The news as of the first cup of coffee, and the music is The Allman Brothers Band on an iPod shuffle, heavy on the Eat A Peach and Hittin' The Note, for First Coffee's money the two best records they've done. Yeah yeah, Live At the Fillmore East this and that, some of us prefer song structure to bloat jams:

Corporate Tracker , a division of Infinata, and Pearson PLC have announced the ability to upload business intelligence, including hundreds of thousands of corporate profiles and millions of key contacts, directly into Salesforce.com CRM client accounts.

Corporate Tracker sells professional intelligence and sales prospects.

Brian Smith, Marketing Manager, Infinata, said because Corporate Tracker is updated every day, "when users connect our data source to their Salesforce.com account they will get up-to-date information on companies as well as executives."

The direct Corporate Tracker-Salesforce.com integration has a point-and-click based installation and lets Salesforce.com users download data into their CRM in seconds. Corporate Tracker officials point out that this "eliminates the need for mapping of fields and uploading of data from an intermediary source."

All Corporate Tracker data is available in Salesforce.com via the system, "including details on mid-level managers such as I/T directors, network administrators, controllers and marketing managers," according to Smith. "The data that we track is the information that sales and marketing teams need." The vendor provides intelligence on 185,000-plus companies and over one million "decision makers."
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Verint Systems and partner Dimension Data have announced that Woolworths Limited, an Australian retailer, has implemented the Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite in its Everyday Money Customer Service Center located in Parramatta, New South Wales. Woolworths deployed the software from Verint and Witness Actionable Solutions to "support enhanced services to customers of its new range of financial services products," according to Verint officials.

Dhun Karai, Head of Woolworths Everyday Money, says the Impact 360 Workforce Optimization provides Woolworths with a way to get information from customer interactions, "maximize workforce performance, and improve the processes and effectiveness of customer service operations."

The Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite is intended to help Woolworths' Everyday Money customer contact center by using software features such as quality monitoring and encryption, workforce management, performance management and eLearning. "With quality monitoring," company officials say, "Woolworths can capture and evaluate caller and agent interactions, as well as analyze uptake and decline factors associated with product offerings and services."

 

The product has encryption of recorded customer interactions as a feature, which can be used to help retailers, financial institutions and other organizations protect the privacy of customer information. Woolworths officials say the ability to use quality monitoring together with workforce management should help the company "automate and effectively forecast and schedule staff," as well as help ensure the right call-takers are in the right place at the right time based on caller demand. 

 

The system also comes with scorecards for employee performance tracking and analysis, and eLearning features, such as the ability to convert call recordings into training, for reinforcing best practices.

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CRM Innovation has released Web2CRM a Software + Services application for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. It's billed as a product letting "non-technical CRM users" create a form for their Web site to get visitor data into their CRM system, instead of cutting and copying form data received by e-mail and manually pasting that into CRM.

CRM Innovation officials say the product can be used to "capture new leads, registration page for Webinars, collect information before releasing white papers, or allowing customers to enter service cases on your site." Company officials say Web2CRM can create "any record type in CRM" with the Visual Form Builder.

Offered as a Software + Services, CRM Innovation hosts the technology necessary to design, present and process the form data. It  works with "all implementation scenarios of CRM 4.0 -- On Line, On Premise, and partner hosted," company officials say. Annual subscriptions are $495 per CRM organization, and there is no charge per form submission. Hosting for the form is included.

The user is presented with a visual form designer interface to drag and drop fields from a facsimile of their CRM form into a designer area, and publish the form. All the form processing occurs on the CRM Innovation hosted server -- "no code changes are required on the client's CRM server," company officials say: "The company's site designer can link to the form via a hyperlink, place the form reference in an iFrame or use the 'carry code' option to place the form html tags directly into their Web page. There is no special coding that needs to be placed on the Web site server, its server platform independent."

The visual form designer uses Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 to present an intuitive WYSIWYG environment. Several form layouts and styles are available to the user based on best practice form design standards. The users can select the custom styling option to match their current Web site's look and feel.

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Surgient, which sells IT service delivery and virtualization automation, has announced a Webcast, "Economic Benefits of the Cloud: Beyond a Cost-Cutting Measure," scheduled for Wednesday, March 25 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time. The presentation features Surgient Chief Technology Officer Dave Malcolm exploring the economic motivators of the cloud in today's economy. And here's a hint: It's not all just about cost reduction.

Of course this economic climate has mandated resource efficiencies and cost cutting, and at the same time IT organizations are in "a strategic position," Surgient officials believe, "and are being called upon to help drive increased revenue." They cite to research done by Gartner, IDC, The 451 Group and Forrester Research predicting that cloud computing will dominate the enterprise in 2009. 

 

Why? Of course there are economic benefits of a self-service private cloud. "But," Surgient officials ask, "how can the cloud actually deliver ROI to your organization?" That's what the Webcast will tackle.

 

The presentation will discuss financial benefits of cloud computing in today's economy, best practices and approaches for implementing a self-service private cloud, the true value of cloud computing with true Policy-Driven Self-Service and trade and how to recognize ROI from cloud computing.

 

Malcolm is responsible for product management, software development and data center operations for Surgient's products and hosted solutions. Prior to Surgient, he was the vice president of Product Group at Motive where he built the software development organization from its early beginnings, and was responsible for product marketing and development of the entire Motive product line, which grew from $2 million to more than $65 million in annual revenue during his tenure. Prior to Motive, Malcolm was the vice president and general manager of the Internet Business Unit at Tivoli Systems.
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ABD3, which describes its line of work as "enablers of real life social networking for today's mobile consumer," has announced the availability of the YellowPin social lifestyle tool. 

 

Using a text message, the service lets users bring their online, social network friends into their -- ostensibly -- real lives by sharing their activities and locations in real time. "As well," company officials say, "YellowPin gives users a guide to the activities their friends are engaging in around them, providing different options for social interaction." 

 

You must admit, it's a worthy goal: Transforming online socializing into in-person interactions for people who want to expand and connect their online network to real life activities. Is First Coffee the only one who sees the subtle irony of that being accomplished via an online network tool?

Launching first on Facebook, socializers can update their selected friends or groups via the application online to show where they are and what they are doing or, when using a mobile phone, sending a text message to 555888 with their location. The YellowPin service uses the same privacy settings as the popular social network, company officials say, "ensuring all information and updates are controlled by subscribers." YellowPin officials say they will never publicize any personal information, and will not use GPS or satellite technology to track your movements.

After adding the application, YellowPin aggregates your network of contacts on Facebook, which then enables you to pull information about the happenings around you and their whereabouts. Whether planning a night out with friends or networking for business, people can transform online social lives into real time interactions. Unlike other services, YellowPin:

The service is available to any phone with SMS capabilities, be it a smartphone or standard, candy bar phone. ("Candy bar phone?" Did I miss another marketing buzzword? Hate it when that happens.)

 

ABD3 officials say the service "pinpoints each person exactly where they are," it's not "a 100-yard guestimate," and communicates the activity a person is engaging in, "rather than just longitude and latitude coordinates." And here's First Coffee's favorite marketing point: It "aggregates friends' activity to give a user a clearer view of their social landscape."

 

Sayles Braga, CEO of ABD3, said with mobile slated to be the largest growth area for social networks, "we believe that people should be free to interact with their friends and control their own information in that environment -- not have a machine dictate it to them." With a free first month, YellowPin will cost 99 cents per month after that, billed directly through existing mobile accounts.