.

>> That’s all right.

>> A couple of years ago, Marc, I started getting these strange late night Facebook messages

From you.

You know, I’d post something.

>> I hope you don’t take them the wrong way.

>> No, I didn’t.

I turned them over to my attorney.

[LAUGHTER]

But the thing is you really use this stuff.

>> Of course.

>> So somehow, though, you’ve taken something that you were fascinated with.

>> I’m deeply

I love technology.

I love software.

I love

we’ve been working on, since Apple 2.

Commodore, assembly language, but we’ve loved this stuff for 30 years.

And we love this, and we love the Facebook, is unbelievable.

And I have 5,000 users on my, friends, I mean my closest friends on Facebook.

>> And there’s me.

>> And my close friend, Steve.

>> But the thing that is amazing, Steve, about Facebook, the thing that just blows my mind,

Is why do I know more about the these strangers than I do about my own employees.

That’s the thing.

I’m learning so much about people on Facebook.

When they tag each other.

When they’re commenting.

Where they’re going.

It’s amazing how much I’m learning.

I am smarter about people I don’t even know about and have never met than people who are basically

My most important employees and what they’re working on.

I am learning why is it so easy to tag things on Facebook but I can’t

it’s time for a big

CrunchUp in the enterprise.

>> Question: On that point.

>> Turn the audience mic on, please.

>> Question: Marc on that point salesforce is only used by a small number of people inside

Corporations, it’s used by salespeople.

Why aren’t you ripping it this out and making available to the entire enterprise for a low

Cost, because you’re charging

>> Yes, we are.

Thank you for doing my marketing strategy.

As usual, why should today be any different?

No.

We are.

And first of all we’re including this for free for all salesforce users.

And then we have a low priced version which includes our full content management product and

A full force.Com development license, and we have all this technology, which basically starts

At $50 a user a month.

And then we’re working on a free version that we’re not ready to unveil yet because we’re just

Not settled on the features and function, because we needed the feedback from the conference

Because we’re showing this for the first time.

And you are 100 percent right.

We have a number of enterprise license agreements with large customers.

Like Dell, who has 80,000 users.

On our service.

They can deploy this enterprise-wide.

But for a lot of our customers, like Bank of America, who has 290,000 employees, we only have

30,000 employees, which is their financial advisors.

We have two million total users, about 67,000, approximately, implementation.

>> So you’ll make this available?

>> We’re working on figuring out what that is, yes.

>> What are you going to call that, chatter Lite.

>> I think that’s news.

>> We don’t know.

We said this at the conference.

But if you had come to the conference, I know it was a long way to go since it was

it was

100 yards away.

>> I wasn’t here yesterday.

>> You don’t have to explain yourself.

>> I watched on it the Web.

>> That’s right.

>> It’s not just status updates.

Like we’ve

this is deep integration between the fundamental, the fundamental transactions

Of your company.

The transaction is kind of, as Jim Gray defined a transaction, now the reason we were able

To get this done so quickly is we were already auditing all of our transactions, in fact, we

Have three and a half billion custom object records on over half, half a million custom objects

That our customers have created, and we have to keep audit trails for all of these transactions,

Especially the banks and the insurance companies that we run, like Aon and others.

And because we have those audit trails on our objects, basically those are just very pretty

Audit trails.

They look like Facebook.

They look like Twitter.

But really just exposing the fundamental audit trails and then we’re doing something else.

We’re providing that linkage between the content, the apps and the people.

So that when I go into an object, it’s not just saying I was created, I was read.

I was updated, I deleted, which was the crud characteristics of a database transaction.

But then I can say, oh, no, this means this.

So like if it’s an account object or an account table.

I can say this account is, you know, doing great.

They’ve adopted all of our technology.

You know, basically I can add meta data.

I’m adding meta data on top of that.

>> ERP systems and enterprise systems have always been about getting real time enterprise

Data and getting it to the right people.

But they’ve done a horrible job of doing that.

I think what you’re saying here is that these consumer apps are creating a UI that is, that

Makes a lot more sense.

>> Aren’t we like a slaved

I feel like many times I’m like having to constantly deal with

The e-mails.

But then my content management system is its own island of data and then my enterprise apps

Are their own islands of data.

And I think what we’ve seen with Facebook and Twitter is that we can provide a user interface

That is, provide meaning, meaning to these enterprise users of all of this information.

And somehow by bringing it together in this synthesis, we can take it another level.

The other really cool thing is you saw with the filters, is that because I’m basically able

To provide queries on tops of huge amounts of data but also through, because there’s an API,

That you can now write to, to feed all of the systems, as well.

