First Coffee

First Coffee for July 20, 2005

July 20, 2005

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Lyle Lovett’s Pontiac:

Plantronics is full of beans this morning, with press advisories about new headsets and a contest to win a place on a space flight.

As Plantronics notes today is the 36-year anniversary of the moon landing, and since Plantronics provided headset Neil Armstrong used to broadcast the “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” transmission from the moon in 1969, the company’s rolling out a “new brand identity and national advertising campaign,” according to company officials, replete with a new corporate logo and tagline – “Sound innovation.”

They’re also launching the “Plantronics to Space and Beyond” promotion, offering consumers “a chance to win a seat on board one of the first commercial flights to space,” according to the contest site. First CoffeeSM hasn’t checked the “full details,” but is sure there’s a list of qualifying details from here to the moon. If only you got miles…

So let’s get to the product announcements:

First up we have the CS55 and CS55 Micro wireless headsets, being billed by company officials as “the first all-wireless headsets in the US to use the new 1.9 GHz voice-dedicated frequency.” They’ll be available in October.

The 1.9 GHz DECT standard frequency is a new voice-dedicated frequency, designed to get rid of interference from nearby Wi-Fi networks, cordless telephones, and other wireless office equipment common on other frequencies.

The headsets themselves, with small booms and weighing 24 to 26 grams and costing about $300, let users move up to 300 feet from their desks while still on a call.

The Pulsar 590 is a Bluetooth stereo headset that lets users listen wirelessly to music and movies and switch to mobile phone calls by pressing one button. Available with a universal Bluetooth audio adapter, the Pulsar 590 provides immediate wireless compatibility for any device with a headphone jack, such as laptops, home stereos, MP3 players, including Apple iPods, and multimedia devices, such as Sony PSP.

The Pulsar 590’s extended range capabilities let users listen to music or have conversations up to 33 feet away from their laptop, music device or cell phone.

First Coffee for July 19, 2005

July 19, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Dave Brubeck’s Time Out. Just never gets old, does it?

First CoffeeSM welcomes Bruce Cleveland this morning. Cleveland is Siebel’s new senior vice president of products, but he’s still running, as before, the company’s OnDemand hosted CRM product and the small and medium business division.

Cleveland graciously took the time to answer some questions First CoffeeSM had. Excerpts appear below, the entire Q&A will be in an article by First CoffeeSM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego on the TMC site later today:

FC: Congratulations on your promotion at Siebel. Do you get a nicer office now, too?

Refill.

July 16, 2005

First CoffeeSM is in Ankara on Monday, getting two of his kids’ passports renewed at the American Embassy there. Unfortunately it’s not something you can do online. So apologies, and we’ll be back Tuesday.

Got this e-mail today from yet another wretched soul, Debby, who made the mistake of trusting Caiman.com. Debby writes:

I wish I had found this site BEFORE I ordered from Caiman! I ordered a game on May 27th and paid the extra cost for “expedited shipping”. On June 15th I sent an e-mail requesting status on my order. My order was shipped (finally) on June 17th.

I requested a refund for the expedited shipping cost, since they did NOT expedite. They are INSISTING that expedited shipping means that I should receive the order 3 to 6 business days AFTER they ship it. HUH? Expedited shipping, to everyone else on the planet, means the order should be SHIPPED faster than a regular order.

I’m planning on pursuing this as far as possible – it’s not the money now, it’s the principle.

First CoffeeSM has adopted it as his personal CRM In Real Life crusade to make Amazon.com aware of the terrible service, unfilled orders, misleading promises and other reasons why they should disallow Caiman.com from their site.

Call Caiman.com. Caiman.com’s phone number is (305) 262-4973, and Caiman.com’s fax number is (305) 468-3892.

Call Amazon.com. E-mail Amazon.com. If enough of us do it, they’ll have to listen.

First Coffee for July 15, 2005

July 15, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Sony’s compilation Pop Music: The Golden Era, 1951-1975 released in 1999. Nice variety of artists from Frank Sinatra to LaBelle, Louis Armstrong to Bob Dylan:

First CoffeeSM’s post on what terrible customer service online retailer Caiman.com provides gets another assent from yet another screwed-over Caiman.com customer.

