April 2006 Archives

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See:”

Telstra Europe, a UK-based “alternative business telephony and data service provider,” has announced the launch of an enhanced range of Business Broadband services across the UK with speeds of up to 8Mbps.

Of course, the actual broadband speed attained will depend on the length and quality of the telephone line. Telstra Europe will provide the fastest speed possible up to the maximum quoted speed of the service purchased. Actual results may vary. Some settling of contents may have occurred during shipping. Serving suggestion.

As competition within the UK broadband market continues to intensify, Telstra’s enhanced service offerings – Business BroadbandMax and Business Broadband Max Pro – are billed as providing customers with free installation, high speed connectivity and nationwide coverage.

Telstra’s also offering “competitive pricing plans” backed up with 24/7 customer and technical support, and the package includes .uk domain name, e-mail and web hosting.

David Thorn, CEO, Telstra Europe, claimed Telstra is “one of the first providers to launch an enhanced business broadband service across the UK with download speeds of up to 8Mbps.”

The Business Broadband Max Pro service costs £59.99 per month ($107) and is recommended for office users with 10 or more staff.  In comparison with the Business Broadband Max service at £39.99  ($71) per month, it provides increased maximum upload speeds and throughput capacity for businesses which have greater bandwidth requirements.

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Happy birthday to the late Ella Fitzgerald, born in Newport News, Virginia in 1918. “I owe Marilyn (Monroe) a real debt,” Fitzgerald once said. “It was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ‘50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.”

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On-demand CRM vendor RightNow Technologies, Inc. has announced results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2006, reporting its 33rd consecutive quarter of revenue growth, with first quarter consolidated revenue of $24.6 million, an increase of 34 percent from the first quarter of 2005.

GAAP net loss in the first quarter of 2006 was $(440,000) or $(0.01) per diluted share, compared to net income of $801,000, or $0.02 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2005. First quarter 2006 non-GAAP net income per diluted share was $0.01, which excludes the effect of the new accounting standard for stock-based compensation.

RightNow added 97 new customers and handled 281 million customer interactions during the first quarter. New, renewed and expanded customer relationships during the first quarter of 2006 included Crutchfield Corporation, Deltek, Electronic Arts, HanseNet Telekommunikations GmbH, London Underground Ltd., Overstock.com, Ricoh, Scholastic Inc., Sharper Image, Ticketmaster, and Virgin America Inc.

For the second quarter of 2006, revenue is anticipated to be in the range of $25.5 to $26.5 million. GAAP diluted net loss per diluted share is expected to be in the range of $(0.02) to $(0.04) cents.

For the full year 2006, revenue is anticipated to be in the range of $115 to $120 million, and GAAP diluted net income per share is expected to be in the range of $0.02 to $0.09 cents. Excluding the effect of stock-based compensation, non-GAAP diluted net income per share for the year is expected to be in the range of $0.16 to $0.23 cents.

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Vimpel Communications, a vendor of telecommunications to Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, and Amdocs, a vendor of CRM products, have announced that VimpelCom and its affiliates across the CIS will standardize on Amdocs technology.

VimpelCom’s CIS affiliates will deploy multiple Amdocs products including billing, contact center, self-service and sales force automation, as well as ordering and service fulfillment.

VimpelCom officials say the company needs help supporting the “fast pace of subscriber growth.”

Currently each VimpelCom affiliate relies on a different system. By standardizing on Amdocs, all VimpelCom CIS companies will have identical billing and customer care systems in each region.

The Amdocs system will create immediate access to all customer data across all touch-points for each affiliate, while its customer service representatives will have a single customer view across all lines of business. This will fit in with VimpelCom’s ambition to build a strong, multi-regional brand and expedite the introduction and support of new services across its CIS affiliates, while paying attention to things like customer satisfaction and retention, and reducing operating costs associated with billing and customer service.

“We have expanded our business across Russia and CIS through acquisitions,” said Sergey Avdeev, Executive Vice President, Chief Technical Officer, VimpelCom, who acknowledged that integrating these affiliates, aligning the business processes to deliver customer service, can be troublesome.

In Russia, VimpelCom uses Amdocs Billing, Amdocs CRM and Amdocs Self Service to support its more than 40 million corporate and individual subscribers.

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According to the Interfax news agency, hopeful Russia VoIP provider GlobeTel has “postponed the launch of a major project to build a wireless Internet access network in 30 Russian cities from April to May.”

Interfax cites a source close to the company as saying the cause of the delay is that GlobeTel’s Russian partner, Internafta, has not provided the money necessary to fund the first stage of construction:

“The project to set up DECT high-speed Internet and mobile telecommunications access requires $600 million. The first $150 million tranche should have been received in January 2006. The company announced a delay in payment several times, after which agreement terms were changed. The companies decided to break up the payment into several smaller tranches, but none of these has been made yet.”

GlobeTel, an American company based in Florida, announced at the end of December 2005 its plans to set up WiMAX, WiFi and DECT services in Russia, using base stations in aerostats (which the vulgar call “blimps”). Construction was to get underway in April:

“The company applied to the Russian Telecommunications Ministry to have its equipment certified in Russia, but applications for a telecom services license and the necessary frequencies have not yet been submitted,” Interfax says.

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According to the Providence Journal, Rhode Island-based Aloha Partners LP has established a new subsidiary, Hiwire, to oversee plans to deliver wireless, broadcast-quality TV programming to cell-phone users.

Charles C. Townsend, president of Aloha Partners, said his company believes the venture will succeed because “It combines the two activities that Americans spend the most time doing: watching TV and talking on the cell phone.”

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 1272 in E flat, performed by the Quartetto Italiano in 1968:

Interested in participating in the beta testing of a new CRM product? Oh come on, where’s your sense of adventure?

The Kyliptix Integrated Business Product CRM module is billed by company officials as delivering “integrated sales, marketing, customer service, and support in one complete offering.”

Designed to adapt to the customer acquisition, retention, and development processes within SMBs, this CRM application provides” low cost of ownership and seamlessly integrates with popular accounting software and other external applications used in today’s business environments,” officials say: “KiBS is here to help solve various problems that are traditionally associated with a utility-style billing model.”