You don’t have to just use our managed framework but there’s an application program you can

Plug into.

There’s so many great data providers whether you’re a content provider or whether you’re a,

You’re providing stock quotes or news stores stories or credit information, or whatever, you

Can plug into this.

Now the power of that, let’s say I’m managing an account object, right?

So let’s say I’m managing account.

Can we go back to the account object like I was showing you?

Think about this.

You not only have the account object, that is, the account, whatever it is, you don’t like

The no SharePoint logo.

>> It’s like the no software logo.

>> That one is extremely good.

Same guy came up with both of them.

>> Funny you said you love software because we don’t have software.

>> I love software.

And, look, I love technology.

Here’s the account object.

Here’s the account.

It’s got Google integrated.

I’ve got Google mapped to the account.

I’ve got meta and what opportunities on this account that I’m working on.

Cases, this is typical salesforce automation.

I showed you this nine years ago.

You know, you were across the street at the other magazine.

Business 2.0.

Now, go back up.

This page we’ve had for a long time.

But that little thing at the top, the little chattering teeth now I click on that now I have

Meta data and integrated data.

So I have the meta data which is Jim steel our chief customer officer saying allied technologies,

This thing is hot.

.

Let’s make this

It’s the AP speaking, they’ve completed a transaction, that they just fulfilled an order on

This account.

So SAP basically said, oh, hey, by the way, I just got an order from them on the website.

And click here and I’m going to bring you into the SAP screen.

Or Oracle said: Oh, this invoice, because I use Oracle for the payables, I clicked here for

Oracle and I click on that

>> What happens when you get confused between apps with people.

>> Let me finish this thought then I’ll any is your question.

Or I’ve hooked into TechCrunch’s API or I’ve hooked into Thompson Reuters am.

PI or Dow Jones or maybe something else here.

And I’m tracking Allied Technologies and all of a sudden there’s an icon there and it says

TechCrunch, Steve Gillmor says Allied Technologies suction.

sucks, what are they doing they’ve got a bug in their system.

Right away I’ll see that information.

That’s the power.

And because I’m following allied technology I’m also going to get that on my home page.

If my competitive group is following it, they’re going to get it in their wall.

And this is really the next

this is exciting.

And this also means that salesforce is becoming a type of a distribution network for information.

That we’re able to filter correctly because we know people are interested in Allied Technology

In this deal, in this product, in this competitive thing.

We become a distribution network, not just an application provider.

But for our users.

So that you can plug into us, because you’re a content

you’re of course a great website.

You provide you tweet and you do all these things but you’re a content provider.

You can plug in your real time media into our network, and we can actually bring it to people

Where they’re going to actually maybe see that but they might not otherwise have seen it because

We know that they’re working on these things.

And that this is important to them.

>> Do you think that this is

>> Does that make sense.

>> Is there an advertising model?

>> I was basically going to ask.

Do you think this is kind of a reboot of the media publishing.

>> We published this 48 hours ago.

While I completely respect his comments and your comments, we’re not that far into it.

We’re looking for feedback.

And this is the first time I’m kind of trying to explain our general strategy and why I brought

Steve to explain the technology, because we want the feedback because we think this is a unique

Concept.

Look, we’ve poked fun at SharePoint quite a few times, but the reality is they’re releasing

SharePoint 2010.

All of our customers are asking to upgrade their servers.

You can put a website on it.

You can put like a wiki on it.

And it’s completely unintegrated basically with everything else.

And it’s just not

it’s very old technology.

And we need to move this industry forward.

That’s what this conference is about.

A lot of people in this room are doing this.

Microsoft kind of continues to hold us back.

SharePoint is the latest thing that they use to kind of hold onto their status quo.

Cash cow servers.

You know, we need some new things.

So here’s our stake in the ground around collaboration.

We’re already in the sales business.

You know that, sales automation.

We’re in the customer service and support business.

Call centers contact centers, portals we do 8,000 customers with that and we’re in the custom

Application development business for ISVs.

>> Have you been testing this.

>> This is the fourth area, collaboration that we’re entering.

>> This is our fourth cloud.

>> Have you been testing chatter, user

>> I’m testing it right now I’m watching everybody to see if they like it or not.

>> Do you think there will be more user interaction through this user interface than through

Your current user interface?

>> I think the social media guys on the consumer side, you know, I quit my job at Oracle in

1996 because I was using Amazon.Com, and I’m like, this app just rocks it’s so much better

Than what we’re doing in our enterprise group.

