August 2005 Archives

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is “Worried About You,” one of the sweetest soul songs the Rolling Stones – a vastly underrated soul band – recorded:

Interesting that Microsoft has bought Teleo, a privately-held San Francisco VoIP company which uses the same voice-processing software from Global IP Sound that Google and Skype use.  Of course – Google’s jumping into VoIP, Microsoft wants to keep up.
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It had to happen sooner or later, someone coming along and organizing all the toys, add-ons, gizmos and general Skype paraphernalia the way people used to hold competitions to see how many different ways one could trick out a Volkswagen Beetle.

Skype has held its first developer competition, awarding Jybe the first prize. More than 100 developers entered the competition, open to pretty much anyone. Luxembourg-based Skype claims there are currently over 400 hardware and software products that integrate with Skype.

(Luxembourg note of the day: Kudos to Gilles Muller, who as far as First Coffee^SM can remember is the First Luxembourger^SM to compete in the U.S. Open tennis tournament men’s draw, ranked 68^th in the world, who knocked off fourth seed Andy Roddick in straight sets – albeit 7-6, 7-6, 7-6 – yesterday in the competition to see who gets to be Roger Federer’s sacrificial lamb in the final.)

Niklas Zennstrom, Skype CEO and co-founder described the developer competition as “fierce,” saying Khaos Labs, Columbus CRM, ISkoot, Audiomatic and SalesForce.com turned in especially notable products.

Jybe won the top award of 2,000 euros for a plug-in that lets webmasters enable Skype and call forwarding, presence, browser synchronization and auto-responding features on their sites. Khaos Labs received a special mention for its Free ActiveS COM wrapper, which has been used by numerous other developers to help build a range of Skype Extras, which are readily available for download from the Skype Developer Zone.

To try to boost interest in its Developer Program, Skype is holding a series of partner events around the world where partners and developers can get together. The next one is September 22 in Palo Alto, then on October 12 there’s one in London, and in Tokyo on November 7.

Partners can also visit the Skype Developer Zone at http://share.skype.com/sdp.

Some of the finalists in the Skype Developer Competition, and other showcase products:

Jybe, a tool for sharing office documents and real-time collaboration over the web with Skype contacts. (http://www.jybe.com)

Dial Mp3, which allows you to listen to any mp3 in your collection on your phone. (http://www.voxu.com/projects/DialMP3/)

Pamela Basic, a personal assistant for Skype that answers calls and chats for you in 32 languages when you are away. (http://www.pamela-systems.com)

Gizmoz, which lets all Skype users communicate with “animated, 3D talking headz.” (http://www.gizmoz.com)

Yabber Nut Answer Machine for Skype, which offers voicemail, delayed messaging and allows you to receive and send messages when away from the computer.

Spontania Video4IM, a video product. (http://www.video4im.com)

Commercial mentions include Columbus CRM, a product integrating Skype with CRM; ISkoot, a free call forwarding product; Audiomatic, voice activated macros including Skype commands and SalesForce CRM integration.
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Spanning Partners has released version 2.0 of Spanning Salesforce, the Really Simple Syndication service delivering sales information “to subscribers’ PCs and mobile devices without firing up a browser or wading through email for updates,” according to industry observer Gavin Clarke, writing in the great British IT site The Register.

Charlie Wood, founder of Spanning and a former VP of NewsGator wrote on the blog Moonwatcher earlier this year “I’ve finished the proof of concept I started working on last weekend, and now get new leads from Salesforce.com via RSS. That way, I don’t have to spend my day with my head buried in Salesforce. Instead I’m notified of new leads through a variety of desktop, online, and mobile RSS aggregators.”

As Wood explains it to The Register, his service helps “solve the problem of information overload and access to data in enterprise applications.”

Jeff Nolan’s Venture Chronicles blog notes that to get started, “all you need is an Enterprise Edition account on Salesforce.com and an RSS reader that supports secure feeds. Popular choices include FeedDemon for Windows, NewsGator for Outlook, NetNewsWire for Mac OS X, and the FeedBurner Mobile Feed Reader for BlackBerry and Palm.”

A couple days ago industry observer Dan Farber blogged “if you use salesforce.com Enterprise or Developer edition, life just got easier. Spanning Salesforce 2.0, from Spanning Partners, is a free service that lets you track new and updated leads, opportunities, etc. in salesforce.com with RSS. By the end of this year, CRM and other enterprise applications that don’t offer standard RSS feeds will be a big step behind.”
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Thanks to Brian, who left a comment on a previous post detailing Caiman.com’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad customer service:

“Here is the address for Caiman if anyone is interested. Also if you feel you have been scammed you can file a complaint online with the Attorney General’s Office of Florida:

http://www.800helpfla.com/ccform.html

Write to Caiman at 6701 NW 7 ST, Suite 125, Miami, FL 33126.
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Thought for the day, from the invaluable Paul Johnson, one of the few public figures who is a bona fide “intellectual” in the classic sense of the word:

“The people among whom anti-Americanism is most rife, who articulate it and set the tone of the venom, are the intellectuals. They ought logically to hold America in the highest regard, for none depend more completely on the freedom of speech and writing which America upholds, or would suffer more grievously if the enemies against whom America struggles were to triumph and rule or misrule the world.

“Indeed, many of the most violently anti-American intellectuals benefit directly and personally from America’s existence, since their books, plays, music, and other creations enjoy favor on the huge American market, and dollar royalties form a large part of their income… You might think that some of these intellectuals – British, French, German for instance – who have been particularly abusive of the U.S. would renounce their American royalties. But not one has done so.”

Smug, ignorant hypocrisy is always a prominent feature of anti-Americanism, whether of the homegrown variety or imported from overseas.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Weird Al Yankovic’s “She Never Told Me She Was A Mime.” That’s the great thing about having kids, you get socially acceptable excuses to play with Hot Wheels, read Where The Wild Things Are and Harold And the Purple Crayon again and listen to Weird Al, the musical and spiritual heir to Spike Jones:

First Coffee^SM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego virtually sat down with RightNow Technologies’ founder and CEO Greg Gianforte for a Q&A as he explained why he’s not afraid of Microsoft and SAP, why there’s a lot more to business than money, The Big Idea, impressing candidates you’re recruiting by letting them camp in the snow and the competitive advantage of the tater pig.

Excerpts here today, the full interview on Thursday on the TMC site:

Hi Greg, thanks for taking time out with us today. You’ve already tried retiring once, if you leave RightNow would it be to retire or start something else?

I’m not sure the whole concept of “retirement” as we generally understand it is really valid. We all have skills and resources, and it’s really our responsibility to use those skills and resources in a worthwhile manner. Putting them on the shelf doesn’t seem very appealing or even ethical to me.

There are those who say the on-demand space is a three-way horserace between you, salesforce.com and NetSuite. If one of you comes to dominate, what will that company have done the others didn’t?

The big issue isn’t who is going to dominate the on-demand space. It’s the fact that the on-demand space is going to dominate the enterprise software market as a whole. So instead of looking at on-demand as a single market that the three of us are battling to dominate, it’s probably better to see on-demand as a business model that’s completely replacing an old-fashioned, low-ROI model that is becoming another artifact in the history of information technology.

SAP and Microsoft are getting ready to jump into hosted CRM. Nervous about being bought out or driven out of business?

Their problem is that they can’t possibly beat us at our own game. SAP, for example, would have to completely re-write all of its applications from scratch in order to build a multi-tenancy architecture to match ours. And, from a business perspective, they would have to replace this huge services ecosystem they’ve developed over the years that thrives on complexity and difficulty.

Microsoft faces similar hurdles. Enterprise applications are something you have to sell direct, which they don’t do. And Microsoft’s customers are in IT – not the business unit, which is where the on-demand buyer is.

Also, these big software companies like to take the money and run. They have no idea what it’s like to depend on a subscription model where you must satisfy your customer to get a renewal. We do. That’s why our renewal rate is 90 percent.

So the dinosaurs of the software industry can make all the noise they want to. To really come after us, they’d have to completely cannibalize their existing business. They can’t afford to do that, and Wall Street won’t let them.

What’s the best music to listen to at work?

I work at work, so I’m listening to my team and my customers – not music. However, when I’m not working, I listen to country-and-western music.

RightNow has quite an innovative employee charitable contributions program. Why is that an important part of the RightNow corporate culture?

It’s a sad day when people are just working for a paycheck. I could talk about Maslow’s hierarchy here, but suffice to say that higher purpose and a sense of mission are essential for human happiness. Plus, I believe both individuals and organizations have a responsibility to the community in which they exist. That means giving time and talent, not just money. So, in addition to matching our employees’ charitable contributions, we also encourage hands-on participation by paying them for up to 40 hours of volunteer work per year. With 500 employees, that means we’re pouring thousands of hours of effort into very worthwhile endeavors everywhere our business operates.

You’ve bootstrapped a leading high-tech firm in Montana from your spare bedroom to a campus full of buildings, which just proves it can be done anywhere, I guess. Are there times your location’s a disadvantage, like recruiting executive talent from the coasts?

Bozeman is actually a great location for building an organization. People here have a great work ethic, we have a high retention rate, and our office costs are obviously a fraction of what they’d be in Silicon Valley. We’ve overcome any recruiting issues we might have had by starting our interviews with two questions: What’s your favorite winter sport, and what small town did your spouse grow up in? We even had one candidate who declined our offer of a hotel room, because he said he’d rather camp out for a few nights. It turned out we had a pretty bad snowstorm that week, but he camped out anyway. Needless to say, he took the job.

My editor was intrigued by your saying 80 percent of the improvements in your products come from users, and 20 percent from “the Big Idea.” Can you elaborate on the Big Idea? Do you mean what y’all at RightNow think, or the accepted wisdom in the industry about what’s coming?

Every so often in the development of your business, you get to the top of a hill. What you have to do then is find a bigger hill to climb that’s adjacent to the one you’re on top of at the time. That’s the next Big Idea for your company. For us, the first hill was web self-service. Once we became the leaders there, we turned our eyes to delivering a full eservice suite. Then we entered the contact center market. And now we’re establishing our leadership in end-to-end CRM.