Designed to simplify collaboration, interoperability, and integration, KiBS CRM “removes confining, costly aspects of traditional agreements with a utility-style billing model.”

Developed on the principle of software as a service or SaaS , KiBS CRM is designed to let companies eliminate licensing arrangements with recurring fees and software management requirements, free up server storage space and reduce IT costs associated with the deployment of products, the acquisition of hardware, software implementation, and on-going maintenance.

The product’s framework and delivery method lets employees in all areas of an organization work with existing data “rather than replicating or porting data to other locations,” company officials say, adding that the CRM application can be integrated
“with various external applications."

KiBS CRM is currently accepting applications from companies interested in participating in our Beta Program. For more information please email anthony@kyliptix.com.

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Enterprise software vendor CDC Corporation, through its CDC Software subsidiary, which focuses on mobile applications and online games through its China.com Inc. (“China.com”) subsidiary, has announced “robust growth in China during the first quarter of 2006,” driven by 24 percent growth in revenue from CDC Software and an increase of 27 percent in online game users.

CDC sells the Pivotal brand of CRM, among other enterprise software products.

During the first quarter of 2006, 16 new customers licensed enterprise software applications from CDC Software in China, and total revenues for the region increased by 24 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

In addition, China.com’s portal business has demonstrated strong momentum over the past quarter, company officials say. China.com has been focusing on developing itself as an ideal portal for Chinese professionals domestically, and the World’s Gateway to China internationally.

China.com is also cross selling CDC Software’s Software as a Service (“SaaS”) products to its enterprise user base. A user survey has been recently completed to assess Chinese SMEs’ demand for SaaS.

CDC Software, The Customer-Driven Company, is a provider of enterprise software applications, including the Pivotal CRM (customer relationship management), Ross ERP (enterprise resource planning) and SCM (supply chain management), IMI warehouse management and order management products.

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New Australian Voice over IP (VoIP) provider Clarinet claims to have “reduced its fixed-line call rates to mobiles to 27 (Australian) cents per minute,” company officials say.

Clarinet Director Greg Pennefather said local and national calls are free on the One Country Plan, and only a flat 10 cents or 10 cents per minute respectively on the One World Plan.

Like Vonage in the US, Clarinet’s broadband telephone service is attracting customers looking for cheaper alternatives for fixed-line calls: “Australian residents and businesses make a lot of calls to mobiles from fixed-lines and it gets expensive, which is why our focus is on reducing these costs,” Pennefather said.

To use Clarinet’s service, customers need a broadband connection, a Clarinet phone adaptor and a normal fixed telephone. Customers with a Clarinet broadband telephone connection can call locally, nationally and internationally from a fixed-line phone.

Clarinet Australia Pty Ltd was formed in 2004 as the Australian arm of Clarinet’s US-based global network integration services company called ITC.

Goldman Sachs JBWere analysts are predicting internet telephony to become commonplace among mainstream users within one to two years, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month.

VoIP technology is booming worldwide, and in the US, the biggest cable companies have halted expansion on traditional telephone services in favor of VoIP, and “the corresponding drop in people using traditional telephony in the US is equally dramatic,” Clarinet officials say.

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South African software vendor SGS, Inc., developer of ContactPoint, is announcing products to facilitate hiring and training of contact center employees.

Employee hiring, training and turnover account for 70 percent of the cost of running a customer contact center, company officials say. As more businesses seek products to improve contact center management and return all or part of the contact center function in-house, SGS is selling tools to improve hiring and training processes to increase agent productivity, customer satisfaction and ultimately revenue.

The new ContactPoint Trainer is scheduled to be launched this July. The proprietary Trainer module creates a part of the ContactPoint competency profiling and development strategy to make sure agents’ competencies are brought in line with the competency requirements of their jobs.

Deon Appelgryn, President and CEO of SGS said Trainer was developed “in response to an industry outcry for a way to better manage costs in employee hiring and training in contact centers.”

Employee hiring and training is the largest single expense in managing a contact center, and up until now there have been few tools measuring returns. Training often fails to address the real problem areas, Appelgryn says, “and is delivered in spite of an unclear understanding of what the outcome should be.”

ContactPoint Trainer helps identify areas that require development on a per agent basis, helping target training efforts.

Trainer is a full-fledged learning management system that is fully compliant with the international SCORM interoperability standards. Learning management, course creation and management, resource management, and scheduling are just some of the capabilities that Trainer provides. In addition, the Trainer online learning facility allows the effective use of slow-down times to train agents at their workstations.

Trainer adheres to the ContactPoint competency modeling philosophy, Appelgryn says: “Through the use of competency gap analysis, training can be targeted towards developing the competencies actually required, rather than settling for a costly and inefficient ‘one size fits all’ approach. Not only are new hires up and running sooner, equipped with the skills they need, but ongoing maintenance training ensures that agents constantly move towards an even better fit with the job.”

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 East Village Opera Company’s “Overture Redux (Le Nozze Di Figaro),” the overture to Puccini’s The Marriage of Figaro replete with Brian May-style guitar and the keyboard figure from “Won’t Get Fooled Again:”

First off it’s the ever-popular Unsubstantiated Rumor Department. First Coffee received an e-mail from an industry insider yesterday asking:

“Have you heard anything about Talisma changing their business model and moving away from being a software provider to becoming solely a knowledge management services provider/consultant? This rumor has been brought up a couple of times recently to a few people here at [name of company] and I’m trying to reach out to those ‘in the know’ and confirm it or squash it.

“Thanks!”

Evidently First Coffee’s not so much in the know that he can answer this, but welcomes any replies from readers – especially Talisma – to set the matter straight. Confirm or squash away.

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CRM vendor Pivotal Systems has acquired the FACTS Business Unit of Tennessee-based Dalcon Business Systems, Inc., a vendor of software and professional services.

Included in the purchase will be Dalcon’s specific products for wholesale distribution companies; software, services and support. Dalcon’s offerings include the enterprise software known as FACTS developed by Infor.

Dalcon works in the new technology fields of data storage and backup products, e-mail security, and IP telephony.

