CHEP's RFID, Customer Effective in S.C., GiftCards on ITunes, Nice and Southern Company, Intuit Wants Entellium, T-Mobile

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
| CRM, ERP, Contact Center, Turkish Coffee and Astroichthiology:

CHEP's RFID, Customer Effective in S.C., GiftCards on ITunes, Nice and Southern Company, Intuit Wants Entellium, T-Mobile

The news as of that all-important third cup of coffee, and the music is Alice Cooper's "Killer" album, once said to be Johnny Rotten's favorite record. It's not hard to see why a Sex Pistol would say that: In his prime the Coop was the master of the fun, don't-take-yourself-seriously school of goofy high-energy rock, churning out such pop masterpieces as "School's Out," "Under My Wheels" and "No More Mr. Nice Guy." But about Billion Dollar Babies he... sigh, it happens to the best... started taking himself seriously and quickly became unlistenable. First Coffee hears ol' Vince does better at golf nowadays, like all the other Arizona retirees:
 
Burlington, Ontario-based IPICO has announced that it has received an order from CHEP Australia for 480,000 tags and reader infrastructure for IPICO's passive Dual Frequency RFID technology to be integrated in CHEP's new, managed, foldable, returnable packaging products across New Zealand.
 
This deployment will involve three service centers across New Zealand's two islands - well, three if you count Stewart Island, but granted, not a whole lot of need for RFID-enabled foldable, returnable packaging products there - and kicks off what IPICO officials are calling "the largest deployment of IPICO's passive Dual Frequency RFID to date."
 
Kind of nice for New Zealand to have the "largest" something in the world, other than the largest reputation for world-class rugby.
 
This order follows the initial agreement signed last year for the trial and customization of IPICO's passive Dual Frequency RFID tags, which involved testing of the technology and its form factor as well as demonstrating "fit for purpose" compliance in CHEP's managed returnable packaging products applications.
 
IPICO officials say the company has spent "almost a year" testing its technology in "the extreme environment that is the norm" for handling produce, "a challenging environment involving both moisture and metal" according to Gordon Westwater, President and CEO, IPICO, and has demonstrated to CHEP the suitability of its platform for this application.
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Customer Effective, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner focused on CRM, has been honored as one of the South Carolina's Fastest-Growing Companies 2008 program's Top 25 winners.
 
The winners were announced during the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce's Annual Summit luncheon held at the Wild Dunes Resort near Charleston on November 13, 2008.
 
The South Carolina's Fastest-Growing Companies program, co-sponsored by Elliott Davis and the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, recognizes "an exceptional and diverse assembly of businesses from across the state." This year's winners represent a cross section of industries and business categories, including  financial services, construction, manufacturing, professional services and technology among others.
 
Scott Millwood, CEO of Customer Effective, said the firm's focus is "on helping our customers improve performance through the automation of sales, marketing and service."
 
For the past seven years, Elliott Davis and the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce have named a list of 25 entities as South Carolina's Fastest-Growing Companies, chosen for percentage increases in both gross revenue (or assets) and full-time employment over the previous fiscal year.
 
Customer Effective was also named to the 2008 Inc. 500 list.
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GiftCertificates.com, a vendor of gift products for the corporate and consumer markets, has announced the launch of the GiftCards application, described by company officials as an iPhone application that lets customers " select, personalize, and purchase gift cards" directly from iPhone or iPod Touches, "without the need to go to an outside Web site."

 
The GiftCards application, developed for GiftCertificates.com by Trillusion Media, is available for download today at www.GiftCardsApp.com or the App Store in iTunes.

 
GiftCertificates.com sells gift cards in categories such as clothing, department stores, electronics, entertainment, health and beauty, home, kids and toys, jewelry, restaurants, shoes & accessories, specialty, sports, and travel.
 
Using the GiftCard application on their mobile devices, customers can browse such brands as REI, Macy's, and Gap, and purchase and send physical or e-Gift cards with personalized messages using contacts from their address book. The GiftCards application also uses the iPhone's GPS capabilities to show the nearest location of a vendor's store.
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Ra'anana, Israel-based Nice Systems has announced that Atlanta-based Southern Company, an electricity company, has expanded its implementation of Nice SmartCenter for its contact center technology environment.
 
Southern Company will replace competing recording and quality management products, and will also add screen content analytics.
 
The electricity company is in fact a long-time user of Nice's workforce management product, IEX TotalView, and will now expand its Nice environment for the company's over four million customers.
 
Nice will provide supervisors of the 850 agents in Southern Company's four contact center locations with tools to support management for "improving agent performance, customer satisfaction, and training effectiveness," Nice officials say.
 
It will also let Southern Company's contact center supervisors evaluate the quality of service provided to customers - the idea is that by identifying interactions and correlating them with agent screen activity, supervisors can determine what steps agents can take to improve customer service, as well as to develop programs for performance improvement.
 
Harvey Ellis, Call Center Operations Support Manager, Southern Company, said that since the firm has used Nice's workforce management product for ten years, "it was natural to make Nice SmartCenter the standard across our contact centers."
 
Nice has over 24,000 customers in more than 135 countries, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 companies.
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Industry observer John Cook reported over the weekend that financial software giant Intuit has an agreement to absorb the assets of Entellium, the troubled Seattle CRM vendor whose former CEO is awaiting trial on federal wire fraud charges.
 
"The deal has not been formally approved," he noted, reporting that Intuit spokeswoman Diane Carlini "confirmed Sunday night in an interview" that the company is pursuing an asset purchase.
 
"We have made an offer for certain assets," Cook reports Carlini as saying, adding that "she did not have any details on the purchase price, though one source who spoke to TechFlash put the figure at about $8 million."
 
As Cook notes, that's significantly less than $40 million that Entellium raised from such venture firms such as Ignition Partners, Intel Capital and Sigma Partners.
 
Within the past two months top executives Parrish Jones and Paul Johnston were arrested on wire fraud charges for inflating revenues over a number of years.
 
Cook reported that acting Entellium CEO Charles Miller "declined to comment on speculation that the company would be sold or file for bankruptcy."
 
The asset purchase, Cook says, "could add fuel to Intuit's attempts to compete in the hosted customer relationship management sector against the likes of Salesforce.com and Microsoft. Intuit made a push into that arena in September with the launch of a new offering that complemented its QuickBooks financial accounting product."
 
An executive for Intuit told Computerworld at the time of the new product launch that its hosted-CRM product would "be between one-third to one-tenth the price when you consider total cost of ownership."
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Mformation Technologies, a vendor of mobile device management software, has announced that T-Mobile International has deployed and is operating Mformation's MDM globally, "supporting management tasks on subscribers' mobile devices."
 
Arnd Gallmann, Senior Vice President of T-Mobile, said the company is using the Mformation platform to manage mobile devices "across our international operations."
 
With the Mformation software, T-Mobile is able to remotely configure and update the software in mobile devices throughout all phases of their life. T-Mobile picked Mformation to work with its over 120 million global customers, Mformation officials say, because of its integrated device management and track record with mobile operators.
 
Mark Edwards, Mformation's CEO, said his company has been working with T-Mobile to ensure that core management tasks are supported for their end users, "regardless of where they are." He said the company expects to underpin "an expanded range of activities and mobile data services for T-Mobile as they roll out more advanced device management capabilities."


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