Salesforce founder Marc Benioff is making headlines in Silicon Valley once again. This time, however, the news is not centred on SaaS, cloud computing or lingering feuds with Larry Ellison, but about making a sizeable donation to help San Francisco's homeless.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announced that Benioff and his wife Lynne, along with the Salesforce Foundation, will help to establish a $3m 'Home for the Holidays' fund to provide housing and rent assistance for homeless families in the city.

"We talked about our plans for addressing this issue, and within 24 hours, the Benioffs agreed to pledge $1.5m in grants to jump-start the new initiative," Lee said in a statement.

"I thank Marc and Lynne for their leadership and their support of homeless families in need, especially now during the holiday season."

Lee added that the campaign will back an initiative to provide 30 to 40 families with housing, a considerable effort in a city where housing can be scarce and among the most expensive in the country.

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff pulled off a glorious public relations coup today when he side-stepped an attempt by Oracle to cancel his planned keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

According to Benioff, Oracle contacted Salesforce at 3:30pm Wednesday to cancel the speech, which Benioff believes was due to disparaging remarks he made about Ellison on Facebook.

Salesforce staff scrambled to enact a Plan B and they were very successful, booking an alternative event at the St Regis Hotel.

Benioff was his usual dynamic self, railing on about the virtues of cloud computing and the bright future for software-as-a-service. He energised the audience and made some excellent points about the future of enterprise IT.

Unfortunately, he also made one very big mistake. Midway through the speech, Benioff was talking about Oracle's ignoring the virtues of cloud computing and the risk the company runs of being left behind, when he made a rather ill-advised comparison.

"It is these very forces that you can be Mubarak and say: 'This doesn't exist,' but the reality is that people have an alternative way of communicating," he said.

It is one thing to use historical examples to back up your business, and in many cases you can find events that indeed parallel current situations quite nicely.

Benioff later clarified this position to some extent, telling reporters: "CEOs today need to understand something. You might think you have command and control, but there is always a way around it.

"We saw that in the Middle East, we're seeing that on Wall Street. Command and control only goes so far."

But Benioff is the head of a enterprise software hosting company. Ellison is the head of an enterprise hardware and software company.

Ellison is not the military dictator of a sovereign nation, and Benioff is not an impoverished and oppressed citizen risking his life in the hope of obtaining basic freedom for his people.

When you're in an insulated position, such as the penthouse office of a successful internet firm, it can be easy to lose touch with the real world. In this case, Benioff was out of line in comparing his own situation to those who have put the rights of their countrymen ahead of their own lives.

To be fair, Benioff had an excellent point. Oracle and Ellison made a big mistake in cancelling the keynote. Benioff's presentation would have been a minor story among a stream of news from OpenWorld. In trying to shut down the presentation, Oracle displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the way social networking operates.

But Benioff has now taken away from his own argument by drawing the ill-advised comparison. He is certainly a master marketer and a visionary when it comes to cloud computing and software-as-a-service.

But if this quote is any indication, he also has some serious problems understanding the significance of what is happening in much of the world right now, and the risks people are taking to effect those changes.

SAN FRANCISCO: Salesforce kicked off its annual Dreamforce customer event in San Francisco on Wednesday, boasting 45,000 attendees and, according to a tweet by Marc Benioff, another 35,000 customers watching online.

The number of attendees has jumped hugely over the past few years. Dreamforce 2010 had over 30,000 attendees, which itself was 70 per cent up on the 2009 event.

While previous Dreamforce events, and Oracle's competing OpenWorld, often make quite an imprint on downtown San Francisco, this week there is a visiting IT crowd like never before.

It seems as if the city has been turned into one giant party, as queues pile up outside drinks venues on Tuesday night, blocking the streets.

Salesforce is being a great host, while obviously basking in all the attention. Free hot dogs are being given out to those passing the vast Moscone Centre where the event is being held, while shops in the city are giving Salesforce attendees large discounts.

Salesforce has also invited more press, bloggers and analysts to the conference than ever before, with at least eight journalists flown out specially from the UK.

There are large pictures of Benioff dotted around the conference too, depicting him almost as some sort of god of the cloud.

Salesforce seems to be increasingly trying to present Dreamforce as the de facto industry event for the cloud, in a similar way that RSA/EMC positions the RSA Conference in the security space.

However, despite being marketed as 'The Cloud Computing Industry Event of the Year', Dreamforce remains very much a customer event, the keynote speaker roster consisting mainly of Salesforce and customer execs.

So is the size of this week's event down to genuine customer interest, or is it more due to Salesforce's marketing prowess?

The firm announced a 97 per cent dip in year-on-year profits in May, although many analysts at the time put this down to the company's rise in operating costs following seven acquisitions in the 12-month period.

At the same time as announcing the profit slump, the firm revealed that it had acquired 5,400 customers over the course of the year.

Whatever the reasons, V3 will bring you all the latest news and opinion from the event over the next few days, so stay tuned.