The founder of Salesforce.com explains how to start a business

IT IS not every management book that can include blurbs on its jacket from Anthony Robbins, a motivational speaker, and Neil Young, an ageing rock star, alongside the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab. Yet it is not every company that is built on a moment of inspiration during a swim with dolphins in Hawaii. “Behind the Cloud”, Marc Benioff’s new book about how he founded Salesforce.com, one of the leaders in what is now called “cloud computing”, is full of personal tales including Mr Benioff’s encounters with the Dalai Lama and Ammachi, India’s “hugging saint”, but for all its New Age feel it is full of advice from which any entrepreneur can learn.

In its ten years, Salesforce has turned from a Hawaiian dream into a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of $8 billion. And Mr Benioff has turned from an ebullient salesman with a promising idea into a proven visionary who saw the potential for “on-demand” computing services delivered via the internet when most in the industry were still wedded to traditional software. ...

Tech firm behaves like a proper company

eBay is offering customers hit by the failure of its search engine last weekend the chance to relist items, rather than sell them at lower prices. They are also offering discount vouchers to buyers who are disappointed to have lost out.…

All I want for Christmas is....

Mini Poll  Following our discussions this week on the importance of evaluating application packages from a technology perspective, we're interested in gathering some more information from you on the things that really matter.…

Can farming save Maine's moribund fishing industry?

AT 7:30am, Sorrento harbour’s small parking lot is full of pickup trucks and empty of people. The lobstermen are already out hauling in their traps; lobstering is big business in coastal Maine. Thankfully, I am here to meet cod farmers, who don’t keep such rough hours. I am awaiting my contact on a bench overlooking the placid bay between Sorrento and the hazy mountains of Acadia National Park. The tide is low. A diesel engine rattles somewhere out on the water. I am in no hurry for him to arrive.

The Victorian homes stretched along Sorrento’s waterfront are shuttered and vacant for most of the year. Like most towns in coastal Maine, the population is split between ‘summer people’, who arrive in July and flee at the first bite of autumn air, and ‘winter people’, real Mainers, who live here year-round, many of whom earn a hardscrabble living catering to tourists in summertime and find any job they can get during the rest of the year. ...

A UN report suggests that striking progress is being made in the fight against AIDS

ALL epidemics run their course. AIDS will be no exception. But concerted action can give them a helping hand to the finish line, and the latest report from the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS, the two United Nations agencies charged with tackling the epidemic, claims that is what is happening.

The most important figure in the report, which was published on Tuesday November 24th, is 17%. This is the estimated drop in the annual number of new infections compared with 2001, the year that the United Nations Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS was signed. The biggest proportionate fall, 25%, has been in East Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease is most rampant, the decline is estimated at 15%. That corresponds to 400,000 fewer African infections in 2008 than in 2001, though 1.9m Africans are still becoming infected each year. ...

British police keep a much larger DNA database than anyone else

DNA databases kept by police forces have grown all over the world since Britain launched the first one in 1995. Police in England and Wales have since amassed profiles of 8.7% of the population, by routinely taking samples from everyone arrested. Samples are held for six years. On Tuesday November 24th the author of a government report on DNA databases claimed that the police were making arrests purely to get more samples on file. Three out of four young black men are now said to have their profiles on the database. Yet the usefulness of DNA databases is not apparently related to size. DNA reportedly helped with 58% of criminal investigations in England and Wales in 2008, compared with 70% in Scotland, which destroys samples taken in more minor investigations and so holds profiles of a much smaller share of its population. According to the FBI, California's database, with 1.2m profiles, has aided nearly 8,000 investigations while Florida's, at half the size, has helped in over 10,000 cases.

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The world saved the bankers. Now it is time for the bankers to return the favour

DEPENDING on how you view it, climate change is either the biggest problem mankind faces or its greatest financial opportunity. For example, McKinsey has become known as a climate-change consultant, thanks to its greenhouse gas “cost abatement curve”. This clever little chart shows the relative opportunity costs of different abatement activities. McKinsey’s curve and expertise on climate change have opened the doors and pockets of ministries and industries around the globe.

What is striking about the global cost-abatement curve is what a bargain it seems to be to lower emissions by protecting rainforests. There is plenty of argument about whether it really will be as cheap as the curve suggests. For example, Simon Counsell, director of the Rainforest Foundation, in Britain, queries whether the opportunity costs of reducing slash-and-burn farming are as low as they are presented. Subsistence farming may, indeed, yield only $200-300 per hectare but paying that sum to the locals will not give them shops in which to buy food. ...

Everything else takes a swim

Hewlett-Packard's profits grew 14 per cent in the fiscal fourth quarter, boosted by corporate cost-cutting and solid performance by its enormous services unit.…

Cheap credit is over and its not coming back, says CBI

The impact of the recession on British businesses may well be permanent, and will certainly last until well into the next decade, the UK's union for bosses has declared.…

Have we progressed that much in 25 years?