Why hasn’t the tater pig caught on nationally yet? I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

We’re not sure we want the tater pig to catch on nationally, actually, because it’s an important recruiting incentive for us. In fact, we have attorneys and lobbyists currently working around the clock to establish ironclad legal protections that would prevent any culinary establishment anywhere else in the United States or overseas from cooking any form of sausage whatsoever inside of any potato or other edible tuber.
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First Coffee^SM is pleased to see there’s been a small outbreak of common sense over at the Federal Communications Commission, as they’ve decided to give VoIP service providers more time – but not much more – to “comply with an order requiring that all subscribers acknowledge potential limitations of the E911 services,” according to industry observer Jay Wrolstad.

Basically they have a few more weeks, as enforcement’s been pushed back to September 28^th instead of this week.

It’s not free grace, though. To “qualify” for the extension, Wrolstad reports, “service providers must have filed a report on or before Aug. 10 regarding progress in obtaining confirmation from their customers.”

Back on June 3 the FCC decreed that VoIP carriers provide E911 capabilities to their subscribers within 120 days, notify customers when E911 service isn’t available through VoIP or otherwise not like traditional 911.

Cutting off service “is an unreasonable demand, especially since we are still in phase one of E911 with wireless systems,” IDC analyst Will Stofega tells Wrolstad.

It’s also one that falls disproportionately on smaller providers, which amounts to an artificial weeding-out process much better left to the market itself. It’s not possible to find a single example of a government controlling the emergence of a new technology like VoIP where government control improved the technology in any way – one reason the Internet turned out so well was that after providing the basic pieces the government got the heck out of the way and let creative people do their thing.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Alabama’s “Song Of the South:”

Wait, first we have to take our doctor-recommended dose of cancer-preventing antioxidants here, hang on a sec… okay, there we go. Gotta do what’s healthy, y’know.

First Coffee^SM doesn’t much like the dog days of August, when news is scarce on the ground, too much like working for a living. Hey, readers in N’Awlins, isn’t it about time y’all went to stay with your in-laws in Shreveport for a while?

New Zealand is making the most audacious change in the 100-year history of its national telephone network, ripping out its public switched telephone network and hiring Alcatel to replace it with an internet protocol network, at a cost of about $200 million New Zealand dollars, about $139 million in American dollars, The Dominion Post is reporting, citing sources in the national capital of Wellington. Go Kiwis.

“It has already spent about $130 million upgrading its six core telecommunications switches and revamping its billing systems, partly in preparation for the move to IP,” according to the news report.

New Zealand Telecom says the project is part of a $1 billion investment in a next-generation telephony network plan, architected last year “following a recommendation by the Commerce Commission, accepted by the Cabinet, that it would not have to give competitors access to the new infrastructure,” the Post says:

The plan calls for Telecom to get rid of about 600 of its 700 telephone exchanges, replacing the other 100 with fiber optic cable running to roadside cabinets, “the first point of aggregation for home phone lines, typically supporting a few hundred households.” The work is expected to stretch out over several years.

It’s possible that the roadside cabinets will be equipped with remote concentrators allowing Telecom to deliver triple play services of on-demand video, broadband internet and IP-based voice services.

Telecom says it will support traditional switched circuit phone calls until at least 2012, but hasn’t made any promises beyond that.

Whew. Time for more antioxidants, can’t be too careful, cancer running in the family and all that. Yes it’s a hassle, but grandchildren on the knee, clinking champagne glasses on Golden Anniversary, et cetera. Go ahead, twist First Coffee^SM’s arm.
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In related antipodean news, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that “West Australian ISP iiNet has launched a nationwide voice over internet protocol service named iiNetphone, the company’s managing director Michael Malone said today.”

The product is only available to those who have a fixed-line service which is bundled with iiNet’s broadband internet plans, the company’s chief technical officer Greg Bader told the Morning Herald.

Subscribers who have a DSL connection with iiNet would first have to take a fixed-line service from the provider in order to get the VoIP service.

IiNetphone is charging no monthly rental fees and has low call rates, with “10 cents being charged for both local untimed calls and calls to capital cities countrywide… national calls outside capital cities would cost five cents per minute over fixed lines.”
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First Coffee^SM was reminded by the current issue of The Economist why South Africa, despite its obvious advantages – educated, native English-speaking population, same time zone as Britain, the legacy of a sophisticated business climate – won’t be benefiting nearly as much as it could from the coming explosion in offshoring until it wakes up and smells the antioxidants:

Most importantly, telecoms are stupidly expensive. South African firms pay nine times more than Singaporean ones for broadband, twice what Malaysian ones do for domestic leased lines and, explaining why India’s not sweating South Africa’s challenge to their lucrative offshoring business, local calls in South Africa cost an unbelievable eleven times what they do in India, international calls are 70 percent more expensive and leasing international lines to America is ten times the price of India.

South Africa was bequeathed an efficient telecommunications infrastructure, it’s not like they have to lay cable or try to use 1950s-style equipment, it’s just sheer profiteering by one sector which is damaging the entire country’s international competitiveness.

More antioxidants already, specifically polyphenols? They help ward off cancer, cut the risk of developing diabetes, lower the risk of heart disease? If you say so, here goes.
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Be your own blogger! That’s right, schlep around the house in your pajamas, slurping down healthy antioxidants all day while you decide who’s the next prominent liberal journalist to take down.

Scott Delea of Web marketing firm DigitalGrit will be leading a session titled “Advanced Tactics in Search Engine Optimization: Leveraging Your Business Blog for Better Lead Generation” at this year’s DMA B-to-B Marketing Conference in Tucson, Arizona. The conference, organized by The Direct Marketing Association, is scheduled for September 13-15, 2005 at the Westin La Paloma Resort.

Delea will be joined by Scott K. Wilder, Group Manager, QuickBooks Division, Intuit, author of “The Official QuickBooks Blog” and manager of QuickBooks Online Community and Collaboration efforts.

The presentation will be held on Wednesday, September 14th at 1:30 PM. The session will focus on business blogs (short for web logs).

“There’s a lot of discussion about the effectiveness of business blogs for marketing,” Delea says. “I think that many marketers aren’t aware of how positively blogs can benefit their search efforts. In addition to the CRM and PR benefits of business blogs, the powerful combination of RSS and well-written, optimized copy can offer a tremendous leg-up in search engine marketing. Blogs are more than just a tech trend – they’re a must-have for all businesses with an online presence.”

They’re also a great way to meet girls, boost your income and learn to drive the big rigs.

For more information on the DMA’s B-to-B Marketing Conference hit the conference site at http://www.the-dma.org/conferences/dmab2b/index.shtml.
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“Honey, any more antioxidants in the pot?” The Associated Press is reporting on a study by St. Joe Vinson of the University of Scranton, which finds that “coffee provides more healthful antioxidants than any other food or beverage in the American diet.”

“The point is, people are getting the most antioxidants from beverages, as opposed to what you might think,” Vinson told the AP. “We think that antioxidants can be good for you in a number of ways,” including affecting enzymes and genes, though more research is needed, Vinson said.

Antioxidants, which are thought to help battle cancer and provide other health benefits, are abundant in grains, tomatoes and many other fruits and vegetables. After analyzing “the antioxidant content of more than 100 different food items, including vegetables, fruits, nuts, spices, oils and common beverages,” Vinson’s team calculated how much antioxidant each food contributes to a person’s diet.

The result? “The average adult consumes 1,299 milligrams of antioxidants daily from coffee. The closest competitor was tea at 294 milligrams. Rounding out the top five sources were bananas, 76 milligrams; dry beans, 72 milligrams; and corn, 48 milligrams.”

Studies in the past have found that coffee helps cut the risk of liver cancer, diabetes and falling asleep during Ken Burns documentaries.

Next up: A study finding Irish whiskey is one of the greatest cancer-preventive substances available today.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Beethoven’s Sonata For Piano and Violin No. 5, op. 24:

Public service request: A reader writes to First Coffee^SM and says “Do you have any info concerning ORASCOM doing business in the US. I know about a the deal with Motorola. Anything else you recall seeing?”

Nothing else First Coffee^SM’s seen, any other readers know anything?
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A tip of the coffee pot to Gordon Coburn, named to ICT Group’s Board of Directors. Mr. Coburn will also serve on the Audit Committee of the Board. This appointment increases the size of the Board to six members with four independent directors.

Coburn, 41, is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation where he is responsible for global financial planning, accounting, treasury and tax functions as well as information systems and mergers and acquisitions.
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Tech consultants Technology Solutions Company has announced a deal with enterprise data management vendors Princeton Softech to deliver “enhanced archiving capabilities” for PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.

As a Princeton Softech alliance partner, TSC will help clients implement database archiving software for managing database growth and maximizing application performance and availability in PeopleSoft environments.
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CRM and voice apps vendor FrontRange Solutions, which concentrates on the SME and distributed enterprise markets, reported total revenue for the quarter ended July 31^st increased over 10 percent to $21.9 million. Q2 2004 total revenues were $19.9 million.

In addition to an increase in revenue, FrontRange also reported an operating profit of $2.4 million, an increase of 15 percent over the three months ended June 30, 2004.
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The “wilder blog rumors,” as Nick Langley reports, have Google acquiring Skype. First Coffee^SM’s all for wild blog rumors, especially since many of them turn out to not have been so wild after all, but can’t see this happening.

For one thing, why would they? Google doesn’t have anything beyond PC-to-PC calling on the board now, and they seem to have what it takes to offer that without digesting Skype. It seems like they’re more interested in seeing what they can do with Gmail, introducing ideas to extend it to mobile phones.

The upside to all this is that they have Microsoft worried. You’ll remember earlier this year when Bill Gates told Fortune that Google was “more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with,” as Langley recounts.

That’s a double-edged sword. Is Google the new Great Satan? Some more paranoid bloggers think so, but as Langley points out, everything they do it opt-in. Take it or leave it, unlike The Boys In Redmond, who take more of an our-way-or-the-highway approach, and who think you want lots of irrelevant bundled features instead of optimal performance.

First Coffee^SM knows which approach he prefers.
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About this whole Lance Armstrong deal: First Coffee^SM really didn’t know there were such petty, vindictive losers in the world.

Granted, it must be tough seeing an American effortlessly whipping your butt – le whippé votre dérriere – in your favorite sporting event year after year after year with all the dreary predictability of Kabuki theater. And how Gaulling when he tests clean for drugs every year while other riders turn up positive.

So now we get some lab claiming some Armstrong sample from six years ago now tests positive for EPO. As Armstrong says, no recognized protocol was followed to retest the sample, there’s no correlating A and B samples to confirm the validity of the test, there’s no credible documentation of the handling of the sample in the intervening years, there’s not even any way to ascertain if the French sporting and sports “journalism” denizens who’ve long hated Armstrong and have been praying for him to fail tests, didn’t simply switch sample labels.

