First Coffee

First Coffee for September 19, 2005

September 19, 2005

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the current iTunes song is “Six Months In a Leaky Boat” by the late, lamented, underrated New Zealand popsters Split Enz:

First CoffeeSM doesn’t know about you, but he feels a whole lot safer this morning, reading that North Korea’s “promised” to give up their nuclear program. Hey, they promised, this isn’t the same empty-promises-for-fuel scam President Clinton fell for. Come on, they promised, cross their hearts hope to die.

But seriously folks, kudos to Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan for holding meaningful, free elections for the first time in many a crescent moon. President Bush still hasn’t gotten the credit he deserves for that.
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Etalk, a division of Autonomy, is announcing the latest release of Qfiniti Enterprise, a unified call recording, agent evaluation, and advanced speech analytics product for the contact center market.

It delivers a scalable and centrally-managed enterprise platform that allows international, multi-site customer service operations to, in company officials’ words, “monitor, measure, improve and understand relevant customer interactions.”

Scott Shute, president of etalk, notes some of the new features and functionality of Qfiniti, such as what the company’s claiming is “the first fully integrated recording, evaluation, and speech analytics offering for quality monitoring, logging, and VoIP-based call acquisition that does not use third-party analytics technology.”

The new interface is an operational and visual improvement over what went before, and supports language localization, which company officials hope will open up more international opportunities.

The theory behind a lot of what Qfiniti’s engineered to do is that a lot of the information that circulates in a contact center – the audio recordings, documents, web pages, e-mails, what have you – is unstructured, in that it resides outside of a normal structured database.

First Coffee for September 13, 2005

September 13, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of… well, now, here in San Francisco for Dreamforce ‘05 First CoffeeSM’s just going to post as needed, next week we’ll be back on the early-morning stuff.

Oh, the music? That’s one of the great things about being back here in America, the CD selection. First CoffeeSM picked up, among others, Al Green’s Greatest Hits, Duke Ellington’s underrated Blues In Orbit and The Definitive Collection: Patsy Cline:

Quote of the Day, from somebody yakking away on a telephone here at the Moscone Center where they’re holding Dreamforce ‘05: “I fell off the idiot train about 500 miles ago.”

Lord I’m one, Lord I’m two, Lord I’m three, Lord I’m four, Lord I’m five hundred miles from where I fell off the idiot train…
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First CoffeeSM had a chance to sit down with the affable Jim Steele, president of salesforce.com. “I don’t really care about the title,” Steele said, noting that he considers himself more of a chief sales officer.

When he first heard about the idea of renting software online via the hosted model, thought the product wouldn’t work for anyone but small companies.

First Coffee for September 12, 2005

September 12, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of… well, now, here in San Francisco for Dreamforce '05 First Coffee's just going to post as needed, next week we'll be back on the early-morning stuff:

One thing to realize: There is never, ever such a thing as a sold-out sporting event. Went to SBC Park here in San Fran yesterday with a great old friend from the Chicago area, as the Chicago Cubs were in town to play the Giants. Bought, ah, secondhand tickets out in front of the stadium during the second inning, $50 club seats for $25. Great game – the Cubs won – great seats, great day, great stadium, great beer, great kickoff to San Francisco.
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Thanks to W. Sibusiso "Sibu" Tshabalala, President and CEO of Pro-SAAP Solutions, LLC who First CoffeeSM mentioned in a piece a while back, who wrote in to say “You are correct; I 'never' have to spell my name over the phone (smiley face).”

Might as well change it to John Smith, right?
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As one can imagine there was quite a bit of tittering over Oracle buying Siebel here at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce.

First Coffee for September 9, 2005

September 9, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Frank Sinatra’s album of “suicide songs,” as he called them, Only The Lonely:

First CoffeeSM’s off to salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2005 in San Francisco tomorrow morning – leave Antalya at 5:00 a.m., fly through Istanbul and Chicago, landing in the Queen of Cities that same day at eight in the evening. You can do things like that, travel for twenty hours and arrive a few hours after you leave when you lose ten hours in a day. Wonderful things, time zones. So efficient.

Tip Your Waitress: Every organization has their press relations people, whatever they’re called their job includes the grim task of having to interact with, pacify and inform the human subspecies known as journalists, a job only slightly less difficult and thankless than coordinating Baptist missionaries in Saudi Arabia.

But when it’s done well it can be done quite well indeed – Angela Lipscomb at SAS is one of the better ones First CoffeeSM’s encountered – and Mentha Benek has done an outstanding job making First CoffeeSM’s trip a) possible, and b) smooth, arranging interviews, the hotel, all the details necessary.

First Coffee for September 8, 2005

September 8, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is… lemme find a CD here… oh, how about country blues master Rev. Gary Davis, Say No to The Devil:

Thanks to Ali Jani, SVP of product management and founder of iCode for taking the time to answer some of First CoffeeSM’s questions. In a few places answers have been lightly edited for a conversational tone:

You’ve been quite an advocate of India as a resource for American high-tech firms. Could iCode be as successful as it is with an “all-American” operation?

Actually, iCode, Inc. is more successful with a mixture of American and India-based resources due to the quality of the talent pool in both locations, the 24/7 around the clock availability for increased productivity, and cost effectiveness. iCode’s carefully blended mixture of India- and American-based resources has had a positive growth impact on iCode’s total solution offerings to the marketplace.

