The New York Times reports that between shots of hard liquor at the office yesterday, one Lehman employee shouted: “Are they going to take my BlackBerry? Come on, come get it.” Oh, they will. Research in Motion's BlackBerry sales were already disappointing in August. With Lehman expected to lay off most of its 29,000 Lehman employees, Merill Lynch and Bank of America expected to cut some 20,000, and plenty of Bear Stearns bankers still unemployed, September could be worse. Their ex-employers may not repossess the hardware, but RIM makes its steadiest profits from the recurring monthly service fees paid by businesses to push corporate email to the devices.

New York's most successful tech company is financial information provider Bloomberg, which somehow manages to charge companies thousands of dollars a year per subscription for access to the terminals that every Wall Street trader has on his or her desk. But with Lehman cutting 29,000 and Bank of America cutting another 20,000, Bloomberg's already low-volume business just got smaller at a time when it is facing redoubled competition from Thomson Reuters.

The benefit of a merger between the likes of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch is that the new company can combine their infrastructures and cut redundant costs. Unfortunately for IP telephony provider Cisco, it's one of those redundant costs. After flirting with Avaya for a couple of years, Merrill Lynch returned as a Cisco client in 2005. Last May, Cisco announced it would deploy 100,000 phones to Bank of America. When clients combine, vendors lose.

On February 27, 2007, Salesforce.com announced its largest deal ever, signing Merrill Lynch as a client and adding 25,000 new subscribers. How will Salesforce.com fare now Merrill and those 25,000 accounts are moving to Bank of America? At worst, Bank of America will insist Merill's brokers and their assistants use the Soffront CRM software the bank signed up for in March. At best, Salesforce.com will lose several thousand accounts as the new company seeks to reduce reduncancies and lays off as many as 20,000.

Investment bank Marlin and Associates helped Rupert Murdoch and News Corp's subsidiary Fox Interactive find MySpace, but otherwise it's been Lehman Brothers advisers bringing their favorite startup clients to the Murdoch empire. IGN Entertainment hired Lehman in the summer of 2005 and sold to Fox Interactive in the fall. Then in April 2007, photo-sharing site Photobucket hired the investment bank only to sell to Fox in May of the same year. Without Lehman Brothers, how will News Corp. grow on the Web?

InStranet went through its third round of funding way back in 2001, when it raised $14.7 million at a $50 million valuation in a round joined by Benchmark Capital. So it's not a huge exit. Then again, at least it's an exit. Salesforce.com will also report its second quarter earnings today. Analysts expect $260.56 million in revenues for a 47.6 percent year over year growth.

Next: VMware cofounder Diane Greene: Her only mistake was working for another tyrant

(Photo by AP/Margot)

Sure, my Sanyo phone has an AOL Instant Messanger app. But it takes two and half minutes to send a message and then another two and a half to see if I got one back. Here's a new version for the iPhone, which could put an end to expensive text messaging. An alternative: Facebook's new iPhone app integrates the site's new chat feature.

Remember radio? That place where you could listen to and discover music without paying for it? It's back.

FileMagnet lets you load and view PDFs and Office documents from you desktop. Such a nice convenient way to keep you working all the time.

This app, a guitar tuner that uses the iPhone's microphone, obviously targets a niche audience. We're betting the Edge asked Jobs for it

This Major League Baseball app would be better if it streamed MLB.tv straight to your iPhone. It doesn't. But it does show game highlights not too long after they actually happen — which won't be a bad way to get through graduations, weddings and PowerPoint presentations.

DutchTab takes the pain out of splitting a tab so you don't have to ask the server to do it. Only problem: greasy fingers on your iPhone.

After using DutchTab to figure out how much you owe, send your friend the cash via PayPal. Seriously, in 2000, the folks at PayPal thought this was how people would use the service rather than to settle eBay auctions. The future is here!

Always be closing, right? Keeping your leads' contact info in your pocket at all times will at least get you the steak knives.

Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette showed us what can go wrong when you have to email blog posts from your iPhone instead of being able to use an app like TypePad. (If you upload the wrong file, you still might end up blogging your deal memos by mistake, though.)

The oversharing generation's perfect app. Opt in and your friends will know where you are at all times.

From: Matthew Greeley

Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 6:04 PM

To: BI_MAILALL

Subject: Salesfarce Waddles into the Innovation Management Market...

Dear BI Team,

This week, Salesforce.com began their push in earnest, to cut into our market share of the On-Demand Innovation Management market, including running print ads in the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek. This comes as no surprise to our executive team, as our internal intelligence group has been expecting this since mid 2007.

We've also heard that salesfarce ground troops are requesting conversations and sit downs around “Collaboration Initiatives”, at several of our clients. They may be in for a surprise when they get there and learn we have already locked-in multi-year subscription deals, negotiated enterprise licensing and that our customers actually like us.

Salesfarce, is not the juggernaut it once was, as a few recent developments point out:

- Their ex-Chief Strategy Officer Tien Tzuo, aka "Benioff's Brain" resurfaced this week as the CEO a new start-up (Zuora). Tzuo is largely credited as the marketing genius behind much of sfdc’s growth and past success.

