Tag: SalesForce.com

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Salesforce.com is the mystery buyer of $2.6 million Social.com [UPDATED]

Salesforce.com Social Enterprise

Salesforce.com appears to be the buyer who paid $2.6 million in late June 2011 for social.com, this year’s top selling domain to date, that has been publicly reported.

The buyer in the social.com sale, which was co-brokered by Marksmen’s Cyntia King and Moniker.com’s John Mauriello, was never revealed.  The purchase set off speculation about the new owner ranging from Twitter to Living Social and even Salesforce.com.

However, up until now there hasn’t been any clear idea as to the buyer.

The primary contact for the domain is Alica Del Valle who is the Trademark Counsel at Salesforce.com.  It didn’t take very much research at all to figure it out.  It started with a few Google searches and I was able to connect the dots after using Network Solutions’ “User ID recovery tool” even though the domain was behind its not-so-private registration services.

I went to the Network Solutions “Forgot Your Login?” page and entered the domain social.com, then clicked the button: Retrieve Your User ID.   The resulting page showed Alica Del Valle as the primary contact, as shown here.

No big news, as others had already done this before but just never connected the name “Alica Del Valle” to Salesforce.com.

Alica Del Valle according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, is not only the attorney of record for Salesforce.com (scroll to bottom of filing), but has been the Trademark Counsel at Salesforce.com since July 2011 according to Alica’s own LinkedIn page.

Earlier in the week I had guessed Salesforce.com was the buyer of Social.com after discovering Salesforce was the buyer of Do.com, a “Coming Soon” site for a yet-to-be launched business productivity app.  The company had brokered the domain Do.com through Marksmen.  Do.com was also hidden behind Whois privacy at Network Solutions using the very same moniker “ADV”.  The privacy was finally removed two days after my Do.com story ran, officially revealing salesforce.com as the owner.

Last week at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff welcomed more than 30,000 attendees to the Social Enterprise.

At the time of this story being published, the Whois information for social.com remains regsistered to “ADV” behind Network Solutions’ private registration services.

The web address still does not resolve to a web page, however the buyer no longer appears to be a mystery.

Updated Nov. 30:  Marc Benioff confirmed publicly at Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce New York that he did buy social.com.

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Talking about this story: TechCrunch, Louis Gray, Domain Name Wire, BillHartzer.com and Elliot’s Blog (blog)

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Salesforce to launch yet to be revealed Do.com, get things done with anyone

Do.com by Salesforce

Salesforce.com has been announcing a number of new products recently, but one product that it hasn’t publicly announced as of yet, is a productivity app called “do” which can be found on the website Do.com.

The slogan on the homepage reads: “The app to get things done with anyone”

The Coming Soon page went live today. 

I discovered the site earlier this evening, after noticing that the domain name transferred from the marksmen.com server to its current server awsdns-52.com on August 26, but for the past several days no website was online.

In July I stumbled upon socl.com a secret Microsoft project while monitoring Marksmen’s name servers.  Marksmen brokered the sale of socl.com and also co-brokered the sale of social.com for $2.6 million to a mystery client. 

The mystery buyer behind social.com has yet to be revealed, but you can officially add Salesforce.com to the bunch.  Social.com is the largest publicly reported domain sale so far in 2011.

Dreamforce, the cloud computing conference held by Salesforce.com is currently being held in San Francisco until September 2.

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Buyers passed on the domain at TRAFFIC NYC 2009, now Salesforce.com unveils Database.com

database

TechCrunch is reporting that Salesforce.com, the cloud computing company that runs the world’s #1 sales application, has launched Database.com, its enterprise cloud database.   Last year, if you recall, the domain name database.com went up for sale at the TRAFFIC 2009 New York Domain Conference – with a reserve range of $800,000-900,000 USD. 

Buyers passed on the name, with some commenting that: “Database [Database.com] is not worth $250,000 let alone $800,000!”.

Not everyone saw the potential of the name, but Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff did.

Marc Benioff says: “We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that will power the shift to real-time enterprise applications that are natively cloud, mobile and social.”

Built to power cloud-based applications, Database.com will offer an infrastructure for enterprise apps to deliver updates and information in real-time. Developers can write their applications in Java, C#, Ruby, PHP or more and can run their apps anywhere – on Force.com, VMforce, Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure or Heroku.

Apps can also run natively on any device, like an iPad, an iPhone, Android or Blackberry. Salesforce says that these apps can all call the Database.com APIs whether it be for a small application or for an app that supports hundreds of thousands of users.

Salesforce.com heavily invests in domain names for branding purposes.  In 2007, the company acquired Force.com.  As Andrew Allemann pointed out: “The branding change was necessary because the company has expanded beyond simply sales management.”  eWeek ran a story that discussed the domain acquisition. 

Apparently Salesforce was in negotiations for the Force.com domain with a California man who had used the dot-com designation for his company, which was named for his surname, according to media reports. Its not clear how much Salesforce paid for the right to Force.com, but the ownership of Force.com has enabled Salesforce, finally, to settle on a brand with continuity.

“We needed a name change. The message wasnt clear enough,” Benioff said during a question-and-answer session with press and analysts following his keynote address. “The key thing was getting the brand out there, a new brand. [We had] sales, service, marketing [and then] heres the platform and the UI. On the platform side, we needed a revision of naming. I did it under duress of the employees. Today I think we really got that.”

Read more about the debut of Database.com.