By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is five Al Stewart CDs on the changer. Here’s betting you don’t have five – here’s
betting you can’t name five Al
Stewart CDs, and we’ll spot you The Year
Of The Cat and Time Passages:
Pro-SAAP Solutions is announcing the launch
of what they’re calling “a powerful new web
based business management” product, Version 5.0,) for the newspaper and magazine publishing industry that will, the
company claims, “support a dramatic technological advance for companies that
adopt the strategy.”
It’s being pitched to “newspapers and publishing businesses” who have dreamed
of “jumping directly from a 1980s era legacy application to 21st Century Web
based information processing.” Sounds good, doesn’t it?
It was developed by a guy who never has to spell his name over the phone, Sibusiso Tshabalala, President &
CEO Pro-SAAP, LLC, nicknamed who’s described in company materials as “an
entrepreneur who managed the advertising and online systems infrastructure for…
publishing firms, including the San
Francisco Chronicle and Ziff-Davis.”
It’s designed, company officials say, to use the investment
companies have made in existing mainframe systems. “In contrast,” they claim, publishing
industry products “from application software vendors like PeopleSoft, SAP, etc.
require ripping out the existing infrastructure and can cost several million
dollars in software license fees and implementation services.”
The Pro-SAAP product, company officials claim, “can be
implemented at a fraction of the cost.”
Tshabalala said Pro-SAAP’s product helps publishing companies migrate “from
legacy technologies into a web-based environment at a fraction of the cost of
implementing a new ERP class application.”
It works with the Admarc software used by a little over half of the newspaper
and magazine publishing firms in North America. It “can be implemented in a
matter of months, and “typical implementations are expected to cost between
$250,000-500,000,” company officials say.
…
This was announced over the weekend, but First CoffeeSM
was hip-deep in Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince, hopefully you were too. Best one in the series except
for the first one. First CoffeeSM is having a hard time seeing how
she’ll tie it all up in one more book – she’s promised seven for the series.
Anyway, Saturday DataDelta, Inc. announced that in
partnership with market research firm The
CDI Institute the launch of the “Single
Customer View Accuracy Survey” survey, billed as “the first Customer Data
Integration industry survey to measure Single Customer View accuracy resulting
from CDI projects.”
“The ability to cut through complexity and provide an accurate view of the customer
is one of the most important aspects of information management today,” Janet
Perna, general manager of IBM’s Information Management division has said.
Ed Allburn, president and CEO of DataDelta, which he claims is “the CDI
industry’s first vendor-neutral tool to analyze and fine-tune CDI system
accuracy” says that traditionally CDI has focused mainly on the mechanics of
data integration with less attention paid the accuracy of the actual results. Yet
he feels that customers “with increasingly powerful Business Intelligence
technologies are demanding increasingly accurate CDI results” – reasonably
enough, First CoffeeSM supposes.
Philip Howard, Research Director at Bloor Research and author of “Data Quality:
An Evaluation and Comparison” says with existing technologies, most companies
using CDI “have to compromise between the accuracy of matching that they use –
either they have to accept a number of false matches or they have to put up
with too many duplicates.”
DataDelta – why does First CoffeeSM keep wanting
to write that as Delta Dawn? – claims the survey is “the first of its kind.” Initial
survey results will be presented at the 17th Information Quality Conference
hosted by Larry English and The International Association for Information and
Data Quality September 19-23 in Houston.
David Raab of Raab Associates, a marketing technology consultant and author of
comparison guides for CRM and customer matching software, says that the CDI
accuracy problem may be much more wide spread than previously realized. “The
complex nature of optimizing record matching business rules means that most
companies likely have serious problems with at least some of their data,” Raab
thinks.
…
Software vendor Autonomy Corporation plc is launching an
upgrade to its existing mobile search technology, IDOL Mobile.
Autonomy provides the core technology that allows mobile
telecommunication carriers to deliver targeted multimedia content – videos, ring
tones, what have you, to e-commerce product suggestions to consumers on the
move – which means you, Faithful Consumer.
IDOL Mobile is one of those double-edged blessings of the
modern world, one of those products which lets other people – in this case, telecommunications
providers – “continuously” (yes, that’s what they threaten) “reach out” to
subscribers with a steady stream of multimedia content – video, files, ring tones,
games, news, e-commerce suggestions, web pages specifically repurposed for
mobile screens, messages from Big Brother sitting in his wheelchair with his dog
by his side, ads… sorry, got carried away there, of course they
wouldn’t push ads, just e-commerce suggestions.
IDOL Mobile can also be used as a work tool, “a fast gateway
to internal and external information from mobile handsets,” the company claims.
“The technology keeps employees abreast of the latest news and developments,”
along, of course, with the latest video, files, ring tones, games, news,
e-commerce suggestions, web pages specifically repurposed for mobile screens,
messages from Big Brother sitting in his wheelchair with his dog by his side,
ads…
This latest upgrade to IDOL Mobile extends the functionality
already available to subscribers, enhancing the retrieval and information
delivery functions so that mobile users can now access over 300 file formats
from their wireless device.
“Mobile search is a hard problem to solve,” said Sue
Feldman, IDC’s VP for Content Technologies. “With small screens and limited
interactivity, mobile users don’t want extraneous information delivered to them.”
…
A friend wrote to First CoffeeSM today suggesting
that Harry
Potter himself could be the seventh Horcrux. Don’t worry, if you
haven’t finished The Half-Blood Prince
this isn’t giving anything away, it’s all pure speculation, but as he says:
I say that Harry
himself is the seventh Horcrux thus explaining why Snape hates him and why
Harry is partial to snakes and can hiss the hiss even if he can’t slither the
slither.
That’s right, First CoffeeSM had forgotten that
Harry was a Parselmouth.
He-who-has-earned-JK-more-galleons-than-the-Spanish-Armada
killed old Lilly (if she had gone to Yale instead of Hogwarts would she now be
known as Eli Lilly?) thus committing a murder in order to make Harry into the
Hor-Dog that he has now become (thanks to Ginny). Remember, the Sorting
Hat originally wanted to make Harry a Slytherin,
Forgotten that too. Man, that J.K. Rowling is one good writer.
his scar hurts
whenever He-who-must....eh, HIM, comes a knocking, and Harry can
sometimes see what whosis is up to. I say one seventh of He-Who is hiding
behind those black foster grants. JK makes a big point of having
Dumbledore explain how a Horcrux can be a living thing (the snake) but that it
is risky for someone to make a Horcrux out of something that can move and
think. It’s Harry - that’s why he survived the attack from He-Who.
He was never meant to die. It also explains why He-who needed his blood
and why no one is allowed to kill him.
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content.
