The "gotta have it first" geeks are at it again. Call it a reunion of the introduction of the iPad, or the last Star Wars movie line.

In Japan, PCWorld reported, "hundreds of people queued to place reservations for the new Apple cell phone."

The iPhone 4 won't go on sale until June 24, but that isn't stopping these guys from camping out -- and yes, somehow you just know it's a guy thing.

Not even incompetence can deter people from the latest shiny thing from Apple. "Despite a disastrous preorder process Tuesday morning," as CNET notes, "enough people were able to place iPhone 4 orders that much of Apple's initial U.S. supply has already been accounted for."

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Spectrum Corporation recently issued a white paper explaining the cost benefits of its call center reporting solutions, of which there are many. The company's call center reporting software is used to tie together disparate legacy call center systems, and thus help companies get more mileage out of those systems - as well as gain greater insight into call center operations.

Specifically, the white paper says, "any hardware or software investment made for the contact center should contain ROI information that supports the purchase of these items. Lacking hard ROI numbers then requires the contact center manager to fall back on soft ROI numbers and the result, more times than not, is a rejection of the requested funds."

As the paper shows, "software and hardware for the contact center can be justified using acceptable or hard return on investment numbers."

It then proceeds to outline the various cost benefits, framing them in terms of the return on investment from each one. Bear in mind that some of these cost savings come about indirectly: Basically what it comes down to is that organizations can uncover many new opportunities for efficiencies by tapping into additional silos of data, unifying them, and then automating the delivery of reporting to increase responsiveness.

Here's a quick rundown of the main points:

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Putting it scientifically, "a ton" of call centers have cropped up around the BP oil spill disaster. There are different types of centers, they each handle something different and they all play a role in the response.

More than 100 people have called Gulf region poison centers since the Deepwater Horizon oil platform caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico April 20, either to receive information or to report side effects from the resulting oil spill.

Dr. Mark Ryan, managing director of the Louisiana Poison Center, said he expects to see that number rise as the oil continues to leak and spread.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that St. Bernard Parish, with support from BP, has established an Oil Spill Call Center to answer questions from St. Bernard residents affected by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The center will be staffed Monday-Friday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. It will be staffed from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Saturdays.

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Next-generation contact centers deliver services across multiple modes of communication: voice, fax, e-mail, instant messaging, web, images and video," says a white paper produced by Radisys. "Combining all these communication channels over a ubiquitous, cost-efficient IP network provides rich new features, while simultaneously lowering telecommunication costs."

The enabler is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), a technology that converts voice into IP packets that are transmitted, alongside traditional data packets, on the IP network. The white paper explains how moving from circuit-based voice networks to VoIP technology significantly improves customer service and productivity by exploiting open computing systems, standards-based interfaces, and decomposed functional architectures.

Convedia media servers, company officials say, have been designed to enable "a wide range of applications," to keep up with how modern contact centers are changing the way many system integrators, hosted contact center service providers and independent software vendors approach their businesses.

Basically put, the Convedia Media Server is engineered to help increase efficiency by simultaneously carrying voice calls using VoIP on the same IP network, rather than the traditional approach of using separate circuit-switched networks. 

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Gomez, the Web performance division of Compuware, has ended its search for an online video platform by selected Sorenson Media's OVP, Sorenson 360.

Sorenson officials say their product was chosen because it could "scale flexibly with its growing online video needs." Kirk Punches, vice president of sales and business development for Sorenson Media, said "Gomez chose Sorenson 360 to address the company's online video needs and meet all of its website's online video challenges."

Gomez officials say they were looking for something that could create and deliver online video content for its Web site and integrate with WordPress. The vendor's products are for optimizing the performance, availability, and quality of Web and mobile applications. Company officials say they're used at "12 of the top 20 most-visited U.S. Web sites."

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