- On the Q1 conference call, they announced Differed Revenue was down sequentially for the first time in company history. This single metric is strongest leading indicator about the future of a subscription business. (By contrast our diff revs grew over 50% during the same period).

- Their Innovation Management solution is a set of generic project management widgets cobbled together to try to cover the areas our best-of-breed products address. These widgets have no interaction, and the design is based on little or no knowledge about the actual process of innovation. Even if they get it to work at some point, they are skating to where the puck was, instead where it's going to be.

You can expect their uber-slick sales force (pun intended) will be quick to brew up some ugly batches of fear, uncertainty and doubt about BI. In fact, we already have reports of them making false claims about us in the marketplace. This is the classic tactic of a company that has gotten too big for their own good. Covering up an inability to innovate by intimidating customers spending more on marketing.

Fortunately, for us, our customers are innovators themselves, and the ability to see things as they really are, often comes with the job title.

Please let your clients know that we welcome a side by side comparison. Our products are NOT apples to apples. This month I have heard feedback — literally from around the globe — that WebStorm 5 is the most advanced tool of its kind available today. Our outsourced datacenters deliver the same standard SAS70 Type II reliability and disaster recovery at a third a cost of their proprietary systems, and we have more customers, more deployments, more revenue and faster growth in this category than any other vendor.

Salesfarce has gotten fat and happy with their past success in SaaS, and like any over-reaching empire, they have eroded from within. Their twilight has come. I believe a slight nudge is all that will be necessary to send this rotted shell of a business —devoid of the virtue of true innovation— crashing into the ground.

I hope you will join me in delivering that nudge over the coming months,

Matt

________________________________________________________

Matt Greeley

President & CEO

Brightidea.com :: Powering Ideas to Reality™

www.brightidea.com

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow
• P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy

Out of this thin straw, Google is spinning a golden tale of a low-cost entry into the enterprise market, and Salesforce.com a move against Microsoft, which has been touting the integration of its rival business-software suite, Dynamics, with Microsoft Office.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is honest in his own way about matters. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend," Benioff told the New York Times. A Microsoft executive countered with the meaningless Valley bromide, uttered whenever a rival emerges: "It validates our strategy." He would have done better if he had simply laughed.

Now the $678 million doesn't take into account the basis of the options grants but even if the average basis was 90% of what the stock was sold for the payoff for the insiders would still be greater than the actual amount of profits they have generated. Does this seem fair? This is absolutely outrageous but NOBODY is highlighting or talking about it.

That's why Zoho has branched out into online customer-relationship management software, the exact same service Marc Benioff's Salesforce.com provides to automate sales. Benioff made an unspecified offer to buy Zoho from Vembu, who refused. A geeky, bespectacled sort capable of withstanding Benioff's charm campaign? That's how I'm going to remember Vembu.

It would also be a brutal comeuppance for Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, who had a very public tiff with Ellison, for whom he worked at Oracle and once idolized. Benioff has since championed a "no software" marketing campaign aimed straight at Oracle; unlike Oracle's offerings, Salesforce.com does not require the installation of software. Selling to Oracle would require eating a lot of crow. Then again, if Benioff actually gets that price, it would cement his reputation as a consummate salesman. Perhaps that's worth an uncomfortable swallow. (Photo by Robert Scoble)

NetSuite says subsequent market demand may not immediately match share prices set by its auction-model IPO, according to the Wall Street Journal. Translation: The price could well drop. Somebody ought to warn Craig Ramsey, the Salesforce.com board member who invested in the company. Unless this is exactly what he wanted to happen. Crafty!

• The New York Times: Google's Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning
  
• O'Reilly's Radar: Hi5, iLike, Slide, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and Six Apart
  
• TechCrunch: Orkut, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle
  
• Valleywag: Hi5, Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, Salesforce.com, and Oracle

Guess the only way to find out for sure who's involved is to attend CampFire Thursday night on the Google campus. We would, but we have a thing against CamelCase. But bring us back a s'more, wouldja?

(Photo by russelljsmith)

Or, rather, pretty charts. They're easier, right?

Here's the U.S. monthly visits for Facebook vs. destination social networks Orkut, Friendster, Plaxo and LinkedIn — all Google partners:

Here's the U.S. monthly visits for Facebook vs. some of Google's other varied new partners, Newsgator, Xing, Ning, and Salesforce.com. For the record, Xing and Ning are not related.

If I'm a developer, I'm still going to Facebook first. Google says these partners reach an audience of over 100 million users globally. But the problem is that all those users are in different networks. Viral success in one network won't necessarily spill over into another.

A better solution for Google? Rework its MySpace search and advertising contract on more favorable terms for News Corp., and in return, get MySpace to sign up for OpenSocial.

Look at what happens when you drop bottomfeeder Plaxo from the list of social networks and add MySpace instead:

The incentive for MySpace, of course, is that this solution would save News Corp. execs the hassle of looking up exactly what an open platform is, exactly. Or having to figure out how to look up definitions on the Internet. Or the Internet.