It’s been about four months since Amazon announced its plans to acquire of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com and Soap.com, for $540 million. The deal has not yet closed, primarily due to an extended review by the FTC.

The FTC took nearly seven months to approve the Google AdMob deal, so it is not yet as bad as it could be. But it is also unclear what antitrust concerns the FTC might have with this particular deal. Is the FTC worried that a combined Amazon-Quidsi will corner the online diapers market and provide free overnight shipping to parents all across the country?

Yes, Diapers.com and Amazon are the No. 1 and No. 2 online retailers of diapers, respectively. (Last year, Quidsi CEO Marc Lore boasted to me that Diapers.com shipped four times as many diapers as Amazon). But their combined sales are a drop in the bucket compared to the overall diapers market. Diapers.com probably did about $300 million in revenues last year. Quidsi also moved into family care products with Soap.com. Diapers are a multi-billion dollar industry, and family care is even bigger. Procter& Gamble alone sold nearly $15 billion worth of baby and family care products combined last year (including diapers, baby wipes, facial tissues, bath tissues, and paper towels).

E-commerce does not exist in a vacuum. It is rarely a market unto itself. Perhaps the FTC is just being thorough. But the longer it takes to either approve or block big deals above $500 million, the bigger a deterrent it becomes to those deals ever happening in the first place (see Groupon). If Amazon was allowed to buy Zappos, there is no reason why it should not be allowed to buy Diapers.com. Unless the concern is that Amazon dominates too many e-commerce markets overall, and allowing it to buy online dominance in adjacent markets sets a bad precedent. So how should the FTC define the market in this case—diapers or online commerce?

Today, at the DEMO Conference in Palm Springs, Salesforce VP of Platform and Marketing George Hu remained markedly confident over Salesforce’s future, smiling broadly in the face of rising costs and dipping profits.

Hu has good reason to be smiling. Salesforce is the talk of the town these days, and one of the preeminent cloud companies in the market. It had a big fourth quarter, with sales growing 29 percent to $457 million. “It was a monster quarter, and the deal flow in the fourth quarter was just awesome,” CEO Marc Benioff gushed in a recent earnings call.

In addition to its customer gains, Salesforce has also been in an acquisitions tear. The company acquired Heroku, the Ruby application platform-as-a-service for $212 million in December and DimDim, a web conferencing service for $31 million, in January — on top of the addition of GroupSwim, a SaaS cloud enterprise service, back in December 2009.

While sales grew 29 percent in Q4, Salesforce’s total operating expenses tipped past 40 percent to $365 million, resulting in a $391,000 loss in operations. The company also made a measly $97 million at the operating income level, compared to its $1.55 billion in sales.

Yet, in spite of these lackluster numbers, back at DEMO, Hu’s expectations remain positive, largely thanks to Salesforce’s enterprise social messaging application, Chatter. Though you may only know Chatter from unpopular Super Bowl ads, Hu said that their team has “cracked the distribution code”, as 80,000 of Salesforce’s 92,000 customers are currently using Chatter. He remained unfazed over competition from other enterprise social networks like Yammer, which boasts over 100,000 businesses (including TechCrunch).

“Today, we are seeing a confluence of cloud, social and mobile, and the best sales person in today’s world is not properly armed unless they’re combining those three key features,” Hu said. He continued on to say that the market in social enterprise, for those who can combine these three components successfully, remains a green field. This is why the company continues to build their human sales force, which the Salesforce (ha) executive said remains a high priority for the company going forward.

Hu’s conclusion, seen in the big picture, shows that 2011 may well be the year of the expanding sales force. Two weeks ago, I attended an “Online Local” panel at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, where representatives from Foursquare, Yodle, Living Social, and Angie’s List said that they are in the process of drastically expanding their own sales staffs in 2011 due to their impression that local merchants lack the technology prowess to buy through self service models. Living Social, for example, has a sales staff of over 450.

In business-to-business decisions, where there are multiple stakeholders, and huge strategic decisions are on the line, Hu said, it takes a real person — those customer-facing sales employees — to explain the details of how the service works, to work through obstacles, and help the customer see the bigger picture.

In light of Salesforce’s flurry of M&A activity and rapid growth, Hu said that what is keeping him up at nights is the education of this massive sales force. As the company has grown from a single application (Salesforce Automation) to a CRM platform, collaboration through social enterprise, and Data-as-a-Service, it has become increasingly difficult to train each new employee to manage their products.

Going forward, Hu said, he would like to see Saleforce become less reliant on their Website or app and become, instead, an invisible and pervasive service. He referred to David Kirkpatrick’s conception of the future of Facebook, in which the social networking giant will look nothing like its current form, but instead its social graph will be inherent to the very plumbing of the Web.

“We have a smiliar view,” Hu said. “Yes, people may still go to salesforce via a browser and login, but we think that collaborative data should be ubiquitous, not just through our app, but through whatever reader you use … We want to be pervasive and invisible, to be embedded in everything that you do.”

Though Hu’s lofty visions of the future may hold weight, you can check out a more dour financial perspective in the WSJ’s coverage of the Salesforce stock run up here.

The Washington Post reports that Hughie Elbert Stover, chief of security at the Upper Big Branch mine and at two other Massey Energy subsidiaries, has been charged with lying to the FBI and obstructing justice in the investigation of the West Virginia coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners. These are the first criminal charges in connection with the worst U.S. mining accident in 40 years.

