December 2005 Archives

Got another comment on Caiman.com’s terrible customer service from “Jeff:”

I ordered a CD one month ago-never came-impossible to get a response-but I blame half.com, too. they both stink.

And on that cheery note, First Coffee^SM’s off to New Zealand for Christmas. Really looking forward to that Istanbul-Dubai-Singapore-Brisbane-Christchurch flight, the redeeming factor is that Emirates is a great airline, puts American airlines to shame.

Merry Christmas to all, peace on earth and good will to men, see you again some time the second week of January.

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Lyle Lovett’s Pontiac:

Brian Scott, president of Landmark Commercial, a commercial real estate firm based in Arlington, Texas had a problem. His server at work melted down, so he went back to his apartment to retrieve a backup copy of critical business data he had stored on a portable hard drive.

“As I was leaving my apartment, the hard drive slipped out of my hand and tumbled down a flight of concrete stairs. I ran down the stairs, but after one look at the case, I knew that years of data and lots of valuable work were lost,” said Scott. “From that point on, every day I worry about backing up business data.”

Scott’s travails earned him the dubious distinction of Most Disastrous Data Loss, an “award” handed out by EVault, Inc., an online backup and recovery firm.

EVault today announced winners of its first annual Data Turkey Awards to “honor” business professionals who “have lived through a data loss, or whose actions and quick thinking have helped to avert a data disaster,” according to company officials.

EVault solicited award submissions in two categories – Most Disastrous Data Loss and Most Spectacular Data Recovery. Award applicants were asked to share lowlights and highlights regarding their data recovery and data loss situations. The awards were open to any small business owner, IT or business professional.

Assuaging the sting somewhat is the prize of a $500 American Express gift check, a $500 contribution on behalf of each winner to a local charity or food bank of their choice and a free one-year subscription to EVault’s Protect online data protection for up to 10 gigabytes of data.

“EVault received an abundance of entries – some tragic, some funny and some just arcane – but all demonstrating the myriad of ways data can disappear forever and in the blink of an eye,” said Phil Gilmour, president and CEO of EVault, Inc. The company claims “tens of thousands of successful data restorations since 1997.”

The winner in the Most Spectacular Data Recovery category was Dunbar St. Paul, a 20-year veteran computer consultant and president of New Orleans-based Computer Solutions. As you’d expect, Hurricane Katrina figures in the story:

St. Paul’s entry detailed his travails during Hurricane Katrina, when his entire client base of 30 companies temporarily lost access to their data. St. Paul says recovery efforts for one client consisted of driving across the shoulder of the road, jumping over a fence and trudging through mud to reach the building – and then donning boots to wade through 18 inches of muddy, toxic water to retrieve his client’s servers.

He worked to get businesses back up and running in hot sites from Memphis to Houston.

“All-in-all it has made everyone here aware of the need for secure, off-site, reliable and efficient data backup and storage,” said St. Paul. “We had a backup to tape, but here’s the kicker -- the tapes were inaccessible. Nobody expects there to be a disaster, but the threat is fairly real, even though we hadn’t had a hurricane in 40 years.”

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Happy birthday Jane Austen, born in 1775. As The Writer’s Almanac says, she’s “the only novelist who published before Charles Dickens whose books still sell thousands of copies every year.”

After the First World War, “Jane Austin novels were prescribed to shell-shocked English soldiers for therapy, because the psychologists found that Austen helped them recover their sense of the world they’d known before the war.”

The writer who wrote so incisively and popularly about getting married never married herself.

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IntelliCorp, a system support of SAP vendor, today announced that NetProcess has been validated for integration with Mercury Quality Center. IntelliCorp has also joined the Mercury Elite Technology Alliance Program.

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NeuStar, a communications clearinghouse services vendor, has announced the acquisition of Foretec Seminars Inc., a provider of secretariat services to the Internet Engineering Task Force, from the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

In connection with the acquisition, NeuStar Secretariat Services, LLC, a subsidiary of NeuStar, has signed a service agreement with the Internet Society on behalf of the IETF Administrative Support Activity to provide secretariat functions in support of the IETF.

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Anadigics, Inc., a vendor of wireless and broadband, has unveiled two new front-end products for wireless LAN mobile and multiple input multiple output applications.

Anadigics’ front-end integrated circuits use the company’s patent pending InGaP-Plus technology to offer integration and performance. The low-profile FEICs combine the power amplifier, low-noise amplifier, and RF antenna switch on a single die to minimize three dimensional space requirements.

The new products, according to company officials, exhibit “exceptionally low current consumption to reduce battery drain in mobile and MIMO applications.”

…

The Economist Intelligence Unit does quite good national risk assessment reports, their one on Hungary is typically good. Highlights:

“Nearly $6 billion in telecommunications investment, $3 billion of this from foreign investors, has transformed the moribund telecoms system inherited from the communist era into one of the best in the region…

“Hungary is still far behind basic EU levels for infrastructure provision…

“Integrated Services Digital Network penetration is on the rise, and cable operators like UPC offer full-scale Internet access in several regions. Within fixed lines, the share of ISDN lines was 16.2% at the end of April 2003, compared with 14.1% a year earlier. Global Telesystems announced in May 2000 that it had built the first fiber-optic connection to Budapest from the company’s EU-wide fiber network. Other fiber connections from Budapest to hubs in Vienna are being developed…

“Broadband communications are spreading rapidly, and most modern services are available or will soon be. Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line services were launched in late 2000, by Matav, the dominant telecoms company, and by Vivendi, the second-largest fixed-line provider. Since then, ADSL penetration has been increasing rapidly and had reached 2% by the end of 2002…

“With the liberalization of the telecoms market, UPC (Hungary’s leading cable provider) and other players are introducing voice and data transmission over television cables. It is estimated that about 45% of Hungary’s 3.8 million households subscribe to cable television…

“Mobile-phone penetration is growing rapidly: it was at 71.2% in May 2003, up from 56% in May 2002, according to the Communication Authority. There are three GSM 900 providers, which also provide DCS 1800 services. An auction for Universal Mobile Telecoms Services frequency concessions was scheduled for late 2003…

“The dominant mobile provider, Westel, launched General Packet Radio Services in 2000 and offered full coverage of the country in August 2001; rival Pannon launched its own service in July 2001. This will eventually increase the speed of mobile data transmission from the present fastest speed of 20 kb/s to 100 kb/s with the use of a GPRS handset…

“Westel launched Wireless Local Area Network service in November 2002 at Budapest’s Ferihegy Airport. The service is available at 28 points throughout Hungary, with additional points to be added soon.”

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 ol’ iTunes Sinatra Shuffle. There comes a time in most everyone’s life when they wonder why they haven’t been listening to more Sinatra, for First Coffee^SM that time came early this year:

Get ready for new taxes on Internet phone users. One of the Federal Communications Commission’s top priorities next year, according to Chairman Kevin Martin – who should know – is to “move to collection for the Universal Service Fund that is technology-neutral.”

Martin advocates what he calls a “numbers-based approach” to collecting taxes. This means that taxes will be figured simply on the basis of phone numbers called, no matter what technology or device is used to do the actual calling.

The Universal Service Fund’s a hungry beast, as of September it had doled out $4.7 billion to rural and other underfunded carriers. It gets its money now from long-distance, wireless, pay-phone and telephone services kicking in a tithe of their revenues which, of course, come directly from Joe Consumer’s wallet as an extra fee on the bills.

The question is what contributions, if any, VoIP providers should be making. Vonage charges a “regulatory recovery fee” of $1.50 on each customer phone number to contribute to the fund, but there isn’t any industry-wide policy on VoIP contributions.

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Visto Corporation, a vendor of push mobile e-mail, says its Visto Mobile 5 with ConstantSync technology has been chosen by Vodafone K.K. to power Vodafone Office Mail, what the company’s billing as Japan’s first “True Push” wireless e-mail.

