The evolution of Twitter clients have been speeding along. While Twitter is the fundamental platform that formed a base for many applications, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, PeopleBrowsr and Sobees, these platforms soon looked to other social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed for additional integration. And many have conquered all mediums, with desktop, web and mobile apps. In fact, the Twitter client race has gradually become a competition to be the first to launch useful and powerful apps that are chock full of features. Sobees, which has flown relatively under the radar, is one of the first clients to launch LinkedIn integration after the professional social network just released its API.

Sobees, which has a Windows native desktop app built in .NET and a web application built off of Microsoft Silverlight, integrates Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and now LinkedIn. Sobees will pull in a full feed from LinkedIn including connections updates, status updates, applications updates, jobs posted, groups joined, recommendations and profiles changes. You can also post status updates from the client, maintain connections, search your LinkedIn stream, and view profiles of connections.

In addition to LinkedIn, Sobees previously added a Facebook full feed, with the inclusion of profiles, friends, events, two-way status updates and your Inbox; and MySpace activities, including status, top friends and comments, with the possibility to update your status. And Sobees supports multiple Twitter accounts, replies, retweets, spam reporting, blocking users, replies to all, updates to status, posting pictures, shortening urls, and spell check.

Sobees desktop offers Twitter lists but the web client does not include list functionality yet. And geolocation will be added to both versions of the clients soon. You can also search Twitter and Friendfeed and enable the client in English, French, German, Italian and soon Spanish.

And in its first venture in the mobile space, Sobees is launching a native Android Twitter client which has support for multiple Twitter accounts, Twitter search and most of the basic Twitter functionality. While the app doesn’t yet have geolocation or lists, Sobees will be adding these features in the near future. Sobees says that an iPhone app is in the pipeline as well.

The Twitter client space is crowded, but it seems that Sobees could make its mark with its various clients. Its Windows client is particularly compelling and will face competition from Seesmic’s recently launched Windows app. But Sobees’ clients, both web and desktops, already feature MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter functionality, making it the most all-inclusive offering on the market. Seesmic and TweetDeck both have mobile offerings which are more expansive but Sobees hopes to boost its Android app soon. So why have we not heard more about Sobees? deskNet, the startup that develops Sobees, is bootstrapped and the company’s founder, Francois Bochatay, says that it simply has not been doing an PR or marketing outreach.

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We all know the Mobile web is exploding in popularity. Opera Mini, Opera’s mobile browser, grew its monthly users by 11 percent to nearly 40 million users in October from 32 million users in August. In terms of page views, Opera Mini delivered 17.2 billion last month, a 238 percent annual increase, indicating that mobile web usage is growing fast. Since September’s report, page-views have gone up by nearly 15 percent.

Opera also reported increased data consumption on its mobile browsers, which compresses up to 90% of the data to save network bandwidth, with Mini users generating more than 263 million MB of data for operators worldwide in October 2009, a 16 percent increase in data consumption since September 2009. Since October 2008, data traffic is up 233 percent.

Although these stats are impressive, it’s important to acknowledge the immense popularity of Webkit and Apple’s Safari Browser. But Opera Mini does seem to have a stronghold in Russia, Asia and Europe. The top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage are (in order): Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Poland and Vietnam.

From October 2008 to October 2009, overall page-views in these countries listed increased by 332 percent, but Opera released some interesting statistics about usage in Latin America in this month’s State of the Browser report. Brazil, Mexico and Argentina lead the countries with the most usage in Latin America.

Unsurprisingly, Google and Facebook are doing well in Latin America, according to the report. While Orkut is strong in Brazil and Paraguay, Facebook is slowly chipping away at its stronghold. Hotmail is the most popular e-mail site in Latin America and Auction site MercadoLibre, eBay’s Latin American partner, is drawing large amounts of users in Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru. And Nokia and Sony Ericsson are by far the most popular handset brands chosen by Opera Mini users in Latin America.

Opera claims that using Opera Mini saves people “billions of dollars every year off their mobile phone bills” because the browser compresses data by up to 90%, which could reduce the amount users pay each month for mobile data. To promote these savings, Opera is launching a new cost savings calculator to let users figure out how much they could save each month. Opera claims that Mini users save a total of $9.4 billion USD per year.