As part of the acquisition, Pivotal Systems will take over Dalcon’s existing FACTS Business Unit. This includes software, services and support of Infor’s FACTS ERP Software. Dalcon’s current FACTS support staff will be working for Pivotal Systems.

“The acquisition of Dalcon’s FACTS Business Unit will add value to Pivotal System’s growing customer base, while continuing to focus on products for the distribution industry,” said Lori Allaman Hanken, Pivotal Systems President.

Pivotal Systems will use Dalcon’s employees as it works to integrate Dalcon’s complementary product offerings into Pivotal’s. Dalcon will continue to operate out of its Nashville office.

Minneapolis-based Pivotal Systems provides services in distribution, supply chain, CRM, inventory management, integrated networking, IP-based phone systems, and warehouse management.

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Planit Fusion Live, a new version of Planit’s design and visualization software for the Kitchen & Bath and home improvement sectors, was debuted by the company at booth 7550 at K/BIS 2006, held at McCormick Place, Chicago, from April 21-23.

Planit Fusion Live incorporates customer management tools, graphics and presentational quality for retailers.

The system’s “Live” technology lets users receive instant updates to both their manufacturers’ catalogs and Fusion software via the internet without the need to manage CD updates.

The software also includes a number of new productivity features, including “drag and drop” tools from the application’s Graphical Add palette, which are now available in both plan and elevation views. In addition, customized tiling capabilities have been introduced, along with the automated calculation of quantities and improved pricing routines.

The company’s Planit Design On-Line service has been extended to provide retailers with lead generation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality. By linking directly to the Planit Design On-Line website, end users can create their own room layouts using the system’s online design and visualization tools. Copies of the finished files are also emailed back to the retailer, complete with the prospect’s name and address, ready for immediate follow-up.

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PacificNet Inc., a vendor of CRM and telemarketing services, call center, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Direct Response Television (DRTV), and Value-Added Services (VAS) in China, has announced that due to the delay in the filing of its Form 10-KSB for the period ended December 31, 2005, it has received a letter from the Nasdaq Stock Market indicating that the company’s common stock is subject to delisting pursuant to Nasdaq Marketplace Rule 4310(c)(14).

Nasdaq Marketplace Rule 4310(c)(14) requires the company to make on a timely basis all filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as required by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.

Accordingly, the Company’s securities are subject to delisting from the Nasdaq Stock Market at the opening of business on April 28, 2006. PacificNet expects to be able to file its 10-KSB early next week or before April 28 in order to maintain its continued listing on Nasdaq.

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RightNow Technologies has announced that founder and CEO Greg Gianforte is bringing his bootstrapping message to the MySQL Users Conference 2006, which is being held April 24-27 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

Gianforte’s presentation will encourage the next generation of software entrepreneurs to start and grow market-driven businesses without depending on excessive outside venture
capital investments, according to RightNow officials.

“It’s important for people who want to start a business to hear that their energy, ideas and drive are more important than their ability to borrow large sums of money,” Gianforte said. “If you have something customers want and you can deliver it at the right price-point, revenue and profits will come. If you don’t, all the capital in the world won’t make your business successful.”

Conventional wisdom has held that entrepreneurs need to write a business plan, raise capital, start a bonfire, and hope that a successful business takes shape before all the money burns away, Gianforte says. Bootstrappers, on the other hand, focus on meeting a legitimate market need, ensuring the viability of their go-to-market strategy, and meeting core business challenges within their existing resource limitations, rather than trying to solve all their problems by simply acquiring more capital.

They thus, Gianforte claims, initiate the sales learning process sooner than entrepreneurs who look to outside investment to sustain them through the early stages of their existence. He says that bootstrapping also promotes decisions that result in profitability and forces entrepreneurs to think more creatively.

It’s a compelling message, and Gianforte knows of whence he speaks: He has used the technique to start and grow several successful companies, including RightNow, which he founded in 1997 and took public in 2004 after 26 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. He is also the author of Bootstrapping Your Business: Start And Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money, published in August of 2005.

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One Connect IP, a regional Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service provider, has announced its acquisition of ZiaNet, the largest privately held Internet Service Provider in the state of New Mexico.

One Connect IP currently serves business and residential customers throughout the Mountain West Region and with this acquisition expands their hosted VoIP services to an additional 30,000 business and residential customers throughout New Mexico. Mesa Capital Partners, a private equity firm headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, led the investment round for One Connect IP.

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

ThreeStone Group and CobbleSoft International have announced a long-term agreement for 3SG to provide on-demand executive sales business development and communications services, while CobbleSoft “continues their focus on rolling out some of the largest projects in the company’s history,” according to CobbleSoft officials.

“Clients are using our self service management methodology at the very heart of enterprise endeavors to incorporate the IT Infrastructure Library best practice standards, and promote helpdesk socialization,” said Richard Stevenson, CobbleSoft’s chief executive and resident coffee maven.

“Our relationship allows us to maintain this client focus while ThreeStone addresses the amazing market response our approach has generated in the Americas, Europe and Australia,” Stevenson explained.

CobbleSoft’s COIGN Enterprise, an on-demand service management and helpdesk product, is a web-based product to employ real time data warehousing with dynamic workflow and on-board analytics for service intelligence.

Using Oracle on demand technology, COIGN automatically and transparently scales to meet GRID, RAC and SOA deployment requirements where and when needed.

3SG will build, execute and scale an international sales business development and communication strategy “that will challenge traditional market players based on CobbleSoft’s main strengths,” 3SG’s founder Jim Turner said:

“CobbleSoft has the unique competitive advantage of enabling new technology with a warm personality,” according to Turner.

The Hanoi University of Technology and Cisco Systems have launched a Networking Research and Development Laboratory focusing on network security, a collaboration sponsored by the Cisco University Research Program.

The guests of honor at the opening ceremony included His Excellency Professor, Doctor of Science Tran Van Nhung, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Training and Education; Professor Hoang Ba Chu, the university’s rector; and James Chia, general director of Cisco Systems Vietnam.

The Networking R&D Lab will be operated by Bach Khoa Networking Academy in HUT, the first regional-level Cisco Networking Academy program in Vietnam. The lab is also the first time that Cisco’s URP is sponsoring R&D in Vietnam.