Visto’s device-agnostic push wireless e-mail offering lets Vodafone K.K. sell push e-mail and PIM on handsets.

This release of Vodafone Office Mail’s service follows Visto’s signing a global contract with Vodafone Group Plc, which was announced in April 2005. Japan is the latest region to launch a Vodafone wireless push e-mail service powered by Visto Mobile.

With Visto Mobile, Vodafone K.K. can offer two-way delivery of e-mail, contacts and calendars to select phones. Mobile users can check e-mail, make appointments or update contact lists away from their desks.

Politeness is a big characteristic of Japanese society, and Shinkichi Kawakami, Executive Officer, Enterprise Business Unit Director, Vodafone K.K. was appropriately polite when he said “I am entirely convinced that Vodafone Office Mail is the perfect service to enable Japanese workers to be just as productive outside the office as they would be sitting directly in front of their office PC.”

The Visto platform enables two-way delivery of e-mail, contacts and calendar updates to devices across “all operating systems,” company officials say, including Symbian, Palm, Microsoft Windows Mobile, J2ME MIDP 2.0, IMAP4 and SyncML.

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Alternet Systems Inc. has announced that it has released SchoolWeb 2.4, what the company describes as “virtual learning environment software for schools.”

SchoolWeb 2.4 is designed to create a “user friendly, Internet learning environment for teachers and students,” company officials say. Combining online courseware with a virtual Internet library, SchoolWeb says it provides “all the tools required to create a high-quality learning environment for students and teachers in the digital age,” according to company officials who probably don’t talk like that in real life.

The SchoolWeb Learning Management System allows users to create or view lesson plans for distribution to students. This is combined with SchoolWeb’s Learning Object Repository, which stores “all relevant information” in a searchable electronic library.

Put together, these two tools help the user build and store a reusable asset base of online courses and reference material, for access by students and teachers, at home or at school. SchoolWeb is marketed as increasing both teacher productivity and student access to educational information, and sounds like a real boon to homeschoolers as well.

For schools – or homeschoolers – in rural or remote locations, SchoolWeb network server systems provide high-speed internet service to locations that have limited access to broadband.

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TMC’s Dear Leader Rich Tehrani sent around an e-mail he got from The Radicati Group giving their latest stats. It’s kind of fun to read “some fast facts,” gives a snapshot of where certain industries are in the Old World and gives you something to drop at the next cocktail party… “Well, you know, Haskins, seeing as how Europe’s total policy management installed base is expected to grow from 16 million users in 2005, to 130 million users in 2009, we at Zickenfuss Consulting are advising our clients to…”:

·The average number of IMs sent per user per day will increase from 37 IMs in 2005, to 94 IMs in 2009.

·The percentage of consumer-only users of public IM will decrease from 70% in 2005, to 4% in 2009 due to the increasing presence of IM in the corporate space.

·European e-mail traffic is set to rise from 26 billion messages per day in 2005, to 49 billion messages per day in 2009, growing at an average yearly growth rate of 17%.

·Europe’s total policy management installed base is expected to grow from 16 million users in 2005, to 130 million users in 2009.

·Europe’s e-mail archiving installed base is expected to increase from 7 million users in 2005, to 90 million users by 2009.

·Revenues for the total compliance & e-mail archiving market in Europe are expected to grow from €207 million in 2005, to €1.8 billion by year-end 2009, an average growth rate of 74% per year.

Radicati – great name – estimates that the total market for directories, including NOS directories, enterprise and carrier directories, and metadirectories/virtual directories, will grow from $669 million in 2005, to $1.38 billion in 2009, and the installed base for NOS directories will increase from 306 million entries in 2005, to 554 million entries in 2009.

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Rambus Inc., a technology licensing company specializing in high-speed chip interfaces, has announced that it has adopted the Register Description Language and licensed Denali’s Blueprint software for Rambus intellectual property development and enhanced customer support.

Rambus has also joined the RDL Alliance, a program formed and chaired by Denali. The goal of the alliance is to promote the standardized usage of RDL in the development and delivery of IP products used in system-on-chip designs.

Configuration registers modeled in RDL store key parameters that define the operation of the chips, and are required by system architects, hardware developers, and software engineers to develop end products.

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True news item which appeared in the Orange County Register: Diedrich Coffee of Irvine has appointed its fifth chief executive in five years.

Diedrich Coffee runs coffee houses like Coffee People stores, they just sold Gloria Jean’s. They hired a new CEO who was working as a senior executive at Mexican restaurant chain Chevys Inc. and a former chief executive of Edwards Theatres.

His name? Stephen Coffey.

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 sounds of First Coffee^SM’s kids doing their homeschool work and the questions they have as Mrs. First Coffee^SM’s at the refugee center – working, not applying:

Happy birthday, Shirley Jackson, author of the 1948 story “The Lottery,” one of the creepiest, scariest, most chilling short stories ever. It’s been copied innumerable times but never equaled in its simple brutal terror – Stephen King alone has written at least two entire novels which read like write-outs of “The Lottery.”

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The NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A to you and me) has awarded Savi Technology a new contract to upgrade and sustain operational support of the RFID-based network Savi built last year to track multi-national defense consignments between Europe and Afghanistan.

The contract followed a year-long assessment of the RFID “backbone” Savi deployed for NATO, and calls for purchase of additional active, data-rich Radio Frequency Identification tags and readers as well as network wide software enhancements to the International Security Assistance Force supply chain, stretching from the Netherlands and Germany through Uzbekistan to Kabul, Afghanistan.

The upgrades include installation of the Savi SmartChain Consignment Management Solution, which will enable NATO to maintain nearly real-time supply chain management and visibility, and will provide an interoperable solution for member nations to share information on both national and joint multi-national consignments.

Savi’s RFID-based network was found to meet NATO’s Standardisation Agreement for ‘best commercial practice” requirements for asset and consignment tracking and were approved by all 26 member nations.

26 nations. And you think you have a cumbersome purchase approval process at your company.

Bruce Jacquemard, Savi’s Executive VP of Worldwide Sales said the ability of interoperable RFID-based networks to link with each other when appropriate “enhances in-transit visibility of supplies and ultimately provides greater confidence to the war fighter needing the right material in the right place at the right time.”

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Angus Kelsell, Google’s European finance director told the Times that the Irish expansion “which will take place over two to three years, is not tax-related… it is to do with supporting our European business.”

Google’s European headquarters in Barrow Street, Dublin, are the company’s largest operation outside the US, and due to its Irish operation, the Times says, California-based Google has “significantly lowered” its tax bill for the first nine months of 2005, according to documents lodged with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S.

No doubt what Google says is right, and they’re probably not even cognizant of the fact that their effective tax rate fell to 31 per cent from 39 per cent, saving somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million a year because more of its earnings came from its Irish unit in 2005 than in 2004, taxed at the Irish rate of 12.5 per cent instead of the US rate of 35 per cent, according to the Times.

Globalization at its finest. Countries with confiscatory tax rates are going to see those companies which can move to countries which steal less of the wealth they create. You say Ireland’s losing money by taxing Google at a lower rate? Really? You think they’d have those hundreds of extra jobs and millions of extra tax dollars if they didn’t?

“The Irish subsidiaries of US companies doubled their earnings in the four years to 2002 to $26.6 billion,” the Times reports, adding that Ireland cut its corporate tax rate to 12.5 per cent in 2003.

So which is better – 12.5 percent of $26.6 billion, or 35 percent of zero? What if America cut its ridiculous corporate tax rate to, oh, 15 percent? Would it be worth the time and trouble for Google to set up Irish operations, or would America be cashing Google’s tax checks?

Ireland’s on to something, realizing that if you don’t steal the profits from hard-working companies they’ll hire more of your citizens. Just in the past couple years Yahoo!, and eBay and Amazon have created jobs in Ireland. Jobs which could have gone to America but for its stupid chase-off-those-who-can-create-wealth tax policy.

