As tech giants eye the cloud computing market, Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff made it clear that he intends to stay competitive. During his keynote speech today at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, he first discussed Force.com Sites, the service for hosting public-facing websites and apps that I covered last night. Then he announced that Salesforce.com is connecting its business application platform with Facebook and Amazon.

The Facebook announcement is probably the most significant, because it allows developers for Force.com (Salesforce’s platform for business applications) to tap into the huge number of users on Facebook. (Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, announced on-stage that Facebook now has more than 120 million active users per month, up 30 million from just three months ago.) It’s also a way for Facebook to introduce more business-oriented apps into its own platform, which is largely dominated by fun and gimmicky consumer-oriented apps.

There are two basic components to Force.com for Facebook. First, as I mentioned, Force.com developers can now introduce their applications into the Facebook platform. Second, Force.com applications can integrate Facebook social data through Facebook Connect.

Salesforce presented two sample applications on-stage. The first was a job recruiting tool built by Appirio, which lets you recommend your Facebook friends for jobs, similar to the way you can refer connections on business networking site LinkedIn. The second involved integrating My Starbucks Idea, where customers submit suggestions to Starbucks, into Facebook. If a user submits a Starbucks idea through Facebook, their friends will see it in their news feeds and can comment on the idea or submit their own.

The Amazon announcement is also significant, particularly because it shows that Salesforce and Amazon’s cloud hosting services can be complementary. Now you can build an app on Force.com, make it available to the public through Force.com Sites, then tap into the computing and storage offered by Amazon. For example, there’s a new app called Lasso, which lets you photograph business cards and view them in your Salesforce.com account. Lasso was built on Force.com, but it uses Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud for image processing, and Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to store the images.

Finally, after bringing tech stars like Sandberg onto the stage, Benioff introduced some real starpower — famed musician Neil Young. Young (pictured, above) is spearheading an initiative called Linc Volt, which retrofits existing automobiles with clean technology, namely electric batteries and a natural gas engine. The Linc Volt site is hosted on Force.com Sites, and it includes some cool Salesforce integration, including a chart that’s constantly updated with information from Young’s Linc Volt car.

Overall, the keynote pffered a promising vision: Salesforce will continue expanding its business application platform and connecting it to other Internet clouds. Benioff is a natural salesman, but I don’t think it was just PR-speak when he said he isn’t concerned about Microsoft’s recent announcement that it’s launching its own cloud application platform called Windows Azure; Benioff playfully described Azure as “future vaporware.”

“I can’t even pronounce it,” he said. “I don’t even know. I don’t care. The important thing is, they said [they're entering the cloud].”

Digital media device maker Roku announced today that it scored an undisclosed but substantial amount in third round funding. Famous for the Netflix Player — the set-top box that lets you watch any of Netflix’s “play instantly” movies or TV shows in your living room — the Saratoga, Calif. company plans to use the new money to further develop its flagship product and others that stream digital media to the TV.

Menlo Ventures provided the round, which comes less than a year after financing from Netflix in January. The goal now for the young company is to edge out its rivals in the field, including Apple TV (which delivers digital television to your computer or TV set), and Vudu (which streams movies). And while Microsoft is still working on launching Netflix “play instantly” fare on the XBox 360, it will pose a serious threat when it does. Yet, despite the formidable competition, the company says there are no plans to sell to a larger player.

As we reported earlier, Roku’s success may depend on its ability to strike partnerships with other digital content providers that may interest general consumers. Amazon’s Video On Demand and NBC’s Hulu would give Roku a major advantage. When asked, a spokesperson said the company is looking to distribute advertising-supported content, in particular, as well as user-generated content in the near future.

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey is about to endorse the Kindle, Amazon’s ebook reader. After today, it will be a lot harder to argue that the Kindle is just a niche device for tech nerds.

Right now, the Amazon website features a video trailer for today’s show, in which Winfrey says she’ll reveal her “new favorite gadget.” In the course of the 30-second commercial, she also describes it as “life-changing, for me” and “the wave of the future.” Interestingly, the commercial doesn’t identify the Kindle specifically, but it’s not hard to connect the dots. Amazon has also sent out an email saying founder Jeff Bezos will be on the show to talk about the Kindle, according to the Financial Times.