Dedicated to the collaboration with researchers at universities and other research organizations around the globe, Cisco’s URP is supposed to help with the development of ideas and technologies and encourage innovation in networking.

The URP operates by soliciting research proposals, subjecting them to stringent peer review, before granting funds to support those deemed most worthy.

“The URP program will bring in an added dimension of international exposure for the researchers in HUT, helping to increase the quality of its research work. Cisco will in turn benefit as the work done in HUT may be used to enhance the features in Cisco’s products,” said Chia.

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BNAmericas is reporting that US business intelligence provider Information Builders has developed a CRM product for Mexico’s largest bank, BBVA Bancomer.

The CRM project is based on IB’s Webfocus platform, a product that delivers enterprise business intelligence at the operational, tactical and executive level. It also is designed to provide integration, scalability and self-service usability for informed decision making and standardized reporting.

BBVA was looking for a simple environment that is versatile and compatible with the different geographic and technical areas of the group, according to bank officials, as well as an application that is scalable, robust and easy to maintain.

“Webfocus facilitates all business intelligence functionalities while allowing companies to store all important data, transform it into useful information and distribute it throughout the company,” IB’s business development manager Manuel Quiroz said.

Information Builders Latin America falls under the company’s Spanish division and covers the whole region except Brazil, which is covered by a separate division.

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Kintera, Inc. has announced that the Community Renewal Society completed its integration to the Kintera social CRM system.

The Alford Group, a consulting group to the nonprofit sector and certified Kintera partner, integrated more than 50,000 records and 23,000 financial transactions from multiple sources into the Kintera Sphere social CRM system.

Founded in 1882, the Community Renewal Society is a progressive faith-based organization that “strives to build a just society in Chicago, free of racism and poverty and in which all of its members live with dignity,” according to society officials. The plan is to accomplish this through news magazines, organizing, training and advocacy –each with different data needs and structures.

The organization wanted to consolidate all of its components onto the Kintera Sphere database platform as it moves to Kintera Sphere as a system of record. The combined data sets and other in-house files, such as data from Community Renewal’s legacy donor management system, were integrated into Kintera Sphere from more than 50,000 records, and included a coding accuracy support system address validation to standardize records.

“Community Renewal has a complicated data structure, and integrating and consolidating on the Kintera Sphere database platform enables us to better manage information at our organization,” said Marsha S. Clesceri, chief operating officer for the Community Renewal Society. “The Alford Group’s integration has allowed us to synchronize data between Kintera Sphere and our existing data sources and accounting software.”

In addition to integrating more than 50,000 records into Kintera Sphere, The Alford Group also was responsible for migrating nearly 23,000 historical financial transactions from the organization’s existing database. As a result, Community Renewal has been able to capture subscriber information, including renewals and billing, in its Kintera Sphere database.

“In today’s competitive environment, nonprofits are increasingly required to streamline their operations and increase philanthropic revenue,” said Brian M. Worrall, senior consultant for The Alford Group.

“The Kintera Sphere social CRM system provides a comprehensive platform for both storing and managing information at organizations ranging from small to complex,” said Steve Johnson, vice president of channel sales for Kintera.

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The Philippines are serious about maintaining their outsourced call center industry: The Philippine journal Business World is reporting that the Trade and Industry department has partnered with the city government and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority to train graduates for call center jobs.

The training will initially target 400 graduates in the next two months.

The training will focus on improving the English proficiency of participants and help them become world-class call center agents based on TESDA-formulated standards, said Teolulo Pasawa, the Davao City field office chief of the Trade department.

He said the target is to train about 900 job applicants this year in call centers or other business process outsourcing-related opportunities, including medical transcription.

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 Rich Mullins’ greatest hits album Songs:

A few days ago First Coffee reported on an article Rodney Gedda had written for Computerworld in Australia on the travails of the Queensland Department of Child Services.

Evidently the Onyx and Fujitsu public relations guys thought the article blamed Onyx and Fujitsu for the problems the program was having, so they kindly pointed me to a correction Gedda has since made on his original reporting:

In September 2004, Fujitsu, Onyx and Microsoft were commissioned by the Department of Child Safety to deliver the first of three phases of the new ICMS based on Onyx CRM and Microsoft’s .Net technology.

This design was delivered to the department “on time and budget” in March 2005, but since then the project has been brought back in-house, and according to one source has blown its budget, and 20 contractors including programmers, testers and technical writers were marched out the door earlier this month.

According to the source, Microsoft has been given a lot of the services work, and is believed to be “burning through $800,000 a fortnight”. The spokesperson said no contractors were made redundant as a result of the completion of the Fujitsu-Onyx contract last year but conceded the project is “now placing greater emphasis on permanent resources.”

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Today’s milestone in history, as far as First Coffee’s concerned, isn’t Joan Miro’s birthday (that’s why the Google logo looks weird today, it’s to honor the Spanish surrealist painter), it’s the fact that in 1841, on this day, the first detective story was published, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” written by Edgar Allan Poe and printed in Graham’s Magazine.

It’s amazing how closely today’s mystery fiction hews to the pattern created by Poe: A genius fictional detective, Auguste C. Dupin in Poe’s case; a not-so-smart sidekick, the plodding policeman and the use of the red herring to lead readers off the track.

Evidently mystery fiction is one of those things like philosophy or rock’n’roll, where those who do it first – Plato and Aristotle, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis – generally do everything really worth doing and after them it’s all variations on a theme.

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Retail Ventures, Inc., a diversified retailer that operates DSW Inc., Filene’s Basement and Value City Department Stores, LLC, has completed the first-phase implementation of a Teradata Warehouse and customer relationship management (CRM) product from Teradata.

According to company officials the move is to extend the company’s analytical intelligence and “marketing agility.”

Retail Ventures’ Teradata Warehouse “complements the company’s current systems and provides a scalable enterprise intelligence environment for its analytical CRM applications,” company officials say, adding that Teradata also provides customer services in support of the information environment.

"The value of actionable information generated from our data warehouse platform and CRM applications is driving the need for additional capacity as we increase our analytical activities,” said Jerry Bisaha, director of Customer and Marketing Systems at Retail Ventures Services. “Our data warehouse-driven approach is a vital requirement to our strategy of increasing the speed of our business decision making.”