As Armstrong told Larry King, “A guy in a Parisian laboratory opens up your sample, you know, Jean Francois so-and-so, and he tests it – nobody’s there to observe, no protocol was followed – and then you get a call from a newspaper that says ‘We found you to be positive six times for EPO’… The World Anti-Doping Agency has come along and has really governed the world of anti-doping. They have set about a protocol and a code that everybody has to live by. And (the lab) violated the code several times,” including the basic code of anonymity. Armstrong’s right – who’d trust a lab like that?

Oh, right, those who’d trust Marie Reine Le Gougne, the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics figure skating judge who agreed to fix votes with Russian judges, torpedoing once and for all whatever credibility figure skating had as a sport.

Interestingly, Dick Pound, the overtly anti-American Canadian who heads the World Anti-Doping Agency, and who’s still bitter at being passed over – Pound “wears his anti-Americanism on his sleeve,” according to international sports observer Daniel Bell – as head of the International Olympic Committee, pooh-poohs the importance of a second sample, calling the policy of testing a second sample “a delaying tactic,” and drops thinly-veiled hints that he’d like to believe the charges against Armstrong.

As Armstrong says, Pound’s stance violates his own organization’s policy. Yet of course had it been a Canadian rider so accused you can bet Pound’d be screaming how the fact that there’s no second sample to test and no recognizable protocol or accepted standards were followed invalidates the whole thing.

Of course no fair-minded person takes these accusations seriously, with as many policies and procedures as were broken the results aren’t valid anyway. Yet it’s pig heaven, escargot in the Lance-haters slop trough for those who snuffle around in this sort of trash like le cochon in truffles.

First Coffee^SM doesn’t know if Armstrong used EPO in 1999 or not. His autobiography – Lance’s, not First Coffee^SM’s – says he was prescribed EPO as part of his cancer treatments. But First Coffee^SM does know that this kind of “retesting” of samples without any supervision, accountability or procedure is not the way to find out, it’s only useful as a way to smear Armstrong in the headlines and gain some measure of pathetic revenge over his beating your best riders silly for seven years.

First Coffee^SM also knows that Armstrong’s faced more hostile stupidity than any other six Tour de France riders combined, the “Lance-only” drug tests, the local press gleefully promoting the most brainless, juvenile anti-Americanism, regurgitating previous doping slanders and any sort of rumor you care to name as if it all had just fallen from the lips of Joan of Arc and St. Denis themselves. Armstrong’s handled it all with grace, class and dignity, never stooping to their level, which must be aggravating to the les toads who peddle such crap.

So this is their latest cheap shot – claim he tested positive in such a manner contrived to preclude the possibility of any conclusive validation or refutation of the claim. Because what they really want isn’t the truth, but just to smear this American, to get his name associated with “positive dope test.”

Hey, and let’s go back and retest French Tour winner Bernard Hinault’s old samples, huh? Or how about multiple winner Miguel Indurian? First Coffee^SM notices he was rather nervous about the whole idea of old samples being retested. Why not find out about everyone, French riders included? Why only announce Armstrong’s “results?”

Now the French are shocked, shocked to “find” doping in the Tour de France. Might it be France’s cycling establishment seeking to distract attention from the last great French racer, Richard Virenque, who was found to have been doping during the Tour in 1998 in the Festina affair?

Bear in mind a long-ago French racing hero, five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil, who raced on amphetamines and said “Do they expect us to ride the Tour on mineral water?” He got the Legion d’honneur, Armstrong gets slimed.

First Coffee^SM wonders what depths the Tour de France’s local press will scrape when explaining away how Armstrong won his six other Tours.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is silky smooth pop with lyrics etched in acid, Carry On Up the Charts: The Best Of the Beautiful South:

Recently Anurag Wadehra, Vice-President of Marketing and Product Management of Siperian, which is big into Customer Data Integration products, took the time to answer some questions from First Coffee^SM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego. Excerpts appear below. The full interview, including Anurag’s thoughts on what’s coming next for CDI will be published Monday on the TMC site.

Hi Anurag, thanks for taking the time with us. What exactly is Customer Data Integration?

Customer Data Integration, or CDI as it is often referred to, is a new software category which combines the necessary technology, processes and services needed to create and maintain an accurate, timely and complete view of a customer.

Sounds like the Holy Grail. How does it differ from other technologies, such as Extract-Transform-Load, Enterprise Information Integration or, say, Data Quality initiatives?

Over the past several years, companies have turned to EII, ETL and DQ technologies in the hopes of addressing their customer data integration issues. Unfortunately, these are limited set of tools, each of which originated for narrow purposes. Each one compliments the CDI platform or framework but none replace it – ETL moves large volumes of data in batch-mode and is still needed as step in building a CDI hub; EII was designed to run distributed queries across disparate sources in real-time and can be used alongside CDI for data aggregation; and finally DQ tools were designed to de-duplicate and “scrub” incorrect names and addresses one source at a time and still need to be integrated with a CDI hub.

What’s the best music to listen to at work?

Silence is golden! Otherwise, my preference shall be Indian classical ragas based on the time of the day.

First Coffee^SM’ll stick to Frank Sinatra. Obviously CDI would be a plus to any CRM initiative, but what are the industry verticals you see that take it the most seriously and really invest in CDI?

We are seeing a lot of interest in health and life sciences, financial services, insurance, telecommunications and high tech industries. The federal government is yet another area where there is a clear need for this type of data integration – but in this case the customer is a citizen, a constituent or an employee.

First Coffee^SM isn’t much of a techie, but understands that Siperian develops their CDI products based on the Adaptive Transaction hub style.  What’s the business reason there?

We obviously think this approach is the most suitable for today’s changing business and IT environments. The Adaptive Transaction hub style, like the one we offer, emerged most recently to address the limitations of the other CDI approaches. With the adaptive style, this type of hub is built as a platform for consolidating data from disparate third party and internal sources and for serving unified customer views to operational applications, analytical systems or both. Unlike other styles, this hub is data-model-neutral and uses templates, is tailored to meet the needs of each industry, and allows enterprise-specific data models to be implemented quickly. In effect this type of hub becomes the customer master or “system-of-record” for all systems.

What are the ROI metrics a company should look for with CDI?

The ROI metrics differ not only industry but by the specific business processes within each vertical. The most common ROI metrics are in three categories: acquiring the customer (such as improving cost efficiency of marketing programs, reducing cost of sales in pharmaceutical companies, etc), serving the customer (cost & efficacy of strategic account management in banking, cost of generating quotes in insurance) and ensuring compliance (such as FDA, CAN-SPAM, Know Your Customer, etc. kind of initiatives). CDI as an infrastructure enables these benefits that unlock the ROI.

Why do you think there’s interest in Customer Data Integration?

CDI initially gained in popularity because it finally fulfills the unmet promise of customer relationship management and business intelligence applications – achieving a unified view of a customer across touch points in real-time. And, what is even more important is that CDI allows companies to manage their most valuable information asset which of course is customer data. By leveraging a CDI solution, organizations can rapidly respond to changes in customer data – such as address update – across business processes which in turn results in more efficient and profitable customer interactions, reduced customer operations costs and increased accuracy of their regulatory compliance initiatives.

Customer Data Integration tools have been in the spotlight recently as a result of IBM’s recent acquisition of another CDI vendor DWL. Are you concerned about the consequences of this new alliance and what do you think it means for CDI vendors like yours?

We see this acquisition as a good thing. Not only does this deal underscore the importance of the customer data integration hub, it proves there are a lot of major deals out there. As a leading best of breed vendor, Siperian continues to be in a great position to grow rapidly and partner with leading players which, by the way, includes IBM for us.
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Software evaluation firm Technology Evaluation Centers has created a business process management evaluation center to help companies selecting BPM software.

Business process management is usually defined as a set of activities organizations use to improve business processes, including interactions between systems, business processes, and human interaction. According to the BPM Standards Group, core BPM processes include financial and operational planning, consolidation and reporting, modeling, analysis, and monitoring of key performance indicators tied to organizational strategy.

TEC thinks that BPM will be “one of the most important business drivers of the near future.” TEC has tracked what they term “significant” increases in customer demand for BPM selection projects, with numbers growing seven-fold since 2004.

Over the next year, projections suggest that revenue in licensing for BPM will grow from $700.3 million in 2005 to $1.05 billion through 2008.

Before companies approach vendors for a request for proposal, TEC suggests companies engage in an on-line comparison of the leading solutions under consideration, in order to save time, money, and staffing resources during the selection process. The TEC BPM Evaluation Center, company officials claim, “enables end users to match their requirements to the functionality provided by a variety of BPM solutions.”

Organizations can use the center to analyze vendors on approximately 600 criteria covering BPM functionality.
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Got this press release late yesterday, video on demand vendor itaas Inc., a provider of end-to-end iTV services in the digital video industry is announcing the launch of its latest product, VOD Session Simulator.

Company officials claim it’s “the first commercially available product of its kind,” as it “gives broadband operators and VOD service providers a powerful simulation tool that allows them to test their VOD environments to identify potential problems and bottlenecks in the system and implement fixes prior to deployment.”

The product gives VOD service providers the ability to test the VOD environments under various simulated load conditions and patterns, identify potential problems in the system, and correct the flaws before launch. Broadband operators can use the tool to help determine the capacity load for their VOD systems.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the pinnacle of pop-rock, 1968’s Something Else by The Kinks – more fun than The Beatles, more rock than Pet Sounds and way more intelligent than anything else at the time:

“It’s really a Dantesque scene,” said police officer Arioso Obregon.

Another plane goes down, this one in Peru. First Coffee^SM isn’t a paranoid conspiracy theorist, except when it comes to the left-wing MSM never giving President Bush any credit for anything whatsoever – the man could single-handedly cure cancer and the headlines would be “Cancer Researchers Thrown Out Of Work By Bush,” “Leukemia Sufferers: Why Is Bush Ignoring Us?” and “Cancer Cure Too Late For Many” and TV coverage would focus on AIDS activists protesting the lack of a cure for AIDS and one six-year old Hispanic girl in Albuquerque who will have died of cancer a week before the cure became available, with the family crying that “people like us” don’t matter enough to Bush for him to find that cure a little bit faster – but doesn’t it seem like there’ve been quite a few plane crashes recently?

