The news as of the first coffee, the beans, of course, being Kopi Luwak beans hand-ground using a 19th century apothecary's mortar and pestle by my man Godfrey, brewed with imported Swiss spring water in a Gaggia piston-style espresso brewer… see, we've been accused here at Radio KCRM 98.6, All Monkees All The Time, of being somewhat, ah, lowbrow and rather crass, which doesn't seem to bother the vast majority of our listeners, primarily because the vast majority of our listeners have their musical selections made by an institutional officer of one kind or another, but occasionally we do get the more well-heeled, cultured listener.

And as a wise man once said we need to be all things to all men, so instead of grabbing a cuppa Maxwell House from the percolator First Coffee had his gentleman's gentleman Godfrey whip something up in the grand style, and instead of the usual t-shirt won in a bar trivia contest we have donned a finely-tailored double-breasted smoking jacket with Chinese brocade collars and cuffs, and instead of Slobberbone or some other such selection from the usual musical fare we've upgraded to a fine 1961 jazz release, Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments."

And we shall strive for the refined diction appropriate for the more educated ear, no more of the Wolfman Jack-style shoutin' and hollerin' here, but a more subtle, sophisticated style appropriate, of course, to you, the more discriminating class of listener.

So bonjour mes amis, and for a historical note we would like to remember that today is the birthday of noted 19th century British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, born in Stratford, England in 1844, noted for his use of sprung rhythm and intricate language and known for such works as "God's Grandeur," "The Starlight Night" and of course, First Coffee's favorite, "The Windhover."

On Tracey Schelmetic's croquet lawn yesterday morning, enjoying her grandmother's secret recipe Magellan G&Ts, First Coffee heard that Information Architects, a vendor of online information products, has announced that they have added a state-of-the-art contact center to their operations through the acquisition of GWIB CO LLC.

GWIB sells contact center services and comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) products. GWIB provides a communications portal that allows clients to connect with their customers through a single entry point.

The company brings what Information Architects officials describe as "a solid and experienced core management team that has a great deal of expertise in contact center development, sales generation, business operations and business expansion." The team has worked extensively in telephony administration, network setup and administration, and has the potential to be "one of the top tier contact centers in the Caribbean," Information Architects hopes.

"With the acquisition of GWIB, Information Architects can now offer… a comprehensive set of on-demand CRM products," said Todd K.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an old favorite around the sprawling First Coffee campus here on the rolling hills, Dave Brubeck's Time Out:

VIPdesk, a vendor of virtual contact center products, has announced that folks, don't look now, but the 2006 holiday season is coming up. Why, it's practically August. And don't tell me you don't have all your Christmas shopping done, you lazy scofflaw.

What's your strategy for serving your retail customers during the upcoming peak holiday season? The National Retail Federation is predicting a nearly 5 percent increase in sales for 2006 over 2005, which was also a record year.

Well, if you're interested, VIPdesk has undertaken several measures to improve technological capabilities, all with your Christmas ease and pleasure in mind.

"VIPdesk has been preparing for the 2006 holiday season since the 2005 season ended on a high note," said Mary Naylor, CEO and founder of VIPdesk and a person who not only has her Christmas shopping done, she has her shopping for Christmas 2007 done.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Bix Beiderbecke's "Trumbology:"

Along with the (hopefully eternally departed) GlobeTel saga, another ongoing area of CRM coverage for First Coffee has been the actions of certain online vendors whose malfeasance destroys customer confidence.

It's not like online commerce is going away, we're not getting all apocalyptic about it here, but frankly put, there are a lot of people who'd be doing a lot more business online if they simply knew who to avoid. And there'd be even more people doing business online if such vendors weren't there in the first place.

This is quite a big deal here at First Coffee, seeing as how we're primarily a Customer Relationship Management blog, educating your musical taste is merely a sideline -- and to that end, pay no attention to the left-wing British rag The Guardian's list "50 Albums That Changed Music."

