Most 'infectious' ideas

In preparation for the iMeme: The Thinkers of Tech conference, Fortune asked leading technology gurus the following question: What, for you, has been the most surprising infectious idea of the past year?

Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff
Title: Founder, Chairman, and CEO salesforce.com
The rise of the enterprise mashup. When mashups first began to get some buzz, they seemed both useful and fun, like craigslist and Google maps. And they were all with consumer apps. But we started incorporating them into our apps, mashing up our platform with Google, Skype, Adobe, and many, many others.

And we are not alone. The community has really embraced this idea, and it's amazing to me how quickly the enterprise has, too. There is a compression in the lag between consumer technology and the emergence of its business iteration, and that's encouraging to me.

Richard Barton

Marc Benioff

Eva Chen

John Clippinger

Esther Dyson

Steve Fambro

Louise Guay

Bill Joy

Mark Lewis

Yusuf Mehdi

Harriet Pearson

Tomaso Poggio

Geordie Rose

Jonathan Schwartz

Sol Trujillo

Padmasree Warrior

Lee Thorn

Bruno Wu
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Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.