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.

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the sounds of First CoffeeSM’s kids doing their homeschool work and the questions they have as Mrs. First CoffeeSM’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.

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 CoffeeSM, 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.

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 CoffeeSM 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 CoffeeSM 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 CoffeeSM, folks – “Brett” echoed what others have written:

I ordered a DVD from Caiman from Amazon on 11/05/05.

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.

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 CoffeeSM 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 CoffeeSM… 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.