Salesforce.com has learned a number of lessons from the social network, and it shows in its enterprise applications. Facebook is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, and the milestone put Saleforce.com within the mood to touch upon the social network’s impact on enterprise software. It was five years ago that Saleforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told top managers that he wanted them all to get on Facebook because, he said, “here’s the direction we have to elect the software we bring to our customers,” recounts Peter Coffee, some of the executives who attended the meeting. That directive soon ended in a public “Facebook Imperative” blog by Benioff and was followed later in 2010 by the introduction of Salesforce Chatter, the collaborative social feed and micro-blogging tool since exposed pervasively through the vendor’s applications and platform. You could say, “and anything else is history,” but that wouldn’t really capture the level to which Salesforce.com has embraced the Facebook way, in step with Coffee, VP of strategic research... Read More »

Google desires to solve some misperceptions about Glass. We have got our own views at the truth. Tech’s Rich And Famous: Who’s Most Charitable? (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Google Glass provides a brand new perspective at the world, but people have trouble seeing it for what this is: a piece in progress. To chase away against misperceptions about its computer-augmented eyewear, Google on Thursday published a listing of the end 10 Google Glass Myths. “In its relatively short existence, Glass has seen some myths develop around it,” Google explained on its Google+ page for Glass. “While we’re flattered by the awareness, we thought it will probably make sense to tackle them, simply to clear the air.” Yet Google has not addressed perhaps an important question about Glass: Does it have a future? Technology blogger Robert Scoble, an early fan of Google Glass, published a Google+ post on Wednesday expressing doubts about Google’s commitment to the project. Scoble, who thrives on taking provocative... Read More »

Connection Draining enables AWS customers to shutter unneeded virtual servers without disrupting users’ in-flight requests to apps. Amazon has a brand new service, highlighted in a tweet by AWS CTO Werner Vogels on Thursday: Elastic Load Balancing now supports Connection Draining, he said, calling it “good news.” Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing service enables a hectic application to spread incoming traffic over a couple of instance of the applying for better response times. When combined with Amazon’s Auto Scaling service, both act together to dynamically allocate and reallocate resources in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud to fit a customer’s needs. Just as traffic often increases, it also decreases, necessitating a scaling back of resources. That’s where Connection Draining is available in. It’s needed during a workload’s scale-back period within the cloud. When traffic diminishes from a peak, instances and network connections needs to be shut down. Closing network connections risks disrupting application responses which are still within the delivery stage. If they’re closed clumsily, users may even... Read More »

Nordic Combined Troubleshooting: Not for the faint of heart. Resolve your non-technical spouse’s email connectivity issue over the telephone, within the air, while ski jumping. Sochi Olympics 2014: 10 Technologies In Spotlight (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Few activities engage an audience as effectively as sport. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, where competitors will publicly struggle to master themselves and their rivals in contests of mental and physical prowess. The human drama of sport, sadly, remains absent from the technology business, in the event you exclude iPhone line-waiting, a competition already on its way out. There isn’t any shortage of competition — we’ve patent wars, product release races, and battles for market share — but tech industry conflicts play out on balance sheets, in datacenters, and in living rooms, out of public view. The tech community needs its own version of the Olympics, an international movement to celebrate success, innovation, and great engineering in a technique... Read More »

Larry Ellison’s Oracle human capital management keynote results in questions on IBM, SAP, games, and island real estate. 16 Top Big Data Analytics Platforms (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) After a whole day of sessions at Oracle HCM World in Las Vegas and a one-hour keynote by Larry Ellison, perhaps it is just not surprising that among the HR professionals in attendance desired to ask the fame CEO questions on topics except human capital management. Ellison was only too happy to oblige, talking about acquisitions, competitors, acquisitions, games, and his plans for the island of Lanai in Hawaii, which he bought in 2012 for an estimated $500 million. Of course, topic A for Ellison throughout his “Modern HCM is Social HCM” keynote was Oracle HCM, the socially enabled application suite that Oracle lately touts as its fastest-growing cloud computing offering. Ellison called HCM and customer-experience apps an important systems at any company or government agency because they facilitate communications and manage the crucial information... Read More »