Suffice it to say that any list which can get through 50 supposedly "influential" albums, including The Spice Girls, Mary J. Blige, Massive Attack, Chic and The Human League, without listing Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, one of the two or three records which changed how everyone wrote songs, was put together by Brits simply incapable of understanding what makes an American-created musical genre tick. It's kind of like thinking the human actors were the real draws in Jaws and Jurassic Park.

One's surprised Frankie Goes To Hollywood isn't on the list, as their idea of "influential" is "sounds like what I heard when I was stoned in a club in Manchester a few years back." One record is cited for its "influence" on "Native American and Maori reggae bands." I'll give you all day and you can't come up with an example of a Native American or Maori reggae band anybody outside of the Guardian's editorial offices has ever heard.

But CRM is based on trust.

The news as of the first coffee this morning here in beautiful crime-free Istanbul, and the guy next door to your apartment has tuned this radio, pounding through your cardboard-thin walls at an ungodly early hour, to Radio KCRM 98.6, All Exile On Main Street All The Time, brought to you by Eljer, the only name you need to know in plumbing fixtures:

Just to let all you guys and dolls know that Radio KCRM will be in Munich next week for a week of R'n'R, so we'll be giving your dial a chance to cool down, returning to our regularly-scheduled programming Tuesday July 25th. Please, no suicide attempts.

Security at the Hofbrauhaus will be beefed up in anticipation of the crush of adoring fans. Last time Radio KCRM was in Munich he went with a friend to the Hofbrauhaus for a little home-brewed Bavarian culture -- okay, a lot of home-brewed Bavarian culture -- and was seated next to a table of Korean tourists and served by a Cambodian waitress.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Slobberbone's "Pinball Song." Happy Battle Of the Boyne Day:

As Steve Ballmer said, Microsoft made the least surprising announcement in its history in Boston yesterday, that they'd like a bigger slice of the software as a service pie.

We've all seen this coming a mile or twelve off, that Microsoft lusteth heavily after salesforce.com, NetSuite, RightNow et al's success selling CRM and other business software online.

But first they needed a CRM worth selling online, and they think they have it fourth time around -- third, to be technically correct since they punted 2.0: According to industry observer Andy Patrizio, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, code-named "Titan," provides true multi-tenancy, "which will allow for multiple customer accounts on a single server."

This, Patrizio says, "will make Microsoft CRM much more competitive with software-as-a-service providers like Salesforce.com, Microsoft's primary target with the release of CRM Live."

We'll see. Marc Benioff remains sanguine, of course, professing not to really care one way or the other what happens in Redmond.

A year ago RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte told First Coffee that as far as the likes of SAP and Microsoft jumping into hosted CRM goes, "there is nothing to be nervous about. These companies are simply recognizing that the hosted model we've been delivering more effectively than anyone else for almost a decade now is the way to go."

Their problem, Gianforte said, is that "they can't possibly beat us at our own game.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Nigel Kennedy's recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons:

Focusing specifically on small and midsize enterprises (SMEs), SAP AG has announced that it will introduce new e-commerce and Web-based capabilities to SAP Business One. The new functions will enable companies to "set up online stores easily and to deploy customer relationship management (CRM) software quickly and simply via the Internet," according to SAP officials.

Addressing increasing demand among SMEs to make e-commerce and CRM core parts of their businesses, SAP officials describe the new features as a way to provide a unified view of information across sales, financials, manufacturing, reporting and customer-facing activities in a single software product.

SAP is acquiring the new e-commerce and CRM capabilities through its recent acquisition of Praxis Software Solutions, a privately-held software company and long-term SAP Business One partner based in Minneapolis. The purchase gives SAP the acquired technology and Praxis employees to throw at the SAP Business One operations.

Why is nobody really very surprised that the French found a way to surrender the World Cup to Italy?

Having outplayed Italy, clearly the best team in the knockout phase of the tournament, for the past hour, Les Bleus found themselves in the precarious position of being in danger of winning.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, which is being consumed college-style, where you get up in the morning and there's a cup of some flat brown liquid, you know it's last night's coffee or Diet Coke or something, but the point is it's caffeinated, so you don't just throw it out, you simply pour in the morning's fresh coffee, add milk and sugar to taste and stir, and the music is our theme song, Adam Carroll's "Ol' Milwaukee's Best:"

Breaking news: A final recount has declared Felipe Calderon winner of the Mexican presidential election. Al Gore demands a recount.