It’s important to take this number with a grain of salt. Opera’s complex calculations look at the top operators in each country, and determine how much they typically charge per MB of browsing, and averaged those figures together. The average cost of browsing in each country is then multiplied by the amount of traffic generated in each country, and the resulting totals are summed and compared to the totals for uncompressed data traffic. The caveat is that Opera’s calculations reflects metered rates (cost per MB) and not flat-rate subscription options, which skews the numbers in their favor.

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Google’s acquisition of display advertising startup Teracent yesterday had significant meaning for rival Tumri; the San Mateo-based advertising platform now counts tech giant Google as a competitor. Tumri, which launched in 2004, provides a similar advertising technology to Teracent. The startup’s product, the AdPod, creates display ads that are customized in realtime to the specific consumer and site.

Tumri’s dynamic ad platform is optimized at the creative level to enable advertisers to change the animation, background template, featured product, headline, image, and more dynamically based on who is viewing the ad and where the individual is viewing the ad from geographically.

Over the past five years, Tumri has picked up a roster of impressive clients including HP, Dell, Lenovo, Sears, K-Mart, Nike, Bank of America, Expedia and British Airways. While Tumri’s CEO Calvin Lui won’t reveal the startup’s revenue numbers, he says Tumri has seen triple digit revenue growth over the past few years.

Interestingly, Tumri has an ongoing partnership with Google which allows them to serve Tumri’s display ads within Google’s content network and via DoubleClick. Tumri also has partnerships with AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Both Tumrui and Teracent partner with Yahoo to power its Smart Ads program for PC advertisers.

Lui told me that he doesn’t anticipate the partnership with Google ending but he did admit that with the acquisition of Teracent, Google has become somewhat of a “frenemy.” As I wrote yesterday, Google says that Teracent’s technology will now be offered to its display advertising clients who run campaigns in Google’s Content Network and to DoubleClick clients. Both Teracent and Tumri were reported as possible acquisition candidates as of a few weeks ago, but Lui declined to comment on any talks with Google about a buyout.

It’s unclear what the state of these partnerships will be when the dust settles post-acquisition but a Yahoo spokeswoman told me that they anticipate to continue its deal with Teracent. But it should be interesting to see if Google will be ok with parsing out its new advertising technology to competitors. Regardless, Lui and Tumri seem to seem optimistic about its prospects facing now rival Google. Says Lui, “This has been an a great opportunity to evangelize this part of the advertising market.”

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The site will feature daily editorial picks on clothing, accessories, and beauty products. Users can then click to purchase the picks on various retail sites. You can filter results by category, designer, price range and store. Users can share products to Facebook, Twitter and save any items to an Amazon Wish List. The site also serves as a comparison shopping site between merchants, and features nearly 100,000 various fashion items from more than 450 brands.

Lucky is using Mall Network’s loyalty shopping technology to power a rewards program that would let shoppers receive up to 25 percent cash back for purchases. The site is an obvious take on how to incorporate editorial content with retail engagement. It seems like the first step for the magazine to create more of a digital presence in the retail world

Lucky is making money from affiliate fees from retailers as well as advertising on the site. Vogue Magazine, which like Lucky, is a Conde Nast publication, just hired President Obama’s campaign digital strategists, Blue State Digital, to help them maximize revenue online. But Lucky seems to have curated its own digital strategy without the help of consultants. The magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Kim France, says the new site is designed to bring the magazine’s content online, but in an engaging and contextual way. The site doesn’t aim to create an e-commerce platform but is geared more towards supporting editorial content and retail stores. Inspired by the idea of comparison shopping portals on Google, Bing and other search engines, Lucky’s web director, Mary Gail Pezzimenti, aimed to create a better version of this that caters to fashion products.

Pezzimenti says that Lucky is looking to broaden its footstep in the digital world in the future, with the possibility of partnering with online sample sale sites, which are gaining serious traction in the space. The magazine is also interested in exploring the intersection of social media and shopping, which startups IMshopping and Weardrobe is furthering. Pezzimenti also highlighted the possibility of bringing click-to-buy technology to Lucky’s site, where users could by products directly from a video or phone. And Lucky is looking into providing personalized styling recommendations, like that of Like’s Covet.com, to help create customized product referrals for users

Earlier this year, Lucky launched a pretty nifty iPhone app that serves as a digital concierge service. The app will locate the closest retailer that carries a particular item or you can buy it online immediately. Once the app locates the retailer that contains the desired item, it will put it on hold at the store. The app has seen over 160,000 downloads since February.