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Laptop news:

ZDNet’s reporting that Taiwan’s Quanta, “the biggest manufacturer of notebooks in the world,” is in for the $100 laptop project.

It’s the brainchild of the One Laptop per Child organization, which “hopes to bring a $100 laptop championed by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte.” The machines will run on Linux, be powered by turning a hand crank and connect to the Internet via mesh networking.

They’ll be destined for places like China, Brazil, India, Thailand and Argentina.

One per child? How about one per student, one per person?

Quanta produces laptop systems which end up with names like “Hewlett-Packard” and “Dell” on them, just like their competitor, Taiwan’s Compal.

If the cheap laptop idea works it’ll be the first time, the concept’s failed pretty much everywhere it’s been tried.

Also Intel’s saying their Yonah chip will be ready in early 2006, as part of what pundits are calling an effort to push the PC into the living room. Keith Kresslin, director of mobile platforms marketing at Intel tells ZDNet the dual-core notebook chip based on a new design will be released in January.

Kresslin says the new dual core chip will be 68 percent better than current one processing core Intel notebook chips.

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The world premiere of JibJab’s latest work will appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno during tomorrow’s show, Thursday, December 15.

The show starts at 11:35 p.m. on the East Coast.

JibJab’s Internet cartoon “This Land” was seen over 80 million times. Their new one will be “a fast-paced, gag-a-second musical romp through the domestic and international strife that have bombarded President Bush over the past year,” according to the Spiridellis brothers, the brains behind JibJab.

“From Katrina, FEMA, bird flu, insurgents, Cindy Sheehan and Scooter Libby to Tom Delay... there were so many issues facing the President, we had to make the song lightning fast to squeeze them all in,” said Grevan Spiridellis, co-founder of JibJab. “People will want to watch it again and again to catch all the references.”

The music is based on a medley of “Auld Lang Syne” and “Turkey in the Straw,” arranged by Wojahn Bros. Music and voiced by actor Jim Meskimen. The video can be seen for free on both JibJab.com and at MSNVideo.com on Thursday, December 15, 2005, immediately following its West Coast premiere on Jay Leno.

This past October, MSN inked a deal with JibJab to co-distribute its next five animations on MSN Video.

“We have fewer employees than the local coffee shop,” Gregg Spiridellis said, adding “please send coffee.”

 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 Al Stewart’s sturdy pre-Year Of The Cat album, Modern Times:

First off, a big welcome to Emily Olesia Rose Tate. Beautiful little girl, beautiful mother, beautiful family, beautiful Christmas present, beautiful answer to prayer.

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Who says momentum doesn’t qualify as news? Speech-recognition vendor Voxify is one of the companies First Coffee^SM’s keeping an eye on, their Automated Agents have conversational skills to handle advanced customer service calls and have proven fairly popular in the travel and hospitality industries.

In other words, they’ve got the Big Mo right now.

The company’s been picking up momentum recently the way the once-left-for-dead Minnesota Vikings have been winning games, so who can tell where they’ll end up? The Vikings as well as Voxify, that is.

The Vikes have been picking up wins, the likes of St. Louis, Green Bay and the New York Giants, while Voxify’s been picking up clients the likes of Continental Airlines, Aer Lingus and CanJet. The Vikes have Brad Johnson. Voxify’s got Adeeb Shanaa.

The Vikings have boat parties. Voxify has... great taste in San Francisco restaurants.

Momentum’s an all-important factor in football, no Super Bowl team of the past 15 years has had a losing record in November-December. It’s also not bad to have as a tech vendor either, where the market tends to play follow the leader even more than the AFC South plays follow the Indianapolis Colts.

There’s company momentum, and there’s industry momentum: “The use of speech in the travel and hospitality industries has been on the rise, and for good reason,” says Steve Cramoysan, Research Director, Gartner. “Speech applications are capable of handling a wide range of call types; from reservations to fare-finding, helping to lighten current call center loads. Current trends clearly point towards increased adoption of speech applications in call centers in the future.”

Continental’s call centers handle some 40 million calls per year, 40 percent of which will soon be initiated by Voxify Automated Agents. “Voxify’s Automated Agents have been an integral part of our move towards customer self-service,” says Martin Hand, Staff Vice President of Reservations Operations at Continental. “Our goal is to consistently deliver speed and simplicity at our call centers, and our Automated Agents help us do just that.”

Adeeb Shanaa, CEO of Voxify says the company strategizes for seasonal needs and other call volume surges. “Our Automated Agents are suited to the travel and hospitality industries,” he says, since “when call centers experience sudden surges of call volumes based on seasonal spikes or unplanned events such as hurricanes, they can’t immediately hire and train new employees to handle the load. One of the benefits of our Automated Agents is their ability to be ready, 24/7, regardless of call volumes.”

Don Nanneman, VP Marketing for Voxify recently found the time to answer a few questions:

FC: It’s being reported in studies that speech automation is part of the boom in hotel industry profits. What’s on the cutting edge of that today that’s helping hotels see ROI from their speech recognition?

FC: As of today, what industries are you seeing as the next ripe market for speech recognition?

DN: The key factor we evaluate as we look at industry sector expansion is the amount of customer interaction involved in selling and delivering and then servicing products or services. That’s why retail, hospitality, and travel were the first industries we targeted. We recently added Automated Agents to support call processes in entertainment, for things like event ticket sales, and utilities, and will be looking for additional segments to add in 2006.

FC: How has speech recognition progressed to the point where industries that may not have had much use for it in the past now are interested in at least taking a look?

DN: While speech recognition and automation have become dependable over the past decade, the challenge now is in understanding how to apply the technology. After the downsizing of most IT organizations over the past five years few companies have the technical depth or breadth to take on large scale speech application development, regardless of industry.

We believe what has prompted many of the customer interaction-centric industries to look at automated agents today is the combination of the quick time to market we are able to offer coupled with our on-demand hosted model, which keeps start up costs low. Couple low cost with low risk, minimal customization and fast time to market, and you’ve got a winning combination for the bulk of the market today.

FC: Where do hotels get most of the cost savings from speech recognition?

DN: By augmenting or replacing customer service representatives with automated agents they can save at least 50% per call. Many of our customers, such as Wyndham International, have achieved an 85% cost savings by using our Automated Agents to handle routine information calls, freeing live agents to deal with more complex problem resolution calls.

FC: Break down a bit the comment from the Gartner analyst about the “future trends” you see increasing adoption in call centers.

DN: Organizations are looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction while at the same time reducing costs and reducing time to market of new services. While a great deal of effort has gone into Internet and web technologies over the past few years in an effort to add additional sales and information channels, the telephone has remained the most ubiquitous communication device – even increasing in importance with the widespread adoption of cell phones.

Those same organizations are dealing with an onslaught of new technologies in their IT centers they are suffering from a shortage of skilled resources capable of dealing with these new systems, especially speech technologies. All of this leads up to a rapid adoption of hosted managed services to deliver on-demand speech applications deployed from what we call industry-specific “trained agent templates.” Minimal start up costs, no technical specialists required to deploy, and an on-demand model eliminates the need for costly and complex infrastructure. The on-demand trend has spread rapidly from CRM, and Automated Agents are suited to exploit this new paradigm.

FC: You mention the “on-demand” aspect of Voxify’s app. Can you dive into that a bit?

DN: A key benefit of the on-demand model is that a virtually unlimited real time call handling capacity is available to our customers through our hosted managed service model. This means that since Voxify is hosting the speech application the client uses it when it needs it. Whether call volume spikes or is unexpectedly low, the automated agents handle the traffic. It’s perfect scalability.

And clients only pay for what they use. It’s an easy model for our clients to understand and to use. That was proven out recently with the back-to-back hurricanes as a number of our customers in hospitality and travel, such as hotels and airlines, saw significant increases in calls, on the order of four to five times normal, as people were scrambling to find a place to stay or to confirm or change existing reservations.

