Salesforce.com and Telegraph Media Group Launch Debate2010

LONDON, March 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, and Telegraph Media Group http://telegraph.co.uk/, publishers of The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, Telegraph.co.uk and The Telegraph weekly world edition, have joined forces to launch Debate2010 http://Debate2010.co.uk/, the UK's largest online debate and discussion forum for the forthcoming General Election.

(Logo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050216/SFW105LOGO)

Debate2010 is the first crowd-sourcing site in the UK to report national opinion in real-time and is designed to facilitate debate in the run up to the General Election. The public will be able to debate topics, post ideas, vote and comment on the issues that most concern them.  Debate2010 will run until polling day and will highlight areas such as healthcare, education, crime, the economy and foreign affairs.

The site was developed using Salesforce Ideas, a crowd-sourcing application delivered in the cloud and enables users to vote on policies and debate topics. With the voting system pushing the most popular ideas to the surface, Debate2010.co.uk will offer a clear overview of what the public really thinks of the key political issues. Debate2010.co.uk was built and launched in less than four weeks and utilises the same groundbreaking technology that the Obama-Biden Transition team used to conduct a successful crowd-sourcing project in the U.S. Issues that appear high on the agenda will form the basis of a UK Citizens Briefing Book to MPs and political parties – a unique compilation of the ideas submitted by the Debate2010 community, which will outline the UK's opinion on key priorities.

Comments on the news:

• Marcus Warren, editor, Telegraph.co.uk, said, "Telegraph Media Group will be leading the way during the election campaign. Our partnership with salesforce.com  gives our readers a truly exciting and innovative way of engaging with the real issues. Social media will be a central theme of the 2010 Election. There will be no better tool to map public opinion in the weeks ahead."
• Dr. Steve Garnett, chairman of EMEA, salesforce.com, added, "By teaming up with Telegraph Media Group to create Debate2010, we are inviting the UK's population to have a say. This fantastic example of how cloud computing can translate into the public sector provides a wake up call for politicians. Engaging in interactive, online discussions is the future of politics."
• David Bradshaw, research manager, IDC, said, "This is an excellent example of how cloud-based technology can reshape the debate and help to engage public opinion. It could also re-shape the nature of political debate moving forward. Following the U.S. election, capturing social media conversations to determine the mind-set of a country proved a powerful phenomenon. Another important change is the way that media organizations are moving their business into the cloud to take advantage of the flexibility and scale it offers, and here Telegraph Media Group certainly seems to be in advance of its peers in the UK."

Supporting Resources:

• Debate2010 can be found at www.Debate2010.co.uk
• Follow Debate2010 on Twitter @debate2010 and join the debate with #debate2010
• Follow salesforce.com on Twitter @Salesforce
• View interviews with the Debate2010 team on YouTube
• Find screen shots on Flickr

About Telegraph Media Group

Telegraph Media Group Limited publishes The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, Telegraph.co.uk and The Telegraph weekly world edition.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at http://www.salesforce.com/uk/products/, has revolutionised the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service. The company's Force.com platform (http://www.salesforce.com/uk/platform/) helps customers, partners and developers to quickly build powerful business applications to run every part of the enterprise in the cloud. Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multitenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing.

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