Traffic has ground to a halt on San Francisco’s Howard Street in the Mission District. Funk music pumps onto the sidewalk. Young men – and they are mostly men – in check shirts and brightly coloured geek glasses hurry past each other, saying things like “Did you catch Hillary? Are you going to will.i.am?”. None of the speakers at this particular sales technology conference requires a surname.
In their downtime, the delegates loll around on beanbag chairs scattered across expanses of artificial grass, balancing Macbook Airs on one knee and free tofu salads in recyclable plastic containers on the other. A tweet starts a rumour that Bono is here, but no one’s seen him. Then someone tracks him down and posts a selfie. There’s a brief flurry of excitement before it turns out to be a Bono lookalike.
Welcome to Dreamforce, the technology conference that thinks it's the Burning Man festival.
The theme of the event, which was held over four days last week, is “innovation, fun, and giving back”. As part of the latter, delegates were invited to bring along a can of food to donate.
But it's also about catering to host Salesforce's customers, mostly small- and medium-business users of its customer relations management software. The big keynote addresses by Hillary (Clinton, of course), Al Gore, Arianna Huffington and musician Neil Young are interspersed with seminars such as "Dude, Where's my Leads?" and "Girly Geeks: Chapter Update and Information session".
Hillary speaks
In her address on Tuesday, Clinton spoke about the “word gap” dividing children from lower-income families from those with more socioeconomic advantages, whose parents speak and read to them more often.
She referred to the importance of an open internet, and the “ongoing struggle with more oppressive regimes worldwide who want more control over the internet, to shut it down and interfere with people’s freedoms”.
Clinton also took a swipe at the media, which she said is not interested in real news, favouring “the best angle, quickest hit, the biggest embarrassment”.
Disappointingly for delegates who wanted to say "they were there when", Clinton refused to be drawn on her presidential ambitions. "I do hope that the United States joins the ranks of those countries that have really overcome that hurdle to gender equality," she said. "But it's just a hypothetical. I don't want to make any news today."
Start-up warnings
On Wednesday, venture capitalist
Marc Andreessen
(possibly the only venture capitalist in the world with fans queuing around the block to hear him speak) sounded a cautionary note about the extravagance of tech start-ups.
He warned about what he calls the “edifice complex” and the correlation between “big, shiny headquarters with bikes everywhere and swimming pools” and the company that built them “falling off a cliff” in the near future, he said.
“Be aware, learn from history and have an appropriate sense of risk,” he advised start-ups.
Andreessen predicted that the global financial services industry would go through more changes in the next five years than it has in the previous 20. He cited Apple Pay and Bitcoin – in which he is an investor – as the most revolutionary products.
He said investors looked on Amazon "almost like a venture capital fund", with "some cash-rich businesses, and some cash burning ones." But he warned against trying to emulated Amazon.
“The Amazon lesson is that if you ever generate a penny of profit, you’ve made a mistake. People need to know it’s not actually that easy.”
Despite all the Dreamforce hype about the next generation of wearable technology, Andreessen described the smartphone as “the most important consumer product in history”, and predicted that it would continue to be the centre of the media universe for most people.
Apple would never make an actual TV, he said, because people only change their TV set once every five or ten years. “But even if nothing else is going on in their lives, they change their smartphone every three years.”
Also on Wednesday, cult-like Salesforce leader Marc Benioff announced a late surprise addition to the running order.
If his conference couldn't have the real Bono, it would have the next best thing: Japanese Bono, also known as Yoshiki, the lead singer with X Japan. The shy metalhead took to the stage to play a most un-metallic version of The Star Spangled Banner.
On the cuff
Then it was time for pop singer turned tech entrepreneur will.i.am to unveil his competitor to the smartphone: the smartwatch, or “smart cuff”, as he would have it.
The Puls wristband will have 1 GB of memory, 16 GB of storage, 3G and wifi capability, Bluetooth, a GPS map system and a pedometer, all powered by an Android- based platform and a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, all wrapped up in a sleek, sturdy band. Wait, wait, there's more: Calls and texts can be made on the device using 3G; the news platform will be provided by Rupert Murdoch's News International.
will.i.am also revealed that his wearables line will expand to include a jacket capable of charging the wrist band simply by touching it; shoes with a built-in weighing scales and pedometer; and a backpack that comes with surround- sound and a charger.
There was an emotional moment when the singer revealed that the payments app on his device had been designed by a student on one of his programmes, Cynthia Erenas, from Boyle Heights, the ghetto where he grew up.
For all the promise of disruption, there was only one genuinely disruptive event, which came during will.i.am’s presentation late on Wednesday.
As he prepared to unveil the Puls, a young man in a Dreamforce T-shirt jumped to his feet and begged will.i.am to give him a job – before he was hustled away by security guards.