Teradata CRM is providing Retail Ventures with desktop user-driven campaign analytics and communication tools designed to better understand and engage the retailer’s customers across multiple channels and marketing initiatives.

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DM Europe has reported that enterprise infrastructure software provider BEA Systems and HP have announced radio frequency identification (RFID) products for enterprise customers.

“The two companies have agreed to provide standards-based RFID products designed to help manufacturers, retailers, distributors, transportation and other industry customers streamline supply chain operations,” DM Europe says:

“HP offers services designed for planning, designing, managing and supporting the RFID-enabled products. BEA provides BEA Web Logic RFID products and a service-oriented approach to RFID. Together, the two companies offerings can enable customers to integrate high volumes of RFID data into existing enterprise processes and applications while building new composite applications.”

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Citrix Systems, Inc. has reported financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2006 ended March 31, 2006.

In the first quarter of fiscal 2006, Citrix achieved revenue of $260 million, compared to $202 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2005, representing 29 percent revenue growth.

Net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2006 was $45 million, or $0.24 per diluted share, compared to $39 million, or $0.22 per diluted share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2005.

Non-GAAP net income, in the first quarter of 2006 increased 45 percent to $61 million, or $0.33 per diluted share, compared to $42 million, or $0.24 per diluted share, in the comparable period last year. Non-GAAP net income excludes the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations and the effects of stock-based compensation. Stock-based compensation impacted operating income by approximately $12 million.

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SAS, a vendor of business intelligence products, has announced new technology with Google that will allow joint clients to perform contextually relevant searches through the popular Google search interface to surface information, analysis and reports from SAS business intelligence software beginning this summer.

The combination of the Google Search Appliance with the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform is billed by SAS as giving users more information than what ordinary keyword searches would return from an initial query.

Google OneBox for Enterprise uses the same technology that provides information on stock tickers or weather information on Google.com. SAS and Google will provide joint customers who activate the OneBox for Enterprise feature of the new Google Search Appliance – already announced by Google – with a familiar, secure way to search for real-time information delivered by SAS BI software.

Google OneBox for Enterprise combined with SAS’s BI products delivers search results in the same way it does for any visitor to the Google website looking for information about local news, weather or restaurants. For example, when a SAS customer types a phrase such as “fourth quarter 2005 sales” into a Google-powered intranet search engine, it will return a snapshot of relevant information including reports, data, and analysis along with links to other results that could consist of the top selling products, top salespersons or top 10 customers for that time period.

All search results are filtered through existing enterprise security protocols, delivering intelligence tailored to each user’s individual access rights.

This is the first of many technology initiatives that SAS and Google will spearhead to help organizations eliminate information silos by sharing relevant knowledge across business units, SAS officials say.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is John Coltrane’s Love Supreme:

The Zagada Institute has announced the publication of its Central America Call Center Report 2007: A Bilingual Niche.

The report is, according to company officials, “the first complete and independent call center study conducted on Central America,” and finds that the Central America Nearshore market’s growth in its current 21,012 agent population “will approach 40 percent annually over the next 24 months, resulting in close to 40,000 agents by the end of 2007.”

An estimated 95 percent of existing agents are bilingual and are “ideally position to continue serving the customer care needs of U.S. companies focused on the expanding Hispanic American market, now exceeding 43 million,” the report finds.

“In our comparative evaluation we find that despite the large sizes of Mexico and Argentina local agent population and the impressive agent growth in the Dominican Republic, the Central America Nearshore market as an aggregate has the highest number of dedicated bilingual agents serving U.S. firms,” said Philip Dickenson Peters, co-director of Zagada Institute and CEO of Zagada Markets.

Based on the levels of growth and service experience, the report categorizes the region into three growth niches: Maturing (Panama, Costa Rica), Contending (El Salvador, Guatemala) and Emerging (Nicaragua, Honduras).

According to company officials the “accelerated provisioning” of bilingual agents across all segments of the Central America Nearshore market is attracting a combination of both U.S. multinationals and outsourcing specialist companies to the region: “Firms report average savings of 35 percent from their regional operations as well on projects outsourced to Central American Third Party call center providers.”

Apart from the region’s expanding bilingual agent population, the report finds that other factors contributing to growth are stable parliamentary democracies, competitive telecommunication rates and coverage in key urban centers, extensive bilingual programs among the region’s 174 tertiary institutes and universities, low cost and adequate physical contact center office capacity in key markets and business friendly Economic Development Agencies. In other words, stable societies which speak English.

The report also finds that certain markets also generate significant business from Latin American and European multinationals.

The report identifies some challenges as “the timely development and preparation of sufficient bilingual agents to meet growing U.S. company demand, and the need to accelerate connectivity beyond major urban centers.”

The report’s vendor analysis finds Avaya as the leader in the region, with Nortel, Genesys, Siemens, SER, Aspect and Cisco as “vigorous competitors.”

…

Speaking of Cisco, they’re going to be constructing the equivalent of a “small city” of infrastructure for Singapore 2006, a series of meetings and seminars where the highlight is the Annual Meetings of the Boards of Governors of the IMF and World Bank Group.

As the "Lead Partner for Network Infrastructure," Cisco will be providing about $1.25 million worth of network infrastructure giving delegates of Singapore 2006 wired and wireless networking access.

Craig Gledhill, managing director of Singapore and Brunei, Cisco Systems say Singapore 2006 will be “an excellent platform to showcase the full potential of an Internet Protocol network built on the principles of Cisco's Intelligent Information Network vision.”

The infrastructure that Cisco will help to build for the expected attendance of 16,000 delegates will be of a similar scale to that of a small city, using well over 4,000 wired points, over 40 wireless access points, and will take over 1.5 man-months to complete.

Singapore 2006 is expected to attract more than 16,000 participants, including delegates from 184 countries such as heads of government, finance ministers and central bank governors, top financiers, international media, business leaders and other visitors.

…

StayinFront, Inc., a vendor of enterprise wide customer relationship management (CRM) applications and other products, has announced that Collegedale, Tenn.-based McKee Foods, a StayinFront client for 5 years, has elected to upgrade to StayinFront Consumer Goods 9.3.

