Dreamforce Day 2 Recap

Day 2 of the Dreamforce show started with another keynote general session. The session was delayed by a few minutes while Marc Benioff attended to some fire marshall duties and requested that "all 2,000 people" in the back find an empty seat.

After a video highlighting the work the Salesforce Foundation is doing, things got underway.

George Lucas was the featured guest and he was interviewed by Robert Thurman, co-founder of Tibet House US and father of Uma Thurman.

While the interview didn't flow as smoothly as I think it could have, Lucas delivered his message about his educational foundation, "edutopia". Thurman, however, did manage to fit about a dozen references to Star Wars into the discussion.

The second part of the session started with a well put-together "Salesforce promotional" video created by Bruce Campbell, Salesforce.com's Chief Creative Officer. After the video, Marc called a reluctant, but gracious, Campbell to the stage to be recognized.

Here is the video (more post below the video):

Marc brought three of his friends on stage to demo and talk about their technology: Dave Duffield of Workday, Josh James of Omniture and Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab.

Click below to read more.....

I had to cut out of the session around this time, so I'll point to a few other blogs that have a recap of today's session as well:

Salesforce Collective: Dreamforce Day 2 - George Lucas & Bob Thurman
Vertical Response for AppExchange blog: Tuesday Morning - Dreamforce
Jaiku: Play by Play of the session
demandblog: Dreamforce Day Two
Where's the Upside?: Directions from Dreamforce (Day 1 and 2)

Had a few meetings, met some new people (Hi Liz!) and attended the "Innovation Through Community" session - nice job Kingsley! (Don't forget to comment on the sessions you attended.)

The 2nd Annual Appy Awards were next. Sixteen awards were given out by Marc Benioff and Jim Steele. It was a fun event, alot of back and forth between Marc and Jim, largely centered around the fact that Jim missed the opening keynote yesterday because he took his daughter to the Emmies. Here's a list of the winners, with apologies to the first winner whose category and name I missed.

Best Force.com Integration: Toby Fox, FONE
Best AppExchange Adopter: Matthew Dickerson, Sirva
Chief Innovation Officer Award: Doug Menefee, The Schumacher Group
Salesforce Sales Excellence Award: Teri Stevens, Sybase
Salesforce PRM Excellence Award: Kurt Shaver, GFi
Salesforce Customer Service Award: Mark Silber, Qualcomm
Salesforce Marketing Excellence Award: Katrina Persno and Ashley Landry, Sungard
Best Global Enterprise Deployment: Julie Akawie, ESI
Best Industry Deployment: Hitesh Vora, TD Ameritrade
Best Non-Profit Deployment Award: Robert Bennett, Family Service Agency of SF
Outstanding Customer Innovation Award: Dell, IdeaStorm
Breakthrough App of the Year: Model Metrics, Accelerate4Pharma
Best APEX Developer: Glenn Wilson, CRMFusion
Best Force.com Native App - Partner: Apttus
Dreamforce Best in Show: VerticalResponse

Congratulations to everyone and especially Glenn Wilson @ CRMFusion and the folks at Vertical Response. They are both advertisers and friends of SalesforceWatch.com.

Finished up the day with a nice dinner with some fellow bloggers and platform and ADN folks (Thanks Adam, Gordon, Kingsley, Paul, Peter, Steve and anyone I missed) and a drink at the Vertical Response party at Roe (thanks VR!).

I'll be at the show all day tomorrow, see you there.