Frankly First CoffeeSM’s wondering whether terrible customer service provided by such companies is a concern of Amazon.com or not. It’s time to find out.

Because it’s one thing to report on Customer Relationship Management news and issues, and offer insights and pointers on good customer service, that’s great and First CoffeeSM likes doing that, but there are times when something needs to be done in the real world, and it’s time for Amazon.com to do something about Caiman.com.

It started when Caiman.com promised a fictitious ship-by date on a CD First CoffeeSM mild-mannered reporter alter ego ordered from Amazon.com. Their customer “service” afterwards was insulting, canned and rude, so it made a great article, Three Ways To Lose Customers.

Reader Greg Veeser wrote in to say yup, same thing happened to me.

1 Comments

First Coffee for July 14, 2005

July 14, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Primal Scream’s 1994 album Give Out But Don’t Give Up:

A tip of the coffee pot to Lawrence “Larry” Asten, who’s being given the position of vice president, worldwide sales and business development at Excel Switching Corporation, a vendor of carrier-class, open services platforms, media gateways and media servers.

Asten’s a respected industry veteran who has about as many years in telecommunications sales and business development as First CoffeeSM has on the planet. He’ll lead Excel’s global sales effort.
…

Market analyst Datamonitor is releasing a report this morning examining “the drivers affecting U.S. banks’ distribution channel strategies and the resulting technology implications.” It gets worse.

Regular readers of this space know that First CoffeeSM casts a colder eye on studies purporting to know to decimal places how much money’s going to be spent on this or that a few years off in the future, since the one thing you can always, always count on is that current trends will not continue as neatly as they’re graphed out. But it is nice when you can at least discern what the report is saying.

The report, “Distribution Strategies In U.S.

First Coffee for July 13, 2005

July 13, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tom Waits’ Meisterwerk, 1985’s Rain Dogs:

Global IP Sound is announcing an OEM license agreement with Microsoft for voice processing products which “improve PC-to-PC voice quality” to be used with MSN and Microsoft Office Real-Time Collaboration, according to Global officials.

The MSN Service, which has more than 165 million active users each month, supports not only text instant messaging but also PC-to-PC voice and video services. MSN will use GIPS VoiceEngine, while RTC will use GIPS Acoustic Echo Cancellation and GIPS Auto Gain Control high quality VoIP functionality.

Gary P. Hermansen, President and CEO of GIPS said there are over 200 million downloads of their software currently in market today.

GIPS VoiceEngine is a packaged VoIP product created specifically for PC or PDA applications to improve sound quality in Internet telephony, simplify the integration of speech codecs, communication with sound cards, real-time performance, RTP protocol handling and other voice-related tasks. GIPS AEC is used to eliminate echo caused by acoustic feedback in real-time communications in a PC environment.
…

First CoffeeSM is glad things are going so well for the University of Arizona that they need to use CRM to handle all their applications.

The U is using edGenuiti’s Multi-Channel & Multi-Campus CRM for Higher Education to automate much of the University of Arizona’s inquiry and application process, allowing their study abroad staff to manage a record number of applications last year.

Prior to edGenuiti, the study abroad office used separate databases to track different stages of the enrollment process – inquiry, applicant, accepted, rejected, etc. And to make things interesting, the databases were only available via one computer in the office.

First Coffee for July 12, 2005

July 12, 2005

Talk away, sister.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the ol' iTunes shuffle, current selection "Jesus Walking On the Water" by The Violent Femmes:

Here we go again. Another highly slanted crap “study” purporting to show how dangerous it is to talk on the cell phone while driving. Cue the Moron Choir’s tired, scratchy refrain about how cell phone usage in cars should be banned.

First CoffeeSM will listen to pleas to ban cell phone usage while driving once roadside ads, rubbernecking at wreck sites, drive-through fast food, driving while tired, driving after taking prescription drugs, car audio systems, talking to passengers, looking at scenery and loose objects in cars, easily distractable and generally flat-out stupid people driving are all banned, since every honest study that’s ever been done shows all of those cause far, far more accidents than cell phone usage.

Prescription drugs alone cause one-third of all accidents. One third!

