By David Sims
[email protected]
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 CoffeeSM 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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
Some of First CoffeeSM’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.
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