You’ve got to hand it to Lucky. In an age where print magazines are floundering, it’s refreshing to see a publication look towards startups, social media and the web for digital inspiration.

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Gmail is furthering its offline strategy today with the announcement of the ability to include attachments in composed emails when offline. Google says this was one of the most requested features for Offline Gmail and starting today, you be able to attach files in offline mode the way you would in online Gmail.

You’ll be able to attach all types of files except inline images, which are images in the body of the email. When you have Offline Gmail enabled, Google says that mail now goes through the outbox when you’re online or offline, allowing Gmail to capture all attachments regardless of internet connections.

Earlier this year, Google rolled out a Google Gears version of Gmail, which detects when you are offline. It caches your e-mail so that you can read it, respond to it, search it, star it, or label it. When you are connected to the Internet again, it sends all the messages. Google also introduced an offline version of Calendar.

Offline access is a big part of Google’s strategy to chip away at Microsoft’s Outlook’s hold on business email. For promotional purposes, Google now wants Gmail users who are using Offline features to take pictures of themselves while accessing their email from an unusual place, such as a submarine, without internet access. Google will post the most interesting photos on the Gmail Blog. I guess a picture is worth a thousand words.

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While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications.

Although the API is now available for all, LinkedIn has already partnered with a select group of developers. Here are a few examples of their integrations.

TweetDeck

Twitter, MySpace and Facebook client TweetDeck will be integrated with LinkedIn in its next version. You will be able to add a LinkedIn column to your TweetDeck, showing all the updates from your network that would normally be visible on the LinkedIn web page. From the client, you’ll be able to see a stream of updates from your contacts, view profiles of contacts and comment and message contacts directly from TweetDeck. If you want to filter the LinkedIn column to only show certain types of update (e.g. status updates, connections or profile changes), you will be able to manage this from the new filter panel which will appear when you click the column header.

Posterous

You can now add LinkedIn as an autopost site on Posterous. So when you update to Posterous, you’ll be able to update directly to your Status Message on LinkedIn. It doesn’t appear that it works the other way around.

Ribbit

Through Knx.to’s recently launched technology, cloud-based VoIP telephony service Ribbit Mobile will pull in the LinkedIn contact info and status updates from anyone who calls you on Ribbit. It will also pull in info from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other social media sites. The idea is to give a social context to all of your contacts, which is definitely useful information for both professional and personal contacts.

JobDASH

From the developers of TwitterJobSearch, comes JobDASH, which is an Adobe Air-powered Twitter and LinkedIn client that serves as a career management tool for IT professionals.t can be used to Track colleagues via LinkedIn, and track industry news. JobDASH also features real-time job listings that are posted on Twitter and cross posted from LinkedIn. You’ll be able to filter listings based on type of job.

Box.net

While Box.net co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie is not yet sure of eventual scope of the integration, it will enable users to take content from Box.net and share it with LinkedIn contacts and on their LinkedIn profiles. Box.net is doing this via its OpenBox platform. The long-term approach is to include LinkedIn data and details on our own users’ profiles (on Box.net) to make a richer experience.

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Google’s on a bit of a shopping spree this holiday season. The search giant just acquired AdMob for $750 million a few weeks ago. Today, Google has acquired display advertising company Teracent for an undisclosed amount of money. The deal is expected to close this quarter.

Teracent’s Intelligent Display Advertising technology creates display ads entirely customized to the specific consumer and site. The startup’s proprietary alogirthims automatically pick the creative parts of a display ad (images, colors, text) in real-time determined by like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

To date, Teracent has only raised $5.8 million in funding. Google says that Teracent’s technology will now be offered to its display advertising clients who run campaigns in Google’s Content Network and to DoubleClick clients. Google had been rumored to be in talks with Teracent about a possible acquisition a few weeks ago. Earlier this year, Yahoo announced a partnership with Teracent as part of its “Smart Ads” program for PC and mobile advertisers. With Teracent’s acquisition by Google, I’m assuming this partnership is nullified.

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As rumors continue to swirl around LinkedIn’s possible IPO, the professional social network is steadily adding useful features that help transcend the platform’s technology into other applications.

LinkedIn recently launched two-way integration with Twitter and also rolled out a plug-in to pull in your LinkedIn contacts within Microsoft Outlook. And today, LinkedIn is opening up its API to start letting developers make applications that tap into LinkedIn’s social network.

While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications. The social network’s search engine was re-launched last year and has done over one billion queries in this year alone.

