Salesforce.com


It didn’t take long before discussion about technology and national security Wednesday turned to this week’s Taliban violence on a Pakistani teenager.

“When reached by cell phone the Taliban claimed credit,” said Google Chairman Eric Schmidt referring to critically-injured Malala Yousufzai. “We know their phone number? Hmm. Why don’t we know where they are?” Keep reading →


Ryan Panchadsaram was selected as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for the Blue Button program as part of the new White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program. The program pairs top innovators from the private sector, nonprofits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate on solutions that aim to deliver significant results in six months.



The Blue Button program is aimed at providing easy access to health records by enabling individuals to securely download their own health information via a simple text file, such as current medications and drug allergies, claims and treatment data, and lab reports. The Department of Veterans Affairs – working with the Department of Health & Human Services, the Department of Defense, and others – are collaborating on the project.

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This is one in a series introducing 18 Fellows working on five initiatives that are part of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program.

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Panchadsaram was most recently the head of Customer & Product at Ginger.io, a spin-off from MIT Media Lab, using big data to transform health. Keep reading →

Former Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, speaking in his new role as an executive for Salesforce.com, told the IT community today that powerful social networking applications are helping organizations interact with employees and customers in new dimensions, spurring a worldwide social enterprise revolution.

Kundra, who served as master of ceremonies for a two-hour presentation at a cloud computing event in Washington, D.C., showed an audience of about 2,000 gathered at the Washington Convention Center how leading corporations are incorporating applications that tap into a variety of social networking platforms to engage employees and customers. Keep reading →


The American Red Cross, borrowing an approach used successfully by Dell, launched what’s being billed as the first social media-based operations center devoted to humanitarian relief.

The Digital Operations Center, located in the Red Cross National Disaster Operations Center in Washington, D.C., expands the Red Cross’ ability to engage with the public during emergencies. The new operations center, which Dell help fund and design, is modeled after Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center, where Dell personnel monitor what customers are saying online about Dell and try to remedy customer issues proactively. Keep reading →


I got the announcement a couple days ago that Vivek Kundra is joining Salesforce.com as executive vice president of emerging markets, and the invitation to be first to post a comment.

Mark Amtower beat me to it and he was right to the point: “Is Salesforce.com part of that “IT Cartel” that Vivek warned us about?” Keep reading →

Salesforce.com demonstrated its latest mobile version of Chatter, a secure social media and collaboration application–and how it might work for FEMA–at the 35th annual FOSE Exposition.