By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s Symphony in B
minor, the “Polonia:”
Happy birthday, Grace Hopper,
born in 1906, who wrote the Common
Business-Oriented Language, or COBOL in the early 1950s when she saw that
most computer mistakes were the result of human mistakes in writing programs,
which were almost all numbers, and thought if they could be written in plain
language ordinary people could write programs, and the number of mistakes would
be reduced.
…
Amino, an IPTV software and consumer
premises equipment vendor, has announced it has been selected by Novis, a major Portuguese telco, for a
residential service to be branded as “Clix Smartv.”
A commercial test launch with AmiNET110 set-top boxes is
scheduled for December 2005 in Lisbon and Porto, with full commercial
deployment planned for 2006 in all major cities.
The service will include an electronic program guide, Video
on Demand, and a personalized choice of channels. Susanna Barbato, Managing
Director of IPTV services for Novis said it would be the first time anyone had
offered IPTV services in Portugal, and the company “expects to create a large
subscriber base in Portugal over the coming years.”
The service will offer 50 channels for the test launch,
increasing to 100 when the commercial deployment commences. The AmiNET110 was chosen
by Novis for residential deployments due to its “flexibility,” said Bob Giddy,
CEO Amino.
The AmiNET110 is compatible with the ReadyLinks Smartfoot and Coaxsys home
networking adapters, allowing operators to avoid costly wiring of CAT5 cable
throughout the home.
…
On-demand CRM vendor NetSuite, Inc. has announced that West
Chester, Pa.-based Nobel Learning Communities, Inc., an
operator of 150 private schools throughout the United States, has selected NetSuite to bring its multiple
schools’ front and back-office operations under one roof with real-time
business management.
NetSuite allows Nobel to run its business operations by
using one system, from financials and revenue recognition to CRM capabilities
such as tracking potential students and allowing students to pay tuition
online.
…
Seven Network Limited and Yahoo! Inc.
have announced that they will combine
their online, mobile and IPTV businesses in Australia and New Zealand. The
strategic partnership brings together Yahoo! Australia & NZ, and the online
assets and television and magazine content of Seven Network, an Australian
media company.
Under the terms of the agreement, Seven and Yahoo! will form a new 50-50
holding company that will own Yahoo! Australia & NZ. Seven and Yahoo! will
each hold three of the six board seats in the entity. It will combine Yahoo!’s
search and communications capabilities and its global Internet network with
Seven’s media and entertainment content and marketing capabilities to create
what Seven Network officials say they hope will be “one of the most
comprehensive and engaging online experiences for Australian consumers and
advertisers.”
Yahoo! Australia & NZ and Seven say they’ll launch a new
name and online presence in late January, coinciding with Seven’s coverage of
the Australian Open and the Olympic Winter Games in Torino.
As First CoffeeSM will be in New Zealand visiting
family at that time – Rich, why don’t we have TMC cover the expenses as a business
trip… Rich? Hello, is this thing on? Rich? Hello?
…
Excerpt from a story First CoffeeSM’ll be
covering this upcoming Tuesday: “In its U.S. midyear lodging forecast, PricewaterhouseCoopers
expects profits in the hotel industry to reach a new record high of almost $25 billion in 2006, a good sign that
both the hospitality and travel industries are back on track.”
One factor helping keep costs low is the strategic use of
speech applications, and on Tuesday we’ll hear how Voxify is one company on the
cutting edge of that.
…
Happy birthday, John Milton,
the British poet who began the drearily predictable literary meme of seeing
Satan as the hero, yawn. First CoffeeSM read Paradise Lost, and agrees with the great English critic Samuel
Johnson, who said yeah it’s good and all that, but “nobody ever wished it was
longer.”
…
Virginia’s always been one of the more
tech-savvy states – it helps having a multi-millionaire governor who made his
pile in high-tech – and one positive advantage of that is the commonwealth’s interim agreement to partner with Northrop Grumman
Information Technology, Inc. to “modernize the state’s information
technology infrastructure,” according to commonwealth officials.
This 10-year contract worth more than $2 billion is believed
to be the largest of its kind and is estimated to bring over 1000 jobs to
Southwest Virginia and Chesterfield County.
Virginia brought Gordon & Glickson on board to help guide the process made
possible by the commonwealth’s Public Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure
Act of 2002, which brings private sector innovation and investment to state
government projects via solicited or unsolicited proposals.
Over the next 10 years, the contract calls for Northrop
Grumman to transform the state’s legacy IT infrastructure, including the
equipment and services for mainframes, servers, desktop and laptop computers,
voice and data networks, operating systems, e-mail, security, help-desk services
and data center facilities.
…
PacificNet Inc., a CRM, telemarketing, call
center, Interactive Voice Response and Value-Added Services vendor selling to
the Chinese market, has announced that its
subsidiary, PacificNet Linkhead, has completed an IVR customer service
center system for ChinaGoHi.
Headquartered in Shenzhen, ChinaGoHi operates a Direct
Response Television infomercial marketing companies for financial advisory
services in China with more than 700 employees in its DRTV infomercial
telemarketing call center, with 700 phone lines and occupying 35,000 square
feet.
PacificNet Linkhead was awarded the contract from ChinaGoHi to provide the IVR
system for its DRTV customer contact center and manage the overall project from
installation to integration.
Key features of the new 1000-line IVR system include
automated call distribution and call answering, real-time customer billing,
order and subscription status inquiry, automated information update via IVR,
SMS, or fax, order confirmation via voice log tele-conferencing with multiple
chat-rooms and CRM database management, among others.
Company officials say the IVR system “greatly improves the
service quality and response time” for ChinaGoHi’s DRTV customers.
…
CyberLink Corp. has responded to the allegation from InterVideo
Inc. that CyberLink’s infringing on its US Patent No. 6,765,788 by
politely saying “bushwa.”
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