By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Jack Johnson’s 2005 album In Between
Dreams, a nice find I made in New Zealand over Christmas, hearing it in a
café on the South Island near Oamaru:
Yes, we’re back from
the most beautiful country in the world, New Zealand, visiting my wife’s
family for Christmas and traveling around afterwards. As a general rule I don’t
like vacations, and I’ve been dreading the first real live car vacation with
three kids (remembering how they went when I was on the other side of the
driver’s seat), but it went swimmingly – our kids traveled well, even on the
14-hour Dubai-Melbourne flights, we covered quite a bit of territory and saw
quite a lot of New Zealand’s cultural history, along with the gorgeous
landscapes and coffee shops offering drinks called “long blacks” or “short
whites” with fresh-baked everything wonderful.
Favorite coffee shop story: We’re in Queenstown, my wife and
I go into a local bakery/coffee shop around seven in the morning – jet lag –
and settle on two long blacks and point to New Zealand-style doughnuts, what we’d
call cream éclairs.
“Sorry,” the counter girl says somewhat apologetically, “those
are old, we’re not selling them, the new ones’ll be out soon.”
Well, day-old doesn’t bother us, so we say don’t worry, we’ll
take ‘em. She serves them and doesn’t charge us for them. “We’ll pay, no problem,” we say. She smiles,
says “no worries, mate” and waves us off.
Excellent museums, gorgeous scenery, strikingly nice people,
good wines, what’s not to like? How about the fact that the main highway
between Auckland and Wellington is still a two-lane road in most places, and
goes through the middle of towns along the way, turning what should be a
four-hour drive into an all-day excursion? “You’re such an American,” my wife
sighs.
Not sure how well I could live there, it is rather far away
from pretty much everything else, and New Zealanders do suffer from that
Canadian-style insecurity about what everyone else thinks of them (or if they
even do), but as a vacation it can’t be beat, especially as a break from its
polar opposite, dirty, crowded, teeming, vibrant, endlessly fascinating world
crossroads Istanbul, my favorite city in the world, where we live now.
But in peaceful New Zealand the world seems very much… not
with us. Iran’s nuclear program, Western Europe’s slow demographic suicide and
decline into sharia rule, and the spectacle of a philandering drunk who leaves
women to die in watery graves, a serial plagiarist, a tax cheat who hires
illegal aliens, a senator with two staffers under indictment for breaking
federal law and a senator who compares American soldiers to Nazis and the Khmer
Rouge anklebiting the decent, honorable Samuel Alito over his “character,” are
not as much in mind as the three pukekos you see wandering around the gardens.
So now our kids understand a bit more about that second
passport they have. But that will be all the traveling we see for a while, you know you do a lot of traveling when your kids play
stewardess and airport security check at home.
…
Safety maven Symantec has evidently agreed to purchase IMLogic, an instant messaging software
firm, according to industry observer Andy Tillett,
who says Symantec claims the move “makes it the sole provider of full solutions
for messaging security and archiving.”
Symantec would like this news to cause you to forget about its little rootkit
kerfuffle, as well as the fact that it seems to be so afraid of Spybot Search and Destroy that it’s taken to issuing what Spybot claims
are libelously false statements about Spybot.
As of now. Thank you.
…
Oh my darling… SPSS Inc., a vendor of predictive analytics
software is announcing its new data
mining workbench, Clementine 10, that it claims will “provide a substantial
boost for customer relations management, marketing, fraud detection and revenue
assurance applications.”
SPSS says it’s specifically upgraded the product’s fraud
detection and revenue assurance capabilities to improve its “anomaly detection.”
Evidently this feature is meant to allow revenue departments to improve tax
compliance more quickly and in a more systematic way.
Analytical CRM and marketing applications, such as customer acquisition,
cross-/up-selling and customer retention, are “enhanced,” the company claims,
through Clementine 10’s “feature selection.”
Clementine 10 is engineered to allow data mining
applications to be managed and processes automated at an enterprise level,
providing results in a secure, auditable environment, through the addition of
SPSS Predictive Enterprise Services.
The new anomaly detection algorithm, the fine print says, is
supposed to simplify both analysis and scoring, helping data miners uncover
unusual events or behavior, which would be “of particular importance to
organizations involved in fraud detection, revenue assurance, tax compliance,
medical research and public safety,” the company asserts.
Also, the product’s new feature selection capabilities “enable
data miners to quickly identify the most- and least-important data attributes
for a given analysis, simplifying predictive modeling in CRM and marketing
applications.” Analysts can also rank and filter attributes in several
different ways for improved focus in model building.
Users can export data to Microsoft Excel directly from the
Clementine interface and, when importing data from Excel, can specify
worksheets and data ranges.
…
No doubt you all confidently took First CoffeeSM’s
advice and plunked the kids’ college
funds down on a New England-Indianapolis AFC final. There’s always next
year or, as I’m explaining to my kids, there are lots of fulfilling, rewarding
jobs that don’t require college educations. In many of them you even get your
name on your shirt.
…
The city council in
Aberdeen, Scotland says it has moved around 4,000 users from Pegasus Mail
to a Novell
GroupWise communications platform that the council says “improves
control for administrators and communication between employees,” according to Thomson Dialog.
Debra Storr, business analyst for the council said many
issues prompted the change, including training needs, long-term vendor support
and the flexibility of the platform.
Steve Rose, project leader in finance and ICT services said
Pegasus Mail worked okay, but it did not store mail in a central database, a
problem for administrators. Plus council members were looking for a system that
could meet changing government-compliance rules, Storr said.
“We knew that Pegasus just couldn’t hack it,” Storr told Thomson.
Aberdeen’s selection of Novell is a boost for the company, Thomson said, “which
has struggled with GroupWise amid strong competition from Microsoft’s Exchange
over the last five years.” It has also had to deal with IBM’s Lotus Notes,
which has a hold on the high-end of the market, Eric Woods, government practice
director for Ovum Ltd. told Thomson:
“Novell has had to try and maintain a position in that space the two giants
have been fighting over.”
…
San Jose-based Aspect Software has released version 6.0 of their EnsemblePro software, billing the
suite as “a complete contact center solution,” according to Commweb News,
providing inbound, outbound, voice, e-mail, and fax capabilities. It was built
from the ground up, integrating multiple applications for traditional voice and
VoIP, including an ACD, predictive dialer, IVR , and unified reporting in one
package.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
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