The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the North Mississippi All-Stars' Electric Blue Watermelon. Think the Allman Brothers with Peter Wolf on vocals playing a raucous college English Lit Department bachelor party:

Okay, it's not exactly breaking news, but there are 25.8 million small businesses in America, paying more than 40 percent of the total U.S. private payroll, and the majority are not using CRM. Yeah they're a self-interested business concern, but First Coffee likes how VendorGuru.com, makes it their business to at least get small businesses thinking about strategies and CRM products.

According to the U.S.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and we're back in action, jet-lagged as all get out from Richmond-Washington, Washington-Atlanta, Atlanta-Milan, Milan-Istanbul this weekend. So any mistakes are to be blamed on any one of the seven cups of coffee so far.

First Coffee did manage to pay a visit to TMC headquarters while back in America for Thanksgiving, and let me say in this e-mail world it's great to sit down over coffee and get to talk with the people you work with and for. So cheers to Patrick, Tracey, Greg, Michelle, Mae, Stefanie, and even Nadji made time to fill me in on the back story of the company, time much appreciated.

Plus you get to learn, um, colorful phrases in Hungarian and Russian from Tracey and Greg which are surprisingly appropriate for the drivers here in Istanbul. Time well spent, friends, time well spent.

Oh, and the music: Past iPod song shuffle selections this morning include Ol' Blue Eyes' "Cheek To Cheek,"  "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" by Minnesota Mudthroat Zimmerman, and an Emerson, Lake and Palmer live version of the song built around the coolest eight-note bass riff ever played, "Peter Gunn." We're in an Aimee Mann mood, though, we'll get to her great Live At St.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius's debut album, cleverly titled Jaco Pastorius. Guess whose picture is on the cover:

Folks, First Coffee's as much in love with technology and its advance as the next guy, but there are some technological innovations we don't need. "Destination elevators" are such an example. Battery "operated" hand razors are another.

You might have seen the news Stefanie Viscusi reported yesterday on SoundBite Communications Inc. and Mindshare Technologies, announcing a "partnership to develop and deliver on demand Customer Experience Management and Monitoring" products for enterprise organizations.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is just about the best music for doing this kind of work, those great albums from Frank Sinatra's Capitol years, currently A Swingin' Affair:

Got an interesting e-mail the other day from a gentleman named Siddhart Swaroop, correcting my Indian nomenclature in an article I wrote recently:

In the Tectura missive, New Delhi is called "Noida." Two different cities, though bordering each other.

Boy, go from not ever having heard of a particular company to seeing their name pop up all over the place, today we hear that ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd. and Syclo, a developer of mobile software products and a company unknown to First Coffee three days ago, have announced the deployment of their joint workforce management at a "major water district in the United States."

It's coyly unnamed, but what might qualify as a "major water district…" New Orleans? Lake Michigan? 

The ClickSoftware and Syclo joint product, marketed as Smart Schedule, clients can "optimize all types of field work, via a pre-integrated/pre-configured" product, according to Syclo officials.

Smart Schedule is a tool for scheduling and dispatching service or work orders and can be integrated into multiple enterprise applications, including CRM, asset management, billing and HR.

Smart Schedule is marketed as something to help eliminate reliance on paperwork, providing for what Syclo and ClickSoftware officials claim are "greater labor efficiencies by enabling the field force to complete more work on each shift."

The way it's supposed to work, evidently, is "the combination of products allows clients to work smarter with more data in the hands of workers at the point of performance: in effect, improving services by mobile workers being able to feed their CIS, asset management and financial applications with the data needed to better track, plan and schedule work."

First Coffee doesn't know about you, but whenever I hear "work smarter," I get this mental image of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss.

The large metro water district (Salt Lake City? The Okeefenokee Swamp? Venice?) was looking for "a proven product mix from established vendors that could be deployed with out-of-the box capability," both work management and schedule modules working together, that was "user friendly, and that could be upgraded (and future proofed) to take advantage of emerging technologies (such as RFID, GIS, GPS)."

Salesforce.com, a vendor of on-demand business services, has announced that its third quarter fiscal year 2007 results will be released on Wednesday, November 15, 2006, after the close of the market.