Workshop  When packaged applications first appeared on the scene a quarter of a century ago, it was normal for them to be very proprietary in nature.…

Redmond aligns with the empire of The Sun

Rupert Murdoch is in talks with Microsoft over his plans to delist his newspaper websites from Google.…

A health-care reform bill gets to the floor of the Senate. A rowdy debate will follow

DEMOCRATS in the Senate defeated a Republican attempt to block their health-care bill on Saturday November 21st, just days after Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, unveiled the long-awaited legislation, which amalgamates proposals from various Senate committees. Republicans tried, with a filibuster, to stop the measure from even proceeding to the floor, providing an early test of Democratic resolve. To get the 60 votes he needed, Mr Reid had to cajole three wavering Democrats—Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska—and their support came at a price. Republicans are calling an extra $100m doled out in federal money for Ms Landrieu's state “the Louisiana purchase”. All three have since pointed out that a final “yea” is far from certain.

The Senate bill is similar in scope to the measure passed by the House of Representatives on November 7th, although there are differences. The Senate bill, for instance, relies much more on expanding Medicaid, the system of provision for the poor. As in the House, the Senate legislation creates insurance “exchanges” and a government-run insurance scheme that would compete with private plans, but it allows for states to opt out. Ms Landrieu and others would like to go further and adopt a “trigger” that would implement a public plan in five years, but only if private plans are no more affordable by then. Joe Lieberman, an independent Democrat, has insisted he will vote against any final bill that contains a public option “as a matter of conscience”. ...

Retailers hope that Thanksgiving will mark the start of an intense festive shopping season

• AFTER the frugality of the economic slump, America's retailers are hoping for a stampede of eager shoppers on “Black Friday”, a traditional day of buying frenzy after the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday November 26th. Sales figures should give some indication of consumers’ confidence in the tentative economic recovery on one of America's busiest days for retailers, which marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Will consumers forget about the recent recession or will they stay away, hoping to pick up better bargains on the internet on “cyber Monday” after window shopping over the weekend? See article

• A DEAL to exchange hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israel for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive in the Gaza strip may be concluded soon. German intermediaries have been attempting to hammer out a deal between Israel and Hamas that would see Mr Shalit, captured in a raid on an Israeli border post in 2006, win his freedom. In early October, 20 Palestinian women were freed from Israeli jails in return for a video proving that Mr Shalit was still alive. Some sources suggest that Mr Shalit could be released by Friday November 27th to coincide with Eid al-Adha an important Muslim festival that marks the end of the haj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. See article ...

No repairs for 'biohazard' Macs

A Mac user claims that Apple voided her warranty and refused to repair her machine because it was "contaminated" with cigarette smoke.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

Record auction prices for rare coloured diamonds

“If you have money to invest, there is no safer haven than something rare,” says Laurence Graff, the London-born “King of Diamonds”. If this is sales talk, he is his own best customer. In December 2008, during some of the bleakest days of the credit crisis, Mr Graff paid $24.3m for the 35.56-carat, 17th-century Wittelsbach blue diamond at Christie’s in London. He set the auction record for any jewel. But in his opinion, “it was the bargain of the century. In my life, it is the rarest of them all; it is the supreme coloured diamond.”

Yet Mr Graff felt it could be improved. His team began work on the Wittelsbach almost immediately. It was a daring, even daredevil, move. When he bought the historic diamond it worked out at $1.46m per carat. As a result of polishing it weighs four carats less. This could be calculated as a loss of about $6m, but not by Mr Graff. He values the Wittelsbach-Graff, as the gem is now called, at $100m. “We have given it life which it didn’t have before,” he explains. Many may soon judge for themselves. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has been in discussions with Graff regarding the possibility of a public presentation of the diamond at the National Museum of Natural History. ...

It's all about horses for courses

Poll Results  Whether to build or buy, that is the question? Well, it is for many when it comes to business applications. It's a topic on which we asked for your feedback as part of our latest workshop, and over 100 of you came back with your views on it. So what did we learn?…

Our top articles ranked by reader popularity.

• The Spanish prisoners
• Any drop to drink?
• Dollars, cents and sensibility
• Imposing limits
• This week's top stories [13 November 2009]
• The week ahead
• Pleased to meet you
• Well connected
• A job to do
• The rise of slime

Is Japan back in a deflationary trap?

WHILE investors have been fretting recently about Japan’s huge debt, another of the dreaded D-words has come back to haunt them. On Friday November 20th, Japan’s Cabinet Office issued a monthly report that for the first time since 2006 acknowledged that the country was suffering from deflation.

Consumer prices have actually been falling for months, but the pace of decline accelerated over the summer. In September prices slumped by 2.2% compared with a year earlier. This is partly because the country is still loaded with excess capacity after the collapse in exports during the global financial crisis, and partly because oil prices were lower in September than in the same month last year. But there are more structural problems, too. As Japan’s population declines, for instance, retailers are being forced to cut prices to gain market share. ...