McKee Foods Corporation is best known for its line of Little Debbie snack cakes. McKee Food’s national-sales force of 400 representatives works with more than 3,300 independent distributors throughout the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and select U.S. Military bases overseas.

McKee Foods decided to upgrade their sales force because “we felt the core functionality they offer in their new Consumer Goods product supports our initiatives,” said Jerry Griswold, Sales Information Systems Manager of McKee Foods Corporation.

“We’ll make some configuration changes to meet our exact workflow processes, and I think our field users will appreciate the new features,” Griswold said.

…

Select Selling has announced that it is sponsoring the upcoming report by The Customer Respect Group on how CRM companies treat their customers online.

Patti Elliott, president of Select Selling, said she felt “it would be helpful to our customers to understand how well the leading CRM vendors manage their own prospective customers online.”

The study brings objective measure to the analysis of corporate performance from an online customer's perspective for the CRM Industry. It assigns a Customer Respect Index a qualitative and quantitative in-depth analysis and independent measure of a customer's online experience when interacting with companies via the Internet, to each surveyed company.

The CRM study will be available by early May 2006 and will include: AmDocs, FrontRange Solutions, Maximizer Software, Microsoft, NetSuite, Oracle, Pivotal, RightNow Technologies, Sage, Salesforce.com, SalesNet, SAP, Siebel/Oracle, and SugarCRM.

Results will be made available through www.customerrespect.com and www.selectselling.com.

…

Verizon Business has announced it is providing hosting services to Danger Inc. for a mobile Internet platform called hiptop.

Danger Inc., based in Palo Alto, California, created hiptop to give users on the move access to the Internet, instant messaging, e-mail, games, photography and telephony. The software is used in handheld devices.

Danger will colocate its equipment in a Verizon Data Center in Amsterdam. The colocation service provides a secure, dedicated environment, Verizon officials say, where customers can colocate their Internet servers, data networks or voice equipment.

Verizon Business will manage traffic from Germany, the Netherlands and the UK as well as support access to mobile Internet, instant messaging and telephony. The contract runs for four years.

The Amsterdam data center is one of 185 Verizon Data Centers in 22 countries, as well as four Verizon Smart Centers, which offer additional services such as a standardised, follow-the-sun service with disaster avoidance and recovery facilities. Verizon Business, is a unit of Verizon Communications.

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 iTunes’s four-song Bob Dylan “exclusive,” current cut “Hero Blues” from the Carnegie Hall 1963 Halloween concert:

CRM services provider West Monroe Partners, a firm of business and technology consulting professionals formed in 2002, has announced an agreement to merge with LxLi, a North American industrial engineering and operational performance improvement services consultancy.

The two companies announced an agreement in principle to merge their respective operations in an effort to expand the capabilities of both firms in the North American consulting marketplace.

LxLi, an industrial engineering consulting firm, offers a range of services focused on productivity and performance management, including methods engineering and work measurement, labor measurement systems, distribution center operations, retail operations, engineered operational turnarounds and logistics and supply chain management services.

West Monroe provides consulting services to the middle and enterprise marketplace, including customer relationship management services as well as supply chain consulting services, enterprise integration services, technology strategy and implementation offerings.

This agreement is seen as a move to improve both companies’ geographic penetration, functional expertise development and breadth of service offerings.

George Bishop, senior vice president and founder of LxLi noted the merger “immediately doubles the Canadian presence of both firms through the integration of our respective Toronto and Montreal offices.”

West Monroe Partners maintains offices in Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, Seattle and Columbus, Ohio.

LxLi focuses on process improvements for distribution centers, retail stores and supply chain operations, favoring the Scientific Time Management approach.

…

Centive, a vendor of on-demand sales compensation management, has announced “record sales” in the first quarter of 2006 with the addition of over 2000 subscribers to Compel – Centive’s on-demand sales compensation management product.

The company credits alliances with CRM and IT consulting providers such as Theikos and Profiling Products for contributing to sales.

Centive highlights closed deals this past quarter with such organizations as Flowserve, a vendor of industrial flow management products and services and Software Spectrum, a single-source provider of business-to-business IT products and services.

Centive CEO Mike Torto said the firm has also delivered an AppExchange version of Compel for Salesforce.com customers and prospects. Compel features integration with Salesforce.com and other CRM systems.

…

Australian industry observer Rodney Gedda tells the story of the, well, not- gone- quite- as- expected CRM implementation for the Queensland Department of Child Safety. Read it as a morality play, thou CRM Everyman:

Evidently the DCS has taken its integrated client management system back in-house after dumping Fujitsu and Onyx “in a bloodbath that has seen around 20 contractors marched out the door earlier this month,” Gedda says:

“In September 2004, Fujitsu, Onyx and Microsoft were commissioned by the Department of Child Safety to deliver the design of the Carer Directory, the first of three phases of the new, integrated client management system based on Onyx CRM and Microsoft’s .Net technology.

“This design was delivered to the department in March 2005, but since then the project has taken an abrupt turn with staff being dumped to bring the project back in-house and to also use a Microsoft CRM package.”

First Coffee remembers last July when his mild-mannered reporter alter ego reported on the “embarrassing admission” by the Queensland Government in Australia, which disclosed, according to the Australian, that “a key element of a $44 million IT revamp at the state’s Department of Child Safety --” namely, an Onyx CRM system “-- will be a year overdue despite an increase in the number of children re-abused in care.”

In 2004 the Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission recommended the “development of a CRM system to help manage foster families and children in care,” replacing a manual process to “track children through the system and avoid sending them to foster carers suspected of abuse.”

The government awarded a $9 million contract to Fujitsu and Onyx Software in late 2004 to build what it calls the Integrated Client Management system, a major part of the Department’s Information Renewal Initiative, which also includes a data warehouse, a critical incident reporting and management system, an upgrade to the electronic records management system and a decision support package.

“It’s a concern,” Shadow Minister for Child Safety Rosemary Menkens told the Australian. “It’s taking them so long to set it up, and so much is falling through the cracks.”

According to one source on the project cited by Gedda the system’s costs have already ballooned past $44 million.