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 iTunes mix of today’s birthday boy, Frank Sinatra:

One reason First Coffee^SM, who’s covered everything from high school girls’ basketball to A-list celebrities, municipal water bond meetings to summits of Central Asian presidents, bodies found floating in a rural lake to oil tankers in crisis on the high seas in his ersatz career as a journalist, enjoys the business technology beat is that there’s not as much hypocrisy, fluff and just plain, flat-out lying as there is in other areas of journalism:

“Mr. City Councilman, did you know, when you bought the worthless 40-acre parcel of land out past the dump on Ladies’ Mile Road that within the year the commonwealth of Virginia would appropriate it for construction of the new maximum-security prison, and pay you ten times what you paid for it five months earlier?”

“Son, I don’t know what you’re implying, but as a proud public servant of the people of Roadkill County, I can assure you…”

“Mr. City Councilman, isn’t it a fact that the commissioner for state facility procurement is a golfing buddy of yours and a good friend?”

“Son, my golfing times are apolitical, I never discuss anything of a professional nature with anyone, certainly not anything inappropriate to the public trust the voters…”

Sometimes you want to go home, put your head in a toilet and flush. So it’s particularly disquieting to see a virulent strain of mendacious spin worming its way into what should be a straightforward, clear-cut, best-man-win field of technological progress.

We speak, of course, of the spurious, specious arguments wi-fi providers put forth against municipal wi-fi. First Coffee^SM salutes the city of Tempe, Arizona, which the Associated Press reports today is “due to have wireless Internet available for all of its 160,000 residents in February.”

The AP says “consider it a municipal status symbol in the digital age: a city blanketed by a wireless Internet network, accessible at competitive prices throughout the town’s homes, cafes, offices and parks.”

Which is wrong, of course. “Status symbol” all wi-fi would be if vendors have it their way, but the city of Tempe understands that municipal wi-fi can be a great spur to local development, a leg up for those who need it to be more productive. City officials sensibly realize that ubiquitous wi-fi will “attract more technology and biotech companies – and the young, upwardly mobile employees they bring,” according to the AP.

Philadelphia’s working on a citywide high-speed system with EarthLink Inc., the town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania is covering large parts of the city with municipal wi-fi and an ISP is building a competing system as they should. New Orleans is building free, limited-speed system. Wayne and Garth’s own Aurora, Illinois is talking about one.

Muni wi-fi’s a no-lose winner. So why do commercial wi-fi providers claim it’s the worst idea since New Coke? Two words: Compe. Tition.

For all they blather about the joys and wonders of free-market competition, and for all the untrammeled good it brings consumers, the plain fact is every single company selling any good or service in the world wants just one thing: A competition-free monopoly. Every business innovation for an edge, any exclusive offering, any competitive advantage is nothing but an attempt to work, however briefly, competition-free: If you’re the only company to think of adding XYZ capability to the JP-47, if your FirePhaser is the only one out there, or if you’re the only one with good customer service, you have a monopoly and can name your price, at least until next week when somebody copies the idea.

A bill in Congress which would make it illegal for municipalities to offer wi-fi, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, is nothing more than a sop to an industry which hates competition as much as the next guy. Competition makes businesses work harder, offer better prices and better products than other companies in order to win consumer dollars, but it costs more and lowers profit margins. Businesses hate it, consumers love it.

Opposition to municipal wi-fi can’t be seen as coming directly from corporations who hate the competition, of course, that’s too obvious, so a report called “Not In The Public Interest – The Myth of Municipal Wi-Fi Networks” was published by the New Millennium Research Council, a supposedly “independent” policy group created by Issue Dynamics.

The connections are explained well by rabid left-wing blogger Matt Rubin (Hey, rabid left-wingers aren’t wrong 100% of the time, blind squirrels and all that): “As Broadbandreports.com explains, IDI is a PR firm and lobbying outfit specializing in Astroturf (i.e. fake grassroots) campaigns on behalf of corporate clients.” In other words, financially interested corporations don’t want you to know they’re creating and bankrolling the “opposition.”

A little free wi-fi here and there isn’t getting anybody’s knickers in a twist. Chapel Hill, North Carolina is spending a couple thousand dollars to give free wi-fi to school kids living in a housing project. Nobody’s objecting, ISPs and other wi-fi providers don’t kick up a fuss although they distrust the premise, they’ll let it go because they weren’t ever going to make any money off school kids in a housing project anyway.

First Coffee^SM’s as virulently free-market as anyone, would end all nonsense like agricultural subsidies (which is just corporate welfare anyway) tomorrow morning, votes Libertarian in national elections and has never met a government program he fully trusts.

Yet there are a few things government does better than private enterprise, although the list is much shorter than most think. Building roads is one. National defense is another. And just like new mammal species in Borneo, municipal wi-fi is one of those rare, new finds to add to that list.

Because it’s precisely government’s inability to do most anything well that lets private business know when to quit the field: When there’s a rare thing government can actually productively do with the taxes it extorts, pop the champagne and get out of the way.

Sessions’s meretricious bill is titled “Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005 (HR 2726),” and it would bar state and local governments “from providing any telecommunications or information service that is ‘substantially similar’ to services provided by private companies.” As First Coffee^SM has written, you, a slow chimp and the Barbie doll in your daughter’s room recognize this as brute protectionism, as simply trying to outlaw competition.

Industry water boy Sessions is a former Southwestern Bell exec who got over $200,000 from the industry in his last election, and has gotten just under half a million dollars over his Congressional career from them, with SBC-associated donors alone kicking in over $74,000 during his five terms. And as Rich Tehrani notes, he still holds half a million dollars in SBC stock options, as well as financial interest in Verizon and Bell South, all of whom – along with Sessions – would profit greatly from killing muni wi-fi.

Municipalities advocating public wi-fi say that the services are needed to promote local business and build up areas the industries won’t invest in. They’re right. Telecoms and ISPs say it’s unfair competition on the one hand, and that they can do a better job on the other. They’re dissembling – if they can do a better job people will pay for it. They just don’t want to have to do a better job by the consumer, they’d rather get away with doing a half-assed job and charging more for it.

In other areas where public and private compete – hospitals, say – it’s been proven people who can will pay for superior private products. What telecoms and ISPs really mean is they don’t want to have to expend the time and effort to do a better job, and without competition they won’t because they won’t have to.

If you’re providing a good or service and you can’t beat the government’s quality or price you deserve to lose. If it’s true that a private company can’t build better or cheaper wi-fi systems than the government, given the inherent waste and inefficiency that’s built into anything government does, then for heaven’s sake that company deserves to be out of business.

If you can’t do better than government you might as well pack it in, go work for a major metropolitan daily newspaper or get elected to Congress, something where your nice comfortable monopoly means you don’t have to work hard to be good.

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 Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s Symphony in B minor, the “Polonia:”

Happy birthday, Grace Hopper, born in 1906, who wrote the Common Business-Oriented Language, or COBOL in the early 1950s when she saw that most computer mistakes were the result of human mistakes in writing programs, which were almost all numbers, and thought if they could be written in plain language ordinary people could write programs, and the number of mistakes would be reduced.

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Amino, an IPTV software and consumer premises equipment vendor, has announced it has been selected by Novis, a major Portuguese telco, for a residential service to be branded as “Clix Smartv.”

A commercial test launch with AmiNET110 set-top boxes is scheduled for December 2005 in Lisbon and Porto, with full commercial deployment planned for 2006 in all major cities.

The service will include an electronic program guide, Video on Demand, and a personalized choice of channels. Susanna Barbato, Managing Director of IPTV services for Novis said it would be the first time anyone had offered IPTV services in Portugal, and the company “expects to create a large subscriber base in Portugal over the coming years.”

The service will offer 50 channels for the test launch, increasing to 100 when the commercial deployment commences. The AmiNET110 was chosen by Novis for residential deployments due to its “flexibility,” said Bob Giddy, CEO Amino.