Good morning good morning, thank your institutional officer for turning your radio dial to Radio KCRM 98.6, All Weird Al Yankovic, All The Time! In today's top news we sent our Radio KCRM Special White House Correspondent to the White House to get President Bush's reaction to gauge the level of tension over North Korea's nuclear tests, and found the president doubled over laughing too hard to answer questions, but we did manage to transcribe the following… "fell into the ocean… biggest flop since Dan Rather's Air National Guard memo story… ["Dong" joke]… hey get Josh on the phone, have him tell 'em we're really scared now… Dick, get the wig and do your Kim imitation, that busts me up every time… [garbled "Dong" joke]… maybe we oughta tell those granola-crunchers in Seattle to head for the bunkers anyway… all those poor damn fish… up and down in what, less than ten minutes? Yeah, reminds me of [surprisingly funny "Dong" joke involving a prominent Democrat member of Congress]… oh my sides… Slick Willie caved in to this putz? Good heavens… Condi, I feel the need to run our own nuke tests, got a good location in mind…

Breaking news: A final recount has declared Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador winner of the Mexican presidential election. Al Gore blames Stephen Hawking.

Moving along, according to the Nigerian industry journal This Day, in a bid to improve Contact Centre products in Nigeria Weco Systems Group, a Nigerian IT firms in Nigeria has entered into partnership with Bucher & Suter, a Cisco "advanced technology outfit."

Uchenna Obidike, Chief Executive Producer of Weco System told This Day, and Radio KCRM quotes, "the whole essence of bringing together egg heads in contact centres in Nigeria was basically to educate our customers on the need for contact centre. We know a lot of them have been talking about it but they approach it wrongly and we believe that Butcher & Suter is the best as far as Cisco Internet protocol Contact Centre (IPCC) is concerned."

Today's business, Obidike explained, " is all about doing more with less, and in order to improve our shareholders' value, you must begin to work at the total cost of ownership reduction in terms of buying a new telecommunication infrastructure.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Stan Kenton's 1945 recording of "Artistry in Rhythm:"

Had us a nice American music festival yesterday here in Istanbul, in honor of the Fourth, started out with Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, moving on to Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue, a selection of '30s and '40s swing and some Bob Dylan. Say whatever you want about American politics or this and that, but we're the greatest country ever for our music alone.

Take the past hundred years. We have, just for starters, Duke Ellington, Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Hank Williams, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Johnny Cash, Aaron Copland, Bill Monroe, Leonard Bernstein, Chuck Berry, Ella Fitzgerald, The Carter Family, Lerner and Lowe, Aretha Franklin, Cole Porter, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, John Cage, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Philip Glass, Robert Johnson, Bing Crosby, James Brown, Charlie Parker, Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein, Woody Guthrie, Jerome Kern, The Ramones, Kronos Quartet, Bessie Smith, Jimi Hendrix, Tommy Dorsey, The Beach Boys… plus it's worth noting that Keith Richards lives in Connecticut.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music should be The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, but iTunes doesn't have it yet. The government should regulate such things:

First Coffee almost feels like John Henry Cardinal Newman here, who had to write one of the classics of Western thought, Apologia Pro Vita Sua in the 19th century to defend his conversion from the Anglican Church to Roman Catholicism.

While not giving up my libertarian preferences in favor of government interventionism, I do feel at odds with my usual anti-government, anti-regulation drinking buddies on the net neutrality issue, as has been pointed out to me by those who normally agree with me and have accused me of all manner of perfidy, of desiring half-wit government bureaucrats controlling the Internet and moving towards a Soviet Russian-style government hamstringing of the free markets.

It's particularly risible to find phone companies complaining about how the government should keep their noses out of phone business, the very same phone companies which wouldn't exist today had the government not stepped in and busted up AT&T's monopoly.