Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a Fortune 500 financial services membership organization, is standardizing on Salesforce for Wealth Management. The company is deploying Salesforce for Wealth Management and will leverage the Force.com Platform and the Force.com AppExchange to build custom applications designed to improve client engagement as well as the productivity of financial representatives.[more]

Got invite for the first tweet-up. It is like a blog meet, but for twitter users. It is going to be a blog meet and a tweet-up and it sure is going to be fun this sunday.

The stock market continues to be in a hysteria. I stopped guessing a long time ago. I don’t like to see red in my portfolio though, but then who does. I kept some amount in stocks thinking I will sell off in march just in time to buy into ELSS for the years tax savings, but since they are in deep red, I didn’t dare sell. Well, this year might not be a very good year.

There already are rumours about firing freeze and IT spendings cut and what not.

India should grow though. Chidambaram’s master stroke of putting more disposable income onto the hands of the middle class might give a much needed boost to our consumer driven economy, and it might actually start to show in the second Qtr results. I am still bullish..

Thank god that my TV no more has more of Obama, Hillary and Britney Spears.

Slide got a 50 million funding. Big time valuation for a company that makes facebook apps and other social widgets. Facebook apps are getting big, even though there is no indication of any revenue in the near term. Two partners of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Bayers has already started a 100 million facebook apps only fund.

Iphone and Facebook seems like the only great invention since the invention of the wheel.

Iphone’s innovation lies in the design. But its greatness will be how people adopts it as a platform.
Facebook’s innovation lies in its platform. Anybody with a good idea can implement it on facebook. The possibility that facebook offers is endless.

Newyorktimes added mixx chiclets. Mixx looks great, the voting button makes it look so boring. They had to copy digg, but calling the button as migg or mixx would have been a downright copy of digg, so they used the more generic vote button, which made it look like the rating plugin that many wordpress users have.

Also the MIXX homepage breaks on my IE…. If you want to have the second mover advantage, you need to be far far better than the first mover. Just like Digg did to delicious.

And delhi bloggers, see you at the meet!

With SUN opening up, Mysql was a very good fit. This is also an immensely good opportunity for Indian IT companies to look beyond the SAP, SOA implementations.

While many speculate how open source entities generate revenue the growth of these popular applications like Linux, Joomla and WordPress and the MySQL acquisition showcases the tremendous growth in this sector.
[Via Email from 5W PR]