By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 5,
songs from his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue finally released officially in 2002:
Eerily enough, there’s an almost direct parallel to the Brand X contretemps elsewhere in the world –
Latvia’s two mobile operators “appear
unwilling to cooperate with newcomer Lithuania’s Bite GSM, which is eager to
lease mobile infrastructure to begin operations, possibly setting the stage for
a confrontation,” according to The Baltic Times a
couple weeks ago.
Basically, LMT and Tele2 don’t want to lease their
infrastructure to Bite GSM while Bite installs its own relay network.
Bite GSM won the tender for Latvia’s third GSM license on March 31, which
evidently meant it now has to sink 150 million euros ($180 million) in building
a new network, but “in the meantime the Danish-owned company would like to use
competitors’ infrastructure in order to launch operations and begin receiving
revenue,” the Times says.
The Latvians aren’t having any of it. “We are not considering such a
possibility now,” Petras Kirdeika, acting CEO of Tele2 has said. LMT, Latvia’s
leading mobile operator, said that it won’t lease its network to other
operators, pleading a lack of excess capacity. Bite officials have offered to
cover the costs of expanding LMT’s capacity. “Bite me,” LMT President Juris
Binde said (in essence).
So why isn’t the Latvian government forcing these network
owners to let competitors use their stuff? Liga Rimsevica, spokeswoman of the
Public Utilities Regulatory Commission, said – imagine – that it’s the mobile
operators’ right to sell their network to whomever they want to: “Presently we
do not have a lever for putting additional commitments on LMT and Tele2
regarding the lease of their networks.”
Companies getting to use their own property to further their
own business interests and not be forced to help their direct competitors –
what a wacky idea, huh?
…
Industry observer David
Paddon says that AOL Canada “is preparing to make a major change in the way it generates
revenues, starting with the launch of a Canadian website that delivers free
video and other content over a broadband connection.”
AOL Canada’s new plan is to generate revenues from
advertising and search engines, giving consumers access to free content,
including from AOL parent Time Warner.
Paddon calls the move a “radical departure for AOL Canada,
which has been charging subscribers a monthly fee for access to Time Warner
content, delivered primarily over dial-up lines with the help of its own
specialized software.”
After the change any standard web browser and high-speed
broadband connection from any service provider can access the revamped aol.ca.
America Online plans a similar revamp of www.aol.com in mid-July.
AOL Canada announced the nationwide availability of AOL
TotalTalk, its residential phone service based on VoIP technology on June 1st,
following the initial availability of AOL TotalTalk in the Greater Toronto Area
earlier this year.
…
Amae Software officials are announcing “successful deployment” of an Amae CI Suite
upgrade that automatically integrates records from leading quality monitoring
vendors including Verint Systems, Witness Systems, Nice Systems, and eTalk
(Autonomy).
Gerald Wluka, VP of Products at Amae Software said call center managers and
supervisors can now “review their customer experiences from their customer’s
perspective and compare with the actual recorded call. This gives management,
supervisors, and quality personnel a complete picture regarding service quality
and customer opportunities and issues.”
To curry favor with management, the new functionality is designed to save
management time and effort. It can also be used to validate and calibrate QA
scores and allow companies to look at interactions from the company and
customer’s perspective.
Call center quality management products will typically do
things like let supervisors listen to and record phone conversations while they’re
viewing the agent’s desktop activities, quietly and unobtrusively checking in
on agent desktops as the call center operates. The software will come with a
customizable scoring report card across categories for agent evaluation, such
as presentation, product knowledge, disclosure, handling objections or whatever
other criteria the call center supervisors desire.
…
Public service announcement: According to Reuters,
“Pakistan’s
data and Internet links with the outside world will be affected until at least
the weekend as repairs are carried out on a faulty undersea fiber-optic
cable.”
The cable malfunctioned late Monday, cutting the country’s
international data links, including the Internet. Satellite back-up systems
were brought on-stream on Wednesday, restoring some Internet access. Pakistan
has only one international cable Internet link.
…
Singapore-based Pacific Internet Limited’s fully-owned
subsidiary Pacific
Internet (Australia) Pty Limited has won a tender to connect 46 Fantastic Furniture stores to a secure
broadband private network.
Revealing the soul of an IT manager, Peter Vernon, IT
Manager, Fantastic Furniture said the company was impressed with, among other
things, that “their detailed project implementation process ensured all stores
were connected without hassles, and on time.”
Vernon said the company also plans to introduce a
centralized e-mail system and an intranet for increased store and head office
productivity.
...
One of the most enjoyably well-written books First CoffeeSM
has ever read is 1982’s Miss Manners’
Guide To Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, by etiquette columnist Judith
Martin. The new version has
been released. Excerpts from an interview with Martin by Tim Engle
of Knight-Ridder Newspapers:
Q: I hear that this book is 100-plus pages longer than the
1982 original… we’ve come up with lots of new ways to be rude?
A: Oh, yes. The chief one is social extortion: “We are
registered at ...” it often starts out. Or cash bars. Or, “Come to dinner but
bring the dinner.” We’ve virtually destroyed the charming old customs of the
exchange of hospitality, of the exchange of presents. If I give you my shopping
list and you give me yours, what’s the point?
Q: I know you’re opposed to cash as a gift. What about gift
cards?
A: That means, “You go buy it, I’m not going to bother
trying to do it.” That’s the next thing from cash. And the gift registries. All
these things. The point of presents is: “I’m fond of you, and here’s my best
guess as to what would please you.” A gift certificate, if anything, is
probably less charming than cash because it limits what you can do with it.
Q: Let’s talk about some recent technologies. There are so
many ways someone on a cell phone can be rude. What’s at the top of your list?
A: I worry about the person who is being called. When you
hear these conversations being shouted in the street – and by the way, there
were always etiquette rules against shouting – what do they consist of? “I’m
crossing the street now, the light changed, I might get a cup of coffee, looks
like rain.” Somebody has to listen to this drivel! There’s always been a rule
in place against boring people senseless, but this is a new way to do it.
Q: Does your column get one kind of question more than any
other?
A: Well, for some years now it’s been mostly about greed:
the people who want me to whitewash their greed – “What’s the polite way of
asking people for cash?” – or the people who are victims of this and have come,
pathetically, to believe that this is a social obligation of theirs.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content – and never drinks decaf, either.