Or maybe First Coffee^SM’s just thinking of his family’s upcoming trip to see Mrs. First Coffee^SM’s family in New Zealand, which will entail that old favorite Antalya- Istanbul- Dubai- Singapore- Brisbane- Auckland itinerary, and back again. We don’t need to be reading about more plane crashes for a while, okay?
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The news yesterday was that CRM is “back,” that the market’s going great guns again.

Half right.

Remember 1979? That year a single named “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang hit the charts. When it did, rap/hip-hop accounted for 2.5 percent of the Top 40 chart, despite a 100 percent increase from 1978. The band Blondie quickly copied it with “Rapture,” scoring one of their bigger post-New Wave hits.

Most critics at the time said well, it’s an interesting new sound, this rap, hip-hop, whatever you want to call it, it’ll be popular in the clubs for a year or two, influence a few mainline acts and peter out, no staying power. Not really a viable long-term business vehicle for the industry, you know. Flash in the pan.

Today, 25 years later, rap/hip-hop is the dominant pop music genre. It’s the rappers and hip-hoppers who are signing the huge contracts, getting radio play, producing the cool ring tones and doing the beer ads on TV. Oh, and you can catch Blondie’s oldies act on their tour of southern Wales. Good seats still available.

It’s hosted CRM, CRM software you rent which resides on someone else’s servers, which is where it’s at, growing like crazy. AMR Research found that while the overall CRM market grew ten percent, none too shabby, granted, to about $11 billion, sales of hosted customer management applications grew 105 percent in 2004.

Overall, in 2003, CRM’s revenue was 95 percent from installed applications, and five percent from hosted. In 2004 hosted had almost doubled that, with the deck tilting to 91 to 9 percent. It might still be single figures, but that’s quite a shift, folks.

“The report indicates that the hosted model has reached prime time as a delivery method for Customer Relationship Management applications… the hosted model has reinvigorated a market that failed to grow over the past several years,” said Rob Bois, senior research analyst at AMR Research. “The hosted category has changed the whole perception of customer management with faster implementations, quicker time to value, and easy customization.”

Hosted’s two stars these days are RightNow Technologies and salesforce.com, which saw 97 percent and 83 percent growth rates, respectively. In terms of overall revenue salesforce.com zoomed up the charts from number 22 to 12 with a bullet, but probably isn’t going to crash through the silicon ceiling of the installed-base application vendors.

Still, there is the Sugarhill Gang to think about...

SAP’s taking over the #1 place from Siebel is in no small part due to dollar-euro exchange rates working in favor of the German company, but still, they are #1 now. AMR expects SAP to find success in the manufacturing sector and for Siebel’s hosted CRM OnDemand product to be the company’s hope. Ironic, as viciously as Tom Siebel blasted hosted CRM when salesforce.com came out, that it might be the company’s lifeline now that they’ve shown the sense to diversify out of buggy whips and zeppelin repair.

First Coffee^SM thinks Siebel has a good shot at becoming a serious hosted player. At least they’re in the water swimming with the Right Now, salesforce.com and NetSuite sharks and learning as they go, unlike SAP, who has yet to dip a toe in the hosted market. Microsoft can’t even get their installed version out the door, any success in hosted is a long way off.

The listing of the vendors ranked by revenue is the usual scorecard, SAP and Siebel with 15 and 12 percent of the market, PeopleSoft with four percent, Amdocs, Dendrite, Oracle-with-the-PeopleSoft-asterisk at three percent and Aspect (about the only significant CRM vendor who’s expected to see a decline in market share in 2005), Avaya, Cisco-ICSG and The Boys From Redmond splashing around in the two percent pool.

OnviSource, the parent company of CadCom Telesystems, Business Solutions and Axius Portals, has announced the purchase of Davacord, Inc. in an all-cash transaction.

Davacord sells converged contact center recording and quality monitoring products that give call centers performance and liability protection, without complex integrations or software upgrades. Davacord’s products are currently used by more than 700 customers in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, including many Fortune 500 customers.

OnviSource is the parent of a group of companies offering contact centers a suite of integrated system and software applications, hosted application services, telecom access services and business outsourcing services in sales, marketing, and business operations.

For whatever it’s worth, earlier this year Davacord was named the 2005 Member’s Choice Winner for the industry’s best recording and quality monitoring tools by ContactCenterWorld.com. The award was tabulated by the highest number of votes from actual users of call recording and quality monitoring products who rated nominated companies on the quality of their products, ongoing support and overall satisfaction.
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IEX Corporation, a Tekelec company and Keynomics LLC have announced a partnership where IEX will offer its customers Talk, Type, Listen, a contact center agent productivity training program designed to enhance agent computer keyboarding and transcription skills.

The offering is developed by Keynomics and is provided as a Web-based hosted program accessed via the WebStation Plus module available with the IEX TotalView Workforce Management system. The training is designed to deliver permanent improvements in contact center productivity, quality and ergonomics in terms of how an agent interfaces simultaneously with the caller and the agent’s computer.

IEX sells workforce management and optimization technology for contact centers. Keynomics sells productivity and quality software for improving corporate keyboarding and office ergonomic techniques.
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Dow Jones is reporting that “the call-center business in the Philippines will continue to grow robustly in the coming years, albeit at a slower pace than that of the past five years,” citing Bong Borja, president of PeopleSupport Inc. and a director of the Call Center Association of the Philippines.

Borja recently told a business forum that the industry is expected to grow seat capacity by 50 percent to 70 percent this year after ending 2004 with a total of 45,000 agent seats, equivalent to 72,000 jobs. In 2000 “this sector of the business process outsourcing industry had a capacity of 2,000 seats and employed 3,000 agents,” Dow Jones reports.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Billie Holiday’s Lady In Autumn: The Best of The Verve Years, a 1991 compilation of her late recordings:

Got one of the more interesting comments in a while yesterday on something in the column. Yes, First Coffee^SM does get some great responses, and we also get… well, some of you people have way too much free time on your hands.

A senior executive from a 9-1-1 service provider who asked to remain anonymous wrote in response to First Coffee^SM’s meditation (i.e. slightly unhinged rant) on Nuvio’s lawsuit challenging the wisdom of the Federal Communications Commission giving VoIPers 120 days to conform to the outmoded emergency 9-1-1 technology they’re in the process of rendering obsolete to say that actually, Karl Rove had nothing to do with it, Joe Wilson’s the one who outed his wife, Valerie Plame as a CIA agent when the lying buffoon shot off his mouth to The Nation and The New York Times… uh, sorry, wrong anonymous source…

“Read your piece about the Nuvio lawsuit,” the exec writes. “Of course we all agree that Nuvio is just trying to buy time. Actually, I think no one will completely make the deadline, because the ILECs can’t really get the connection orders processed in time; their systems just aren’t set up for that.”

First Coffee^SM can’t help but think that the FCC knew this, too, when they set up the deadline.

“Someone told me that there is a team of literally dozens of people working in one ILEC trying to deal with the orders placed by Vonage. This includes people working to change processes to allow VoIP carriers to order connections and services, and the people actually processing the orders.”

The 120 deadline “IS too short,” the exec writes, “and is causing a very unfortunate thing to happen. The industry actually worked out a standard that met the needs of the 9-1-1 community and the VoIP community. It was done in NENA, the National Emergency Number Association, and it’s called ‘i2’.”

The problem, as she explains it, is that i2 depends on creating some databases derived from, but somewhat different from the existing 9-1-1 databases, and there is not enough time to create them in the 120 days: “Since the order doesn’t say you have to follow the standard, and because the databases aren’t available, the VoIP guys and their contractors are putting together solutions that won’t meet the needs of the 9-1-1 guys, but fits within the letter of the Order.”

As a wise man said once, the letter of the law killeth.

“The result will be unfortunate; the Public Safety Answering Points will still be whining, the VoIP carriers will claim they are in compliance, and we’ll be struggling longer than we should be to get the right thing to happen.”

The long term will see the 9-1-1 system evolving to be IP based, of that this executive is confident, “and in fact VoIP based. There is work underway in NENA, called “i3”, to do this. There is a report out of the FCC’s NRIC organization that describes how this will work, and there is effort in the IETF to support this vision already.”

He’s confident that the VoIP carriers will like i3, because “it’s probably going to be a lot cheaper for them, but it takes upgrading PSAPs, for which there is currently no money, and lots of bureaucracy to get through.”

Public Safety Answering Points are the local governmental organizations who pick up the phone and respond to the 9-1-1 calls, the cops and fire departments and paramedics and the exec is correct, few have “Upgrade To Cutting-Edge Technology” as a budgetary line item.

Bear in mind that this is someone in the industry, so take all product and technology references as maybe possibly coming from somebody with a not purely disinterested stake in the technologies and products heretowith named heretofore therewith et cetera ad infinitum, but the point stands: An artificially-set deadline does not help the best technologies develop, but tries instead to cram fresh innovation into the wagon ruts of the past.
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A tip of the coffee pot to Blair Goulet, named president of Open Solutions Canada, a strategic business unit of Open Solutions Inc.

As president of Open Solutions Canada, Goulet will be responsible for leading the Banking Solutions Group and Payment Solutions Group. Open Solutions Canada operates under the auspices of Open Solutions’ International Operations Department and Goulet will report to Wayne Ginn, Open Solutions’ vice president of International Operations.

Goulet joins Open Solutions Canada from SOLCORP, the financial services software division of EDS.
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Software maker Autonomy Corporation plc, is announcing an Original Equipment Manufacturer agreement with BEA Systems, allowing BEA to embed Autonomy’s IDOL 5.0, described by company officials as “infrastructure technology which enables enterprises to perform advanced operations on unstructured, semi structured and structured information in real-time,” into BEA WebLogic Portal 9.0.

IDOL 5.0 is the latest version of Autonomy’s flagship product IDOL, with some new features such as a sentient architecture, a new algorithm for Automatic Query Guidance, 50 new IDOL operations and improved installation facilities.

Autonomy and BEA have worked together in various partnership deals since 2001.

Saying “the future of enterprise portals lies far beyond simple search facilities,” Nils Gilman, Senior Director, Product Marketing, BEA Systems said the Autonomy technology “is designed to add significant value to BEA portal solutions through the full automation, clustering and personalization of unstructured information in the enterprise.”

Stouffer Egan, CEO of Autonomy’s North American operations claimed the company’s OEM business is growing at 70 percent year on year.
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Enterprise Marketing Management vendor Aprimo, Inc. is announcing that the, ah, delicately-named European printer Communisis has selected Aprimo as a partner to provide software and support its managed technology service offering.