I should first explain the radio silence of the last couple of weeks. We'd wanted to respond to feedback not with promises of future improvements but with actual fixes. So that's what I'm doing now—but I regret any impression that we weren't listening. Without more verbiage, the main changes you wanted: More »

It’s feeling like we should have a weekly section for “kudos to Senator Ron Wyden.” Each week he seems to be the only major elected public official who seems to actually be fighting for the people, rather than for greater power for corporations and government. His latest is that he seems to be one of the few elected officials who are actually pushing for real debate about the “sunsetted” Patriot Act provisions. As you may recall, Congress has been rubber stamping extensions to the three provisions, which allow for very broad surveillance with very little oversight. Each time they extend the provisions, they claim there hasn’t been enough time to debate the provisions, so we should just push it out again. But then no debate actually happens. It looks like Senator Wyden is looking to fix that:

[The Patriot Act] was written and passed six weeks after the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history. Congress wisely included sunset dates for the Patriot Act’s most controversial provisions, so that they could be thoughtfully considered at a later time. After ten years, it is clearly time for that debate.”

I’d argue it’s well past the time for that debate, but that’s a minor quibble. Wyden is also pushing for legislation that narrows the surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act and further protects our Fourth Amendment rights.

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Adding a new item to your iCal calendar can sometimes take a minute when you need to set its length, the alarms, and a number of other settings. Remind Me Later is a free app that sits in your menubar and, when called upon, lets you enter a simple sentence that will be interpreted into an event on your calendar. More »

Do you know what this is?

Science blogger Southern Fried Scientist found it in a cabinet in his laboratory. It’s got a motor, which turns some kind of centrifuge, and a set of optical lenses, which appear to be focused on the center of the centrifuge drum. It’s made out of Bakelite and steel, and the older scientists in his lab agree that it’s probably early 20th century vintage. Whatever it is.

One final clue, two patent numbers that are written on a plaque which also identifies Bausch & Lomb as the makers of the optics—# 1,648,369 and # 1,907,803.

What do you think, Boingers?

How to Automatically Download TV Shows as Soon as They’ve Aired (or Turn Your PC into a TiVo)

More »

Your taskbar/dock are the places you pin your most frequently used applications. The contents may not be your favorite software, but the titles are often the most important. What do you pin to your taskbar or dock and why? More »

Do you secretly wish you could look like a celebrity but don’t have the entourage, yacht, or cash flow to make it possible?

Well, thanks to YouCeleb, an e-commerce site launching today, now you can look — and feel — like a celebrity. (A sober one, of course.) The startup offers daily deals and discounts on designer fashion that celebrities wear after the cameras stop rolling.

Here’s how it works: The YouCeleb team identifies paparazzi photos of a celebrity, determines what they’re wearing, and then works with the relevant celebrity and brand to provide you with deals on those particular clothes and accessories. Operating under a group buy model similar to Groupon’s, YouCeleb offers a daily deal on a certain item and then sets a minimum number of items that must be sold. If you’re interested in the item, you fill out your payment information, but you don’t pay anything until that minimum is met.

Now, before you scoff at this as a way for celebrities to further line their pockets, you should know that YouCeleb donates the proceeds that the celebrity would receive to the charity of their choice.

Typically, brands are known to seed celebrities with their clothes in the hopes that they will wear them and in turn expose the products to their fans. While this is a popular method across the board, it doesn’t allow brands to measure actual sales and how much publicity their product is actually receiving.

YouCeleb addresses this issue by not only allowing brands to measure the actual number of sales generated by the deal but also shortens how long it takes the consumer to find out that a certain celebrity wears a certain brand. YouCeleb’s group buy model allows brands to sell enough of a particular product that the discounted price is fiscally viable and, as users share the deal over social networks, publicity ensues.

Among the brands YouCeleb has already recruited include, Heyday shoes, Prince Peter Collection, Blume clothing, Knockout Athletics, and Coogi. YouCeleb Founder and CEO Amit Dharmani told me that another 100 brand deals are currently in the works.

While some might find it uncool to emulate celebrity trends, more of us than we’d like to admit have seen some cool item on TV or in a magazine that we liked but couldn’t identify. Says Dharmani:

“Often times I noticed myself looking at an image of a celebrity on ESPN, or TMZ or some other website and wondering what type of sunglasses, or shoes, or jacket that person was wearing. It would take me quite a while to find the answer, and half the time I would go buy the cheaper version of the product instead of the actual one.”

YouCeleb hopes to amend this problem for the customer (and brand) by highlighting one image and one deal per day, allowing the customer to buy the actual item at a discounted rate rather than a cheap knock-off.

While celebrity endorsement and collective buying aren’t new trends, YouCeleb is hoping that combining the two in an e-commerce space will be. Sites like Gilt, RueLaLa, iDeeli and Hautelook all focus on fashion clothing at a discounted price, and present adequate competition, but YouCeleb hopes to distinguish their model by focusing on celebrities and by offering brands and consumers to target one particular item.

The startup is a product of Incubate Miami, a science and technology business incubator located in downtown Miami that offers strategic resources for young companies and entrepreneurs. YouCeleb graduated from the incubator in December 2010 and was founded by Amit Dharmani, CTO John Cattaneo, and VP of Business Development Darin Schmidt.

Though Dharmani said he wasn’t able to share which celebrities have already agreed to partner with YouCeleb, he said that he and his team have previous experience both the music industry and with celebrity management, so a wide range of actors, musicians, and athletes are already on board. And this profile on picortwo.com might give a small hint as to one possible partnership. Stay tuned for more.

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