Ajax Girl

On Monday, Google and Salesforce are officially announcing the complete integration of Google Apps (Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk) and Salesforce’s online enterprise apps. TechCrunch broke the story last week. Now we have some more details. Google Apps will get exposure to Salesforce’s one million paying business subscribers, and Salesforce in turn

Google is in effect becoming Salesforce’s productivity suite. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentation can be created from within Salesforce’s CRM application. With one click, sales people who use Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle. Sales events and marketing campaigns can be overlayed onto a Google Calendar, as well as colleague’s schedules for figuring out convenient meeting times. And GTalk works as the de facto instant messenger within Salesforce.

Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff tells me that he is embracing Google as another way to undercut Microsoft:

You’ve seen what we have been doing is slowly integrating all of our services with theirs. Certainly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which makes Google my best friend. I have spoken with a lot of customers who want to get off of Microsoft Word.

Of course, Microsoft’s desktop Office apps are threatened long-term by Google Apps, and its own CRM software for small businesses is threatened by Salesforce. But why didn’t Salesforce simply build its own Web-based productivity apps as so many others are doing? Says Benioff:

I really didn’t want to compete against Google in an area they consider core.

Better to gang up against Microsoft together. Now he has the leading Web-based productivity suite baked into Salesforce. But that brings up another question. If Google and Salesforce are so well suited for each other, why doesn’t Google just buy Salesforce? It could accelerate the growth of Google’s enterprise business and make it a little bit less reliant on advertising dollars (since Salesforce charges monthly subscriptions). When I put this notion to Benioff, he punts it back to Google:

You should give them a call and ask them about that.

Something tells me I won’t get a straight answer from them either.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/269770948/

BuddyTV, home to one of the web’s largest television-oriented communities, has raised $6 million in Series B funding from Madrona Venture Group. This round brings BuddyTV’s total funding to over $9 million.

BuddyTV aims to provide a comprehensive resource and community for television fans, serving up daily editorials, interviews, and discussions. Other features include a “Television Jockey” service, which allows users to stream video and audio live to other members as they share their thoughts on the latest TV events.

In June 2007 BuddyTV raised $2.8 million in a round led by Gemstar-TV Guide. Competitors to BuddyTV include MeeVee, which was recently placed on Deadpool watch.

We should note that previous rumors of BuddyTV’s acquisition by Comcast have proven to be false.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/269770833/

YouTorrent, the bittorrent meta search engine we wrote about in January, is on the market and has switched to legal torrents only.

TorrentFreak reports that “YouTorrent’s selling points are the great interface, an ad-less design, and its ability to search most of the bigger BitTorrent sites” and since launching in January has grown to a remarkable 10 million uniques per month.

In an odd move, the owners have switched YouTorrent’s meta-search to sites that only list legal torrents, a decision that may well kill YouTorrent’s traffic before the site finds a buyer.

How much the owners are chasing for YouTorrent was not disclosed, however the site has zero income as the owners have never run ads.

For those looking for a YouTorrent alternative now it’s useless, try PizzaTorrent.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/269668706/

Paris, France-based Iminent raised a €2.4 million second round of financing this month from I-Source Gestion and previous investor 360º Capital Partners. They’ve raised a total of €5.4 million to date - their first round was closed a year ago.

The company offers a Windows-only download that enhances the instant messaging experience with extravagant emoticons and video features.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/269570743/

GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. Calls will not go through.

We’ve noted problems with the service in the past, but never a general outage. The site is down. The service is down. Everything appears to be offline.

If you want to be a phone company, and get your users to rely on you to manage all of your incoming calls, this simply cannot happen. There are undoubtedly going to be a lot of very upset homeless people this morning, as well as GrandCentral’s other users.

GrandCentral’s blog is offline as well. If Google wants users to take the service seriously in the future, they should make some kind of announcement on their main blog letting users know what happened and when they can expect the service to be back.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/269515549/

AlertThingy, the Adobe AIR desktop application for FriendFeed that we previewed last month, has just launched. It is one of the first applications built on the new FriendFeed API.

The application allows users to see the data stream from people they follow on FriendFeed, and post new messages directly to the service. Users can also comment on posted items, and bookmark them. And possibly the best feature: it includes FriendFeed search.

Alert Thingy is now the second Adobe AIR application that is running full time on my desktop (the other is Twhirl, for Twitter). I expect it will be very popular with the Centralized Me crowd.

The application was created by Howard/Baines.

See Sobees for another desktop FriendFeed application, although it runs only on Windows machines. AIR applications are cross platform.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/269425428/