Communisis will offer Aprimo Marketing, a suite of Web-based EMM software products designed “to bring more precision, discipline and control to the marketing process,” according to company officials, as well as a copy of Das Kapital.

Aprimo Marketing products will be made available to Communisis clients for the Web-native platform that can be integrated with a customer’s existing enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems.
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According to Cox News Service, 42 percent of respondents in a recent survey said that coffee is “more or equally important” than sex in any given week:

“The survey, commissioned by Dunkin’ Donuts, also found that coffee drinkers reported more robust romance, with two-thirds of respondents saying they had sex once a week or more.” Only 58 percent of non-coffee drinkers reported as much action. So either coffee drinkers are more prone to exaggeration…

First Coffee^SM would not say that coffee is “more important” than sex. But coffee and Dunkin’s doughnuts? Hmm. At any rate, First Coffee^SM is concerned for Richard Walker, who wrote recently in the Waikato Times about giving up coffee.

In light of the above survey results Mr. Walker might want to reconsider his rash effort.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an iPod mix, current song “Jerry Springer” by Weird Al Yankovic:

This came out last Friday afternoon, so maybe you missed it (too), but customer support outsourcer Sitel Corp., has announced that it’s completed a $145 million refinancing package, consisting of a senior revolving credit facility of $90 million and two term loans totaling $55 million.

Proceeds from the new financing will be used “to retire the Company’s 9 ¼ percent senior subordinated notes, due March 2006, replace the existing credit facility due December 2005, and provide funds for working capital and other general corporate purposes,” according to company officials.

The senior subordinated notes will be redeemed in September 2005 at the face value of $83.8 million, plus interest. The refinancing will result in an estimated non-cash charge in the third quarter of 2005 of approximately $0.4 million to write-off remaining debt issuance costs.

A couple weeks ago the Omaha, Nebraska-based announced Q2 net income of $3.2 million, or 4 cents per share, compared with $2.5 million, or 3 cents per share, for Q2 2004.
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LoJack for Laptops – does it work? According to an evaluation by David Andelman, yes it does. If you don’t mind the way the system works, it might be a good idea for you.

Absolute Software's LoJack for Laptops used to be called CompuTrace, Andelman says. He installed it from a disk, registered it with the office in Vancouver, did a test call to “report” it stolen and “lo and behold, they told me just where my laptop was located. It worked perfectly.”

It costs $49.95 for year or $99 for three years. When it’s stolen and you report it the service locates it, notifies its “recovery team,” all ex-cops, who call local law enforcement and give them to the location of the stolen laptop. Yes, the thief has to go online for it to be located.

“At the beginning, we wondered whether law enforcement would really care about laptops,” John Livingston, Aboslute’s CEO told Andelman. “But they were very supportive. Property theft is a situation where they don’t get a lot of success. But this is stolen property with a built-in electronic tip where it’s located. They also realized that, in 5 per cent of the cases, the location they go to other criminal activity is taking place.”

For instance, Andelman says, “a distress call came from a laptop in McKinney, Texas. The local police stumbled onto a big chop-shop location with drugs and weapons. They also got the stolen computer back.”

The software remains in place even on a laptop which has been stripped and the hard disk reformatted. Which is Andelman’s concern – do you really want a third-party, basically ineradicable set of eyes in your computer? Absolute can wipe your entire hard drive – on your say-so, of course, if you have sensitive information that’s been stolen along with the laptop, and wouldn’t that be a nifty challenge for hackers, breaking into that command?

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the 1993 Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, the all-star Madison Square Garden tribute to ol’ Minnesota Mudthroat, and when we say “tribute,” we don’t mean a bunch of bands you’ve never heard of phoning in covers, we’re talking Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Johnny Cash, Ron Wood, George Harrison, Eddie Vedder, Lou Reed, John Mellencamp, Stevie Wonder, Johnny Winter, Willie Nelson, Tom Petty and Chrissie Hynde, Roger McGuinn, Levon Helm, Shawn Colvin, Tracy Chapman – where else do you get the greatest country, soul, Irish, rock and folk acts sharing the stage with a Beatle? Well, now that Cash and Harrison are dead the answer is nowhere, but you get the point, we’re talking guys who usually get tribute concerts showing up to pay tribute to Bob … huh? Oh, right, sorry, the frustrated rock critic will shut up now:
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First Coffee^SM wrote a while ago about Concerto Software and Aspect Communications merging, today they’ve announced that the combined company will be named Aspect Software. Like when Chrysler “merged” with Daimler-Benz, the merged name was “Daimler Chrysler,” which is pronounced “Daimler.”
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What’s interesting is this lawsuit filed by Nuvio which is, in reality, a plea by VoIP to please let us do it a better way, don’t make us conform to a dying technology.

Now that the VoIP industry’s grumblingly accepted the government’s authority to regulate, they want it to be as enlightened as possible and not to get in the way of business. The industry sees rules being set by a bunch of Washington pointyheads instead of people who know the industry or particularly care all that much about the industry. Policy is set by those who want VoIP to be basically a souped-up version of POTS since that’d make bureaucrats’ lives easier and more predictable. And bureaucrats like things to be easy and predictable. That’s why they’re bureaucrats.

People with their lives and businesses invested in VoIP see other people setting VoIP policy who aren’t driven by real-world considerations of the development of the VoIP industry and all the potential advantages and all the cool technology, but who are, in fact, driven by considerations of getting promoted, not screwing up, pleasing friends, currying favor, networking and not having to work too hard.

First Coffee^SM isn’t saying this is a correct or incorrect view of the political process, although First Coffee^SM has lived in Washington, D.C. and has worked as a journalist in the D.C. area, and is aware that policy for, say, hazelnut subsidies is rarely driven by what’s best for Americans who like hazelnuts, but more often by who’s friends with whom and What The Politically Expedient Thing To Do Here is and how to get one’s political butt covered in case something goes wrong and some counsel comes around looking for someone to blame, and who’s pouring money in whose re-election fund and how someone can make friends in this particular case which can be helpful in getting a return favor down the line.

Not saying that’s what’s going on here with the FCC at all, but just to note that that’s the public perception, rightly or wrongly, of the logrolling that goes on in D.C. When a business hears that some Deputy Assistant Undersecretary For This or That is in charge of issuing a ruling that has a real-world impact on their livelihoods and the future of their business they get real concerned since they know the decisions aren’t made solely, or even mostly on business considerations with the best interests of business in mind, but on a lot of factors of no relevance to their business.

To recap: In May, the FCC ordered that VoIP providers must make a way for their customers to reach an emergency dispatcher when they call 911, and have it work the way it works from standard phones, which is to say dispatchers must be able to identify the caller’s phone number and location on the screen, without requiring someone who’s fallen and can’t get up to rattle it off. The deadline is November 28^th.

VoIPer Nuvio Corp. is challenging the FCC requiring all VoIPers to ensure old-fashioned 911 emergency call service by then. Nuvio’s got about 10,000 subscribers, not bad but not exactly an industry 800-pound gorilla, and it’s filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia asking the court to hear the case. Fair enough.

“We have worked diligently to provide our users with 911 access,” Jason Talley, president and chief executive of Nuvio tells the AP. But, “the 120-day requirement imposed by the FCC is arbitrary and capricious and without support in the record.” Basically hey, you D.C. chairwarmin’ clock-punchers don’t know what you’re doing.

(Clever, too: VoIP’s so new of course there’s no “record.”)

And of course Nuvio has to toss in the threat of Lost Business: “The company asked the court to expedite the case and rule by Nov. 7. If there’s no decision by then, Nuvio warned it will have no choice but to start suspending some customers,” the AP writes.

When the ruling was issued in May First Coffee^SM thought it sounded more like a strongly-encouraged goal than a hard and fast deadline. Oh sure the word “deadline” was bandied about a lot, but if a company was trying, really making an effort to come into compliance, come 9:00 a.m. November 28^th if they weren’t 100 percent compliant FCC storm troopers wouldn’t carry off computers and servers and padlock the building, they’d accept “material progress” or “good-faith effort” and say okay, get your act together and we’ll check back in February.

And that still might very well be the case. First Coffee^SM will be shocked if anyone but the genuine scofflaws, those with absolutely no intention of complying will actually be thrown out of business.

Check out Talley’s comment again: Hey, we’re trying. We have no objection to providing 911 for our customers, we think it’s a good thing, if we could wave a magic wand we’d have it in place tomorrow, but we’re the guys who are making this technology work on the street, and some kid three years out of Georgetown Law School who couldn’t find a job in the private sector but whose daddy is friends with a senator isn’t going to decide that November 28 is a nice, round date to fill in on his report and expect the real world to accommodate that when we can do a lot better than that, given time.

In other words, in the eyes of the industry the FCC’s stance is “a decision wrapped in good intentions but tied to outdated concepts,” in Roy Mark’s apt wording.

Nobody who objects to providing 911 service belongs in the VoIP industry, let’s get that clear. “I absolutely share the [FCC’s] concern about E911 services and VoIP,” said Talley. “I think maybe they were a little exuberant, though. The order was put together really quick and may not be based on the best technology useable out there,” Mark quotes him as saying.

What the industry wants is to rethink 911. “To enable E911 service, VoIP providers must obtain access to incumbent local exchange carriers systems, interconnection facilities, numbering resources, public service answering points and other critical elements that traditional telephone companies employ to provide E911 service,” Vonage said in a filing. VoIPers, however, would like to run it through routers, and provide maps, photos and other cool stuff the current system doesn’t do but which is possible with VoIP.

Which is where the business mindset smashes into the hide of government thinking. Government doesn’t want innovation, thinking outside the box, risk-taking or cool ideas. Government wants order, stability, regular raises and promotions and do it this way because this is how we’ve always done it and it makes my life easier.

That’s the problem here. Government wants VoIP to look, act and work like the 20^th century technology they already know how to regulate. VoIP’s saying look, the whole point here is that there’s a better way of doing things, we’re not interested in complying with an obsolete industry model we’re burying, get out of the way and see what we can do that’s better than that. Which is why they’re in business and bureaucrats are in government.

The industry deserves the chance. They deserve government staying out of the way while they show how much better than the current system they can do.

As Mark suggests, First Coffee^SM thinks the lawsuit’s just to buy time. Talley knows he won’t win, but maybe he can use government’s own inefficiency and bureaucracy against it as he buys time for the industry to create the better way of doing 911 before they have to waste a great deal of time and energy complying with outdated practices on outdated technology mandated by outdated minds.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Alan Parsons Project’s Poe project, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, the only album of theirs worth buying:

A decision that VoIP should not be monopolized by Philippine telcos is expected next week from the country’s National Telecommunications Commission, according to Business World.