First Coffee for September 7, 2005

September 7, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an old favorite, Al Stewart’s Modern Times:

Got an e-mail yesterday from Jeffrey Billado:

I am a PBX salesman and I came across a bid request for a hotel property that requires speech activated valet services. Essentially what they desire is the ability for a guest to press one button from their room phone, hit an IVR, request their car, set the time for pickup and then go down to the valet area at that time. This needs to be all speech activated - they only want to press the initial button from the room phone.

Are you aware of any pre-packaged solutions that can do this?

Anybody know of something e-mail Jeff at [email protected].
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Microsoft adopts the on-demand hosted software delivery model… well, kinda.

Australian-based AIE Technologies is announcing the launch of www.Software4Rent.Biz, what they describe as “a fully automated, web-based service where users can rent popular Microsoft programs such as PowerPoint, Excel, Project, etc., on an ad-hoc basis such as by the hour, day, week, etc.”

Leave it to the Aussies. Most underrated country in the world. The website allows users to use a credit card to rent software for as little as $2 a day and can be accessed at www.software4rent.biz.

Garry Ohlson, AIE’s CEO told Byron Connolly in August that the service “had taken three years to develop as a response to Microsoft’s Service Provider Licensing Agreements of 2002,” in Connolly’s words.

As a result, AIE can offer Software4Rent, what they’re billing as “a world first – an online, internet accessed system to rent various Microsoft products and soon other software such as accounting, security, design, CRM etc., on an as-needed basis, on demand, online and always available.”

This sounds like a trial balloon to First CoffeeSM, the good folks back in Redmond’ll be watching to see how this flies. Microsoft Australia licensing product manager Thomas Kablau told ComputerWorld a couple weeks ago that Microsoft has around 62 direct SPLA partners in Australia that offer Microsoft products on a rental basis.

Based on AIE’s CALPIM software asset management engine, Software4Rent allows SME, SoHo and private users to be one-hundred proof license compliant with their software at hosted prices.

Many people cannot justify what they perceive as a high license cost for their perceived low or private usage,” Ohlson said, “so rather than buy it, many individuals borrow or download a copy illegally.

First Coffee for September 6, 2005

September 6, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Frank Sinatra’s album In The Wee Small Hours:

It’s a mixed blessing when your two favorite tennis players go head-to-head in the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam, but First CoffeeSM will be cheering for Andre Agassi to just barely defeat James Blake in the most thrilling five-set quarterfinal match in U.S. Open history tomorrow. His son Blake will be, understandably, cheering for the opposition.
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Optaros Inc. is a venture capital-funded consulting and systems integration firm that concentrates on helping large enterprises get into open source software and global sourcing.

First Coffee for September 5, 2005

September 5, 2005

First Coffee for September 2, 2005

September 2, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Steve Taylor’s “Written Guarantee:”

Okay, let’s start with a helping of humble pie this morning, a correction on Wednesday’s First CoffeeSM:

“Hello, thanks for the mention of Jybe but I wanted to clarify something,” writes Brian Hoogendam from www.jybe.com. “The winner of the Skype competition was www.jyve.com – that is Jyve, not Jybe. While we did get an honorable mention, Charles, Andrew and the team at Jyve really worked hard and I wanted to make sure they are given proper credit.”

Consider it corrected, Brian, sorry about that. The press release mentioned both in confusing terms (non-native English speakers wrote the release), so First CoffeeSM took what seemed the most logical reading.
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Got another great comment, this one from J. Alec West:

“If the FCC needs to mandate anything, it should be a two tier service level – BASIC (no 911) and ENHANCED (e911 compliant).

First Coffee for September 1, 2005

September 1, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is “No More Looking Back” by The Kinks, one of this great band’s finest songs:

“Today customers are being introduced to the new Sprint,” says Len Lauer, Sprint’s chief operating officer.

Company officials are saying the “new Sprint” is opening for business “under a new brand,” where the “resounding answer” to “virtually all” customer questions will be “Yes, you can.” They promise a greater number and diversity of devices and the extent and breadth of applications and content, along with “new, compelling pricing plans.”

Get ready for an “aggressive” market-saturating ad campaign where “Sprint will be hard to miss in September and into the fourth quarter,” as they’ll be busy convincing you that “the new Sprint will make digital life simple, instant, enriching and productive.”

Sprint’s also promising to drive true revenue through meaningful and relevant content directly to the wireless device, part of “aggressive position in maximizing its sponsorship assets,” such as its deals with NASCAR and the NFL.

Highlights of their go-to-market offers include:

Sprint Fair & Flexible. A plan that includes nationwide roaming and allows customers to use their phones as much as they want with no huge overages, as the plans “adjust automatically to meet a customer’s usage month to month.”

Sprint Free Incoming. Free incoming calls anytime, from anywhere on the Sprint PCS Network or Nextel National Network.

Sprint Mobile to Mobile Calling. Unlimited minutes for just $5 a month for customers on the Sprint PCS Network and the Nextel National Network.

The Ability to Turn Back Time. With a new plan, the customer can choose when their nights begin: at 6, 7 or 9 p.m.

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