Mindjet's MindManager for Mac, Opera: Facebook #1, Lotus on BlackBerry, Teleperformance Survey

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Mindjet's MindManager for Mac, Opera: Facebook #1, Lotus on BlackBerry, Teleperformance Survey

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tom Waits's hodgepodge collection of outtakes and unreleased material, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. The material on this collection is so strong you wonder he couldn't find a place for it on the studio releases -- then you listen to those and realize yeah, those were pretty good too:

Mindjet, seller of collaboration and personal productivity tools, has made the MindManager 8 for Mac application available after the launch of its Web-based collaboration product Mindjet Catalyst last October 2009.

This latest version of the tool, which company officials describe as "a mind mapping application," is billed as having "further functionality and integration with native Mac applications" for information management for Mac users.

MindManager uses visuals on an expandable canvas, or "map," to capture and organize ideas and processes so that users and teams can see the forest and the trees -- what a novel concept -- "compared to documents, presentations and e-mail that constrain one to working one page at a time," company officials said.

Pricing details were not mentioned.
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Facebook is now the most-visited social network on the mobile Web among Opera Mobile users, according to Opera's State of the Mobile Web report.
 
Unique users of Facebook grew more than 600 percent during 2009, a statement which could be taken in a couple of interesting ways ("Those must be some tall people!").
 
You'll never guess what site was formerly the most popular social network among Opera Mini users: VKontakte. Ever heard of it? We haven't. Maybe that's because the top 10 countries ranked by number of Opera Mini users are -- in order -- Russia, Indonesia, India, Ukraine, China, South Africa, United States, Vietnam, Nigeria, and United Kingdom.
 
And Nigeria is back on the list after a three-month absence, pushing Poland out of the top 10 for the first time. That might explain it: "Given the popularity of Opera in Russian-speaking countries, VKontakte used to be in the top position based on unique users, but it was overtaken by Facebook in 2009," company officials explain.
 
Twitter saw its usage increase more than any other social network, surging more than 2,800 percent in just one year. And Friendster, must suck to be you: All of the listed social-networking sites, except for Friendster, showed "significant" user growth from Opera Mini users in 2009, company officials said. FTL, Friendster.

Opera's State of the Mobile Web report, published monthly, provides information on the top global trends affecting the mobile Web. This month the report highlights Southeast Asia and examines social networking on the mobile Web.
 
In December 2009, more than 46.3 million people used Opera Mini, an 11 percent increase from November 2009 and more than 159 percent compared to December 2008. Those 46.3 million people viewed more than 20.7 billion pages in December, and since November, page views have gone up 10.1 percent.
 
Opera Mini users generated over 315 million megabytes of data for operators worldwide in December 2009, and since November, the data consumed went up by 10.5 percent. Bear in mind that data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90 percent -- "if this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 2.9 petabytes of data in December," company officials say, noting that since December 2008, data traffic is up 206 percent.
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Given the growing interest by enterprises for mobile collaboration and social networking, Research In Motion has announced that it is further mobilizing IBM Lotus Software on the BlackBerry platform.

To that end, they've released the BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Quickr, which enables secure mobile access to IBM's document-based collaboration software from BlackBerry smartphones. RIM is also releasing a new version of the BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections for enterprise social networking.
 
These applications join the BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Sametime for unified communications and collaboration.

David Yach, CTO for Software at Research In Motion, said the company has "made it easy for IT departments to align with corporate policies and deliver these capabilities."

BlackBerry smartphone users can navigate IBM Lotus Quickr libraries and folders using the tool, company officials say, as well as upload, preview or download content and edit files within Quickr's version controls.
 
The application also integrates with the BlackBerry e-mail application and the Documents To Go suite on a BlackBerry smartphone so users can edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

There are updates to the server component as well with the BlackBerry Social Networking Application Proxy server, which is billed as a tool that "optimizes the data sent between IBM Lotus Connections or IBM Lotus Quickr and BlackBerry smartphones in order to improve performance and minimize data plan usage. Administrators can also generate usage reports."
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A single negative experience with a customer call center would likely cause 68 percent of the respondents to take their business elsewhere, according to a recent survey released by Teleperformance, an outsourced contact center vendor.
The results of the customer care survey, Teleperformance officials say, show that the quality of experience with a company's customer contact center determines consumer sentiment and brand loyalty.
 
Survey results also revealed consumers expect excellent service in return for brand loyalty, finding that 87 percent of people felt they had a right to a better contact center experience if they regularly spend money with a company or stay loyal to a brand.
 
Almost exactly half of people said the main reason for their dissatisfaction with a company is poor customer service or a bad contact center experience.
 
The survey was commissioned by Teleperformance and conducted by YouGov. Over 1,000 U.S. adult consumers completed the survey recently.

"In a tight economy, retaining customers is critical," said Dominic Dato, Executive Chairman of Teleperformance USA. "Companies can't afford not to make quality customer service a priority."

Recently Teleperformance has announced a new customer experience concept, Teleperformance Platinum, with "affordable" pricing. The program allows the customer's environment to be "reproduced at the agent workstation to address specific customer demands, ranging from complex issues related to technical support to building strategic relationships," vendor officials say.


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