The AmiNET110 is compatible with the ReadyLinks Smartfoot and Coaxsys home networking adapters, allowing operators to avoid costly wiring of CAT5 cable throughout the home.

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On-demand CRM vendor NetSuite, Inc. has announced that West Chester, Pa.-based Nobel Learning Communities, Inc., an operator of 150 private schools throughout the United States, has selected NetSuite to bring its multiple schools’ front and back-office operations under one roof with real-time business management.

NetSuite allows Nobel to run its business operations by using one system, from financials and revenue recognition to CRM capabilities such as tracking potential students and allowing students to pay tuition online.

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Seven Network Limited and Yahoo! Inc. have announced that they will combine their online, mobile and IPTV businesses in Australia and New Zealand. The strategic partnership brings together Yahoo! Australia & NZ, and the online assets and television and magazine content of Seven Network, an Australian media company.

Under the terms of the agreement, Seven and Yahoo! will form a new 50-50 holding company that will own Yahoo! Australia & NZ. Seven and Yahoo! will each hold three of the six board seats in the entity. It will combine Yahoo!’s search and communications capabilities and its global Internet network with Seven’s media and entertainment content and marketing capabilities to create what Seven Network officials say they hope will be “one of the most comprehensive and engaging online experiences for Australian consumers and advertisers.”

Yahoo! Australia & NZ and Seven say they’ll launch a new name and online presence in late January, coinciding with Seven’s coverage of the Australian Open and the Olympic Winter Games in Torino.

As First Coffee^SM will be in New Zealand visiting family at that time – Rich, why don’t we have TMC cover the expenses as a business trip… Rich? Hello, is this thing on? Rich? Hello?

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Excerpt from a story First Coffee^SM’ll be covering this upcoming Tuesday: “In its U.S. midyear lodging forecast, PricewaterhouseCoopers expects profits in the hotel industry to reach a new record high of almost $25 billion in 2006, a good sign that both the hospitality and travel industries are back on track.”

One factor helping keep costs low is the strategic use of speech applications, and on Tuesday we’ll hear how Voxify is one company on the cutting edge of that.

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Happy birthday, John Milton, the British poet who began the drearily predictable literary meme of seeing Satan as the hero, yawn. First Coffee^SM read Paradise Lost, and agrees with the great English critic Samuel Johnson, who said yeah it’s good and all that, but “nobody ever wished it was longer.”

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Virginia’s always been one of the more tech-savvy states – it helps having a multi-millionaire governor who made his pile in high-tech – and one positive advantage of that is the commonwealth’s interim agreement to partner with Northrop Grumman Information Technology, Inc. to “modernize the state’s information technology infrastructure,” according to commonwealth officials.

This 10-year contract worth more than $2 billion is believed to be the largest of its kind and is estimated to bring over 1000 jobs to Southwest Virginia and Chesterfield County.

Virginia brought Gordon & Glickson on board to help guide the process made possible by the commonwealth’s Public Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act of 2002, which brings private sector innovation and investment to state government projects via solicited or unsolicited proposals.

Over the next 10 years, the contract calls for Northrop Grumman to transform the state’s legacy IT infrastructure, including the equipment and services for mainframes, servers, desktop and laptop computers, voice and data networks, operating systems, e-mail, security, help-desk services and data center facilities.

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PacificNet Inc., a CRM, telemarketing, call center, Interactive Voice Response and Value-Added Services vendor selling to the Chinese market, has announced that its subsidiary, PacificNet Linkhead, has completed an IVR customer service center system for ChinaGoHi.

Headquartered in Shenzhen, ChinaGoHi operates a Direct Response Television infomercial marketing companies for financial advisory services in China with more than 700 employees in its DRTV infomercial telemarketing call center, with 700 phone lines and occupying 35,000 square feet.

PacificNet Linkhead was awarded the contract from ChinaGoHi to provide the IVR system for its DRTV customer contact center and manage the overall project from installation to integration.

Key features of the new 1000-line IVR system include automated call distribution and call answering, real-time customer billing, order and subscription status inquiry, automated information update via IVR, SMS, or fax, order confirmation via voice log tele-conferencing with multiple chat-rooms and CRM database management, among others.

Company officials say the IVR system “greatly improves the service quality and response time” for ChinaGoHi’s DRTV customers.

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CyberLink Corp. has responded to the allegation from InterVideo Inc. that CyberLink’s infringing on its US Patent No. 6,765,788 by politely saying “bushwa.”

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 BBC Philharmonic’s broadcast version of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6:

Happy birthday, and thanks for all the great columns, Ann Coulter.

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It’s great to write about the theory of CRM, how companies should be treating their customers better, and to praise companies who do it well, but we here at First Coffee^SM think it’s also appropriate to kick a little butt when somebody clearly despises their customers. This usually happens in the online world, since anybody who treated customer as badly as Caiman.com treats their customers wouldn’t last from one Christmas season to the next on a street corner shop somewhere.

First Coffee^SM printed an account of a terrible customer experience he had buying a CD via the online vendor through Amazon.com, more as an object lesson than anything else, and was astounded at how many other e-mails that provoked from customers feeling similarly ill-used, lied to and otherwise treated like a whiny ATM.

This led to another entry, “Terrible Service Costs Caiman.com Another Customer,” printed back in April, and the responses to that one are still rolling in. On the day before Thanksgiving Day “Eric” wrote in to post “Caiman.com is absolutely the worst customer service experience ever!,” and yesterday, Pearl Harbor Day – it must be a day of great moment to post on First Coffee^SM, folks – “Brett” echoed what others have written:

I ordered a DVD from Caiman from Amazon on 11/05/05. I received an email from them saying it has shipped. On 12/07/05 it is still not here. I emailed “Claire” in customer service. She said the USPS can take up to 21 days to deliver a package. This is total fabrication. I then asked for the tracking number for the package. She replied, “The USPS does not provide us with tracking numbers.” Once again, I believe such a statement is a total fabrication. They’re the worst. SOMEBODY SHUT THEM DOWN.

That so many people have written in to complain about Caiman.com’s terrible customer service tells us that a) this isn’t First Coffee^SM griping about a one-off mistake somebody at an otherwise fine company made, and b) it’s a lot easier for companies providing bad service like Caiman.com to thrive online, where they’re virtually anonymous and, parasite-like, cling to their host sites like Amazon.com.

What can be done about this? Not just about Caiman.com’s awful treatment of customers, but to improve customer service online in general? Do people not read the customer opinions on Amazon.com? First Coffee^SM didn’t, or else he would’ve taken his business elsewhere. My bad, okay, but it’s a mistake not to be made twice.

Some posters to the entry above have contacted the Better Business Bureau to complain about Caiman.com, some have written the Florida Attorney General’s office. That’s upsetting your customers in a big way, when they take the time and effort to track down that sort of recourse. The problem there is that enforcement action rarely filters down in a meaningful way to company headquarters.

First Coffee^SM’s recommendation? When you find someone who couldn’t care less about providing you with good customer service, who you think isn’t shooting 100% straight with you, who tries to slough you off with obviously canned e-mails providing information you know to be incorrect, in other words a company which can’t be bothered to even pretend to give a rip about you as long as you simply hand over the money, give ‘em the ol’ Nancy Reagan treatment and just buy a complete set of new china after consulting your astrologer.

Uh, rather, just say no. The only thing that’ll get such scofflaws off the Internet is loss of revenue. It’s the only power we have to improve the quality and reliability of customer service, so let’s use it.

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Motorola, Inc. has announced that the company deployed its commercial UMTS on Taiwan, within nine months of contract signing, to let VIBO Telecom launch 3G commercial service on December 6, 2005.

Motorola provided VIBO with a complete 3G network including Motorola’s UMTS system and exclusive 3G handsets, so VIBO could launch the latest 3G multimedia services this week to customers across Taiwan. A system upgrade to HSDPA via a simple software download will be carried out at a future time, when VIBO opts for a 3G network enhancement, Motorola officials say.

