By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Daughters Of the Lonesome Isle,
the 1994 John Cage collection of piano compositions played by longtime Cage pianist
Margaret Leng Tan:
Pegasus Wireless Corporation is announcing
today the signing of an agreement to
supply its complete line of 802.11 WiFi broadband wireless networking products
to Ukrainian company Walrus Ltd. Walrus Ltd has agreed to carry Pegasus
Wireless’s 802.11 WiFi line exclusively for a period of two years.
Jasper Knabb, President of Pegasus Wireless, calls Ukraine a
“a virgin market.” He said upon his first visit toUkraine “it
was clear that they have the entire technology infrastructure, except for
802.11 WiFi products. There are no wireless products on their shelves at all.”
First CoffeeSM has friends who’ve tried to make
money in Ukraine, one of whom, safely back home drinking a decent beer, implied
that its business ethics diverge slightly from America’s. First CoffeeSM
wishes Pegasus all the luck in the world.
Yet Alex Tsao, CEO of Pegasus is correct when he says “Eastern
Europe has been overlooked as a market in general. We have been in the Chinese
market for five years now, and it is a long term investment. Eastern Europe’s infrastructure
is more advanced.”
…
Ontario-based –
Niagara Falls, to be precise – Telephone Magic Inc. is announcing the addition of the TalkSwitch line of phone systems to its telecom
website.
The TalkSwitch 48-CVA is an all-in-one hybrid PBX that
combines PSTN and VoIP trunks, allowing companies with one to 32 phone users
per location In addition to features common to the entire TalkSwitch line of
phone systems, the combination of PSTN lines and built-in VoIP trunks in the
TalkSwitch 48-CVA allows businesses with one to 32 phone users per location to
use the public telephone system for local calls and automatically switch to
VoIP for long distance and inter-branch calling.
Jeff Jackson, President of Telephone Magic Inc. said the TalkSwitch 48-CVA “and indeed, all
TalkSwitch phone systems” are “affordably priced and designed to be installed
by non-technical users.” In other words, it’s aimed at small businesses.
TalkSwitch supports all regular analog and cellular phones. Software updates
are free.
…
“The VOIP industry is energizing local economies around the
country,” proclaims TMONE Director of Sales Andy Cecil today as
the Iowa City-based company announce
their fourth expansion in three years.
“VOIP companies such as Vonage are proving that one day
broadband phone service customers will out number traditional wire line
customers,” Cecil thinks.
Iowa City-based TMONE is an all inclusive direct marketing company that caters to CLEC’s, ISP’s
and VOIP providers looking to make their marketing more accountable for
acquisition. “Branding is a secondary objective for most of TMONE’s clients,”
explains John Burchert, TMONE Chief Operating Officer.
“VoIP is an electrifying emerging technology that possesses
a need for customer acquisition” says Director of Sales Andy Cecil. TMONE sees
VoIP customer acquisition as a cash cow which will “continue to advance TMONE
as the company is called upon to assist in acquiring new persistent VoIP
customer bases.”
...
You know how most of the truly useful things in our daily
lives – Velcro, laser technology, the Internet, Tang – were started as
government-funded military or domestic security things? CRM might benefit from Saffron Technology’s “associative memory”
technique, currently being used by the American intelligence community.
In a great article in the Triangle
Tech Journal Elliott West writes that Saffron’s technology is “giving the
U.S. intelligence community the ability to make connections from reams of data.”
Sound like a familiar task?
Using a technique called “associative memory”, West writes, “Saffron
Technology’s software uses leaps of logic and makes associations that might
otherwise be missed.” The company’s working with some government agencies
including the FBI, who are participating in a pilot program with its software.
Saffron was founded in 1999 by former IBM hands Dr. Manny
Aparicio and Jim Fleming, who set out to develop intelligence software: “The
software allows [users] to see the big picture by putting the pieces
together...from data,” Baldwin told West, adding that “it really learns more
like the human brain does. It absorbs patterns and learns from what exists in
the data.”
Baldwin calls this approach an “associative memory”
technique, not the “rules based” methods commonly used to search data – “Find
everyone with an Arabicky-sounding name living in Lackawanna who’s traveled to
Pakistan in the past six months.”
“With the associative memory techniques,” West explains, “the
software can recognize patterns and make connections between pieces of data
that the human user may have missed or didn’t know existed. With this method,
it can discover relationships quickly between data points found in massive
amounts of data. ‘It gives you things that are related that maybe you didn’t
ask for,’” said Baldwin.
With Saffron’s technology, Army and intelligence analysts “don’t
have to read every single piece of information that is sent in,” which is
physically impossible since “hundreds of thousands” of reports are generated
daily, “but can examine trends and view the patterns the software found,”
Baldwin says: “Our software can read all of that data and show them a quick
picture of what happened overnight.”
Customer relationship management users are salivating
already, of course. Patience – “Saffron is also investigating non-intelligence
uses for its software and not surprisingly, one of those areas is in the
customer relationship management field,” West says.
Its uses are obvious: Instead of tracking terrorists’
aliases, the software can make connections among reams of customers
transactions currently underanalyzed or un-analyzable using current procedures
to find “previously unknown trends.” Maybe there’s another diapers-and-beer
gold mine lurking out there?
…
David Holtzman, former CTO of Network
Solutions has an opinion piece in yesterday’s BusinessWeek
arguing for a Constitutional Amendment
ensuring “privacy.” Sounds like Mr. Holtzman got one too many spam e-mails
last week.
He cites the examples of Citigroup losing a box of computer
tapes containing financial information of almost 4 million customers and
similar “lapses” at Time Warner, Lexis/Nexis, Bank of America and the credit
bureau ChoicePoint, which “unknowingly sold 145,000 customer records to a
criminal enterprise.” Which is more of a case for an amendment against
stupidity. Invest in prison futures, everyone.
“The needs of commercial interests and national security are
antithetical to a citizen’s desire to be left alone,” he writes. Right. Welcome
to 2005 America. First CoffeeSM will accept some national security
intrusion – the CIA-generated spam is still at tolerable levels. Commercial
intrusion is being dealt with as we speak.
“The solution is to guarantee the right to privacy to all
citizens by amending the Constitution, which has no such safeguard today,”
Holtzman writes. “In fact, the word “privacy”
is never mentioned in the document, even in an amendment… The lack of a
Constitutional mention of privacy relegates its defense to lawyers and legislators
who are free to define it in any way that suits them and their constituents.”
Which is exactly what happens today with things that are
specifically mentioned in the Constitution. As Dave Barry said “The Bill of
Rights says Americans have the right to bear arms. The Supreme Court has
interpreted this to mean that Americans do not have the right to bear arms.” So
what’s the point?
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content placement, but “appreciates” a kilo of Jamaican Blue Mountain Peaberry
whole bean coffee.