Welcome to Startup Monday.  Our new weekly post will feature the hottest ideas from the tech and events industry.  If you have a startup that we should look into, let us know on Twitter!

Salesforce.com‘s annual convention, Dreamforce, is in full swing this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event, which began Dec. 6th and continues until tomorrow, Dec. 9th, has been promoting the release of 5 new applications for their cloud computing enterprise. CEO Mark Benioff stated in his address that this new stage, ‘Cloud 2′, “is built around a social and mobile web that includes Facebook, feeds, push notifications, touch, smartphones, location, HTML5 and mobile operating systems.” According to Mashable.com ‘s list of the new platforms are as follows:

Appforce: A platform for companies to build collaborative departmental apps that scale.

Siteforce: A website creation solution designed with both developers and business users in mind.

VMforce: A private beta service for Java developers to run their applications natively on Force.com

Heroku: The just acquired popular cloud platform for Ruby applications.

ISVforce: A platform service that enables ISVs to build and deliver multi-tenant cloud apps.

As far as events go, Dreamforce’s schedule is packed with over 700 speeches, parties, and musical guests, such as Neil Young and Stevie Wonder.  Last night various speeches and keynotes, from speakers such as Marc Sofia of Baker Hughes and Herman Boyd of DuPont, were delivered to give convention-goers a bit more information about the new applications.  Many attendees were from other companies in the software industry and the technological industry at large.

Tonight’s big event is being held at SF MOMA and will commence at 6:30pm.  The purpose of this event is for the marketing and sales divisions of the company, and will be sponsored by PR Newswire.  Salesforce has a great event management department, and ABCey thinks these events look really cool!  As event planners, how would you plan such a large event or convention, and where would you host these events?

The full Mashable article can be viewed here!

On Monday, December 13th from 6:30pm to 10:30 pm, Choice Catering will launch their very first “Pop-Up” restuaruant service, which will feature The French Laundry cuisine.  The event will be held in the back lounge area at Triptych Restaurant at 1155 Folsom between 7th and 8th street.  Abcey Events is teaming up with Choice Catering to create an awesome Pop-Up Restaurant and event, complete with theme.  This will be the first of many installments of Choice’s Pop-Up plans.  These events will take place once a month, at different locations each time around the city.  Best of all, a portion of all proceeds will go toward Blue Planet Run!

Seating will begin at 6:00pm and end at 8:30pm.

What it is:

• Once a month on Mondays, beginning in December
• Showcases local eateries and their products
• Works hand in hand with Blue Planet Run
• Rotating guest chefs
• New fun themes each time
• Local Artists’ work will be available for viewing at locations

Menu: The French Laundry, 5 course Prix Fixe Menu ($65), with optional wine pairing ($40)

Make Reservations:

Discounted Pre-Sale Tickets available by hopping online: http://choicepopup.eventbrite.com. Or book by phone: 415.322.8373.  Please call and confirm your arrival time!

ABCey is really excited about this event!  Not only will it be at a great venue, but the menu will be spectacular.  How cool that this will take place every month! We’d love to see you there!

“OpenTable is the leading supplier of reservation, table management and guest management software for restaurants. In addition, the company operates www.opentable.com, the world’s most popular website for making restaurant reservations online.” (opentable.com)

Open Table has been around for awhile now but it never seizes to amaze me how convenient this website is, especially when the application came to the Iphone. They have also just joined forces with Yelp to make reservations even easier. This will allow logged-in Yelp users to make a reservation at many restaurants without leaving the site. You won’t need an OpenTable account to take advantage of the system, but if you use the same e-mail address for both accounts, they’ll continue to earn dining reward points on OpenTable, which can add up to credit at certain restaurants.

The App: Being an event planner, this can be extremely useful at times when you need to scout available venues on the fly! This application/website not only finds nearby restaurants but can book your table as well. Calling restaurants and being put on hold is now a thing of the past. It will even give you directions to the restaurant from wherever you are. You are shown only nearby restaurants, and while it doesn’t filter by type of cuisine or refine your search as easily as you can on the website, it’s still very functional. They have also just created a new app for the iPad which will allow a lot more information on one single screen, and is more user friendly than the Iphone app.

For more info on the iPad app, check out OpenTable iPhone App Now Available For iPad [OpenTable Restaurant Reservation App Is Now Available For iPad] » TFTS – Technology, Gadgets & Curiosities

Dining Points: Every time you make a reservation and show up, you receive dining award points. The points can be anywhere from 100-1000 depending on the restaurant and time you chose, and are not awarded for cancellations/no-shows. They can later become a “dinning cheque” which can be used at any OpenTable restaurant world wide.

Have you used the OpenTable app yet?