Marc Benioff
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Salesforce buys Slack for $27.7 billion
The massive cloud computing company wants Slack's real-time messenger to help bolster its cloud business brand.
Eric Schmidt: Ice Cream Sandwich coming in October or November
Got your sights set on the next version of Android, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich? We knew it was coming near the end of the year, but we now at least have a slightly more specific time frame straight from the horse's mouth. Google's own Eric Schmidt revealed in an interview with Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff that ICS -- the highly-anticipated update to Android that will merge elements of Honeycomb and Gingerbread into one universal OS -- can be expected to arrive in October or November. This matches up with rumors saying the Nexus Prime will be released in the tenth month, but it's the first time we've heard anything official from El Goog since I/O four months ago. Check out the video below to get Schmidt's full statement.
Salesforce CEO Benioff "gifted" App Store trademark and domain to Jobs
In an interview with Bloomberg, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tells an interesting tale of how he gave the App Store domain and trademark to to Apple as a gift to Steve Jobs. Of course, the App Store trademark itself is now under scrutiny, with Microsoft and Amazon claiming it is a generic term. Apparently Benioff and some of his team met with Jobs in 2003, and Steve suggested they build an ecosystem around their Salesforce product, which Jobs praised. They wound up with App Exchange, but Benioff also trademarked App Store and bought the domain. When Apple launched an app ecosystem for the iPhone, Benioff was in the audience during the announcement. He went directly to Jobs at the event and said he was giving Apple the trademark and domain as a gift, thanking him for his sage advice in 2003. It's a nice story, and sadly the kind of nice thing you don't hear that often in Silicon Valley these days. [via The Next Web]