The two-year debate on who can offer VoIP and on what terms is expected to end with a ruling that while VoIP may be provided by the state telcos, it can also be offered commercially by companies such as ISPs.

Deputy Commissioner Jorge V. Sarmiento said the final NTC ruling will not veer from the “essence” of the last draft ruling issued in March, which said VoIP falls under the definition of VAS in the 1995 Philippine Telecommunications Policy Act of the Philippines or Republic Act 7925, Business World said:

“VoIP is expected to drastically drive down monthly telecommunication charges in the Philippines. With VoIP, the NTC expects international call rates to drop to $0.10 a minute from $0.40 a minute.”
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NetSuite’s happy – as they should be, as they should be – with the decision of the St. John Sea Dogs, a team in an organization called the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, to adopt NetSuite.

Sorry, if First Coffee^SM knew or cared the first thing about hockey there’d be some cute hockey terminology in a pun here, but frankly it rates in interest somewhere just south of test cricket and just north of buzkashi, the national sport of Afghanistan, where teams of men on horseback try to pitch a headless goat carcass across a goal line. Games may last as long as a week. Anything goes.

NetSuite also counts the Oakland Athletics major league baseball team as a customer.

As a start-up hockey franchise, the Sea Dogs team realized it needed consistent, targeted communication to season ticket holders and potential fan base. It’ll use NetSuite for its entire back office, including financials, customer data, and product inventory, tying all touch points into a central repository.

NetSuite features a technology called NetFlex which will help the Sea Dogs integrate with Harbour Station’s online ticketing system. The hosted system also allows scouts, who are based throughout Eastern Canada, to access calendars and enter expense reports.

The hosted feature particularly appealed to the team. David Turk, executive director for the Saint John Sea Dogs said “we don’t have an internal IT staff, so NetSuite’s on-demand model was particularly attractive.”

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Crosby, Stills & Nash’s CSN. Clever album titles from those guys – Crosby, Stills & Nash and CSN:

Ever hear of Spotster? First Coffee^SM hadn’t either, but this sounds like a cool product. They have a search engine they’re introducing today, which they describe as “targeted at the specific needs of business professionals looking for information within their industry.”

The search service creates “a comprehensive vertical industry web” that delivers search results to industry professionals. It’s live in beta and is available at www.spotster.net.

Spotster has introduced the service for three targeted industry segments including Customer Relationship Management, Integration & Web Services and Radio Frequency Identification.

Industry-specific search and research has become more difficult on traditional search engines – Google, et al – which lack a focus on industry-specific sites. There’s also all the search engine spam to wade through, irrelevant – i.e. “paid for” – sites cropping up high while genuinely useful, relevant sites are buried deep.

Okay okay, we all feel sorry for each other. What privately-funded, San Jose-based Spotster’s claiming to offer is a B2B-tuned search engine for targeted industry research by “dynamically creating and growing a vertical industry web of pages most relevant to a particular industry,” according to company officials, who describe the technology as capable of ensuring that “only the highly relevant web pages are included in its industry index.” It also boasts the obligatory special search algorithm, in this case “tuned to deliver accurate results to the user.”

Suppose, says Vaibhav Domkundwar, Founder and “Chief Spotster” that you want to look up everything about “SAP NetWeaver.” You’d zoom on over to Integration Spotster to get the goods. “A RFID company sales person looking for business contacts, say ‘Supply Chain’ contacts, within the RFID web can use contacts search within RFID Spotster to discover the contacts she was looking for,” Domkundwar says.

Works for CRM too: “A CRM professional looking for ‘Salesforce.com customers’ can use CRM Spotster to spot the targeted results,” says Domkundwar, who says user feedback is encouraged at this point.
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ClientLogic, a contact center outsourcer, has announced a significant increase in its presence in Latin America with the addition of a new customer care site in Panama and the expansion of an existing site in Monterrey, Mexico.

It’s to bolster its bilingual and near-shore English services to North American clients.

ClientLogic also has an eye on the Hispanic market. According to the Conference Board, Hispanic households across America will “sharply increase” both their numbers and economic clout over the next ten years. Today’s 10 million-plus Hispanic households will soar to 13.5 million by 2010, up from less than 6 million in 1990, and will control, according to the Conference Board’s crystal ball, $670 billion in personal income.
...

An Ontario-based company called Telephone Magic Inc. is announcing the addition of the Venture IP line of phone systems to its telecom website.

The Venture IP Telephone system is a low-cost IP based Peer to Peer system for SMBs. It eliminates the need for central switches and offers PBX telephony features such as auto attendant, voice mail and intercom / paging are built into the Venture 480i phone.

When plugged into the Local Area Network, the Venture 480i senses other 480i phones on the network and the Venture IP Gateway, then auto-configures itself. The other 480i phones on the network reconfigure to recognize the new extension. This automation reduces the cost of installation, one advantage when the system’s marketed to SMBs.

Company President Jeff Jackson says that the newer VoIP and hybrid business phone systems on the market are bundling features and functionality at affordable prices.

The Aastra Venture IP phone system consists of two main components – the Venture IP Gateway which connects the LAN to up to four incoming analog phone lines, and the Venture IP 480i phone which incorporates the functions normally provided by a central PBX unit. This system allows for up to 200 local extensions.
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Digital Dynamics Software, Inc., which sells an IP Telephony Application suite for Cisco IP telephones, is announcing the release of their new VoIP Contact Dialer. This Microsoft Outlook add-in lets IP Telephony Application Suite users pick an Outlook Contact from their address book and dial it by pressing a button on the Outlook menu bar. The add-in can initiate a speakerphone conversation and end calls on the IP telephone without the user having to touch the IP phone.

Digital Dynamics Software is providing Cisco IP telephone users with a free 30-day free evaluation version of its IP Telephony Application Suite and the VoIP Contact Dialer. The evaluation software can be downloaded at http://www.digdyn.com.
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TapiRex “is actually a serious business tool,” according to company officials, who evidently want to get that straight at the outset. According to its developer Christoph Buenger it helps companies and call centers identify the names of callers the instant the phone rings. It works at home too, so you can yell at Marlene not to answer if it might prove to be a touchy or problematic situation.

Plus, “Displaying Outlook Contact notes on the caller or the caller’s photograph allows you to get ready with the right answers or questions even before you lift the handset,” company officials say.

TapiRex channels incoming caller data to screens on the office network to appropriate reps, giving the caller’s name before answering the call and keeping a history of answered and missed incoming calls with time, date, name and number. TapiRex works through the lunch break, never calls her mother or does her nails while on the job.

Prices start from $26.90 for the single user version for download from http://www.cbuenger.com/shop/. There are free add-ons, such as the one to make it work with Skype. There’s another add-on, mceTapiRex, on a Windows XP Media Center 2005 system displays the incoming call on your TV screen, and letting you use your remote control to check missed calls on the TV screen.
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Some of First Coffee^SM’s friends and family back home in Richmond, Virginia think it’s dangerous living here in Turkey. Not half as dangerous as it is trying to buy a computer in Richmond, according to the Associated Press.

Henrico County’s schools were selling 50 used Apple iBooks out at Richmond Raceway yesterday, and 5,500 people showed up, turning a secondhand computer sale into “a violent stampede” with “people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far as to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.”

People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl’s stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.

Jesse Sandler said he was one of the people pushing forward, using a folding chair he had brought with him to beat back people who tried to cut in front of him.

“I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, ‘Bam,’” the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on the keyboard at a testing station.

“They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just,” he said.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Other Stewart, Rod’s 1971 masterpiece Every Picture Tells A Story:

Today’s Reader Of The Day is Peter Moore who, when challenged by yesterday’s column to name Al Stewart albums other than Year Of the Cat and Time Passages, rattled off eleven more, including one, Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, a rarities and B-sides collection which First Coffee^SM’s never heard. Well done.
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Sedona Corp., which sells their Intarsia CRM to small and mid-size financial institutions such as insurance companies, community and regional banks and credit unions, has announced Q2 revenues of $229,000 compared to $407,000 reported in the same period one year ago.

Revenue from license fees and royalties increased to $87,000 from $80,000 in 2004, a jump company officials attribute to additional sales from one of the company’s partners.

Service revenues decreased to $142,000 compared to $327,000 reported one year ago. The reduction was due to a $300,000 decrease in related party revenue recognized in 2004.

Total revenues for the first six months of 2005 were $386,000, compared to $694,000 reported in 2004.

Their net loss for the three months ended June 30, 2005 was $641,000, or ($0.01) per share, compared to $611,000, or ($0.01) per share reported in the second quarter of 2004. For the six months ended June 30, 2005, the net loss was $1,458,000, or ($0.02) per share, compared to $1,343,000, or ($.02) per share, reported for same period in 2004.
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Chalk up another milestone for Avaya: According to company officials, they’ve just shipped their seven millionth line, for ING Vysya Bank, a private Indian bank.

Avaya said its IP line shipments surpassed traditional line shipments this year, further demonstrating Avaya’s global momentum in a growing market.

The Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based IP telephony company claims to be the “worldwide leader in IP telephony line shipments for first quarter 2005 with a 21 percent share,” citing research from the Synergy Research Group.

Jeremy Duke, president and CEO, Synergy Research Group noted that “the adoption of IP telephony by enterprises is growing markedly, as demonstrated by a more than 70 percent year-over-year growth noted in the first quarter of this year,” opining that “the major part of the adoption curve still lies ahead.”

In 2004, IP telephony accounted for eight percent of the 423 million total enterprise telephony lines installed worldwide, but that number increases almost daily. The overall market for IP lines installed is expected to quadruple by 2007.
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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia-based Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad has upgraded its nationwide network to enable it to be “more responsive to changing business requirements,” according to company officials.

The network, deployed by HeiTech Padu Berhad via Padu*Net with equipment from Cisco Systems, was “built on the principles of Cisco’s vision for an Intelligent Information Network,” Bank Islam officials say, to “provide Bank Islam with a foundation upon which to deliver fast, reliable and highly secure banking transactions for more than 85 of its branches nationwide.”

Bank Islam expects the move to allow it to scale and deploy advanced services such as VoIP and application optimization and virtualization technologies integrating IT more tightly to the needs of the business.