With Motorola’s UMTS network, VIBO was able to provide its initial 1.5 million subscribers with 3G services. Subscribers now can access VIBO’s 3G multi-media services, which generally provide a greater variety of quality voice and data services than previously available with 2/2.5G.

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Pactolus Communications Software Corporation, a developer of Class 4/5 SIP-based IP voice services, and Convedia Corporation, a supplier of IP media servers, have announced that the two companies are collaborating to offer service provider deployment of SIP-based, IMS-compliant services.

The partnership, Pactolus officials say, will enable “rapid, economical deployment of media-rich services and features for applications based on Pactolus’ RapidFLEX Service Creation Environment and its SIPwar Carrier Services Suite, using Convedia’s IP multimedia processing.”

Over the last four years, the two companies’ products have been used in numerous service provider networks, such as that of Primus Canada.

Officials from both companies say the collaboration is to help simplify both media-rich features, and the delivery of services of all types of fixed and mobile network topologies, in the hopes of driving increased subscriber usage and retention. The emerging IMS cross-network service model, they believe, fosters subscriber adoption of advanced calling features, customizations, unified contact databases and calling groups, which extends the usability of carrier services and promotes subscriber loyalty.

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We’re settled into our apartment in Istanbul now, which actually has a view of Bosphorus if you stand on the roof and jump. Here’s how First Coffee^SM explained the experience to a friend in an e-mail:

Arrange for the truck to pick up our stuff in Antalya at nine in the morning Friday. Truck shows up at 10:30, so early by Turkish standards we’re lucky we’re dressed. We’d agreed to pay 500 lira ($370) for the guy to do the move, truck and all, he gets there and doesn’t have any helpers. Where are the helpers? Oh, helpers, yeah, that’ll be 300 lira, I can have a couple guys here in ten minutes (upon which he’ll pay them 15 lira each and pocket 270). Forget it, we’ll do it ourselves. Um, 150 lira? Sorry, Charlie. It’s mostly boxes anyway, not much furniture, a friend’s staying with us so he helps.

Truck’s all packed, locked, the guy says you’re going to Cengelkoy in Istanbul, right? Right, like we told you a couple weeks ago. Sorry, can’t take you there, streets are too narrow, the guy says. (You think this is an exaggeration? After the truck is locked he says this.) Much phone-calling back and forth with the woman who lives in the apartment we’re moving into, assures him yes, it’s fine, the truck can make it no problem. No bribe, sorry. Grumpy, he says he’ll have it in Istanbul Saturday morning, leaves.

We fly to Istanbul Friday night, call the truck guy, who says sure, I’ll have a couple helpers to unload tomorrow morning, no problem.

Saturday comes and goes. Sunday morning he calls, says he’s “in Istanbul” somewhere. Fine, we say, we’ll be at church, you can come to the flat after two. Guy calls at 11:30 saying he’s at the apartment. This is still Swiss timing for Turkey, mind you. We get home at two, he’s there, where are the guys to help? Oh, you wanted helpers? Makes some calls, in five minutes two guys show up asking 100 lira each.

Paying 25 lira for a day’s work is a lot, this job’ll take a couple hours, max.  Friend and I start unpacking. Um, 60 lira? Get lost. Security guard hails a couple gardeners thrilled to pieces to get 30 each for a couple hours’ work and who are Our Good Friends now.

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 from the Leonard Bernstein Century series of recordings, this one’s him conducting Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring:

Some industry reax on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0:

Barbara Darrow, one of the more perceptive industry observers, writes “With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the company now offers a ‘rent-to-own’ option. But partners wanting true multi-tenancy will have to wait for the next release, code-named Titan.”

Tenancy is an issue others have commented on as well. This reporter heard from RightNow Technologies’ CEO Greg Gianforte, who explained that Microsoft isn’t actually hosting the applications, their partners are and will offer single tenant hosting.

“One of the breakthroughs in hosting is multi-tenancy, multiple applications on a shared set of hardware, which is the standard for successful software-as-a-service companies,” Gianforte said. “There are no economies of scale or margin in single tenant hosting. This model was introduced in the 90’s and failed.”

Partners wanting to host Microsoft CRM can now do so for $24.95 per user per month via a new Service Provider Licensing Agreement option, Darrow says, compared to salesforce.com Enterprise Edition’s list price of $125 per user per month, and Salesnet Enterprise Edition’s $99 per user per month:

“With this SPLA pricing, Microsoft has started to move toward true hostable product. But the company has not been able to deliver, as hoped, a true multi-tenancy solution yet.”

John Pallatto sees Dynamics as Microsoft’s “bid to make customer relationship management more pervasive in companies large and small,” and cites the widely-cited Forrester CRM analyst Liz Herbert who says that “while it doesn’t present a strong direct challenge to companies that are providing true, multi-tenant on demand CRM applications, it addresses the needs of customers who don’t want to deal with managing the IT resources required to host the application on their own sites,” in Pallatto’s words summarizing Herbert’s comments.

Herbert also told Susan B. Shor that the product “will see some traction in larger enterprises, but more at the division level where a division chooses on its own to change CRM systems… Oracle, SAP and Siebel tend to be long deployment, high-cost, high-risk investments, whereas, Microsoft CRM is quicker to deploy and has a lower upfront cost.”

The tradeoff, Shor says, who calls Dynamics “a giant step from previous versions,” is that Dynamics “is lacking some of the functionality of those massive programs.”

Ephraim Schwartz calls Dynamics “a second front in its assault on the CRM market… a step beyond SMBs, with the company targeting the enterprise for the first time.” He says Dynamics’s reseller model is “not really an indication that Microsoft is moving to a full software as a service offering.”

And the federal government’s being targeted: Dibya Sarkar writes that Microsoft “expects to capture a significant segment of the CRM market in government,” primarily because Dynamics is tightly integrated with both Office and Outlook, already widely used across the federal government.

“[Dynamics] really pushes usability, adoption and the widespread pervasive use of CRM across a variety of information workers who before were too intimidated or felt that a CRM system wasn’t part of their job,” Sarkar reports Kevin Faulkner, the company’s senior director of product marketing as saying.

“Typical CRM applications are specialized, require detailed knowledge and are not easy to use,” Sarkar writes. “But because many workers use e-mail, electronic calendars and other functions, integrating the latest version into Outlook was a no-brainer. The application is widely used, and the CRM functions blend easily.”

...

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the sprawling, brilliant mess that is the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street, with the most powerful blues slam jam ever recorded by white guys, “Stop Breaking Down.” Hey, it’s not a morning without at least one ridiculously overgeneralized opinion:

Happy birthday, and a reverent tip of the top hat and cane, to Ira Gershwin.

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A recent Harris poll found that 20 percent of Americans think “VoIP” is “a European hybrid car.” Not a bad guess, really. Ten percent think it’s “a low-carb vodka.”

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Microsoft Corp. is announcing that its new CRM release, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, which gets its debut party today, is currently in use in “a cross-section of its worldwide customer base,” including “small businesses, midsize companies and large enterprises,” and represent both “new customers and those that are upgrading from Microsoft CRM 1.2,” according to company officials.

That’s right, there wasn’t any 2.0. Straight ahead to the future, folks. Kind of like the Traveling Wilburys.

“Microsoft Dynamics as a product line is not limiting itself to small and mid-sized businesses,” Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics told Reuters late last night. “Clearly CRM is an example of where we are going after large business in a very broad manner.”

Industry observer Todd Bishop has reported that Microsoft will offer 3.0 “for a monthly subscription fee today, forging ahead with the company’s new online strategy and trying to fend off a key rival.”

You can get it under a traditional software license (for a standard price), as Bishop says, but Microsoft’s trying to eat salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite’s lunch by offering a hosted version as well.

