David Needle

Holiday Gifts With a Digital Twist Appeal to Consumers, Techies It’s not too early to start thinking about holiday gifts for the geeks in your life. Here are 10 gifts displayed at Pepcom’s annual “Halloween Spectacular.” Turn Your Bed into a ‘Smart Bed’ With Beddit Smart Beddit Smart is a thin sensor you place under […]

SAN FRANCISCO – Oracle’s chairman Larry Ellison told the OpenWorld audience Oct. 28 that his company has the answer to the constant threat of data breaches and cyber-attacks. “We need much better security, next generation security. We are not winning a lot of these cyber battles,” said Ellison. “We haven’t lost the war, but … […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Cisco’s John Chambers is excited about what government is doing when it comes to deploying and integrating digital technologies across society—just not the U.S. government. “For the first time, our country has not led in technical innovation,” said Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco who now serves as executive chairman. Chambers on Sept. 30 […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple CEO Tim Cook took pains to tell a packed hall of Box customers here at the BoxWorks conference Sept. 29 that Apple’s interest in the enterprise isn’t anything new. “We started many years ago, but kept it quiet, building enterprise features into our software because we realized that people don’t want to carry […]

SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft continues to make alliances with enterprise software rivals, the latest being an announcement that its Office productivity apps and services will integrate with Salesforce’s CRM platform. Since taking over as Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella has made Office 365 apps available to Apple iPad and iPhone users as well as Android device users. The […]

SAN FRANCISCO—What’s next for Uber, the popular ride-sharing service that’s disrupting the taxi industry in countries around the world? CEO and cofounder Travis Kalanick told attendees at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference that he’s looking forward to “the ride ahead” even if the visibility as to what’s next is a bit “foggy”. That’s because new technology always […]

Salesforce.com is spinning out two new sales prospect tracking services called SalesforceIQ for Small Business and SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud. Both are designed to provide data-driven insights and suggested next steps for busy sales representatives. The services, based on data analysis technology that Salesforce acquired with the July 2014 buyout of RelateIQ, analyze information in […]

Can hospitals and other medical providers tap cloud computing to get a better picture of patients’ needs? That’s the promise of Salesforce Health Cloud, a new service developed with the help of several leading care providers, including Centura Health, DJO Global, Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands and the University of California, San Francisco […]

SAN FRANCISO—Borrowing a page from Apple’s heavy emphasis on design and usability, Salesforce previewed the new Lightning Experience user interface for its Customer Relationship Management platform. Company officials say the Lightning Experience interface will make it easier for developers to create apps for the core Sales Cloud and for its corporate customers to add components […]

SAN FRANCISCO–The idea that you can get real work done on the tiny screen of a smartwatch may seem counterintuitive, but Salesforce just announced that 20 developer partners are bringing out apps for the Apple Watch designed to do just that. To be clear, you can still get more done with equivalent apps on a […]

Business intelligence tools have long been important to helping companies spot buying patterns, product return rates and other information useful in product development and support. But the information is by definition old because the analysis often happens days or weeks after the purchase information has been collected. In this age of social media, the popularity […]

Building on last year’s release of its easy-to-use, visual developer platform Lightning, Salesforce has announced the availability of Salesforce Lightning Components and AppExchange for Components. The idea behind Lightning is to simplify the development of enterprise mobile apps via point-and-click and drop down menus and templates. Components, which include handy functions such as search, mapping, […]