Why are we building financials and CRM and all this stuff that looks like green screens on

3270 terminals, and I quit my job.

And in ‘99 I basically started salesforce so that I could

I didn’t quit my job in ‘96.

But I probably should have.

Looking back at it.

But in 1999, when I did quit my job, I started salesforce, and all we did was take Amazon.

It’s not like we were rocket scientists.

We took that architecture, and we built salesforce automation.

Now we’re basically again looking to the consumer world, the metaphors that are being popularized,

Like feeds, like profiles.

You know, like groups.

These are great things, and then we can take great computer science and other things that we’ve

Built to deploy what we think is maybe the next generation.

We think, you know, he and I have had a lot of talks.

And I think that what he’s been talking about for now for a couple of years is dead on on this

Real time.

Steve, I’m sure everyone in this room knows, and if you don’t know, Steve Gillmor was talking

About real time in the enterprise before me, before anybody.

And he is 100 percent right.

He wrote the first articles on it.

The first everything.

And what we’re trying to do is take these ideas, and we’re trying to actually implement them

But on our development platform, and within our application framework so that we can do it.

And this is the thing.

So you know, because we’ve been working together for nine, or 10 years now, that we’re passionate

About software as a service, no software, scalability.

Democracitization of applications, but collaboration is the next one that’s got to happen.

And why should the great thing that’s happening only be on the consumer side.

Because I mean I think it’s really cool that I can follow Ashton on Twitter and millions of

People are doing that.

But why can’t I follow my PowerPoint presentations?

Why can’t I follow on with what’s going on with my key products.

>> Let’s have people come up to the mic.

We’re a little bit over on time.

But

>> A few questions from the audience.

>> Go ahead.

>> Question: Alex Williams.

You write Web.

Over the past few days you talked about for instance what Dell is doing with Answers, be able

To pull that information, create knowledge bases out of Facebook.

What about the contact lists?

Within Facebook?

And being able to export that information?

>> Only in so much as users want to move that information around.

Otherwise we can just deploy that as a real time feed.

Using Facebook as a service.

You know, that’s one of the great things about the net.

Is that all these things are architected with these great APIs.

So we don’t need to manage the data.

I mean, if the customer wants us to manage the data, it’s probably because of a security reason.

Or because of a sharing or a privacy area.

That’s our expertise.

That’s our core.

That’s why we have the iso certifications and every transaction SSL, and we have our identity

Protection systems, and all of those things.

That’s our core, our sharing models and our customers are 27,000 customers have set up the

Fundamental and key architecture, security architecture to their company.

That’s a huge investment they’ve met in the meta data, in our systems.

And now we’re enabling that through this user interface.

But this is just one.

And also here’s the thing you’ve got to remember about salesforce.Com.

Of course, we are an infrastructure layer.

First and foremost, we are a multi-tenant meta-driven server.

That’s number one.

Number two is we have a huge infrastructure layer that we, ranging from security to scalability,

Reliability, availability.

Number three is we have a development platform to let our customers build their own applications.

Which is our force.Com environment.

Now we’ve added chatter, which is a social development platform so that you as ISVs can build

Apps that make sense for our customers or for your own customers or for customers that don’t

Exist yet.

And then we add apps on top of this comprehensive integrated architecture.

These are not separate servers.

These are not separate apps.

These are not separate services.

That’s not how we do it.

Other vendors do it in a different way.

Obviously, Microsoft has lots of servers.

Oracle has lots of servers that are all getting upgraded and updated in various levels of order.

Different service providers also have siloed services, that have kind of a similar model.

We are a fully integrated comprehensive service with one API that

a bulk load API you can

>> Let’s get a few more questions in.

Lili is in the audience would like to respond to all this Microsoft bashing, feel free to come

Up to the mic.

>> I’m not bashing Microsoft.

I’m just explaining why they’re a monopoly, because they hold onto the status quo through this

Cash cow mechanism of the operating

I just upgraded my PC.

I have a new P C&I wanted to upgrade.

And I upgraded, and I paid for this upgrade.

It’s called Windows 7.

Let me tell you I upgraded I got no new new features.

Fantastic business model.

How do I get this.

If you upgrade

>> The new features that works.

>> You know what, this is insane that we even tolerate this in our industry.

We laugh about it.

Yes, oh it’s a company and you upgrade to get the features fixed and you have to pay.

But ha, ha, ha.

Come on, are we tired of this?

We pay companies like Oracle and SAP, our customers pay them 22 percent maintenance year after

Year for software that was written 10 and 20 years ago that hasn’t been upgradeed and updated

And customers are just forced to tolerate it.