Over the past year, LinkedIn has made select business development partnerships with technology companies for integrations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Twitter. While these partnerships created additional channels for LinkedIn’s platform, the opening up of the social network’s API is no doubt going to expand its presence across the web, perhaps representing a new level of growth for the social network.

LinkedIn has already tested the API with several developers and applications are already going to be launching in the near future. Twitter, MySpace and Facebook client TweetDeck will be integrated with LinkedIn in its next version. From the client, you’ll be able to see a stream of updates from your contacts, view profiles of contacts and comment and message contacts directly from TweetDeck. Posterous, Box.net, and Ribbit will all launch LinkedIn integrations in the near future as well.

LinkedIn’s VP of search and platform products, Adam Nash, told me that over the past year, the network has received 4,000 requests from developers to integrate LinkedIn with their applications. Nash says that this is the first step for LinkedIn to become an open ecosystem and there are future plans for additional APIs to be released down the line.

50 million users strong, LinkedIn could expand its already powerful growth with development of third-party applications. It’s a no-brainer for LinkedIn to open up its API. As Twitter’s platform has shown, an open ecosystem produces innovative and sometimes, extremely popular, products around a product. And it doesn’t hurt to have a loyal developer community as well.

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Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a new product today, Zoho Recruit. A niche product, Zoho Recruit, is an application designed to help HR Departments and staffing agencies management recruitment.

Zoho Recruit, which is an offshoot of Zoho People’s recruitment technology, is an Applicant Tracking System that helps staffing agencies and recruiting departments track job openings, resumes, candidates and contacts. The application will source candidates by gathering resumes from multiple sources on the web and includes a technology that will weed out the candidates.

The application will include a database that manages resumes and track potential candidates throughout the interviewing process. You can also schedule interviews, send automatic e-mail notifications and log candidate activities and notes.

Zoho Recruit will also power a platform to create and publish job openings. The app includes an activity stream to let users stay on tops of new within Zoho Recruit and is fully customizable. Zoho Recruit is based on a freemium model, with the more feature-rich platform priced at $12/per user/per month.

Zoho continues to innovate and iterate by launching new products and add-ons to its existing offerings. Most recently, the startup launched Zoho Discussions, a online forum tool for businesses. Over the past two years, Zohos has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. Zoho knows that it will have to fight an uphill battle to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and soon Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. Although Zoho ’s the underdog, the startup’s strategy may be paying off—the startup has reached 2 million users in just 4 years. And the startup is on Microsoft’s radar, with a Microsoft exec calling of Zoho as a competitor that offered “fake Office capabilities.”

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We’ve seen in the past year that Hulu gets testy about their video content being used on other sites or platforms, with Boxee and TV.com both forced to remove Hulu content from their sites and applications. Now startup Rippol is facing the same fate.

Rippol just publicly launched their video discovery sites at yesterday’s Real-Time CrunchUp, which combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting video content.

Less than a few hours after Rippol launched, the startup’s co-founder Aaron Crayford received notice from Hulu that the video embeds on Rippol from Hulu were in violation of the terms of service which state that embeds are for personal, non-commercial use only. While Rippol says that they won’t place ads in the videos or around the videos, Hulu says that the simple fact that Rippol plans to make money from the entire content service violates the TOS. Instead, Hulu offered Rippol the ability to us its site map, which is a feed that links back to Hulu for video playback. Don’t embed, says Hulu. Link instead. Here’s the email notice:

We saw that you launched today. We want to notify you that you are using our embeds in violation of our terms of service which state specifically that embeds are for personal, non-commercial use only. As such we will plan to block embedding from your site by 12/4. Typically we disable embedding immediately but given that you just launched, we want to give you some time to transition.

In the place of the embeds, we can offer you is a site map feed that links back to Hulu for video playback and includes several useful pieces of metadata in a feed. It includes video titles, descriptions, thumbnails, video type, duration info, season number, episode number, air date, expiration date, in addition to the video link on Hulu.com.

It is updated every few hours: http://www.hulu.com/video_sitemap.index.xml

When Rippol responded that they will never put ads in or around Hulu content, Hulu responded:

Ad placement would be more relevant to the “non-commercial” part of the TOS vs. the “personal” part. While you may not plan to place ads near our content, Rippol is a commercial business in the sense that you plan to make money from the content service you create. Thus our content on your site is being used for commercial purposes, even if it is indirect (i.e. you attract users with Hulu content but only monetize other content).

