By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is The Glenn Miller Orchestra, currently "Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree." A Certain Someone just said "Why do you listen to such old music?"
My friend and valued lifetime companion in a very deep, meaningful and legally-binding sense, there is no such thing as "old" or "new," or "trendy" or "hot" or "uncool" music, there are only two kinds: "Good" and "Bad." Centuries-old Gregorian chants are "good" music. The twaddle on the lips and iPods of 12-year old today is "bad" music. A song released yesterday can be "good" music. Ninety-eight percent of the music from centuries ago perished because it was "bad" music.
Delving through the sacks of e-mail accumulating here at the sprawling campus of First Coffee, some themes emerge:
"Why don't you do more Fleetwood Mac reviews?"
"What's a really, really strong coffee? It's Finals Week here."
"Why don't you do more Top Ten lists of products so I know what to buy for my CRM project here at my company?"
"We are a leading vendor, and we have just released the CRM silver bullet product everybody has been waiting for."
"Your First Guaranty National Security account has been suspended."
"Huh? New Zealand? I thought you were in Istanbul."
"You don't spend enough time on one news item, it jumps around all over the place."
First Coffee can answer 85 percent of the e-mail through answering these oft-repeated queries:
Because Fleetwood Mac sucks, that's why. Same reason we don't do Britney Spears Week.
Espresso if you're used to normal filter coffee. Bean for bean there's less caffeine in espresso since the more a coffee bean is roasted to get that dark espresso quality the more caffeine leaches out, but in concentration it's a healthy shot. If that isn't doing it anymore try Turkish coffee, but don't drink it down all the way - those are grounds the mud at the bottom of the cup. Every waiter in Istanbul puts a glass of water on the table when a tourist orders Turkish coffee.
But if Turkish coffee doesn't do it anymore, it's time for café cubano, which isn't sipped, it's shot like whiskey. After that? When First Coffee waited tables after college, pulling the six-to-midnight shift, he'd get a lime wheel from the bar, put coffee grounds on one half and sugar on the other and eat it. Sure kept you going from 10:30 on. Beyond that? First Coffee had a college roommate who ate instant coffee crystals. But that guy had professional-strength issues.
We don't do more -- e.g. any -- Top Ten lists in that this is a news roundup feature.
First Coffee is perishing under a withering hail of silver bullets.
Has it. Here, let me give you my bank account information and passwords. You can take what the son of the former Nigerian state minister of the treasury didn't take.
We moved from Istanbul to Mangawhai Village, New Zealand in late September. Mrs. First Coffee is a Kiwi, and it's nice to be around the grandparents on this side of the family. That, and New Zealand's everything Istanbul is not -- clean, green, quiet and rather slow. But there is a fine selection of table wines and fish and chip shops.
Yes, well, this is a news roundup, where we rattle off the bullet-pointed news items you probably don't get rounded up in this particular combination anywhere else. Some of it's obscure, some of it's blindingly relevant, some of it's far away, some of it's next door, and the beauty of it all is you never know which is which, do you? We don't either. That's the fun of it for us, too.
...
Vendor eTrigue has announced the general availability of eTrigue 3.0, a demand generation application designed to align marketing and sales efforts. The vendor launched the original application three years ago.
"For the past three years we've been working with customers to develop the features to drive sales with consistency," said Jim Meyer, vice president and general manager at eTrigue Corporation.
Company officials say features of the SaaS eTrigue 3.0 include lead management and demand generation which "executes and tracks multichannel, multi-touch campaigns, including e-mail, landing pages, search, online, tradeshow and telemarketing campaigns to deliver qualified prospects to sales."
The product uses Salesforce CRM for the Force.com AppExchange, which "gives sales teams a window to prospect activity without cluttering Salesforce CRM with unqualified leads," company officials say. The product scores and profiles prospects in real time, a feature which is regarded as an aid to determining which leads are ready to buy, providing a window into the eTrigue database where active prospects can be viewed, sorted, and analyzed, "just like leads and contacts directly within Salesforce CRM," eTrigue officials say.
The product has something called "3-D Lead Scoring," which means users can qualify prospects based on who (demographic), what (activity), and when (buy time), independently scored and reported. Plus, eTrigue for AppExchange adds ("When and for how long/how often?") to the mix for that 3-D scoring. Users can then create custom scores based on different characteristic to "indentify buying behaviors to capitalize on a particular market, trend, or event," company officials say.
"Profile-plus" lead alerts provide details to sales people via e-mail for contact with prospects. Real-time lead alerts can be triggered based on any element stored in the eTrigue marketing database, including levels of activity on a specific Web page or multiple Web pages, time spent , or in combination with a demographic value such as title. Alerts include the most recent visit details, a full view of all scoring variables, relationship totals and campaign source.
ETrigue 3.0 also includes a number of enhancements designed to improve its performance and ease of use, company officials say, adding that eTrigue 3.0 is available for a flat monthly subscription fee -- "with no hidden costs," they promise, "which includes unlimited e-mail, Web visits or landing page views."
Set up, training, eTrigue for the Force.com AppExchange and integration with Salesforce CRM or other supported CRM systems is all included.
...
Epicor Software has unveiled, to nearly 2,000 attendees at its annual customer conference, the launch of its next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) product, Epicor 9. With the launch, Epicor officials say they're "introducing a new approach to the way ERP systems are designed, built, and used."
Expected to be generally available before the end of the year, Epicor 9 will use Web 2.0 concepts to provide what company officials describe as "a truly collaborative and dynamic enterprise business application experience."
Basically Epicor 9 is an adaptable and collaborative business architecture that pretty much works no matter where you are, your industry of means of access.
Walid Abu-Hadba, CVP, Developer & Platform Evangelism for Microsoft, said The Best Little Software Company In Redmond "applauds Epicor for its deep usage of the Microsoft platform to deliver its service-based business products."
Epicor officials say they have "converged" the best of their offerings into this next-generation superset release.The release, in the view of the Epicorians, provides "reach, synergy, and visibility" to the organization and its trading partners.
Specifically, Epicor features numerous essential embedded capabilities that manage the flow of processes right across the enterprise. This approach to core functionality, "typically provided in other systems through after-the-fact integration or third party add-ons," includes customer relationship management (CRM), supplier relationship management (SRM), advanced planning and scheduling (APS), business process management (BPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC), product configuration, field service and more.
Epicor officials say users can select whether to deploy on-premise, single-tenant hosted, or multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS), Windows-based or Web-based, centralized or decentralized, end-to-end or individual suites: "Customers can also choose how to configure the application suites to best fit and improve business processes. End users can choose several options for interacting with their ERP system: using the standard application forms, through Microsoft Office applications, through Internet and intranet portal pages or composite applications, using a search engine, taking RSS feeds, and from mobile devices."