Microsoft is claiming happy customers at successful 3.0 installations at such companies as Volvo, Corillian and Perot Systems, as well as a Dominican Republic law firm, an Australian-based provider of on-site and wide- area paging systems and Whistler, British Columbia, the host of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

There’s the slew of integrators anxious to get their offerings up and running as well. Avanade Inc., a Microsoft integrator, has announced the availability of their Enterprise CRM products for health plans, financial services and customer care, using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.

Mike Pazak, vice president of Enterprise Business Solutions at Avanade said the company would use Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 to “market our suite of enterprise-ready CRM applications,” focusing primarily on the health plans, financial services, and call center industries.

He said Avande would combine the Microsoft CRM product with offerings from their alliance partners GaleForce Solutions and Genesys.

Avanade claims a “unique approach” to its enterprise-ready CRM offerings, citing as an example their new health plan product and the release of the financial services and customer care tools on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, “designed to capitalize on the enhanced product capabilities, including marketing automation, reporting, and analytics.”

Other companies are seeking to associate themselves with today’s launch of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. Ascentium Corporation has announced that Tourism Whistler, the official sales and marketing organization for Whistler, British Columbia, has been chosen as a showcase customer for today’s launch, according to the wonderfully-named Diane Mombourquette, vice president of Finance and Operations at Tourism Whistler.

Ascentium’s CRM upgrade solution for Tourism Whistler, according to Ascentium officials, makes them “one of the first Microsoft CRM 3.0 customers worldwide featured at the introduction of the new customer relationship management suite.”

c360 Solutions, Inc. is also announcing that its software product line, Productivity Packs for Microsoft CRM 3.0, is generally available. They’ll begin upgrading and delivering these through their network of over 450 authorized c360 partners around the world.

Of course Microsoft has to keep such industry partners and resellers such as c360 Ascentium and Avanade happy, a problem salesforce.com and the other hosted vendors don’t have. As Bishop explains, Microsoft isn’t offering 3.0 directly to business customers, which other hosted vendors are free to do and which makes the most sense, but are offering it “through its existing network of industry partners and resellers. Those partners, not Microsoft, will host the programs and offer them to end customers.”

This awkward, have-it-both-ways approach was predictably pilloried by the hosted, or “on-demand” vendors. “I think it really shows that Microsoft doesn’t get what on-demand is all about,” Phill Robinson, senior vice president of global marketing for salesforce.com told Bishop. “There’s not a lot of advantage to customers for (Microsoft’s) partners to do the hosting.”

Rob Bois, an analyst at AMR Research, told Reuters the new Microsoft CRM product “challenges SAP and Oracle and directly threatens upstart SalesForce.com Inc., which has a strong presence among small and medium-sized companies,” in Reuters’ words. Bois said it’s where they’re starting as they try to move upstream to the larger enterprises.

The English language version of Microsoft CRM is available immediately worldwide. New versions will be available in the next few months in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and Iberian), Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Presumably the Slovene launch is on the drawing board.

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Got Firefox 1.5?

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CinemaNow Japan Inc., a joint venture between CinemaNow Inc., Tokyo-based Transcosmos and Microsoft, has announced a licensing agreement with Warner Bros. International Television to make movies available for download via its Web site on a pay-per-view and subscription basis.

CinemaNow Japan claims to be “the first online service to offer movies from a major Hollywood studio to the Japanese market via an online subscription.”

Curt Marvis, CEO of CinemaNow and chairman of CinemaNow Japan characterized the move as another step in CinemaNow’s goal of building “a truly global distribution network that reaches localized markets.”

As part of the agreement, Warner Bros. International Television will offer current hits like Ocean’s Twelve, as well as library titles ranging from Rebel Without a Cause to the original Batman movie via CinemaNow Japan’s subscription service, which offers any user with a broadband Internet connection the ability to download movies on an unlimited basis and watch them anytime, anywhere, for as long as they are a subscriber.

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“Low-carb vodka?”

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 Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me, rapidly becoming one of First Coffee’s favorite records:

First Coffee^SM is in his new home in Istanbul, boy it felt good coming back. This is where he lived in the early ‘90s, met Mrs. First Coffee here – yes, it’s the kind of city where Americans can meet New Zealanders – and has never really shaken the desire to come back. Now that we’re back here, moving from the Mediterranean city of Antalya over the weekend, it feels like we’ve come home.

Walking up Istiklal Caddesi, the great pedestrian boulevard-outdoor zoo that is the heart of the most fascinating city in the world (coffee shops along Istiklal should charge admission for those of us who sit at their outdoor café tables, hour by hour, watching all the world pass by) to the Union Church yesterday morning we met the pastor’s wife, a good friend of ours, and asked why the street was all torn up.

Well, they’re repaving. People walked past workers swinging picks, ladies dressed for church delicately stepping on the paving stones the workers laid in the mud thirty seconds earlier. Turns out they’d repaved the whole thing a month earlier, but it was a few inches too high and the trolley wouldn’t run, so they tore it all up and are doing it all again.

Welcome to Istanbul, kids. Believe me, you’ll never be bored.

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Verizon Communications Inc. announced late last night that it is looking options to divest the company’s wholly owned directories publishing business, Verizon Information Services.

VIS is in the directory publishing business nationwide and controls SuperPages.com, a local search portal. In the United States, VIS provides sales, publishing and other related services for approximately 1,750 directory titles in 44 states and Washington, D.C.

VIS had combined operating revenues of $3.6 billion in 2004. The unit is based in Texas and has 7,300 employees.

Company officials describe the move as an attempt to “sharpen Verizon’s focus on three core network-based businesses in the wireless, broadband and enterprise markets.” The Verizon Board of Directors has authorized the company’s management to check into divesting VIS through a spin-off, sale or other scheme.

Verizon Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg said what with the MCI merger expected to close shortly, “this is the right time” to get rid of VIS. He said Verizon remains “focused” on a strategy of operating networks to serve wireless, broadband and enterprise customers, and is “satisfied with the current levels of investment in our network growth initiatives.”

There is no change to Verizon’s previously announced operating guidance for 2006.

Seidenberg said he thinks that, given the “attractive opportunities developing in the local search and advertising markets for VIS,” a divestiture would give VIS “more flexibility to maneuver in the fast-changing environment of content providers.”

The company anticipates that it could complete a disposition in 2006. Verizon has engaged Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. and JPMorgan Securities Inc. as its financial advisors.

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CRM Mastery, which does CRM tech research and software evaluation and selection assistance for small and mid-sized enterprises, has announced the release of its directory of CRM-related technology products on the Internet.

“Most CRM solution directories on the web are self-maintained by the participating vendors,” says Jim Berkowitz, the founder and CEO of CRM Mastery which bills itself as a completely independent, unbiased research firm.

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Teledata Networks, a provider of access and network products for telecom operators and service providers, has announced a partnership agreement with NEC Neva, a provider of telecommunication products for fixed line operators in the Russian market, for distribution of BroadAccess Multiservice Access Gateways in northwest Russia.

The agreement encompasses the distribution of BroadAccess MSAGs supporting a flexible suite of services, from traditional to advanced next generation applications. The BroadAccess MSAGs will be managed by ClearAccess+, an Element Management System using client-server architecture.

The planned deployment of MSAGs will allow traditional broadband services in more outreach locations as well as modernizing existing infrastructure by enabling NGN rollout in towns and cities.

NEC Neva said they were impressed with Teledata Networks’ ability to deliver and deploy the BroadAccess MSAG and provide suitable broadband services. Teledata Networks has been working in Russia since 1997, doing business with a variety of carriers.

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Also in Russia, Scientific-Atlanta will provide headend and optical transport equipment and systems to COMCOR (Moscow Telecommunication Corporation) to deliver cable programming in Moscow. Cable operators will access COMCOR’s signal delivered to fiber nodes in its backbone network via the Scientific-Atlanta equipment.