First Coffee for July 11, 2005

July 11, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Best of Tony Bennett:

A tip of the coffee pot to Dan Taylor, just appointed to Scribe Software Corporation’s board of directors. Dan’s the founder and former CEO of ManagedOps.com and The Taylor Group, and the author of Integration Manager, the original standard for integration with Microsoft Great Plains that is now part of the Microsoft Great Plains offering.
...

It’s nice to get a different-sounding news advisory once in a while, and Business Signatures Corporation is announcing that today they’ve “emerged from a four-year stealth phase” to “unveil an innovative software solution called Business Signatures Customer Intent Suite.”

A four-year stealth phase! That’s a lot more bracing than the usual “Acme Anvils is announcing the release of the revolutionary innovative earthshattering epochal XP-49 Roadrunner Crusher dashboard add-on solution…” drone.

Based on what BSC claims is “new data management technology,” it’s “designed to help companies discern the intent of their online customers in real time – and act upon it immediately.”

Business Signatures was founded in 2001 by three ex-Oracle guys who set out to solve what they identified as “the three biggest challenges facing online businesses today” – managing IT infrastructure for the best possible customer experience, preventing online fraud and maximizing customer profitability through personalized customer service.

To do this, company officials explain, they “focused on the one problem not currently addressed by existing solutions: understanding customers’ online interactions as they happen, at scale and at the individual customer and transaction level.”

The product BSC is hawking here is designed to give companies an “instantaneous” view of customer intent: what online customers are trying to do in the moment. They think this will allow companies to “act immediately to service, protect and, ultimately, retain their customers.”

Peter Relan, founder and CEO of Business Signatures says discerning actionable customer intent in the online channel is a lot harder than it is in a store, where you can watch the customer pick up a paintbrush, a roller, drop cloths, price blue paint and scrapers, discern he’s going to paint his back porch and go over and offer painting tips and suggestions and sell him some extra sanders and a stepladder and keep him coming back as a Satisfied Customer.

Can’t do that online.

First Coffee for July 8, 2005

July 8, 2005

“As Brits, we’ll carry on — it doesn’t scare us at all,” said tour guide Michael Cahill, 37. “Look, loads of people are walking down the streets. It’s Great Britain – not called ‘Great’ for nothing.”

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the eerily appropriate The Unforgettable Fire by U2, especially the first cut, “A Sort of Homecoming” which would serve well as the soundtrack for a London bombing video montage:

Why, now here’s a timely product announcement. Applied Global Technologies rushed out a press release this morning “announcing” the “development” of a communications package for Emergency Response and Management Applications.

Almost creepy how… well-timed that was.

“The compact, self-contained ruggedized kit allows first responders to provide terrestrial command centers with immediate data, video and audio from any remote location,” reads the press release.

“Ruggedized,” wow.

First Coffee for July 7, 2005

July 7, 2005

UBy David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Everybody’s Bach, a Deutsche Grammophon collection of Bach pieces released this year:

The Oki Electric Industry Co. is announcing that it’s delivered an IP telephony system to Kobe Steel, Ltd. based on Oki’s IP telephony server, IP Convergence Server SS9100.

Kobe Steel installed 2,000 units of Oki’s IP phones in its Tokyo headquarters, according to Oki officials, and expects to expand to 15 locations to reach 10,000 IP telephony units throughout the country by the fiscal year ending March 2009. If that happens it’ll be one of the largest IP telephony systems in Japan.

NTT Communications Corp. took charge of the system integration, and Kobelco Systems Corp. took charge of the total coordination.

First CoffeeSM realizes that Kobe Steel’s headquarters are in Tokyo, not Kobe, but still, perhaps mindful of the terrible Kobe earthquake in January of 1995, which cost thousands of lives and billions of yen in damages, disaster considerations are built into the system: “In addition, even in a time of a disaster when PSTNs restrictions apply to communications, outgoing calls can be made via Kobe Center, which makes it a disaster-resistant system,” Oki officials say.

Or maybe that’s a nationwide thing now, like New Zealand, Japan’s earthquake-proof construction requirements are tight and strict.
…

First CoffeeSM’s tiring of the Siebel – salesforce.com game of announcing new customer wins in the style of “Acme Anvils chose salesforce.com, NOT SIEBEL! HA HA!

Previous 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 Next