Note we are not singling out Rippol as we have transitioned other premium video aggregators to our site map feed.

Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It also 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. Naturally, some of the TV shows and movies that surface on Rippol are from Hulu.

Boxee encountered a similar issue in February. Boxee’s software package converts computers, Apple TVs and other popular products into media centers, and integrated Hulu content. But this ended abruptly in February when Hulu’s studio content partners demanded that Boxee take down all videos pulled from from Hulu. TV.com suffered a similar fate when Hulu pulled the plug on content earlier this year, although CBS Interactive, which owns TV.com, vehemently argued that they were within their rights to stream Hulu content.

The thing is that Rippol, and perhaps other video sites like Boxee, may be willing to enter into a distribution agreement with Hulu with regard to embedding content. In Hulu’s note to Rippol, the representative stated that “the only way for a company to legitimately embed our videos the way you do is to enter into a structured distribution relationship with us. However, we are currently entering into these very selectively.”

When Hulu axed the Boxee integration, CEO Jason Kilar wrote in a blog post:

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.

Our mission to make media dramatically easier and more user-focused has not changed and will not change. We will not stop until we achieve it and we are sober in our assessment that we have such a long way to go.

The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users. Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time. We embrace this activity in ways that respect content owners’ — and even the entire industry’s — challenges to create great content that users love. Yes, it’s a complex matter. A tough mission, and a never-ending one, but one we are passionately committed to.

Even before Hulu launched the site had announced partnerships to embed content with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo. The site also has a partnership with Comcast’s Fancast . And the site also recently launched the ability to watch some video content its video content on its Facebook page.

It’s clear the Hulu is at the mercy of of studio content owners who are calling the shots on partnerships and who should be allowed to embed Hulu content. Kilar is correct in saying that Hulu’s strategy of limited partnerships is not a win for users. But the other party left out here are the developers and startups, like Rippol and Boxee, which are crating innovative and useful products that provide a creative way to watch their videos and even drive traffic to Hulu.

When Hulu was announced in 2007, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said that Hulu would aim to have “ubiquitous distribution.” The press release issued at the time said that Hulu “will actively seek agreements with a variety of additional distribution partners.” The release also stated that each “distribution partner will feature the site’s content in an embedded player customized with a look and feel consistent with each site, making the offering organic to each destination.”

Clearly, when Hulu was announced, the ambitions were to have many more partnerships to distribute the site’s content. But all signs have pointed to the fact that Hulu and its content partners are simply not open to startups and smaller sites who have new innovations to video consumption. Frankly, it’s disappointing for the developer community as well as consumers.

In the meantime, Rippol’s Crayford says that most of Hulu’s content is available on the content owners sites, which means Rippol will point crawlers to a lot of different domains instead of Hulu, which is tedious (TV.com does this).

When we asked Hulu about the Rippol situation, they responded:

Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been told our folks are in communication with Rippol on how to possibly work together.

The basic policy on our embeds is that we do not allow sites to host the entire Hulu content library without a formal distribution agreement. These agreements are evaluated on a case by case basis with the involvement of content owners. Alternatively, we provide a video site map to allow publishers to link to our videos.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

We’re here at the second TechCrunch RealTime CrunchUp in San Francisco, where we’ll be taking a deeper dive into realtime technology and where the streams are taking us. Kicking off the event is a conversation with Twitter COO Dick Costolo. And we’ll have much more real-time goodness coming your way throughout the day (see the agenda below). Watch the live stream of the event, powered by Ustream, here!

CRUNCHUP AGENDA

9:00 – 9:30 AM From RSS To Realtime: A Conversation With Twitter COO Dick Costolo
moderators: Michael Arrington, Steve Gillmor

9:30 – 11:00 AM Roundtable: Filtering The Stream. Getting Rid of the Noise.
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, Steve Gillmor

Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox
Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal
Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur
Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal
CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss
Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng
Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor
MySpace, Chief Product Officer, Jason Hirschhorn
Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen
OneRiot, CEO Kimbal Musk
Angel Investor Ron Conway

11:00 – 11:15 AM Break

11:15 – 11:45 AM The Social Enterprise: A Conversation With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
moderators: Steve Gillmor, Erick Schonfeld

11:45 – 12:30 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)
introductions by Erick Schonfeld, Jason Kincaid