Under Islamic banking principles interest is not paid, instead profit-sharing agreements are agreed upon. Islamic banks in Malaysia mostly use a concept called al wadiah yad dhamanah, or guaranteed custody, where you aren’t paid interest for depositing your money in the bank – paying interest is un-Islamic – you receive mudaraba, a share of any profit that the bank makes by using your deposit, according to a good intro to Islamic banking principles.

Such profit-sharing, at the discretion of the bank but almost always a predetermined ratio, generally works out to returns close to those acquired under prevailing international interest rates.
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Telvista, Inc., a provider of bilingual contact center outsourcing products, will use products from ClearCube Technology, which sells PC Blade technology, to “streamline workstations and secure data at Telvista’s new customer contact center in Danville, Virginia,” according to company officials.

Telvista needed PC products for the new center which could serve “a wide range of corporate customers, each with different IT standards,” according to Alvaro Holguin, Telvista CIO. He said PC Blade from ClearCube worked well enough in their Odessa centers, so they decided to put them in Danville.

Because PC Blades are centralized, the technology can increase security for IT equipment and data inside the Danville facility, which opened April 20, 2005 and is expected to handle hundreds of thousands of customer contacts per year via phone, e-mail, chat, and Interactive Voice Response.
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Proving their CRM acumen, Sovereign Bank has decided to partner with the Philadelphia Eagles pro football team to offer the Eagles Totally FREE Checking account in the greater Philadelphia area.

First Coffee^SM wonders who else they researched as possible sports partners – the Montreal Alouettes? Real Madrid?

The account features exclusive Philadelphia Eagles checks, unfortunately not signed by Eagles owner Jeff Lurie. Customers will also receive an Eagles checkbook cover and an official NFL Licensed Eagles hat when they open the account at participating Sovereign Community Banking Offices or through the bank’s contact center.

The account comes with built-in preset limits for checks written to disgruntled wide receivers.

Sovereign, the official bank of the Philadelphia Eagles, conducted research on fan loyalty and the potential of introducing an Eagles-themed checking account into the Philadelphia market. The bank received a very favorable response to the Eagles-themed checking account in the Philadelphia area, which shocked First Coffee^SM, who just naturally assumed that New England Patriots or Dallas Cowboys-themed accounts would do better in Philadelphia.

Honestly, how can First Coffee^SM get this kind of CRM job, researching which NFL team has sufficient “fan loyalty” for themed checking accounts in, say, Green Bay, Wisconsin? It really requires “research” to determine that a Philadelphia Eagles-themed checking account would do well in the Philadelphia market?

Features of the Eagles Totally FREE Checking account include no minimum balance requirement, no monthly maintenance fee, Sovereign CheckCard with no annual or monthly fee, free Online Banking with BillPay, free telephone banking, no per check charges, unlimited check writing, free direct deposit – heck, with terms like that this lifelong Redskins fan’d happily sign up, writing “For Donovan McNabb’s Super Bowl last drive medication” on the memo line of each check – but if your account is overdrawn professional malcontent Terrell Owens is sent to your house to whine and moan about how hard done by he is, making only $7 million or so per year – before endorsements – to play a game for about half an hour, 17 days a year, until you pay up.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is five Al Stewart CDs on the changer. Here’s betting you don’t have five – here’s betting you can’t name five Al Stewart CDs, and we’ll spot you The Year Of The Cat and Time Passages:

Pro-SAAP Solutions is announcing the launch of what they’re calling “a powerful new web based business management” product, Version 5.0,) for the newspaper and magazine publishing industry that will, the company claims, “support a dramatic technological advance for companies that adopt the strategy.”

It’s being pitched to “newspapers and publishing businesses” who have dreamed of “jumping directly from a 1980s era legacy application to 21st Century Web based information processing.” Sounds good, doesn’t it?

It was developed by a guy who never has to spell his name over the phone, Sibusiso Tshabalala, President & CEO Pro-SAAP, LLC, nicknamed who’s described in company materials as “an entrepreneur who managed the advertising and online systems infrastructure for… publishing firms, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Ziff-Davis.”

It’s designed, company officials say, to use the investment companies have made in existing mainframe systems. “In contrast,” they claim, publishing industry products “from application software vendors like PeopleSoft, SAP, etc. require ripping out the existing infrastructure and can cost several million dollars in software license fees and implementation services.”

The Pro-SAAP product, company officials claim, “can be implemented at a fraction of the cost.”

Tshabalala said Pro-SAAP’s product helps publishing companies migrate “from legacy technologies into a web-based environment at a fraction of the cost of implementing a new ERP class application.”

It works with the Admarc software used by a little over half of the newspaper and magazine publishing firms in North America. It “can be implemented in a matter of months, and “typical implementations are expected to cost between $250,000-500,000,” company officials say.
…

This was announced over the weekend, but First Coffee^SM was hip-deep in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, hopefully you were too. Best one in the series except for the first one. First Coffee^SM is having a hard time seeing how she’ll tie it all up in one more book – she’s promised seven for the series.

Anyway, Saturday DataDelta, Inc. announced that in partnership with market research firm The CDI Institute the launch of the “Single Customer View Accuracy Survey” survey, billed as “the first Customer Data Integration industry survey to measure Single Customer View accuracy resulting from CDI projects.”

“The ability to cut through complexity and provide an accurate view of the customer is one of the most important aspects of information management today,” Janet Perna, general manager of IBM’s Information Management division has said.

Ed Allburn, president and CEO of DataDelta, which he claims is “the CDI industry’s first vendor-neutral tool to analyze and fine-tune CDI system accuracy” says that traditionally CDI has focused mainly on the mechanics of data integration with less attention paid the accuracy of the actual results. Yet he feels that customers “with increasingly powerful Business Intelligence technologies are demanding increasingly accurate CDI results” – reasonably enough, First Coffee^SM supposes.

Philip Howard, Research Director at Bloor Research and author of “Data Quality: An Evaluation and Comparison” says with existing technologies, most companies using CDI “have to compromise between the accuracy of matching that they use – either they have to accept a number of false matches or they have to put up with too many duplicates.”

DataDelta – why does First Coffee^SM keep wanting to write that as Delta Dawn? – claims the survey is “the first of its kind.” Initial survey results will be presented at the 17th Information Quality Conference hosted by Larry English and The International Association for Information and Data Quality September 19-23 in Houston.

David Raab of Raab Associates, a marketing technology consultant and author of comparison guides for CRM and customer matching software, says that the CDI accuracy problem may be much more wide spread than previously realized. “The complex nature of optimizing record matching business rules means that most companies likely have serious problems with at least some of their data,” Raab thinks.
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Software vendor Autonomy Corporation plc is launching an upgrade to its existing mobile search technology, IDOL Mobile.

Autonomy provides the core technology that allows mobile telecommunication carriers to deliver targeted multimedia content – videos, ring tones, what have you, to e-commerce product suggestions to consumers on the move – which means you, Faithful Consumer.

IDOL Mobile is one of those double-edged blessings of the modern world, one of those products which lets other people – in this case, telecommunications providers – “continuously” (yes, that’s what they threaten) “reach out” to subscribers with a steady stream of multimedia content – video, files, ring tones, games, news, e-commerce suggestions, web pages specifically repurposed for mobile screens, messages from Big Brother sitting in his wheelchair with his dog by his side, ads… sorry, got carried away there, of course they wouldn’t push ads, just e-commerce suggestions.

IDOL Mobile can also be used as a work tool, “a fast gateway to internal and external information from mobile handsets,” the company claims. “The technology keeps employees abreast of the latest news and developments,” along, of course, with the latest video, files, ring tones, games, news, e-commerce suggestions, web pages specifically repurposed for mobile screens, messages from Big Brother sitting in his wheelchair with his dog by his side, ads…

This latest upgrade to IDOL Mobile extends the functionality already available to subscribers, enhancing the retrieval and information delivery functions so that mobile users can now access over 300 file formats from their wireless device.

“Mobile search is a hard problem to solve,” said Sue Feldman, IDC’s VP for Content Technologies. “With small screens and limited interactivity, mobile users don’t want extraneous information delivered to them.”
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A friend wrote to First Coffee^SM today suggesting that Harry Potter himself could be the seventh Horcrux. Don’t worry, if you haven’t finished The Half-Blood Prince this isn’t giving anything away, it’s all pure speculation, but as he says:

I say that Harry himself is the seventh Horcrux thus explaining why Snape hates him and why Harry is partial to snakes and can hiss the hiss even if he can’t slither the slither.

That’s right, First Coffee^SM had forgotten that Harry was a Parselmouth.

He-who-has-earned-JK-more-galleons-than-the-Spanish-Armada killed old Lilly (if she had gone to Yale instead of Hogwarts would she now be known as Eli Lilly?) thus committing a murder in order to make Harry into the Hor-Dog that he has now become (thanks to Ginny). Remember, the Sorting Hat originally wanted to make Harry a Slytherin,

Forgotten that too. Man, that J.K. Rowling is one good writer.

his scar hurts whenever He-who-must....eh, HIM, comes a knocking, and Harry can sometimes see what whosis is up to. I say one seventh of He-Who is hiding behind those black foster grants. JK makes a big point of having Dumbledore explain how a Horcrux can be a living thing (the snake) but that it is risky for someone to make a Horcrux out of something that can move and think. It’s Harry - that’s why he survived the attack from He-Who. He was never meant to die. It also explains why He-who needed his blood and why no one is allowed to kill him.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

Ugandan Jewish coffee seller J.J. Keki, left, leader of Uganda's Abayudaya Jewish community, with his son and two colleagues. Photo by Laura Wetzler.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Everybody’s Bach:

ELoyalty Corporation, an enterprise CRM consulting company, has posted a net loss of $2.9 million for the period ended July 2, 2005.

For the second quarter of 2005, eLoyalty reported total revenue of $19.6 million, an increase of 8 percent over the comparable period last year, but a net loss of $2.9 million, “which is unfavorable by $2.5 million,” according to company officials’ rather elegant phrasing, “when compared to the second quarter of 2004.”

The net loss available to common shareholders was $0.52 a share, compared to a net loss of $0.13 a share in the second quarter of 2004. ELoyalty realized non-GAAP “Adjusted Earnings” measure loss of $0.2 million for the second quarter of 2005.

In addition, the company recorded a restructuring charge of $0.5 million in the second quarter of 2005. The charge was for severance and other expenses primarily related to the elimination of two Vice President positions and a small number of other personnel reductions.
…

Finally, someone putting technology to good use.