“Fujitsu and Onyx made big shows of getting in on this at the time, but it seems the mid-2005 deadline has been overshot and Microsoft has now stepped in,” his source says.

Gedda says the cost blowout is “due to a change in project scope. Initially, the system was being developed for the Department of Child Safety. It is now being expanded across four departments including Department of Communities, its disability support agency, and the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy.”

…

PacificNet Inc., a vendor of CRM and telemarketing services, call center, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Value-Added Services (VAS) in China, has reported unaudited results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2005.

Q4 2005 highlights include quarterly revenues of $13,368,000, an increase of 33 percent as compared to $10,068,000 from Q4 2004, and a sequential increase of 25 percent as compared to $10,722,000 from Q3 2005.

Financial results of fiscal year ended December 31, 2005 include revenues of $43,975,000, an increase of 48 percent as compared to $29,709,000 from 2004; gross profit of $10,687,000, an increase of 90 percent as compared to $5,635,000 from 2004; operating profit of $4,484,000, an increase of 131 percent as compared to $1,937,000 from 2004; and net income of $2,537,000, or $0.25 per basic share.

…

First Coffee’s West Coast readers are no doubt aware that today’s the 100^th anniversary of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, one of the worst natural disasters in American history.

The earthquake began near dawn, at 5:12 on a Wednesday morning, and lasted for a little over a minute. Scientists later determined that the San Andreas Fault had moved about twenty-three feet. After the city lost its running water firemen attempted to stop the spread of fire by dynamiting whole city blocks.

More than 500 city blocks and more than 28,000 buildings were in ruins. Some 250,000 people were left homeless. Nearly 3,000 people died. But the city was determined to rebuild: three years later about 20,000 new buildings had gone up.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Al Green’s version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry:”

Document products companies Data Impact and Speedscan have announced that the two companies have merged, creating a company with worldwide reach in selling document management.

The closely held company will operate as Data Impact in the U.S. and Speedscan in the Asia Pacific region. The combined company has a worldwide workforce in excess of 150 people.

Data Impact CEO Bill Plant-Mason said it’s his belief that “customers prefer a single provider of outsourced business processes,” and that the newly-merged company “can now offer, on an international basis, a complete suite of document management services, including digitizing and indexing of high volumes of paper documents, conversion of microfilm and fiche to digital documents, integration and management of complex electronic print streams and a unique ‘click to pay’ electronic remittance system.”

The new company blends Data Impact’s print stream processing, document scanning and film conversion services with Speedscan’s document archival products.

The recent merger follows the acquisition by Data Impact last year of Florida-based Leahy Corporation, a regional film scanning specialist.

“Our strategy,” said Data Impact Chairman Charles Koehler, “is to keep adding geographically and product-wise to our comprehensive suite of services, providing the document imaging and management answers our clients want and need in order to stay ahead of their competitors.”

He characterized this merger with Speedscan as “a very important step” toward that goal.”

…

Readers might have noticed that First Coffee spends more time than average tracking developments in India. That’s not completely without design, it’s my belief that India, in 20 years’ time, will be a more dynamic, productive and important economy than China or the EU, unless one of two things happen: China frees up its political structure, or the EU finds a way to reverse its demographic decline. Either could happen, I guess, at least mathematically, but if you’re betting money, right now the smart bet’s India.

Especially when it comes to technological developments requiring creativity and innovation, such as CRM, China and the EU can’t touch India. The Economic Times an Indian publication, has a recent article on how the “drab and matter-of-fact business model of container freight stations is giving way to more sophisticated etiquettes, made to perfection by consumer marketing.”

It cites Saurashtra Containers, a container freight station going operational by the month-end in Mundra in Gujarat, which is “is putting a lot of stress on customer relationship management.”

Looking at the large cargo hub for Mundra Port that starts from north and western India (Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan, western UP & MP & Gujarat), the company has opened offices at New Delhi, Ahmedabad and Mumbai with dedicated relationship managers.

Personalized level of services and customer care will be the prime focus to facilitate our clients, Sant Khare, CEO of Saurashtra Containers told The Economic Times:

“Accordingly, relationship mangers would guide their clients about the advantages of routing their cargo through the facility, about location like Mundra could reduce their logistics cost, apart from offering them the host of services that are on offer at the CFS.”

Not only the whole team but also everyone at the facility have been put a three week training on every aspects of CFS functioning at par with international standards, Khare said, adding that “the 25-acre facility will have 20,000 square mile covered storage area and container stacking capacity of 5,500 TEUs in the properly paved container yard.”

Properly paved.

Incidentally, another reason to be bullish on India is that whereas in China economic “growth” is largely the province of state-owned corporations which don’t operate in genuine economic reality, IBM India has recently announced that it is seeking opportunities to boost its revenues in the small and medium business segment, since “almost 60 percent of the information technology spending in India is accrued from the SMB segment,” according to India Business Insight.

And that is a great sign of vital economic growth, the SMB sector: “The segment has been recording growth of 17 percent in India as against the industry average of 15 percent. The high growth rate is attributed to the increased availability of bandwidth and more comprehensive product offerings from IT vendors. IBM has also decided to enhance its presence in Tier-II cities by increasing the number of channel partners from 170 to 225.”

…

In another positive development in Wi-Fi, The Sacramento Bee is reporting that travelers passing through Sacramento International Airport will have free wireless Internet access, after airport officials decided to scrap a fee-based service.

“Every public area inside both Terminals A and B will have Wi-Fi connections, making Sacramento International the only major Northern California airport with free access,” airport officials told the Bee Friday.

Since August 2003, the airport has offered Wi-Fi service in partnership with Airport Network Products, but users paid $6.95 a day to get online. So when the airport’s contract with Airport Network ended this month, officials decided to make the service free.

Airport spokeswoman Karen Doron told the Bee that “we felt it was more important to offer this service for free, rather than make a little money off it.” Indeed, the Bee reports, “the airport’s share of the $6.95 access fees went to pay off Airport Network for the equipment it had installed.”

…

In the Philippines, the publication Business World is reporting that Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. petitioned regulators last Wednesday to revoke the license that the latter awarded a non-telco for offering internet telephony to PLDT subscribers.