There’s no doubt that the Kindle will get a boost because of the this. The question is, how big will the boost be, and will it last? At $359, the Kindle isn’t that cheap, and with the economy tumbling, Winfrey’s core audience may be less willing than, say, your average Silicon Valley techie to put a dent in their budget to buy a cool new gadget. During a recent earnings call, Bezos said Kindle customers continue buying the same amount of physical books, they just buy electronic books too. On the one hand, that’s good news for traditional publishing. On the other hand, if ebooks aren’t a replacement for physical books, then they’re just an additional expense.

Still, there’s no denying the growing indicators that reading ebooks is starting to become mainstream. I’ve written about the popular ebook reader for the iPhone called Stanza. It’s also worth noting that this week’s Appl featured app for the iPhone is a downloadable version of the Bone comic book. Paging through an electronic comic book isn’t as easy as reading a real comic, but it’s doable.

All in all, it’s looking like troglodytes like me, who thumb their noses at ebooks, will have to learn to adapt. Otherwise, I’ll just be that old guy muttering in the corner about the good old days.

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which is probably the most prominent environment for running web applications in the Internet cloud, has announced two big moves that should solidify its dominance and increase its appeal to big business users.

Most importantly, Amazon took the “beta testing” label off EC2. Though the label didn’t stop some developers from launching apps on EC2 and others from launching services to supplement it, it was probably still a drawback for anyone wanting to build their business around Amazon, and probably a dealbreaker for big companies.

Now, it’s almost as if the cloud has finally gotten its official seal of approval, especially with EC2’s service agreement guaranteeing 99.95 percent uptime. Consultants Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher of AKF Partners previously criticized the absence of such a guarantee in their column on why “the cloud isn’t for everyone.” (EC2 now guarantees 0.05 percent more uptime than Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, S3).

Also, as announced at the beginning of the month, EC2 has added support for Microsoft Windows Server. As I failed to hammer home at the time, it looks like Amazon is trying to stay competitive with Microsoft, which plans to launch its own platform for cloud development. The timing is revealing. Amazon announced its support for Windows Server on the same day that Microsoft started generating press for its cloud platform, and Amazon has actually rolled out that support just a few days before the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, where Windows Strata (as it’s rumored to be named) will be unveiled.

Amazon also mentioned new features that will be released next year, such as a console to simplify management within its web services, as well as load balancing, automatic scaling and cloud monitoring. In essence, it’s starting to provide a lot of those extra services that startups could be making money from too. That could be a threat to companies like RightScale and Elastra. (Which is particularly interesting since Amazon just invested in Elastra.)

Google, Microsoft and Rackspace may all be eyeing the cloud, but Amazon remains at the head of the pack for now.

[Photo:flickr/lrargerich]

Here’s the latest action:

Moore’s Law gets a life extension — Researchers at McGill University claim to have discovered a new state of matter, a “quasi-three-dimensional system,” that may extend the famous trend of tech companies being able to pack twice as many transistors onto computer chips every two years.

AT&T income up; company surprised by iPhone payments — AT&T has lifted its net income 5.5 percent over the same reporting quarter last year, but its stock price dropped. One possible reason: Investors were surprised by the massive $900 million sum the company had to pay Apple for iPhone sales.

Bill Gates’ secretive new company — The Microsoft co-founder has a new company called bgC3, which appears to be a sort of think tank or lab intended to spin out ideas to Microsoft and others, according to brand-new Seattle tech blog TechFlash.

General Electric raises stake in A123 to $55 million — GE has placed a follow-on investment in electric car battery maker A123 Systems, which would likely have had an IPO by now if not for market conditions.

Malware growing, energy companies at high risk — Corporate nets are at an increasing risk of backdoor attacks carried out through employees, according to ScanSafe. Energy companies are at a 189 percent higher risk than those in other sectors.

Comcast offers doubled broadband speeds for 10 million — By the end of 2008, a segment of Comcast customers will be able to buy broadband services as fast as 50 megabits per second, around eight times faster than most high-speed DSL service. Of course, the higher access speeds will also mean higher pricing.

Yahoo’s Inquisitor reaches Firefox, Internet Explorer – Inquisitor, a personalized search tool released earlier this year for users of the Safari web browser, is now available on the two mass-market browsers.

RackSpace buys two cloud companies — In a bid to compete with Amazon’s cloud services, hosting company Rackspace has bought Slicehost and Jungle Disk.

