Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry

During a luncheon for press and analysts, Benioff was asked about this seemingly competitive swipe at Oracle. “Larry is my mentor,” he said. “They are a vendor to us. We have a great relationship with them.” In his 2009 book, “Behind the Cloud,” Benioff has a brief section called “The Larry Ellison Playbook,” where he talks about lessons he learned from Ellison, such as “always have a vision” and “think of it as you want it, not as it is!” Benioff, though, is no clone of Ellison. During the lunch he also talked about the company’s proposed campus in San Francisco, on the land next to a new UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, for which he and his wife donated $100 million. He said the big campus will be important in growing the company and its workforce. “It’s very important for us to have employees for life,” he said. Benioff also went around talking to and giving kudos to many top Salesforce executives during the lunch, in contrast to what he calls Ellison’s “management-by-ridicule” tactics.

That was out of the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch. You can find that article, in full, here. E-Consultancy also mentioned the book:

Marc Benioff probably doesn't mind a few clouds. Salesforce.com's CEO believes that cloud computing is a big part of the future, and has called the book he wrote about Salesforce.com's rise Behind the Cloud. But Benioff isn't just talking about and promoting the cloud. He's putting his money where his mouth is, and Salesforce.com is increasingly looking to play a larger role in the cloud computing market. Yesterday, the company made one of its biggest announcements yet: Database.com. Billed as "the enterprise cloud database," Database.com aims to make your existing database a thing of the past. Instead of installing MySQL on your server, or spending thousands upon thousands of dollars licensing MS SQL Server or Oracle, Benioff believes "Databases need to be in the cloud" and wants businesses to store, manage and interact with their data using Database.com, which will be publicly available in 2011.

Find the rest of that article, here.

American Values: Thrift from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

Ben Franklin once said “a penny saved is a penny earned.” In this era of advertising and prominently-placed product logos, though, can we say that thrift is still a fundamental American Value? Or is conspicuous consumption more in keeping with what it means to be an American? In today’s installment of our American Values series, we talk with Lauren Weber, author of “In Cheap We Trust,” about our national relationship with thrift. We also talk with Amy Halloran. A self-proclaimed thrifty American, she joins us from Troy, NY.

Download the podcast here.

BREAKING RANKS: Sadly, Travel Writing Is Dead from The Atlantic Wire by Erik Hayden

In new series of essays, Foreign Policy magazine declares travel writing dead. The easy culprit to blame is Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love, but the truth is that bestselling memoir was only the final "nail in the coffin" for a once-proud genre that has increasingly become "brainless," asserts Graeme Wood (also a contributing editor at The Atlantic). He explains that an ideal travel writer is "a sort of prophet" who has a "way of seeing the world through the eyes of one who has the time and luxury to look at it directly, rather than through the distortions of propagandists and wishful thinkers." That ideal has now been perhaps irreversibly tarnished by an "internet age frivolity" that threatens to combine "the worst of the traveler and the worst of the homebody":
The writer goes overseas but brings back news about a tedious inner crisis, leaving undisturbed any insights about the places visited. Eat, Pray, Love -- to take only the easiest target as an example -- is a whole memoir premised on the notion that even the most decadent, boring, and conventional kinds of travel somehow heal the soul and can turn a suburban ninny into a Herodotus or a Basho.
But why has travel writing devolved into such a "narcissistic" genre? As best as Wood can see, it's simple: "it is easier than ever to travel, and not at all easier to write well." Now that perspectives of "previously arcane hideaways" are now more numerous, and the accounts written quicker than ever, the views have regrettably become "far less exquisite."

If you don't particularly agree, Foreign Policy has posted a contrasting piece: Travel Writing Lives!

Hear, hear. I honestly couldn't get through it; it read like my kid sister's blog; just, instead of homework and the cool new game on Facebook, there were musings about being abroad, and getting into people's pants. But, really: who cares? I wasn't interested, but I can see the commercial value for something like this, and it's obvious that the thing could take off, given the right sort of marketing. And it obviously accomplished what its masters had in store for the text. Right on. Though: with the right kind of web marketing, the publishers probably could have made more in ad dollars had they released the book in pieces, through a blog. Again, with the right marketing team behind it to take it viral; instead of millions of readers you could have had a few hundred million readers; you know, since it was laid out so linearly, it would've been perfect for the blog format. Just download the free Kindle sample to check it out; it's one of those things that you just want to check out, because all of the kids at school are talking about it.

What Seth Godin Did on His Summer Vacation from Inc.com by John Warrillow

For many Inc. readers, Seth Godin needs no introduction. The marketing guru has written twelve bestsellers and his latest book, Linchpin, hit the Amazon top 10 list on the first day it was published and later became a New York Times bestseller. As an entrepreneur, he has founded dozens of companies, some of which flopped. But one, Yoyodyne popped and was ultimately acquired by Yahoo! in 1998. Yoyodyne pioneered the use of ethical direct mail online, something Godin calls “permission marketing” – also the name of his classic book, which Fortune ranked as the year’s best business book in 1999. His latest company, Squidoo.com, is ranked among the top 125 sites in the U.S. by traffic.

Read more about Seth and his latest venture, here. See also: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers

Become Shelf Aware During Banned Books Week from Seattlest by Kim Jeffries

Sorry, we were too immersed in re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (gotta prep for part one of the movie, natch!) to realize the irony that the 2010 Banned Books Week started on Saturday. - The Seattlest

That's pretty much the way we feel: Banned Books is run of the mill marketing for commercial fiction. Check out their website: www.bannedbooksweek.org