“Have you ever had the experience where you call someone up and they don’t seem to be paying attention to you? “ asks Anmol Madan in the abstract for a project he leads at the MIT Media Lab. If so, you might need the Jerk-O-Meter.

As described by graduate researcher Madan, it’s “a real-time speech feature analysis application that runs on your VoIP phone or cell phone that remedies precisely that experience.”

The Jerk-O-Meter uses “speech features for activity and stress (and soon empathy) to measure if you are ‘being a jerk’ on the phone,” the abstract claims. “The phone displays messages in case you are, and can also be set up to inform the person on the other end of the line that you’re extremely busy.”

The current version of the application runs in Linux on the Zaurus VoIP phone.

The Associated Press reports that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are “developing software for cell phones that would analyze speech patterns and voice tones to rate people – on a scale of 0 to 100 percent – on how engaged they are in a conversation.”

Madan says the tool might assist telephone sales: “Think of a situation where you could actually prevent an argument,” he tells the AP. “Just having this device can make people more attentive because they know they’re being monitored.”

The software measures levels of stress and empathy in a person’s voice, keeps track of how often someone is speaking and pops up warning messages such as “Don’t be a jerk!” or “Be a little nicer.” Or you could win the “Wow, you’re a smooth talker” commendation.

First Coffee^SM frankly sees this as a boon to politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who invest great deals of time, effort and money in trying to be appealing and humanly likeable to Earthlings. Delivering their stump speeches in front of the Jerk-O-Meter is one way of learning to imitate the way flesh and blood human beings who believe what they’re saying sound like.
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Siemens Venture Capital GmbH, a subsidiary of Siemens AG, is announcing a strategic investment in Dune Networks, a provider of merchant silicon for traffic management and scalable switching fabrics.

“To enable the emerging converged network, carrier-class equipment needs to be flexible and able to guarantee bandwidth not only per subscriber but also per each subscriber-application,” said Gerd Goette, Investment Partner at Siemens Venture Capital, adding that Dune’s traffic management technology “together with its scalable fabric” has let Siemens “develop a product portfolio, around a single technology, which addresses the service provider’s traffic management requirements in the Metro, Core and Edge markets.”
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A tip of the coffee pot to David Gardner, named TyMetrix’s Chief Technology Officer. TyMetrix, a CT Corporation company and Wolters Kluwer business does web-based e-billing and matter management solutions for corporate law departments, claims organizations, law firms, and other legal support vendors.

Gardner is responsible for product development, security, quality assurance, and all technology platforms and infrastructure that support TyMetrix engagements. Prior to joining TyMetrix, he spent 12 years with Pitney Bowes.
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Vodafone New Zealand is announcing the launch of 3G enabled services. From this week on, Vodafone customers can access what company officials are calling “the latest mobile services that this new technology makes possible, such as simultaneous voice and data sessions, for example video calling.”

Vodafone New Zealand Director of Technology Jeni Mundy says the launch of 3G enabled services is “a huge milestone” for Vodafone’s 1.9 million customers and the New Zealand mobile market.

Mundy said Vodafone was bringing “the world’s most popular mobile technology,” 3GSM, to its New Zealand customers to “ensure that they have the best and most advanced technology available with advantages such as an extensive roaming footprint.”

Nokia is providing the complete 3G core and radio networks, supplying, deploying and testing the equipment in the field. It’s also providing 3G network management, monitoring and maintenance services in an arrangement known as Managed Services, which means it’ll run the network to Vodafone’s specifications allowing them to move away from day-to-day operations of their networks.

Vodafone New Zealand Ltd is part of Vodafone Group Plc, which has more than 165 million proportionate customers worldwide.

As at June 2005 Vodafone New Zealand has more than 1.9 million customers.

What’s a “proportionate” customer?
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According to JTA News (“Global News Service Of the Jewish People”), the recent release of Mirembe Kawomera, or “Delicious Peace,” a Fair Trade – and kosher – coffee is produced by a new cooperative of Jewish, Muslim and Christian coffee farmers from the Mbale region of Uganda.

“We think this coalition is unique in all of Africa,” says coffee farmer J. J. Keki, leader of the 700-member Abayudaya Ugandan Jewish community that is at the core of the project.

Laura Wetzler, the Uganda coordinator for Kulanu, a Washington-based Jewish charity that promotes community-empowerment projects around the world contacted fair trade Thanksgiving Coffee Co.’s head Paul Katzeff and told him of the cooperative of 400 coffee farmers organized by Keki, “who was going door-to-door asking his Muslim and Christian neighbors to join the Abayudaya Jews to improve their general lot.”

The Abayudaya are descendants of a Ugandan general who adopted Judaism in the early 20th century, according to JTA: “Nearing extinction during the reign of the dictator Idi Amin, the community revitalized itself in the 1980s and drew the interest of Kulanu, which sent a delegation in 1995 along with a Conservative rabbi, who formally converted the community.”

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a song so good you wonder if James Taylor really wrote it, “Mexico:”

A couple columns ago First Coffee^SM ranted about how companies wishing to “do CRM” run out and buy a lot of shiny new technology from a big name vendor, unpack it, plug it in and pat themselves on the back for having gotten that taken care of, just wait for the improved customer satisfaction scores to roll in, what’s next week, ERP?

There’s no excuse for that – First Coffee^SM and former colleague Bob Thompson of CRMGuru told you that wasn’t the way to do it in 2000. We can’t understand why there still seems to be a problem – didn’t we tell you the right way to do it?

The impetus for that particular splenetic columnar rant – it doesn’t take much, folks, it really doesn’t – was a report Forrester did on the dissatisfaction with CRM vendors from such companies. First Coffee^SM has less than zero sympathy for such companies, since 99.7 percent of the time they screwed up the process themselves, and blame the technology for the resultant mess the way some clod who spills coffee on her hand will blame McDonald’s.

Got a note from William Band about the column:

David- I wrote the Forrester report on CRM enterprise suite vendors. I fully agree with the points in your article. Bob Thompson and I had a good chat about the issues that you raise. I always advise my clients to pay more attention to CRM strategy, process and people issues- rather than technology- but, they often resist hearing this information. Regards, Bill Band, Forrester Research

It’s a tough, lonely life hectoring companies to make sure they’ve covered their strategic, procedural and personnel heinies before buying technology, kudos to Bill for shouldering the task.

Last time: Folks, buying technology is the end of the process, not the start. By the time you’ve purchased technology for your CRM project you’ve figured out the particular business problem you need to solve, exactly what you think you can achieve by solving it, how your employees are going to solve it, why they need that specific technological tool to help them do it and why solving it justifies the expense.

At that point, not before, you pick up the phone and call tech vendors.
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NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelson recently took time to answer some questions. Here’s an abridged edition of his comments, the full version can be found in an article by First Coffee^SM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego on the TMC site.

Hi Zach, thanks for taking the time to talk. So, what’s it like to work for Larry Ellison?

A pleasure, David. Larry has a wealth of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t in the software applications business, and he’s not shy about sharing that knowledge.

What was the opportunity you saw at the founding of NetSuite? What wasn’t being done in the hosted space that you were confident you could do?

We felt that the way SMB companies tried to run their business – attempting to tie together an accounting application from one vendor to a sales application from another vendor to an ecommerce application from another vendor – would never work.

We also felt the way software was traditionally sold by vendors, in effect shipping customers a disc and daring them to install it, was also going to be replaced by a service like Amazon.com where you just log-in and use the application.

Siebel’s Bruce Cleveland said here a while ago that hosted is simply a delivery method, that the actual CRM has to stand on its own. Is there in your mind any real difference between building hosted or installed CRM?

A customer’s first decision when looking at application is not usually “how is it delivered” but rather “does it solve my business problem?” In the early days of hosted business applications, they didn’t solve many problems as they were just beginning to be developed. Once you get that “yes,” then the distribution of the software as a service over the Internet will heavily tilt the playing field in the direction of a web-native application over a traditional on premise solution because the web-native offering costs the customer nothing to manage, upgrade or maintain.

In terms of building a hosted solution… the difference can be summed up in one concept: if the vendor writing the software has to manage it themselves, they will write a lot better software. In the case of stone-age software, the vendor hands the customer a box of 200 discs and wishes them good luck. So for those software vendors who think it is trivial to deliver software as a service, I wish them a lot of luck. It’s not something you wake up one morning and know how to do.

Let’s hear about the new product – what does it add to the discussion?

We’re rolling out hundreds of really great customer-requested features that we’ve been working hard to include in V10.6. NetSuite 10.6 includes a major break-through in browser based user interfaces that allow users to perform complex business functions that dynamically change data without requiring the entire browser page to be regenerated.

You were quoted recently as saying that you, salesforce.com and RightNow are all established in the on-demand space. What would an upstart have to do to elbow into the market? Where is there still room for competitive difference?

Developing a successful web-native solution takes time, money and great software developers. NetSuite and the others you mention have been at this for seven years. It will take an upstart today at least that long to get to where we are. And of course, we won’t be sleeping during those seven years.

You really want to be retired by 2012? And do what?

I don’t think I will ever retire. This is the best job in the world.

You say right now the on-demand market’s big enough to support you, salesforce.com and RightNow. At what point will that change?

There are about 7 million small businesses in the United States. No one company has a strong grip on this market but someone will eventually emerge as a leader, though I think NetSuite has the longest “legs” of any company in the on-demand space and offers the most robust solution. Again, you have to remember that it takes a tremendous amount of skill and experience to develop software via a hosted model. It’s not easy.

Salesforce.com is talking about expanding beyond CRM, basically becoming a rival to Windows. Any Multiforce-style vistas of grandeur for NetSuite?

We have a similar capability in NetSuite 10.6 called NetSuite Customer Centers. Customer Centers allow you build new applications on top of NetSuite’s infrastructure, which enables those applications to leverage the NetSuite user interface as well as our data center hosting and security model.

Salesforce.com’s core application stores data that is pretty useless when running a business, data like who are the prospects and contacts for a sales lead. It is much more likely that meaningful business applications will be written on the core business data than based on a bunch of suspect sales contact data.

What’s the best music to play while at work?

I can’t work and listen to music at the same time…

Now that SAP and Microsoft are both threatening to jump into on-demand CRM, which one do you think has a more realistic shot of success?

They will be too late to the party when they jump in. I don’t care how much money or how many developers they throw at the problem. But I hope they do announce on demand products… it will be the ultimate validation of what we are doing.

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