Hot Potato, Justin Shaffer
Seesmic, Loic Le Meur
Qwisk, Zachary Garbow
Knx.to, Rohit Khare, Salim Ismail
StatusNet, Evan Prodromou
Mozzler, Chris Were
Realtime Pitch From The Audience*

12:30 – 2:00 PM Lunch

2:00 – 2:45 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)
introductions by Jason Kincaid, Leena Rao

Plymedia, Matt Knopf
Tweetmeme, Nick Halstead
VideoLobby, Peter Urban
Rippol, Aaron Crayford
Bazaar Labs, Somrat Niyogi
Realtime Pitch From the Audience*

2:45 – 3:30 PM Media Streams: Are These The Ultimate Marketing Vehicles?
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, Paul Carr

DailyBooth, co-founder Ryan Amos
Ad.ly, CEO Sean Rad
CoTweet, CEO Jesse Engle
Hollywood agent, Robin Bechtel (digital strategist for Britney Spears, Warner Bros. Records)
more
NewTek, SVP strategic development Philip Nelson

3:30 – 3:45 Break

3:45 – 4:30 Geo Streams: We Know Where You Are, Right Now
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, MG Siegler

Foursquare, VP business development Tristan Walker
Twitter, director of platform Ryan Sarver
Google, Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
SimpleGeo, founder Matt Galligan
Hot Potato, founder Justin Shaffer
Mixer Labs, CEO Elad Gil

4:30 – 5:00 Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, Steve Gillmor

A discussion with Paul Buchheit (Facebook/Friendfeed/Gmail) and Rob Goldman, CEO Threadsy

5:00 – 5:45 PM Where The Realtime Rubber Meets The Road: When Does The Serious Money Come In?
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, Steve Gillmor

Angel investor, Ron Conway
Microsoft, corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development, Dan’l Lewin
Charles River Ventures, VC George Zachary
Accel Partners, VC Andrew Braccia
Foundes Fund, VC Brian Singerman
Facebook/Friendfeed, Paul Buchheit

5:45 – 7:30 PM Realtime After Party and StartUp Demos

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

There are a number of real-time search engines in the space, including Collecta and OneRiot. Today, at the Real-Time CrunchUp, Infoaxe debuts its real time search engine.

What makes Infoaxe unique is that it doesn’t tap into streams from Twitter, Facebook, or Digg for content. Infoaxe’s search engine relies completely on attention data generated by the startup’s web history search engine.

Infoaxe doesn’t want to replace Google or even other real-time search engines. Instead, it wants to provide another layer on top of Google search results, which is why all results on InfoAxe are featured side by side with the same results from Google. One criticism of InfoAxe’s search algorithm is that it only draws from the data hose of its product, which provides a limited view. But InfoAxe says that its web history search engine toolbar just crossed 2 million registered users.

Regardless, InfoAxe could have a promising real-time product. Advised at Stanford by the late Rajeev Motwani and Professor Hector Garcia Molina, InfoAxe has raised $900,000 in seed funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Labrador Ventures, Band of Angels and Amidzad Partners.

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For security nuts and enterprise clients, Cisco is launching an iPhone app, called Cisco SIO, to put Cisco Security Intelligence Operations in users’ hands. The app gives giving users real-time access to security information and also lets users create personalized alerts to show security threats that could impact their network.

Powered by the Cisco’s Security IntelliShield Alert Manager Service, the app informs, protects and enables IT staff to respond in real time to alerts and threats to the network. The application will deliver data on early warning intelligence, threat vulnerabilities and sill suggest solutions to any problems that take place. It also provides unique IP and URL address e-mail and Web reputation look-up powered by the Cisco’s IronPort SenderBase Security Network. Via the app, you’ll also be able to access Cisco security news and information from the company’s blog, Twitter feed, podcasts and press releases, which Cisco hopes to use to engage with the greater security technology community.

Cisco’s Security Intelligence Operations product has four main components. Cisco SensorBase is a threat-monitoring network pulls in data from allof Cisco devices and services. Cisco IntelliShield is a historical-threat database of 40,000 vulnerabilities and 3,300 IPS signatures; and more than 600 third-party threat-intelligence sources, which track more than 500 third-party data feeds and 100 security news feeds around the clock. Cisco also offers enterprises a Threat Operations Center which is composed of 500 security analysts around the world that monitor and research threats 24 hours a day. SIO also offers real-time updates with recommendations and other content to try to help clients track threats, analyze intelligence and more.