Samsung pulls bid for SanDisk — The question is, why? SanDisk shares dropped precipitously after Samsung announced that it was pulling its $5.85 billion bid, which some never thought was serious. Various theories on the WSJ Deal Journal.

Geothermal companies get 190 million acres to play with — Energy companies generating electricity from heat far below the planet’s surface have had a massive amount of federal land in 12 states opened for their use.

Here’s the latest action:

Amazon is like Apple, eBay is like Microsoft — Or at least that’s the tech-industry analogy that comes to mind when reading this piece about the increasingly competitive battle between the two e-commerce giants.

“Black” silicon is a better light receiver — A silicon variation discovered in Harvard University’s labs and licensed out to a company called SiOnyx, is far more receptive to light than ordinary silicon. The substance (pictured) may be useful for X-ray machines, transistors, night-vision goggles and a number of other devices. Solar cells are also a potential use, although it will be quite a few years before we see commercialization. Lots at Xconomy.

Egnyte file-sharing service gets iPhone interface — More here.

Fraud ring funnels credit card data to Pakistan – The Wall Street Journal has the story.

Google is testing out search ads on YouTube — YouTube has overtaken Yahoo as the number two destination for web searches, behind Google. Meanwhile, the video site is now broadcasting some full-length TV shows.

Add hearing loss to ways your iPhone can hurt you — Earbuds, like the ones that come with the iPhone, hurt your hearing when you listen to loud music, researchers say. Already, other researchers are finding that keeping your phone in your pocket while you talk using such earbuds also reduces your sperm count, guys. And using a mobile phone in the first place may increase the chance of brain tumors.

Micron buys stake in memory-maker Inotera Memory — For $400 million. That’ll make some memories.

Justice Department closes investigation into collusion by graphics chip makers — Nvidia and ATI Technologies won’t be facing anti-trust charges.

President Bush signs “anti-piracy” bill — One man’s piracy is another man’s fuel for innovation.

Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu promise faster servers — The companies intend to increase the performance of applications like databases and online transaction software.

Tech outsourcing firm Infosys cuts forecasts — The cause is the firm’s dependence on business from the now-weakened U.S. financial sector.

EA has Spore expansion packs coming — The game-maker has confirmed.

Image recognition company Eyealike launches video advertising platform — TechCrunch has more.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, also known as Amazon S3, plans to change its pricing on Nov. 1 in a move that should help it stay competitive against emerging cloud storage companies.

Amazon S3, and the larger suite of Amazon Web Services, provides the infrastructure for many of the web companies that we’ve covered. (As is often the case, one of the most effective demonstrations of S3’s importance came when it failed in February, and again in July, affecting startups like 37signals and Twitter.) Now, other tech players are getting ready to take it on. Google, for example, recently launched its App Engine, while Mosso (a division of Rackspace, the only venture-backed company to hold an IPO in the last few months) has announced plans to launch a storage service called CloudFS.

Amazon’s official reason for the price change is lower costs associated with economies of scale, but the incentive provided by increasing competition probably didn’t hurt.

Here’s how it will work: Instead of just charging a flat rate per unit of storage (15 cents per gigabyte, for example), Amazon has divided the pricing into four tiers, with the price decreasing as you use more storage. That could also help it tempt more big companies, or to remain affordable for startups as they grow.

In its announcement, Amazon also touts a some impressive usage data. S3 now stores 29 billion objects, up from 22 billion a quarter ago — to make that dizzyingly large number a little more concrete, that’s four objects for every person on Earth. During peak usage on Oct. 1, S3 received 70,000 storage, retrieval and deletion requests. Sounds like the Internet cloud is alive, well and busy.

[photo: flickr/meaduva]

Microsoft, the king of traditional, desktop-based software companies, has two pieces of news today showing its movement into the Internet cloud. First, Amazon said its Elastic Compute Cloud — its popular environment for running web applications — will now support the Microsoft Windows Server. Then, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer talked some more about Microsoft’s operating system for the creation of web apps, which will be formally announced in a Los Angeles developer conference at the end of October. Ballmer calls it “Windows Cloud.”