Which firms spend most on R&D?

BIG carmakers and drug and technology firms devote the most cash to research and development, according to the European Commission’s latest tally. These types of business rely on developing new products or constantly updating old ones to compete for customers. Toyota was the world's leading R&D spender in 2008. The Japanese carmaker increased its annual R&D budget by 7.6% to €7.6 billion ($10.6 billion), knocking Microsoft off the top spot. Worldwide R&D spending increased by 6.9% in 2008, having also grown by 9% in 2007.

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The latest plastic pitches are a goal-scorer’s delight

IT’S official: the grass is greener in Europe. International football’s governing body, FIFA, has ruled that the soccer pitches in South Africa where the World Cup will be played next summer are not fit enough for the month-long competition. Pitches planted with locally grown kikuyu grass will have to be dug up and replanted with lush European rye grass.

No matter that the European turf, bred for a damper and cooler climate, will require more water, fertiliser and maintenance. FIFA is adamant: the hardy local stuff is not green enough for international television. Of course, once the final whistle has blown and the television crews have dispersed, the pitches will need to be resown at great expense with grass fit for South African conditions. ...

Awaits Win7 bonanza

Dell released its financial results for Q3 ended 30 October on Thursday, and for its troubles, it took a beating in after hours trading.…

Two minor but competent figures will be president and high representative of the EU

A MAN who has been Belgian prime minister for less than a year and a British technocrat who has never held elected office were chosen by European Union leaders on Thursday November 19th to represent their 27 countries around the world, and lead their policymaking at the highest level. It seems odd to appoint people as little-known as Herman Van Rompuy and Catherine Ashton to such big jobs.

For nearly a decade, EU politicians have been wrangling about a new rule book, calling for Europe to equip itself with leadership posts that would help their club to stride the world stage. Yet by the time national leaders arrived at a Brussels summit to fill the new posts of president of the European Council and EU foreign-policy chief, or high representative, their boasts and ambition were a sad memory. ...

Imminent Time Warner divorce puts web firm in bedsit

AOL has asked 2,500 workers to volunteer for redundancy packages at the ailing web firm.…

'Sacrificial offering on the altar of stock exchange'

Updated  Hewlett-Packard workers have voted in favour of strike action in the UK, following a ballot among members of the Unite union who complained about 150 customer engineers being shunted over to a subsidiary company.…

Web 2.0 music titan mashup

MySpace, the yesterday-man of social networking sites, has reportedly bought Imeem for an undisclosed sum.…

The latest row over Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory

BINYAMIN NETANYAHU, Israel’s prime minister, came under pressure this week when news leaked of a new plan to build 900 homes in the occupied Jerusalem suburb of Gilo. His aides say that he knew nothing about the scheme before a local planning committee considered it.

True or not, the latest settlement expansion is exasperating for those who have been involved, for several months, in negotiations between the United States and Israel. Mr Netanyahu’s colleagues are bristling that previous efforts to prevent new building will now be forgotten. George Mitchell, America’s special envoy to the region, has been in talks with Mr Netanyahu over settlement building and the need to find ways to assuage Palestinian resentment of it (or even to find ways to freeze or stop it). These, so far, have proved fruitless, although Mr Netanyahu did meet Barack Obama in the White House two weeks ago for what he had hoped would be a tension-easing conversation. ...

Despite more suspected jihadist terrorist plots on western soil, there are still few attacks

THE number of jihadist terror plots in Europe, North America and Australia has risen alarmingly in 2009, according to a report from Control Risks, a security consultancy. But plots are rarely successful, probably because of improved gathering and sharing of intelligence, better security (especially at airports) and bad planning. According to newspaper reports and court records, seven planned attacks were exposed between January and October this year and only one (a small and inconsequential attack on Italian barracks) was carried out. The average age of apprehended terrorists fell between 2001 and 2009. An absence of formal training, resources and experienced leadership has led to an increase in lone plotters, who are much younger than in the past.

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Seven minutes of slurry

Small business groups were less than impressed with Gordon Brown's fantasy list of what he would do in the unlikely event that he is re-elected as Prime Minister.…

Does failure in Barcelona augur poorly for Copenhagen?

THERE is an odd crowd on my late-afternoon flight from London to Barcelona. Peeking at the reading material of my seatmates, I notice that most of us seem to be heading for the UN climate-change talks in Barcelona—the last before a larger gathering in Copenhagen this December. For the last two years, most of the world’s nations have been negotiating a deal that is supposed to reduce carbon emissions and tackle climate change. It is somewhat ironic that the negotiation has involved so much airline travel by so many people. The gentleman next to me, while checking out women on his mobile, is definitely shuffling UN paperwork. Thousands are expected at what has been breathlessly called “humanity’s most important meeting”. ...

One in the PKI?

Crypto pioneer and Sun Microsystems' veteran chief security officer Whitfield Diffie has left the company, with database-giant Oracle's acquisition still in the air.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud