Salesforce.com formally opens its 12th annual Dreamforce extravaganza on Monday, but the four-day event to be attended by an estimated 135,000 attendees heralded the event with a $1 million Hackathon that started 6 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday and ended at noon on Sunday.
Developers who attended the pre-Dreamforce Hackathon competed in three categories: mobile apps on Force.com, mobile apps for Heroku and mobile apps for Force.com with Heroku. First place winners in each category will receive $100,000 each and the chance to compete for a grand prize of $150,000.
Around 25,000 of these developers are expected to show up at the 18 different venues at the Moscone Conference on Monday in what is being touted as "the world's largest software event ever." This is certainly a far cry from the first Dreamforce conference in 2003 when 1,300, or less than 1 percent of this year's attendees, showed up.
But Dreamforce 2014 is not the usual tech conference. This year's event, says Salesforce.com CEO and chairman Marc Benioff, is focused on "the future of cloud, social, mobile and connected technologies and how companies are connecting with customers in a whole new way." This year's lineup of activities will center more on the philanthropic side of doing business in Silicon Valley, where Benioff began selling business applications on the Internet 15 years ago.
Since then, the foundation arm of Salesforce.com has given away up to $68 million in grants, and its workers have logged in 680,000 hours in volunteer work and community service. So it's no surprise, therefore, that Salesforce.com has asked attendees to bring one can of food to the event as part of a campaign to create 1 million meals and help combat hunger. Benioff himself and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, who will be speaking at the event, have pledged to match crowd donations. Also a major part of Dreamforce will be the fifth annual concert that aims to raise $8 million for San Francisco's UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital.
Suzanne DiBianca, president of Salesforce.com Foundation, and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, Stanford University expert on philanthropy, will also speak to 250 venture capitalists to show them the benefits of convincing their portfolio companies to start giving back early. Arrillaga-Andreessen's husband, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, will also be at the event.
"The venture capital community needs to hear that message, to take it to heart, to translate it into the board meetings of their own companies," says Salesforce.com executive vice president of corporate development and strategy John Somorjai.
The company has been working to introduce its 1-1-1 philanthropy model to the 100 software companies, mostly mobile app firms, it has invested in. The model requires Salesforce.com to give back 1 percent of its product, equity and employee hours to charity and has been adopted by its portfolio companies as well as other big players in the technology industry, such as Google, VMWare and Zynga.
"We want to use 'Salesforce for Startups' as an incentive for more companies to implement the 1-1-1 model," says Salesforce.com director of startup relations Ludovic Ulrich. "It's a clear ask to the community we are putting together."
Salesforce.com has also invited some 200 military veterans to a training event that aims to help ease the transition to civilian life and will be encouraging developers to volunteer an hour of their time to teach code through Code.org.