It’s the same thing.

We need new models.

>> Thank you from for switching from Microsoft to Oracle bashing.

>> I didn’t want to just stay in one area.

>> You did great.

>> I didn’t want to give you the show you wanted, Steve.

>> [Indiscernible] I’ve been working in large corporation enterprises recently there’s two

Challenges.

One is the people challenge in collaboration enterprise and the other one is IT department

Bottleneck and you’ve made inroads with salesforce into the enterprise on that front.

But we see a lot of issues widening that into internal collaboration.

>> Yes.

>> By IT departments protecting their turf.

How do you see those walls falling?

>> I see exactly what you said.

I see that, of course, we have IT departments who, A, need collaboration, just like you’re

Saying, there are cultural challenges.

You do have a clash of civilizations regarding on premise and cloud computing.

We know that is happening.

And there’s a rationalization happening.

And it depends a lot on the country, actually.

It depends on a lot the size of company.

And it depends a lot on the, Jeff Moore has this great thing called technology adoption curve.

It has a lot to do with where the CIO is on the adoption curve and their own consciousness,

In terms of them being willing to look at new ideas.

We see it for years.

I see Sam Whitmore in the audience.

I used to go see Sam in 1989 when I was at Oracle talking about Macks and PCs front end corporation

Information systems and CIOs were kicking us out saying, now we’re going deck backs imperpetuity.

Now basically 20 years later most not only do most people in the room don’t even know what

Deck vaks or VMS is, we used to be their neighbor in Boston.

The company doesn’t even exist.

That’s what’s great about our industry, that we are riding innovation, which is constantly

Getting lower cost and easier to use technology out there and we’re all on this technology

Continuum and it’s kind of at an unseen level and it’s moving forward it’s like this tremendous

Vehicle.

And we are all, all have the obligation to drive that paradigm forward.

And for those companies who don’t latch on to that technology continuum, that somehow use it

For their own selfish advantages, and I hope that salesforce never becomes one of those that

I think it’s an abuse of power in many ways.

And that’s why I am a proponent that we have to use technology.

We have to drive its cost down.

We have to make it easier to use and ultimately we have to make it for the good of other people.

And we don’t have time for that speech.

But it’s in my book, though, under force for change.

There’s a chapter on it.

>> Last question.

>> Question: Hello.

We heard a lot of blogs and a lot of places that you talked personally to Soho that you wanted

To buy them out.

Is that true.

Did you want to buy them and what do you think of them and are you still in talks with them?

>> No, you know, look, there’s so many companies out there and I’m sure everybody talks to

Us at lots of different levels.

You know, we have 4,000 employees and there’s lots of conversations happening with tens of

Thousands of companies, but the reality is we’ve only looked at buying a few companies over

Ten years, because as Steve will tell you, we’re working at a very core level in our systems

Architecture.

It’s very hard for us to buy anybody.

And I’m not that familiar with this company.

But there’s a lot of great companies out there.

But for us to bring any technology in, it’s very hard, because if you go back to that one slide,

You’ll see at that bottom level, our meta data architecture is extremely sophisticated, wrapped

By our privacy and sharing model.

And you know, I’m not saying that we won’t look at buying companies in the future or that,

I can of course never comment on any kind of merger or acquisition, but the thing is it’s very

Hard for us to buy companies.

That’s why we bought like Sindia mobile enablement every AP you build runs automatically on

The iPhone and Blackberry, our content management system, our knowledge management system.

These are things that we bought but then we had to completely rewrite into our architecture.

>> And the fact that

>> I hope that answers your question.

Thank you very much.

>> The fact people can tap into the platform and all these different APIs makes it not as

Necessary to buy these companies because you can tap into them.

>> Isn’t that the new world we’re in.

Isn’t that where we’re all trying to go?

Isn’t chatter hopefully make TechCrunch a better company?

Isn’t it a possibility that now we can bring your content to our users and so our users can

Get value from the work that you guys are doing, and the work that others are doing here?

We’re trying to build open frameworks that are based on open standards.

That’s why we’ve

you know, completely integrated all the Google apps.

When you put your Google user name and your Google password into salesforce.Com, all kinds

Of new features and functions open up for you.

We’ve deeply integrated with Google.

Not just Google Maps like you saw but Google Mail, the spreadsheets, all of their capabilities.

And all this stuff awedly case kAdz and we’re doing that with other companies, too, where we

Can look inside their WSDLs and APIs to reveal features and functionalities for users all in

Real time so when you update your Google spreadsheet.

