By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is still that Traffic live CD, Welcome To The Canteen. First Coffee^SM had forgotten what a good work CD it is:

Got another comment on Caiman.com’s terrible customer service, this one from “Anthony:”

I think they have their people put false positive feedback on amazon.com. I have been cheated by them I wish I had tried harder to find a local copy of Xenogears.

First Coffee^SM’s heard from a lot of people who’ve been let down by Caiman.com – either not getting what they ordered, having it arrive grossly late or not at all, and being sent rude e-mails by a company completely uninterested in providing good customer service.

Someday soon, we hope, Amazon.com is going to do the right thing by their customers in the choice of vendors they allow to sell items on their site.
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A tip of the coffee pot to Akshay Sharma, formerly Siemens’ Chief Architect Mobile Enterprise Solutions Calypso Wireless, Inc., who’s been appointed Calypso’s Chief Technology Officer. Company officials say Sharma will be tasked with spearheading implementation of Calypso’s technology on the C1250i WiFi-GSM-GPRS VoIP smart cellular phone.

“One of Mr. Sharma’s principal tasks will be to coordinate the activities of all three Calypso Research & Development centers in Miami Florida, Milan Italy and Hong Kong,” said Mike Pizzi, Executive Vice President & General Counsel of Calypso Wireless.
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It’s always nice when someone takes customer satisfaction seriously enough to spend money on it. MCI, Inc. has announced that it has enhanced its customer loyalty program through “an expanded strategic engagement” with customer experience management vendor Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

In addition to their existing twice-yearly customer relationship surveys, MCI’s customer-facing operations can now “receive immediate customer feedback on all non-technical inquiries, technical faults and provisioning activities, which provide MCI with real-time representation of operational performance,” according to company officials.

Andy MacLeod, general manager and senior vice president, MCI Europe said the company expects to get “immediate access to customer feedback,” allowing them to “monitor progress toward delivering an enhanced customer experience.”

Launched in 2004, MCI’s Customer Loyalty Program was centered around a relationship survey, designed to gather quantitative and qualitative feedback from MCI’s most important customers. In early 2005, MCI tweaked the program to gain more immediate customer feedback on issues such as how a service was delivered or how an inquiry to
MCI’s help desk was addressed.

Company officials say the feedback provided “has already led to a number of customer loyalty activities and improvement initiatives, as well as steering investments aimed at improving customer service.”
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Palm, Inc. and Research In Motion have announced that they’re working together to bring BlackBerry Connect to the Palm Treo 650 smartphone. The companies expect the product to be available in the United States and internationally starting in early calendar 2006, according to company officials.

Through RIM’s BlackBerry Connect licensing program, Palm will enable its Treo 650 and future Palm OS-based Treo smartphones with secure, push-based wireless e-mail via BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The new configuration, according to Palm officials, will enable push-based e-mail using BlackBerry Connect with Palm’s VersaMail e-mail client, support for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino, wireless calendar synchronization, remote address lookup of corporate e-mail directory, convenient e-mail-attachment viewing, triple DES encryption and IT policy enforcement and commands, such as remotely disabling or wiping e-mail and PIM data from a device in the event it is lost or stolen.
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Cablevision Systems Corporation has released a statement saying Cablevision President and CEO James Dolan was “admitted to the hospital Saturday and is scheduled to undergo heart bypass surgery Monday. His physicians expect him to make a full and complete recovery.”
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CanWest Global Communications Corp. has announced today that its 70% owned New Zealand media operation, CanWest MediaWorks (NZ) Limited, reported consolidated earnings before interest, income tax, depreciation and amortization of NZ$68 million ($47.5 million) for the year ended August 31, 2005, an 11% improvement compared with pro forma combined EBITDA for the same period last year.

By the way, those of you impressed with the spectacular New Zealand landscape – and the quality of New Zealand filmmaking – in the Lord Of the Rings movies have another chance to see The Land of the Long White Cloud on the silver screen this Christmas, when Disney releases The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, its much-hyped first installment in its Narnia series.

Seen as a sort of hybrid Harry-Potter-Meets-The-Lord-Of-The-Rings-In-New-Zealand marketing vehicle, it’s a huge bet for Disney, which has reportedly sunk an upwards of $200 to $250 million in the movie. It was filmed in New Zealand’s South Island near Christchurch, probably the most beautiful chunk of real estate left in the world.

First Coffee^SM will be down around there for a couple weeks around Christmas, as Mrs. First Coffee^SM’s Kiwi family will be migrating there for a reunion. When your family lives in New Zealand, western Canada and the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, family reunions become much bigger deals.
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Gotta love Bruce Cleveland, Siebel’s feisty Senior VP and GM Products and designated salesforce.com mudslinger. In response to the hoopla surrounding salesforce.com’s App Exchange announcement, Cleveland writes in a letter “if one looks at the applications that salesforce.com currently has on its site, virtually none are any that most people have heard of. And businesses are not going to use those applications simply because they are available in a convenient location.”

As Cleveland says, anybody remember download.com? Merisel? OS/2? The one big flaw Cleveland sees in the whole App Exchange strategy, he says, is that an online platform for distributing applications isn’t a new idea, and there’s still the age-old problem of building a loyal customer base for the applications, no matter how they’re distributed.

And, “if any of these App Exchange companies are fortunate enough to grow to a point where they are large enough to survive on their own, what’s the purpose of staying there? It’s the Web after all… convenience of price, location and shipping is irrelevant.”

Riffing on Marc Benioff’s Hawaii theme, instead of App Exchange becoming “a thriving Big Island, it’s quite likely we’ll see App Exchange become Molokai, the leper’s island of application software,” Cleveland says.

Maybe not exactly a leper’s island, First Coffee^SM can’t see Marc Benioff subsidizing unwanted, useless applications just to prop up App Exchange – that probably requires a longer attention span, for one thing – but reckons App Exchange could turn into a kind of Star Search or American Idol, where you can see lots of talent you haven’t heard of, as Cleveland points out, in search of the one or two stars who’ll break out.

It might turn out like those sweaty music clubs you pay $5 covers at to see a band trying to break its way to the top. Dave Matthews used to play those kinds of clubs, now he doesn’t, but that’s where he was discovered. And once discovered, he left them behind.

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