Marc Benioff is like the Austin Powers of the technology business: a lovable and self-assured anachronism. He dresses in Hawaiian shirts, practices yoga and takes his golden retriever to work, as if the dot-com days had never ended. His company is just as anachronistic. It still calls itself Salesforce.com. Its 267 employees are encouraged to take time off each week to fight the digital divide, a cause that fell out of vogue with exposed-brick office walls. The walls in Salesforce.com's Embarcadero office? Exposed brick. Yet Benioff says the company -- which sells software for salespeople -- is actually benefiting from the post-dot-com austerity. Analysts agree that as its larger competitors struggle with the corporate spending downturn, this is a moment of opportunity for Salesforce.com. Benioff, 37, left a 13-year Oracle career to found Salesforce.com in 1999 with a team of software developers, some of the millions he'd earned at Oracle, and a $2 million investment from his … [Read more...] about NEWSMAKER PROFILE: Marc Benioff / Swimming against the dot-com tide
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Marietta Girl, 9, Sends Nearly 800 Cards To Military Troops
MARIETTA, GA — When Amie Burke asked her then eight-year-old daughter at the time to write an acrostic poem as part of her homeschool curriculum, Burke said she was completely caught off guard by the completed assignment. "She did it in less than two minutes," said Burke. "I said, 'What is it?' and she said, 'It's the word kids and stands for Kindness In Doing Service.' It stopped me in my tracks." After reviewing it, Burke immediately asked Jaida to elaborate more and explain what she meant. "She said, 'I just want to start a group where kids get together and do community service projects' and I gave her a high-five and was like, 'Let's do it.'" They came up with the second half of the name together. CARE stands for Connecting and Respecting Everyone. KIDS CARE was incorporated in January of this year and they kicked off with a book drive, collecting over 1,000 books. Their most recent project was a handmade holiday card drive that began in July at the Marietta Square Artesian … [Read more...] about Marietta Girl, 9, Sends Nearly 800 Cards To Military Troops
John Bolton Interview: Former Ambassador Mulls Presidential Run
For the past five months, John Bolton has been pondering the possibility of running for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. But he isn’t convinced that he has the proper temperament. “I think it’s a legitimate question,” says the notoriously prickly former ambassador to the United Nations, an assignment President Bush gave Bolton through a recess appointment after he proved unconfirmable even by a Republican-controlled Senate. “One person I spoke to said you have to be ready to get up every morning and enjoy campaigning for a year and a half roughly. And if you’re not prepared to enjoy it, this person advised, don’t do it.” As ambassador for 16 months between 2005 and 2006—the capstone of a controversial, combative career in various Republican administrations—Bolton was never mistaken for anybody who aspired to the title of Mr. Congeniality. With his acid tongue, hard-line policy views, impatience with bureaucratic niceties, … [Read more...] about John Bolton Interview: Former Ambassador Mulls Presidential Run