The National Telecommunications Commission gave non-telco Transpacific Broadcast Group International, Inc. the authority to resell voice over internet protocol (VoIP) to PLDT subscribers in Manila, Laguna, Angeles, Pampanga and parts of Cavite.

Rogelio V. Quevedo, lawyer of PLDT, told Business World that TBGI is a mere corporate client of PLDT Corporate Business Group and therefore “can neither re-sell PLDT VoIP services to domestic clients nor commercially offer PLDT i-Gate Mode internet service to clients in Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, and Taiwan.”

VoIP resellers are entities that source VoIP from an authorized provider under an agreement to resell the service directly to retail clients, and Quevedo claims that since TBGI is a corporate client of PLDT “it cannot resell our VoIP or internet services. There is clearly a breach of contract on their part… it claimed to have an interconnection agreement with us; there is none. It can only resell our VoIP if we can agree to an interconnection fee that is the market rate for inter-network connections.”

NTC had opened the gates of VoIP business to non-telcos like internet service providers and value-added service providers in November 2005, Business World notes, adding that “previously, VoIP was a territory of telcos, which put up fierce opposition to the liberalization of VoIP by citing telcos’ massive investment in laying out telecom infrastructure. Non-telcos that NTC allowed to operate as either VoIP reseller or provider are TBGI, listed firm Cashrounds, Inc., Cebu-based Technetworks Corp., and BTnT Network Corp.”

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

• Taipei's Population – 2,625,445
• Percentage of Taipei households with computers – 88 percent
• Percentage of Taipei households with Internet access – 84 percent
• Percentage of Taipei households with a broadband Internet connection – 64 percent
• Percentage of Taipei residents with mobile phones – 87 percent
• Percentage of Taipei residents using PWLN connections – 13 percent

For now, it looks like WiFly is free: “The trial period has been extended (but they don't tell you until when) so lucky Taipeians... the signal strength in various parts of the centre of the town was pretty good I found and you always had at least two access points to choose from.”

Saarinen says that the city government intends to provide a whole range of service over the WiFly network, “but it looks like it'll be used for making free VoIP calls as well:

“Ennyah will make Wifi as well as converged Wifi/GSM handsets that will work over the WiFly network, providing free calling for a flat-rate US$33 a month (Wifi+GSM) or US$16 (Wifi) - the cost includes unlimited international calling as well.”

Saarinen reports that “when I tried connecting to servers in NZ while in Taipei, I noted that traffic went via the US and thus had large roundtrip times, over 400ms in most cases. In comparison, the roundtrip time for Taiwan-US traffic was around 120-130ms.”

…

This past week Alien Technology Corporation announced that it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of approximately $120 million of its common stock.

It is expected that all shares sold in the offering will be sold by the company.

Alien is a vendor of EPC RFID tags, readers, and services, and the performance of their IPO will serve as a bellwether on the industry. The company seeks to be listed on the NASDAQ under the symbol RFID.

…

Got your taxes in yet?

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

She angles away from it without trying to look scared, and doesn’t see the two plainclothes Turkish cops who are loitering in front of the tram stop, looking like two businessmen waiting for a ride up to Taksim Square, maybe to meet a client at Starbucks, maybe to catch the subway to Esentepe or Mecidiyekoy, or a bus to Besiktas and a ferry across the Bosphorus to Uskudar or Kadikoy. It’s ten-thirty now, they could be at their meeting in Kadikoy by noon, given good traffic on the Asian side.

They see her. With that practiced nod, invisible to anyone who’s not a cop, they peel themselves away from the tram stop and follow, one twenty feet behind the other.

They know where she’s going – to the Istanbul Migrants Center just around the corner from Tunel, a low building in a garden sandwiched between the grand old Swedish Consulate and that building with all those suspicious Westerners, mostly Christian missionaries, the two policemen are sure. Who else would spend their time and money giving food, blankets and medical care to a bunch of worthless African illegals?

One moves in about five feet behind her on the right, rounding the gradual corner away from the tram stop on the outside to get in between her and the gate for the garden. The other one tightens up on her left, if they’d been labeled A, B and C they’d have made a nice equilateral triangle making its way through the crowd.

She’s been here before, asking for food, a place to stay and cold medicine. She didn’t know what a “cold” was before leaving Morocco. At first she thought she was dying. Then some other migrants explained no, it’s just a cold-weather thing here, go to the IMC, they’ll give you something for it.

She turns left after the tram stop, following the tracks up Istiklal, and is about to cross over into the garden when one of the policemen steps between her and the gate, reaches out and almost without breaking stride guides her by the wrist on down Istiklal.

The other one has his cell phone out and is calling the cops back in the police car by the coffee shop, watching to see if she’ll try to make a run for it. They don’t think she will. That’s one reason they’ve decided on her.

She doesn’t. She keeps walking until the police car pulls up beside them, the two plainclothes men gently help her into the back, get in themselves on either side of her and drive off.

She gets off the train at the top of Tunel in the middle of the pack. It’s about ten o’clock in the morning. She knows most illegal migrants move about in early morning or late at night, so she figures moving about at ten in the morning will fool them, make any cops think she’s legal.

She is not a smart girl. But she has thought of this. Truth to tell, she would be a good addition to a country willing to take her, as most of the migrants in holding patterns here in Istanbul are – they’re the ones who did something, who showed initiative and got out of whatever hellish situation they were in, they’re willing to suffer hardships and work hard to get to America, to Canada, to Europe. 

But of course no country would take a 19-year old Moroccan girl who’s now three months pregnant by the human smuggler who dropped her off with the others on the Turkish coast one night, telling them it was Italy and to go over the side. Especially since she has no passport, no papers, no skills and nothing except a burning desire to get to a better life. 

Coming out to the tram stop at the end of Istiklal Caddesi, the great pedestrian boulevard at the heart of Istanbul, she sees the police car parked in front of the Kaffee Haus, the place run by an Austrian couple who were nice to her the first time she was here. She had to leave soon after with a group making another run for the Greek border – although she’d hated to leave such a good job, they’d actually paid her – and hadn’t had time to thank them for the work and their kindness. She’s too embarrassed to go back now – and there’s the police car.