The keynote featured success stories from many clients, using many of the new in '12 sister sites. The School of Rock is an example of this and they demonstrated how their school functions with Do.com. Two announcements made for Do.com were an Android app and a now open API for developer use.
Then on came MC Hammer, performing with his crew "Too Legit to Quit" and "Can't Touch This."
Next came a quick segment that seemed fairly recycled from last year, touting the evolution of computing and its shift from on-premise servers and hardware to the cloud. These changes are fostering the "Social Revolution" in which Salesforce.com is proud to be part of.
The rest of the keynote were success stories from GE, Rossignol, Charles Schwab, Activision, Yelp, Commonwealth Bank, Virgin America, and Facebook. Marc Benioff's vision of General Electrics future was interesting and in short form think of engines with APIs, dumping data into Salesforce for analysis. I saw this on a smaller scale in the Dev Zone yesterday with the Fitbit. My highschool Cisco networking professor, Mr. Thomas, predicted this over a decade ago when he said everything will talk to everything and collect information about itself. Data is king.
The Fireside Chat with Marc Benioff and Sir Richard Branson started off interesting and then seemed to snowball off-topic. I enjoyed hearing about Branson's start and how he became who he is, but the conversation quickly turned to politics and my ears went numb; tuning in and out. Benioff inquired Branson's stance on the war on drugs. A cheer erupted as Branson announced the war on drugs was a failed effort and he would like to see countries "decriminalize" drugs (note, not legalize) and treat their use the same as you would treat alcoholism.
The Gala this evening was very enjoyable. 7-8 blocks away from the Moscone Center, City Hall was set up to entertain this year's almost 90,000 Dreamforce attendees. Starving from a long day, we were first greeted with popcorn. Popcorn turned into tents with gazpacho, BLTs, shrimp coctails and tons of beer and wine. Hiking deeper into the lawn area, more food tents contained quite an array of food including fish and chips, nachos, meatballs, pizza, and more.
Red Hot Chili Peppers came on a little after 8:15 and played their greatest hits, new and old (Can't Stop, By The Way, Dani California, Californications, Under the Bridge, Snow and others with Give It Away as the encore.