COMCOR has selected Scientific-Atlanta as the exclusive supplier for this two-year network expansion which includes what COMCOR officials describe as enhancements to its existing Scientific-Atlanta digital headend, new Vision 1000 analog headends, the deployment of the iLYNX backbone system and associated fiber nodes, and the installation of Prisma II analog optics.

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Over the weekend Abstract Design Group announced a new Canadian VoIP store powered by their own e-commerce product. The online store carries an assortment of VoIP products and related services, which include server administration and software.

The new online store carries an assortment of Digium products and related services, which include server administration and software.

VoipStoreCanada.ca will soon expand to offer more products from many more VoIP manufacturers, company officials say: “We want to be a complete VoIP source for our consumers… a one-stop shop for this technology,” says Ryan Price, CEO of Abstract Design Group. “This is why we also offer support, configuration and custom programming services via the online store.”

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For those of you keeping your offshoring scorecard up to date, the Financial Times is reporting that JPMorgan Chase “plans to hire 4,500 graduates in India as part of its plan to shift 30 percent of its back office and support operations offshore over the next two years.”They’ll put most of the bank’s exchange operations in Mumbai and Bangalore.

Over the past two years the bank’s had roughly 200 employees in India, but are recruiting between 300 and 400 Indian grads per month, and hope to have 9,000 employees in India by the end of 2007, the newspaper said breaking it down to “3,000 in investment banking and 6,000 in commercial banking, the latter including 2,000 in call-center operations.”

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And if you’re looking to buy fiber optic transceivers and processor components online, as of this morning there’s a new option for you: ProtocolTransport.com.

Run by Gillaspy Associates, it showcases fiber optic transceivers from Finisar and processor components from PMC-Sierra. The site catalogs WDM and single wavelength transceivers, passive optical products and optical amplifiers from Finisar.

On the Integrated Circuit side ProtocolTransport.com lists MIPS-based processors, SERDES, storage, VoIP, printer and networking products from PMC-Sierra.

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 that great rendition of “You Belong To Me” from the Shrek soundtrack:

This may be the last coherent column for a while (“Whaddya mean “last?” Yeah yeah…) as tomorrow First Coffee packs up the wife and kids – actually the wife, known to friends informally as St. Sue, is doing most of the packing while First Coffee^SM downs caffeine and mutters gloomily about the BlackBerry ruling – and moves house twelve hours up the road to Istanbul. The truck’s coming at nine tomorrow morning, we’re flying up at five to start life in the most fascinating, diverse and surprising city in the world.

St. Sue will miss the beaches, hot weather and relaxed Mediterranean lifestyle here in Antalya. First Coffee^SM… won’t.

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Nokia (hey, first time that company’s been mentioned in the column) has announced its plans to expand its mobile device production in Dongguan, China. This expansion will, according to the savants in Espoo,” provide more capacity and flexibility to meet the growing market demand worldwide, especially China and Asia.”

Dongguan is considered a “strategic location” for Nokia’s global supply network for mobile devices – “Dongguan is an elementary part of our global manufacturing network,” according to Raimo Puntala, Senior Vice President, Operations and Logistics, Nokia, who described increasing capacity in Dongguan as part of Nokia’s strategy to improve its competitive position in the fast-growing Chinese and Asian markets.

Nokia’s hoping the expanded factory will begin production in the third quarter of 2006, and expects to ramp up gradually, with the work force reaching approximately 1,900 employees when production is at full scale. The expanded production facilities will be located adjacent to Nokia’s existing facility.

Nokia currently has nine mobile device factories, and the Nokia Chennai plant in India is planned to be operational in the first half of 2006. Nokia has six R&D units, four manufacturing sites and widespread operations in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

There are about 6,000 Nokia employees in China.

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Happy birthday, Sherlock Holmes. Today in 1887 the first Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” written by a bored young doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle, appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual.

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If you were up late last night you might have caught this, but for the rest of us MidNet, Inc., proud creator, owner, and operator of The Middle Network, announced that it has signed a Bilateral Service Delivery Agreement with Galaxy Multi Media Corp. for collaboration in the delivery of their complementary services.

MidNet enables videophone services over The Middle Network, a purpose-built environment for video-based communications. Galaxy is a wholesale VoIP service provider with long-distance services and enhanced calling features. The Middle Network supports VoIP and VoIP-with-Video calls.

The migration from the traditional public telephone system to VoIP is well underway, as far as they’re concerned. According to International Data Corporation, the 5 million VoIP users in 2005 are projected to grow to 27 million users in 2009. These numbers may rise further as VoIP’s video capabilities are exploited, or so MidNet hopes.

Through this agreement, The Middle Network will be connected to the worldwide public telephone network, “the ultimate source of the migration to VoIP.” And yes, the agreement provides users of The Middle Network in the United States and Canada with access to 911 emergency assistance, 411 directory assistance, and toll free numbers (1-8xx).

MidNet’s president and CEO, Tilo Kunz said through the company’s partnership with Uniloc USA, “we’ve been able to extend our security and privacy features to the Internet and third-party private networks,” and now with Galaxy, “we’re able to extend the reach of The Middle Network to the public telephone network.”

Once the integration is completed, a subscriber’s Middle Network videophone can be used as their only telephone for both video calls and voice-only calls.

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According to the invaluable Writer’s Almanac, “on this day in 1913, the first gas station in the United States opened at the corner of Baum Boulevard and St. Clair Street in Pittsburgh. It sold just thirty gallons of gas the first day it was open, at twenty-seven cents a gallon. It was a brick building with a little pagoda on top, and it offered free air for tires, restrooms, and twenty-four hour service.”

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Evidently someone named Paul English has released a listing of major U.S. companies who, according to English, “design their IVR systems poorly and make it difficult for callers to speak with a live agent.”

If this has kept you up at nights, Angel.com, a vendor of on-demand call center and Interactive Voice Response products and a division of MicroStrategy Incorporated, has released an IVR Cheat Sheet for Businesses, what they describe as “a listing of quick tips businesses can use to make their IVR systems more user-friendly and efficient.”

“I applaud Mr. English’s efforts because he obviously is acting with the consumer’s best interests in mind, but it is equally important to note that IVR, if used correctly, can often help callers resolve issues faster and more accurately than a live agent,” said Michael Zirngibl, President and CEO of Angel.com and someone who never has to spell his name over the phone.

Okay okay, the top tips: Let callers know what to expect from the system immediately. This is a simple rule that applies to any customer experience – “present a pleasant greeting and explain succinctly what the system can and will do for the caller.” Don’t hide the option for callers to speak with a live agent, because “no matter how useful your IVR system is for customers, there will always be a segment of customers who prefer to speak to a live agent to resolve their issue.”

Whenever possible, give the caller an approximate time for the completion of the request. And if transferring to a live agent, let the caller know the expected hold time and provide options to go back into the IVR system.

Do not, repeat, do not make callers repeat information collected in the IVR to the live agent they are transferred to. If you do this the avenging angel will pull up all your shrubs and kick your dog, go to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. First Coffee^SM has asked many an agent why he finds himself repeating information he’s just given someone else and has never heard an intelligent answer.

If you want callers to believe that the IVR can help them resolve a problem, respect the time they put into the IVR and don’t ask for the same answers twice.

Oh, and always let the caller know what is happening: “Keep in mind that the IVR dialogue should be similar to a conversation between two human beings.” The system should explain pauses with messages such as “Thanks for the information, let me look up your account” or “I am trying to find the most appropriate person to handle your request.” The full version of the IVR Cheat Sheet for Businesses is available at http://www.angel.com/ivrcheatsheet.

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There are two kinds of people in this world, those who don’t mind hearing a good song repeated three, four, six times in a row, just keep hitting “Repeat” on the CD player, and those whose craving for novelty and attention spans of hummingbirds dunked in a vat of Jolt Cola render their lives forever a whirl of meaningless, colorless blur.

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