The company will host a conference call at 2:00 p.m.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Charlie Parker: The Gold Collection:

Kintera Inc., a CRM vendor specializing in selling products to nonprofit organizations, has announced that La Leche League International has selected Kintera's social constituent relationship management (yet another variation on the CRM theme) system for its core member and donor management needs.

La Leche League International is a multinational organization that helps mothers worldwide breastfeed through mother-to-mother support, encouragement, information and education.

First Coffee thinks this is just amazing -- something ignorant peasant women have known how to do instinctually for thousands of years, modern, educated women need to form organizations and produce literature to know how to do. Reminds me of Bill Cosby's joke about parents going to birth classes, how the class was all these intellectuals going to learn to do something people have always known how to do for millennia.

Anyway, Kintera and ooTao Inc., a vendor of identity and data interoperability infrastructure development products, have signed an agreement to jointly integrate La Leche League International's open source authentication and data sharing standards with Kintera's social CRM platform, Kintera Sphere, enabling data to be shared between Kintera Sphere and other systems used by La Leche League International.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music, since we seem to be on a Stones kick here, is Sticky Fingers, which some consider their best. First Coffee's willing to grant it could be as high as their second best, but no higher:

Today in Munich, at Convergence 2006 EMEA, Microsoft announced it will release a new version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista.

Microsoft has also announced that, in addition to being offered through Microsoft's standard Volume Licensing program, Microsoft Dynamics CRM will be offered through the licensing model that is used with Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning products. Company officials say this is to make it "simpler and more convenient" for customers and partners to buy and deploy Microsoft Dynamics for customer relationship management (CRM), financial management and supply chain management.

The new version, compatible with the 2007 Office release and Windows Vista, will be released at the same time as the 2007 Office release and will ultimately be available in 18 languages.

Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, said customers and partners could deploy it "as on-premise software or an on-demand service." Microsoft officials outlined the new features as follows:

An "enriched user experience" based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

The news as of the lazy afternoon coffee here, and the music is lazy afternoon music, the Stones' "Waiting On A Friend." Love that Sonny Rollins sax, really makes the track:

Zeus Technology, a vendor of application traffic management software, has announced its partnership with Danish network, security and consultancy services company Netic A/S.

The partnership will enable Netic to deliver Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager to its customer base, establishing availability of the advanced Application Delivery Controller in Denmark. A leading Danish mobile network operator has already selected ZXTM to power its billing, CRM and self-service platforms.

ZXTM is a traffic management product available as both an appliance and as a software platform to run on existing data center servers and blades and in virtualized environments, "providing customers with the ultimate flexibility in choosing a product that suits their technology and business needs," according to Zeus officials.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a 1970s Rolling Stones mix. It's sturdy if not great music, but I appreciate it: After their 1968-1972 skein of the best four-album run in rock history there was going to be some letdown, but even through all the marking-time records they’ve made in the past 34 years, there hasn't been any outright rubbish. Bob Dylan's thrown some absolute garbage out there, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, Steve Miller, Tom Waits, Paul McCartney, The Who, John Mellencamp, Lou Reed, R.E.M., David Bowie, U2, Joni Mitchell, anybody who's been around twenty years or more has at least one avert-your-eyes bad album, Neil Young's got a whole shelf of crap, but almost uniquely not the Stones, they've always adhered to a high standard of professionalism in what they do that's frankly admirable. It’s not all timeless music, there's forgettable product like Emotional Rescue and Undercover, but none of their records sound like they just didn't care about the quality, it all sounds like they were at least taking their job seriously and there's something to be said for that, other bands could do with a work ethic and taking pride in a job well done like that:

In the third quarter 2006 quarterly revenue increased to $377.5 million, up 60 percent from the year-ago quarter.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Rolling Stones' Some Girls:

Satuit Technologies, Inc. has announced that Harris Investment Management, Inc. has selected Satuit as its customer relationship management (CRM) provider of choice.

HIM needed a CRM product that could scale as its business grows while providing "more efficiency, better management and stronger analytics from the marketing, sales and client service processes," according to HIM officials. 

HIM offers investment management products and services, as well as convenience, choice and flexibility -- all with a single point of contact. To support the single point of contact business model, HIM sought a CRM product built for the asset management industry rather than a general-purpose package.

This requirement narrowed the options significantly.