The news as of the second coffee this morning, and the music is Eric Clapton's Timepieces collection:
Not a great morning to try to get work done, in addition to this being the height -- or depth -- of holiday season, as news is pretty thin on the ground, and it's also First Coffee's birthday and his Ever-Loving And Wonderful Wife™ bought him The Complete Cartoons Of The New Yorker, whose hundreds and hundreds of pages sit here oh so temptingly…
The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer: The book, great as it is, does not have the complete cartoons, but the two accompanying CDs do, all 68,647 of them. And most importantly, all 1,000 by Charles Addams, the best cartoonist that magazine's ever seen.
One of my favorite Addams cartoons is here, the one of Pugsley at a large pond in Central Park, where at one end is a group of kids with their graceful sailboats in the water, and Pugsley's putting a black submarine in the pond at his end, grinning maliciously at the sailboats.
Norwegian retail chain Coop Trondos has chosen Lawson Software's M3 software to provide a consistent product for its 30-plus chain of stores to help improve their processes throughout the value chain.
The contract was signed in Lawson's first quarter fiscal 2007. Trondos runs two Coop OBS Hypermarkets and more than 30 other retail stores in Norway and has a total annual revenue of $433 million.
With the new retail product from Lawson, Trondos officials say the company is "expanding its use of IT to include more efficient tools for planning functions in goods intake and stock control."
"With our choice of Lawson M3, we want to invest in an integrated retail product that covers processes running throughout the whole value chain. This also includes a service desk solution based on Lawson's Retail concept, which includes integration with the Lindbak POS solution," says Ludvik Erlandsen, financial director for Coop Trondos.
After conducting a market evaluation involving four possible suppliers and solutions in the fall of 2005, Trondos evaluated Lawson M3 (previously Movex) and SAP, resulting in the choice of the Lawson Java-based ERP product.
"The key to profitability lies in integrated information flow between the point-of-sales application and our ERP applications. With the new product, we will be able to provide better central support and give the individual shop the opportunity to concentrate its activities purely on running the store," Erlandsen says.
Over the last year Lawson has made inroads in the retail industry with several new contracts in Norway and the rest of Scandinavia, and a number of new projects with existing customers.
"We found that we reached an efficiency limit within the framework of our existing product. In order to improve further, we had to think holistically and we started a project that we called 'IT in the supply chain.' The aim was to ensure an efficient flow of goods in line with the best players on the Scandinavian market. We understood early that this would require further development of business solutions, and chose to go out into the market to find a solution that met our needs," says Erlandsen.
Here's a good cartoon: Guy talking on a cell phone, walking along the street, says "Can you hold on a minute? I think I've taken another picture of my ear."
CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation and a provider of enterprise software applications and services, has announced that it has hired Sam Anidjar, senior vice president, mergers and acquisitions and Fred Dilkes, senior vice president, worldwide major accounts and channels to its senior management team.
Both will report directly to Eric Musser, president, CDC Software.
Anidjar comes to CDC Software from SSA Global where he most recently served as vice president of acquisitions. In his role as senior vice president, mergers and acquisitions, Mr. Anidjar will be responsible for driving all acquisitions on a global basis for CDC Software and will also assist with select opportunities driven by CDC Corporation and China.com.
Dilkes has more than 20 years of sales and management experience, most recently as vice president of sales, southeast, for SSA Global. He will be responsible for expanding the company's global base of channel partners and using the Franchise Partner Program to invest in selected partners in strategic geographies.
Here's one from 2001: Two guys sitting in a Manhattan bar, one says to the other "If I don't have that third martini, the terrorists have won."
QAD Inc., a vendor of enterprise applications for global manufacturers, today reported financial results for the fiscal 2007 second quarter and six-month period ended July 31, 2006.
QAD posted total revenue of $58.4 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2007, compared with $58.0 million in the same period last year. License revenue for the most recent quarter was $13.5 million, versus $16.3 million in the same period last year. Maintenance and other revenue was $30.7 million, compared with $29.5 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2006. Services revenue was $14.2 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2007, versus $12.3 million in last year's second quarter.
Net income for the fiscal 2007 second quarter was $1.1 million, or $0.03 per diluted share, including stock compensation expense of $1.3 million, or $0.02 per diluted share net of tax, related to the expensing of equity compensation under FAS 123R.
In the comparable period last year, net income was $3.8 million, or $0.12 per diluted share.
And of course there's the classic Robert Mankoff cartoon I used to have as a poster on my wall: "10th Anniversary Reunion Of Woodstock," one big cocktail party with everyone in business suits and Laura Ashley.
Okalla Corp. has extended the date for entering into a formal agreement with Web Transaction Services Inc. until October 16, 2006 with all basic terms remaining unchanged. The extension is attributable to unexpected delays with the due diligence and finalization of the closing documentation.
WTS, based in Austin, Texas, is a vendor of secure, reliable, and user-friendly e-check payment and ticketing systems for on-line subscriptions and instant access management processing.
Additional services include ACH gateway processing and file management, fraud prevention, real-time reporting and customer service. WTS processes in excess of $125 million of merchant payment transactions per annum.
There's a good one of a father walking with his little boy through Central Park, he's saying "The sun rises over the Upper East Side and sets over the Upper West Side." A surprising number of Manhattanites don't get the joke.
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