He’s got it actually on the demo.

You update your Google spreadsheet it appears in your feed in real time.

This Google app has been updated.

This Google spreadsheet has been upgraded.

This traffic just appeared near the this account that you’re on your way to.

It’s happening with your feeds.

.

I mentioned a lot of our partners we have if you go to appexchange.Com you’ll see over 850

Apps and services deeply integrated at that level and soon all of those will start appearing

In these feeds, enabling our users with the very concept of the real time enterprise.

Letting them CrunchUp, CrunchUp.

It’s great.

I agree, we need a CrunchUp.

And we need to go real time.

We need to get into the new world.

I’m sorry my energy is so low.

>> All right.

>> It’s been a long week.

>> Congratulations.

>> You’re probably two years ahead of your competition, right?

>> Is that it?

That’s the total analysis?

>> How long

>> Steve, come on, it’s not our total analysis of this.

>> You said I invented this.

So I’m saying congratulations.

>> Thank you very much.

>> Congratulations to you.

Because I do have to say that Steve was

I mean, it’s empirical.

I’m sure all of you know that you can go back and read his blogs that he was the first one,

And we read this stuff and this is how we

we don’t come up

we don’t have that many ideas

On our own.

We are looking for things and we’re trying to figure out how to take our fundamental premise

Which is everything’s moving into the cloud and that we can provide into a democratized way.

>> But you’re putting a lot of wood behind this arrow.

>> We’ve completely rewritten our architecture around this concept of real time enterprise,

Yes.

>> Well, I want to thank Marc Benioff.

>> Thanks for Steve and Dan for being here.

>> I think this is a big bet.

And you know, the fact that you are doing it first, very curious to see how fast other your

Competitors are going to try to follow this.

>> I think it will be difficult for them.

We were going to explain why.

But this is not tacked on.

This is not some feed running on the side or somebody typing in status updates, running a feed

On the side.

This is deeply integrated into our core, what we’ve done.

And it was just really honestly a fluke, because we had to do this compliance work for these

Large banks and financial institutions, that we had the concept of feeds buried into our core

Systems and then we’re able to kind of hear of these words that we’re able to kind of able

To dress them up and make them usable for customers and create more value.

It is a complete coincidence.

That’s really

is that right, Steve?

>> That’s right.

>> Anything else you would want to say on that one piece?

>> I think it was coincidence of the compliance combined with the deep sharing model and security

Model so that we felt free to liberate that information in a way that would not compromise

Our customers’ concerns over privacy.

Those two things combined.

As well as things like mobile support, all the things we have.

All these innovations we’ve been creating unknowingly led to our ability to expose this information

To the field which was really the true innovation to make the enterprise real time.

>> I want to thank Steve Gillmor really for this, because we had some of it but we would not

Have known.

>> Well, thank you.

>> What’s interesting your relationships with members of the media, you don’t treat the media

As observers.

You treat them as participants.

And

>> Sam, you’re going to have to tell them that that’s not true.

>> Okay.

>> Thank you.

>> They are.

The media is a critical part of our ecosystem of our industry.

They’re not just pundits.

They’re not just observers.

In many cases they’re prophetic.

They’re seeing things we don’t see.

You see thousands of companies.

We don’t see it where we rely on that.

And also the industry and analysts too, regulators all this kind of thing, these are really

Important people, too.

Not all of them but some of them are.

>> With that, can you please give Marc a hand.

Thank you very much.

>> Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Thank you TechCrunch.

f you want two tickets.

>> Just explain why.

>> Explain why you want to go to LeWeb.

He’ll pick it and what’s the time period?

>> Next hour?

>> Tonight.

>> By tonight.

>> Yeah.

>> Explain in one tweet why you want to go.

>> By 8:00 p.M. Tonight.

Two tickets.

>> 1500 Euros each.

>> That’s 1500 Euros each.

Julian, congratulations

Photo Credit/Flickr:TheKenYeung

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Everyone loves picture messaging – or at least, they love the idea of it. The iPhone carrying masses clamored for it, then celebrated once they got it by sending everyone pictures of their immediate surroundings and beloved pets before forgetting the feature exists. After the novelty wears off, it’s generally reserved for the occasions when there is genuinely something interesting to show. Need the wife’s advice on whether to buy the blue shirt or the green one? Picture message. Want to ask her out to coffee? You’ll probably stick with text.

FunMobility, a company thats been cashing in on cell phone media (like ringtones and wallpapers) since 1999, is looking to change that with FunMail. They’re referring to the new service as “every-day picture messaging”.

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.