As the iPhone increasingly gains traction as a mobile device used in the business world, enterprise giants like Cisco are also throwing their hat in the ring. Real-time information, especially when it comes to IT security, is necessary to have on-demand. Cisco has also rolled out apps for its WebEx Meeting Center and mobile offerings.

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We recently wrote about stealth startup Project Fair Bid, which aimed to reinvent and legitimize a controversial bidding model pioneered by Swoopo. Today, Project Fair Bid is emerging from its cocoon as BigDeal.com, an auction-based e-commerce site which takes a different twist on the questionable paid bidding model.

Similar to Swoopo, BigDeal lets users purchase virtual bids $0.75 each which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by $0.15 and an extra 30 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. With this model, items end up selling substantially below their market value. But one of the main criticisms of Swoopo was the risk of losing your money spent on bids (regardless of whether you win or not) when the auction concludes. BigDeal takes a couple of steps to mitigate this risk.

With BigDeal’s model, any users who get outbid get a full credit of the money uses for bids to buy the item via a “Buy Item Now” option (which Swoopo also has, called “Swoop-it-now”). So if you spent $10 on bids, your Buy It Now price will be dropped by $10. Of course, the Buy It Now price will frequently be higher than the price of item sold for in the auction but at least users aren’t necessarily losing money all together. And the Buy It Now price is set at the same price that Amazon lists for the same product.

That’s not all. BigDeal provides an added incentive for bids by letting all users trade in the money they spent on bids for gift cards. All users get $1 gift card discount for every $1 spent on bids. So if you buy $25 in bids, BigDeal will give you a $100 gift card for $75. Gift cards that can be bought are from prominent retailers such as Amazon, Gap, Walmart, Foot Locker and more. It all sounds too good to be true, right? Well, Big Deal admits that they are taking a cut when it comes to the gift card bonus, but the incentive is designed to build loyalty around the site and draw a viral following. Big Deal monetizes by taking a percentage off of the sale price.

Big Deal’s co-founder, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau tells me that the site aims to insert transparency in every step of the bidding and buying process. For example, on a given item’s page, you’ll see a list of the other bidders who have submitted bids on the item, their time spent on bidding on the item, number of bids, and the time since each users last bid. Interestingly, Bid Deal also features the previous auctions that have taken place around an item, which gives you the bid history and the exact price the same item was sold for in past auctions. The site, which claims to only feature the top-of the line products, has also added high-quality pictures of all items and quirky (yet informative) descriptions of products. For example, part of the description for the Nintendo Wii includes a poem, “Ode To The Nintendo Wii.”

For now Big Deal, which is open to the U.S. only, is concentrating on consumer electronics but hopes to expand to additional verticals in the near future. Big Deal’s founders all have significant experience in both the auction and e-commerce space, with alums from eBay, Yahoo Shopping, Walmart, and more. from The startup raised $4.5 million in funding from from the Mayfield Fund, First Round Capital, and Foundation Capital, with Raj Kapoor, Charles Moldow and Josh Kopelman on the the board of directors.

There is evidence that Big Deal could takeoff. While Swoopo’s model was controversial, the startup was able gain a loyal following since launching in late 2008, with the site counting nearly 2 million members in Canada, Germany, the U.S., Austria, and Switzerland and recently raising a $10 million funding round led by August Capital.

It seems that Big Deal has taken the best elements of Swoopo’s model and added several features which make it more of a win-win for consumers. Plus, it adds information, like bidding history, to the process to make the auction more fair. And the very least, you can leave the site with a gift card, so the money you spend on bids isn’t completely lost.

While the site will face competition from Swoopo, and even eBay to a certain degree, it is compelling. After demoing the product, I’m actually a fan and am looking forward to trying it out to perhaps check some items off of my holiday shopping list. Like any auction model, Big Deal requires more of a time investment than a direct buy retail site but it’s actually fun to compete for a product. I’m just waiting for the site to start selling designer handbags.

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Twitter has implemented a small change today, which by comparison to Retweets and UI redesigns isn’t such a huge deal but it’s definitely worth mention. Twitter’s prompting question above the box from which you Tweet from has been “What are you doing” since the microblogging platform launched. Today, it’s been changed to “What’s Happening.”

It’s a wise move because “What are you doing” seemed too narrow for the platform. Broadening the question to match all the things people use twitter for was necessary. Considering that Twitter is now used for breaking news, that term doesn’t really cover it. Here’s the full text of co-founder Biz Stone’s blog post:

People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, “What’s happening?” A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive.