The Microsoft CEO previously discussed Windows Cloud under its code name Project Red Dog. While additional details were not forthcoming, the new nickname and description as a “web operating system” give some sense of the ambition involved. Windows Cloud is the latest in Microsoft’s efforts to move aggressively online; other recent moves in this area include testing a version of Microsoft Office that’s delivered via online subscription (also known as the software-as-a-service business model), as well as trying to link all of your electronic devices though a service called Live Mesh.

Windows Cloud could open up another front in Microsoft’s war with Google, which launched Google App Engine, its own environment for building and deploying web apps, earlier this year. It could also make Microsoft a competitor with Amazon’s Web Services.

Speaking of Amazon, support for Microsoft Windows has reportedly been a big demand among Amazon customers. Previously, EC2 was limited to Linux and other Unix-based systems. Now, as Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels says, Amazon can run “the majority of popular software systems in the cloud.” Among other things, that means EC2 now supports ASP.NET websites, and can also support a single global Windows desktop that’s accessed from multiple locations.

[Photo from Kinder Mountain Rescue Team]

Amazon will have a media store launching on Google’s Android platform, just as VentureBeat first reported yesterday. It will launch on the G1 device which will be available on October 22 through T-Mobile. The over 6 million DRM-free songs from all four major music labels and thousands of Independent ones will be available to buy and download right to the device.

One thing that isn’t mentioned in Amazon’s press release is video. While it certainly seems feasible that eventually Amazon’s video store will make it to the device, that doesn’t appear to be ready to go at launch. Watching the video of it in action at the unveiling press conference today, it’s entirely possible that our source simply saw the YouTube video clips on the device and assumed it was Amazon’s video store. (The two are very close to each other in the demo video that was shown — see the picture at the top right.)

It’s hard to argue with an entire catalog that is DRM-free, whereas much of iTunes is still not DRM-free, despite Apple chief executive Steve Jobs’ claims that Apple was working on making that happen. The music labels, it would seem, are determined not to give Apple any more power in the market, and instead are backing rival services like Amazon with DRM-free tracks.

Also great is that many tracks through Amazon MP3 will be $0.89 and many albums are priced from $5.99 to $8.99. Compare this with iTunes’ priceing of $0.99 for most tracks and $9.99 for most albums.

One thing that isn’t great about Amazon MP3 on Android is that you’ll need to be connected to Wi-Fi to download tracks. You can search, browse and listen to samples of songs over a regular mobile connection, but you will need the faster Wi-Fi one to get the music onto your device. Of course, the same is true for the iTunes store on the iPhone as well.

The G1 will come pre-loaded with the Amazon MP3 application at launch.

We’re a day away from the official announcement of the first phone running Google’s Android mobile platform, T-Mobile’s HTC-built G1. While the phone won’t be out until next month (October 17 remains the date we’re hearing), the device is out there in the wild right now in the hands of select Google and likely T-Mobile employees. In fact, we’ve just received a tip that not only did a G1 make an appearance at a bar in the San Francisco Bay Area over the weekend, but it had a special surprise: An Amazon music and video store application running on it.

Yes, it looks like Amazon will have an app for Android that will complete head-on with the iTunes app on Apple’s popular iPhone device.

Such an app makes perfect sense. One of the key selling points of the iPhone remains the fact that it is also a great iPod music player. The fact that it can connect and download music directly from the iTunes store on the device, is great for getting music on the go. One thing you cannot yet do through the mobile iTunes store however is buy/rent movies or any other form of video. Our source believes that Amazon’s app will allow for that.

The Amazon music store on Android will almost for sure be a mobile version of its AmazonMP3 online digital music store, which is gaining popularity, but still far behind iTunes. Any video store would seem to be based on Amazon’s just relaunched Video On Demand service. It would seem unlikely though that you’ll be able to stream movies over the service, instead, I would bet you’ll only be able to buy them.

We reached out to Amazon for a comment this story, but they declined.

Separately, we’ve heard that another soon-to-be major player in the online digital music world, MySpace Music, will not have a mobile version of its product ready to go anytime soon. The reasoning is that all the rights behind streaming music to mobile devices have not been resolved, John Faith, the general manager and vice president of MySpace Mobile, recently told us.

MySpace music will be largely a streaming music service when it launches (likely at some point this month). Interestingly enough, Amazon will be handling the transactions for people who wish to buy tracks through MySpace Music.

Look to hear more about Amazon’s plans for Android in the coming weeks, if not at the event tomorrow itself.

[photo: rizzn.com]