First Coffee

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Gustav Holst's The Planets suite. Yes, we're quite highbrow here at First Coffee. It was our New Year's resolution, to improve and broaden the music played here at the sprawling headquarters just outside of Milwaukee, get off the Frank Sinatra treadmill:

Small and medium-sized businesses now can get Verizon Internet access coupled with automatic wireless broadband backup, according to Verizon officials.   White gloves included: "This gives small- and medium-sized business customers Internet access along with the peace of mind that comes with having a wireless backup plan in place," says Carrie Gray, Verizon Business executive director of SMB solutions marketing, adding that their "white-glove managed installation approach" is used.   The product, catchily named Verizon Internet Dedicated Access with Mobile Broadband, routes business traffic to the Verizon Wireless 3G EV-DO broadband wireless network in the event of a service disruption. Company officials are pitching it as "ideal" for businesses with distributed locations, who primarily use IDA for outbound traffic, Web research or point-of-sale transactions. 

The broadband backup over the Verizon Wireless network is intended to give SMB customers an alternative to traditional wireline business-continuity, Verizon officials say, offering "high speed at a low cost." It has two linked ADTRAN NetVanta 3200 routers -- one connected to the primary T1 access source and the other featuring a 3G wireless Network Interface Module designed for use with the Verizon Wireless network.
"Small and mid-size businesses, across a variety of vertical industries, seek the same resilient, reliable networks of their large counterparts," said Gary Bolton, vice president of global marketing, ADTRAN.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Aimee Mann's Christmas album, Another Drifter In The Snow, right now First Coffee's favorite Christmas album:

IPromote has announced what company officials are calling a "breakthrough" for small businesses, with the addition of mobile advertising to its local platform.   Company officials are billing it as a way of "providing businesses with the opportunity to unlock the ROI potential of display advertising on mobile devices." In short, iPromote is a way to get exposure in the mobile market at a local level with ads shown on thousands of popular apps and mobile-specific Web sites.

At a minimum of five dollars per day, small businesses will now receive instant mobile and Web-based ads and the ability to target locally all in one campaign. iPromote's local ad server, AdXpert, uses both distribution channels to deliver lead generation for the advertiser.
"Local businesses can now access mobile advertising to directly reach new customers in their local area," says Michael Barr, CEO of iPromote, adding that "mobile advertising is expected to experience phenomenal growth in the next few years."

IPromote is a division of 2KDirect, and operates offices in San Luis Obispo, California and New York City. 2KDirect also operates the iPromote Ad Network and AdXpert local ad serving technology. ...

Another worthy cause First Coffee's glad to help publicize: For the sixth consecutive year, Comcast is offering Troop Greetings On Demand at no additional cost to its digital cable customers through the end of January 2010.   The service delivers Christmas greetings from military personnel stationed overseas to their loved ones back home to watch whenever and as often as they wish. The video greetings are accessible under the "Get Local" section of Comcast's signature On Demand menu, and run anywhere from five to twenty-five seconds.
To compile Troop Greetings On Demand, Comcast secured hundreds of videotapes from Army/Air Force Hometown News Service and edited them into short video greetings for viewers.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a scientific comparison of Robert Earl Keen's three live albums. Right now Live In Austin, Texas, the more acoustic country-fried one, is holding a slight edge over Live At The Ryman a decidedly more rocking show. No. 2 Live Dinner is maybe not as good at either his country or rock sound as either of the above, it does feature more between-song patter, which, unfortunately, is not Mr. Keen's strong suit -- Arlo Guthrie or Todd Snider he is not.

But we must say we do love No. 2's inspired, blazing "The Road Goes On Forever" and "Think It Over One Time" versions.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is... folks, it's just a Rod Stewart "Big Bayou" kind of day -- crank up the Chuck Berry riffs, the pounding honky-tonk piano, the Muscle Shoals horns, the good-time Southern-fried songwriting and let 'er rip:

Dependable HomeTech, a Canada- based provider of technology support services for residential and business customers, has selected InVision Enterprise WFM for scheduling its call center agents.   By implementing the technology from InVision Software, a vendor of enterprise-wide workforce management tools, DHT officials said they're trying to improve the efficiency of their disparate service departments - "This will result in a better service at the appropriate times for customers and a reduction in labor costs."

DHT employs 500 people in total, with 150 of them working in the DHT headquarters-based call center. They get calls from residential and business customers, provide technical support and premium support over the phone or online.   The company's decision to purchase InVision's software was influenced by "several factors," DHT officials say, "besides economic reasons and InVision's competitive pricing."   Evidently DHT required one single platform for planning across disparate departments in order to achieve "flexibility in staff planning," company officials say, adding that they liked InVision's optimization engine and the module AutoScheduler: "Now, the planners at DHT can create requirement-driven and optimized schedules at the push of a button while meeting all scheduling constraints."

Founded in 1995 and based in Ratingen, Germany, InVision employs more than 210 WFM specialists and has offices across Europe, North America, and South Africa. ...

PilotFish Technology officials say they've enhanced their XCS eiConsole to support the SAP IDoc formats.   The XCS eiConsole is a graphical Integrated Development Environment for developing, deploying, managing, and maintaining interfaces "between any system and any other system regardless of platform, operating system, database, data format, or communications protocol," company officials claim.   The XCS eiConsole, with support for SAP IDoc integration, is being marketed as a way to get capabilities designed to slash the time required to parse, produce, and map IDoc data formats - it "address the subtleties of working with SAP IDoc."

In addition to supporting the SAP IDoc formats, the XCS eiConsole supports all major XML standards, EDI formats, and connectivity options, such as database, file directory, e-mail, FTP, HTTP, JMS, RMI, SOAP Web Service, what have you. This would make integrating SAP systems a whole lot easier.

You can get a free 90-day evaluation download of the XCS eiConsole with support from the PilotFish site linked above.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Clash's London Calling. One big reason The Clash are still listened to today and the vast majority of punk from that era is forgotten is that The Clash had what the vast majority of punks did not: You could sense joy and fun in their music along with the passionate politics:

The Federal Trade Commission has told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection of the Committee on Energy and Commerce that it's cracking down on the deceptive marketing of prepaid phone cards.   The Commission vote approving the testimony was 4-0. FTC officials say pending legislation would give the agency "stronger tools to combat the problem."
Lois Greisman, Associate Director of the FTC's Division of Marketing Practices, says that in 2009 the FTC obtained court orders settling two cases against major distributors of prepaid calling cards, imposing judgments of more than $3.5 million for deceiving consumers about the number of calling minutes that their cards provide.