online tool

Salesforce.com continued developing as "the enterprise cloud computing company" Monday with announcements that it is extending its Force.com platform to Facebook and Amazon Web Services.

The announcements are part of a series of recent moves that include the unveiling this week of Force.com Sites, enabling businesses to utilize the Force.com platform and applications in the creation of public Web sites.

'Social Meet CRM'

Just because your band doesn't have the bucks for a six-figure advertising campaign doesn't mean you wouldn't be interested in promoting it on MySpace.

At least, that's what the Internet social network is banking on with a new self-service graphical "display" advertising platform that lets small businesses and individuals target their pitches to site users by characteristics like gender, geography and musical preferences.

Up to now, the online tool for managing and tracking listings on eBay, called eBay Selling Manager, has only offered sellers direct access to applications that the e-commerce giant developed in-house. But that's about to change.

Project Echo, unveiled at this week's eBay Developers Conference in Chicago, takes the company's online platform to the next level by enabling outside developers to embed applications in the eBay site.