Image: Salesforce
The streaming wars are coming to the office

Good morning! This Wednesday, Salesforce enters the living room with Salesforce+, Marjorie Taylor Greene gets another Twitter suspension, and Google doubles down on privacy for teens.
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It's Friday night. The long workweek is finished and you're curled up on your couch. After debating for 20 minutes whether to watch "The Office" or "Schitt's Creek," you get tired and instead turn on … Salesforce?
Say hello to Salesforce+, an expensive marketing campaign masquerading as a streaming site. The company even launched Salesforce Studios to support the initiative and has hundreds of people working on the project — including script writers and producers — according to CMO Sarah Franklin.
This is marketing 101. And it's a dog and pony show that anyone who's been to an enterprise software conference in the past five years has witnessed firsthand.
Now you can get that sweet Salesforce content on demand, along with original series and live channels that will stream the company's many events every year. Eventually, Salesforce is aiming to create a YouTube-like platform that allows for "community-submitted content and series," per Franklin, with the company retaining editorial control over what gets posted.
Salesforce is not the first corporation to try to disguise a corporate-backed video content hub as something more profound. It's taking a similar approach to Publicis Sapient, which hired talent from The Wall Street Journal and Netflix to launch a video service it refers to as "the Quibi of business." (Relatedly, Monica Langley, a former WSJ reporter now serving as Salesforce's executive vice president, will host one of the shows on Salesforce+.)
But there's always an audience for the hours of corporate-curated content that will be housed on the platform.
With Dreamforce coming up in September, it's a given that Salesforce+ will be shoved in the faces of every attendee. There's just one burning question: How did Salesforce, a company renowned for its marketing prowess, not come up with a more unique name?
— Joe Williams (email | twitter)
A version of this story appeared on Protocol.com.
Singapore is fast becoming a global hotbed of tech innovation. It's easy to see why. Nearly 80 of the world's top 100 tech firms have set up outposts there, including Google, Facebook, Stripe, Salesforce and homegrown unicorns like the super-app Grab.
On Protocol: Niantic's John Hanke is dreading the metaverse:
Sen. Ed Markey and Reps. Kathy Castor and Lori Trahan want gaming to better protect children:
On Protocol | Workplace: Codes of conduct work in favor of companies, not workers, attorney Domenique Camacho Moran says:
On Protocol | China: Alibaba's rape allegation exposed the industry's binge drinking problem, feminist activist Lü Pin said:
On Protocol: Tidal might be relatively small, but that's OK, COO Lior Tibon says:
Robinhood is buying Say Technologies in a $140 million deal, indicating that the company is trying to branch out its services.
AWS reportedly won a $10 billion NSA contract. It's a similar-sized deal to the scrapped JEDI contract, Nextgov reported, and (surprise!) Microsoft has already filed a protest.
Unity acquired Parsec, a remote work tool for game developers, for $320 million. It's Unity's biggest purchase to date.
Devesh Mishra is joining Deliveroo as chief product and tech officer. Mishra worked at Amazon for over a decade, most recently as the VP of global supply chain.
Hatem Naguib is Barracuda's next CEO. He's been the company's COO since late 2018.
Marjorie Taylor Greene's Twitter account was suspended again for a week after the platform labeled one of her tweets as misleading. It's her third and longest suspension this year.
Mao Taotao, Weibo's PR director, was arrested for suspected bribery. He was fired from the company as a result.
Sometimes, we have to take tech news in small doses. And for Clockwise, a podcast hosted by Dan Moren and Mikah Sargent, that means mulling over four stories, once a week.
Topics range from WWDC recaps to hypothetical questions like which tech giants they'd want to break up and what tech unions could look like in the future. At 30 minutes per episode, it's a quick way to ponder where the industry is and where it might be headed.
Business leaders say they choose Singapore for its modern tech infrastructure, strong government support, robust pipeline of talent and pro-business regulations (the World Bank ranks it No. 2 in the world for ease of doing business). Plus, its location in the heart of Southeast Asia serves as a launchpad into the bustling Asian-Pacific market.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Ed Markey's title. This story was updated on Aug. 11, 2021.
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