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering “What are you doing?” with “Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,” at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”

We don’t expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter, but maybe it’ll make it easier to explain to your dad.

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There continue to be conflicting views as to whether iPhone developers actually make money from ads on the iPhone. One issue is that free app developers who advertise in games end up paying on a CPC basis, in which the click takes the visitor to the App Store. But often times the actual download doesn’t take place, so the developer is left paying for clicks that don’t produce conversions, says mobile game advertising network Greystripe. Now the network is changing its ad network economics around to help developers mitigate this issue.

Greystripe is offering a $0.99 per download program available today to guarantee iPhone application developers downloads of their free apps. Of course, this comes with a catch. Greystripe is offering download program to publishers who spend a minimum of $10,000 and is being offered on a limited basis to the first 200 developers who apply. The first 100 qualifying developers who email techcrunch@greystripe.com will gain instant access to the program.

Greystripe’s says that its rich media full-screen ads generate higher click through rates and are able to generate better revenue to its publishers. Based on this, the network thinks it can run a pay per download program that works for its publishers and advertisers. Greystripe also recently introduced a guaranteed CPC program. Although Greystripe claims its rates are higher, we’ve heard they are on par with AdMob’s rates.

It’s important to note that with Google’s acquisition of AdMob, other mobile ad networks may be left scrambling. Greystripe is not only aiming to make their network for attractive, but is also trying to provide an incentive for developers who are using other ad networks to switch over. Google has high hopes for AdMob and it should certainly continue to be the leader of the pack in the future. That being said, Greystripe has been able to raised several rounds of VC funding and even got a $2 million infusion from NBC. It should be interesting to see how the smaller ad networks like Greystripe, Videogg and others fare against Google-owned AdMob.

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In time for the holiday shopping season, TheFind, a technology-heavy shopping search engine, has launched a nifty comparison shopping feature that’s worth a spin.

When you do a search for a product on the find, you can now choose to see the “best price” view. For now, the feature is only available for electronics and appliances, which amounts to around 40 million products (or 10 percent of the total index) indexed by TheFind. The search engine will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. It will automatically try to detect your location and list the best prices from local retailers. The engine will also list the items that have the lowest verified price. And TheFind is using iStorez coupon technology, which they bought a few months ago, to list discount codes and coupons for each applicable deal.

The comparison view also includes several little features, such as the ability to see what tax and shipping will be within results, as well as the inclusion of BizRate ratings for retailers. TheFind will eventually extend the best price feature to other verticals such as toys, health and beauty and more. The new feature is a bonus, but the site will face competition from Microsoft’s Bing, PriceGrabber and others.

TheFind aims to be a one-stop shopping destination for consumers where they can search for a varied list of items from multiple sources. The site currently indexes 400 million products from over 500,000 stores. Last year, TheFind launched an iPhone app that allows users to search for stores in a region that are selling a particular product. The app will also compare prices of products from stores in your location and even calculates the cost to drive from your location to a particular store.

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There are a host of directories of iPhone apps on the web as well as applications that make personalized recommendations of apps, such as Chorus, that might catch your fancy. Mplayit enters this space hoping to combine these two ambitions into one, comprehensive Facebook app.

Mplayit’s directory of iPhone and mobile apps includes all 100,000 plus iPhone apps and a smattering of other mobile app as well. Each app has a dedicated page where Mplayit will post videos of the app (created either by the developer or pulled from YouTube), a detailed description of the app and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from Apple’s App Store (from which Mplayit receives a affiliate fee).

Once you start clicking on various app and downloading apps, Mplayit will begin to recommend apps to you based on your behavior on the site. And you can share apps on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook page also shows the activity that’s taking place in other app stores, such as Apple’s, to show users what apps are receiving the most downloads, reviews and more. Users will also be able to see the “apptivity” within their social network, so they can clearly see what apps their friends and family are most interested in. Similar app directories will be rolled out in the Facebook app for the Blackberry and Android in the next few months.

Mplayit already helps major carriers, such as Sprint, power app directories for games and apps, so the startup has experience in the space. Mplayit founder and CEO Michael Powers, says that Facebook is the ideal platform for the the app discovery engine because of the ability to tap into your social graph to discover and share apps. The app is comprehensive and does give you more details about apps than the reviews in Apple’s App store. Mplayit is definitely worth a look.

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