Hillary Clinton and Bruno Mars in One Day!

I am in San Francisco attending the Dreamforce 2014 Conference. I finished Day 1 and Day 2 culminating with the Gala Concert featuring Filipino American artist Bruno Mars.

Day 3 and Day 4 of the Dreamforce Conference are still to come as I write this column. I intend to be more detailed after I finish the entire conference.

Last week in my other column, Tech It From My Barber, I quoted Algoworks, an attendee of Dreamforce 2013, “Dreamforce promises a learning experience that can boost how you operate your business, help you create new business connections, provide solutions to problems that you want it sought quickest, and of course lots of fun- all jam packed within a time frame of glorious 4 days.”

In just two days, I already have a similar impression. But I like the fact that outside of the role of Salesforce.com in helping businesses expand and creating new ones with its Customer Success Platform, it is involved in giving back to the community.

Salesforce is homegrown – founded in San Francisco. So is Dreamforce. It is not surprising that many of its charitable projects are in the city involving the community and the government.

Fighting hunger is a focus, for example. A million meals have been distributed and expect a million more after the conference.

Fighting for the future is another focus. Educating the children is a great weapon in this battle. After all, they are our future.

The choice of Hillary Clinton as a Keynote Speaker signifies that Dreamforce 2014 is very serious in fighting for the future. A known strong advocate for the education and healthcare of children either as a lawyer, a former First Lady of Arkansas, a former First Lady of the United States, a former U.S. Senator, and former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was the right leader and partner of the Salesforce Foundation in a battle affecting the future.

With Clinton, the focus of the war for the future would not only be citywide, countrywide, but also worldwide.

It would be even be better if she becomes the first woman President of the United States.

In her Keynote, Clinton talked about educating the children by reading and singing to them. She says, “The word gap leads to an achievement gap & has lifelong consequences.” Increasing the vocabulary of children by reading to them also leads to creativity and increases achievement motivation among them.

She described how she and her husband, former US President Bill Clinton, used to read to Chelsea. She also sang to her until Chelsea was old enough to complain and stop her from singing.

After her speech, she distributed bags full of children’s books donated by Scholastics and other learning materials for parents to read to their children.

She actually spoke about various topics that also interested me – Net Neutrality, Philanthropy in Technology, Corporate Responsibility or Ethics, among others. She is a firm believer of “open Internet” and Ethics being as important as electronics.

Those topics are obviously relevant in winning the future as well.

The Keynote Speech of Salesforce President Marc Benioff was as interesting. Expectedly, he talked about the new products and technologies of his company. I find the “Wave” and “Lightning” app and operating platform, respectively, very interesting and useful to customers and businesses.

All of us in the audience were amazed by the demo on “Lightning” through the speed of delivery of 3 bottles of Coke from a San Francisco warehouse to Moscone Center, Halls A & B within minutes and in our eyes. How? DRONE!

Of course, his Keynote also highlighted Salesforce Foundation’s partnership with the San Francisco City Government and the SF Unified School District System. His guests included, Mayor Ed Lee of San Francisco, Superintendent Richard Carranza and Principal Lee of the Unified School District. They all talked about how the SF-SF (Salesforce and  San Francisco) partnership proved to be very successful. The $5M donation, the installation of Wi-Fi in all the schools, the computers, and the training of teachers were instruments to a winning battle for the future especially for the 90% socially and economically disadvantaged kids.

The Keynotes of Clinton and Marc Benioff as you can see were not only “talk the talk”, they were also “walk the walk.”

Will.I.Am was also there. His life story is quite interesting as a successful Musician, Entrepreneur, and Philanthropist. He is in fact launching at the conference a new wearable technology product. He merits a separate and longer article later.

In between presentations, we were being entertained by the Beach Boys. After that they continued playing at Moscone Center’s Plaza where Dreamforce 2014 attendees just relaxed, ate free food and drinks, and listened.

 

Dreamforce 2014 registered more than 146,000 attendees. Most of them went to the Bruno Mars Concert at the Civic Center. Part Filipino, he makes me proud. Everybody was rocking and shaking! It was too packed to roll!

The event was dubbed as a UCSF (University of California San Francisco) Children’s Hospital Benefits Concert - also health and education oriented tool for the future.

Bruno Mars played the greatest of KEYS and sang the best of NOTES!

This KEYNOTE of the evening made my day!