By David Sims

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The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Peter Wolf’s Long Line album. It’s fun making a musical discovery like this, I mean I liked the guy’s whammer-jammer rave-up act with the J. Geils Band as much as the next high school kid, but his solo stuff, especially Sleepless, is way better than I’d imagined – much stronger than Mick Jagger or Roger Daltrey’s solo ventures, for comparison. No wonder that band fell apart as soon as he left:

SalesPage Technologies, a vendor of customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced that U.S. Global Investors, Inc. has selected SalesPage Technologies’ fund.space CRM product.

Tailored specifically for the financial services industry, according to SalesPage officials, the Web-based fund.space product and fund.space Mobile for Blackberry provide U.S. Global Investors with a comprehensive customer-focused product.

“Having added a wholesale distribution group to our existing business, we were looking for a CRM product that not only met our requirements, but could get us up and running quickly while helping us address a number of business process issues,” said Susan B. McGee, president of U.S. Global Investors.

Michael Pessetti, vice president of sales and marketing for SalesPage Technologies said “as an end to end system, fund.space provides a solid platform of information on which our clients can process and track their transactional data, as well as develop and implement sales and compliance strategies. It also offers staying power well beyond the initial implementation.”

SalesPage will also provide several services to U.S. Global as part of the implementation, including integration of transactional data from DST Systems and multiple Omnibus platforms.

To aid in their preparations for compliance with the pending 22c-2 regulations U.S. Global will implement the SalesPage Trade Analyzer module. This will enable them to establish business rules for monitoring trading activity as transactions are processed into the fund.space system from multiple sources.

SalesPage officials claim fund.space is “the most comprehensive CRM package created specifically for firms in the investment management industry,” that it’s designed specifically for asset management companies, annuities firms, and investment providers, with additional applications that can be tailored for a broader spectrum of financial organizations.

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Happy birthday Eleanora Fagan, born today in Philadelphia in 1915. You might know her better as Billie Holiday, considered by some to be the greatest jazz singer ever.

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Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, has announced that the Canal+ Group has deployed a Teradata enterprise data warehouse.

This choice, which Teradata officials aren’t shy about saying was made “following the implementation of Siebel real-time management and analysis products,” will give the Canal+ Group a 360-degree view of its eight million subscribers.

The goal is to enable many of the group’s departments, such as marketing, contact center, human resources, finance and others, to use the decision-making system.

The Canal+ Group decided to support the installation of the Siebel analytical and decision-making products with the Teradata enterprise data warehouse. Faced with a situation that the traditional warehouse could no longer cover its emerging business needs, the increasing number of users and the scope of its new corporate projects, the company decided to revamp its technical environment using an enterprise platform.

“To respect our deadlines, we had an urgent need for a robust infrastructure that was extensible, in order to become a real centralized infrastructure for Canal+ IT system,” said Pierre Gressier, chief information officer at Canal+ Group.

By consolidating its data marts and information centers, the company was able to reduce considerably the overall maintenance and administration costs of its old systems.

It appears to be working: The analytical products provided by Teradata have already enabled the marketing teams to improve the bases of analysis for calculating ratings and customer populations, company officials say.

Their objective is to conduct regular campaigns to gain new customers and improve existing subscriber loyalty by further focusing their targets and messages.

The list of specifications prepared by the group management highlighted the need for migrating the data warehouse as well as existing data mart and information center functions without changing the original models. The product also had to be completely compatible with the Siebel products.

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I.D. Systems, Inc. has announced that it has received orders from the U.S. Postal Service to deploy the company’s Wireless Asset Net powered industrial vehicle management system at 16 additional USPS facilities.

These orders increase the number of USPS facilities deploying the Wireless Asset Net to 38. Under the terms of the USPS’ three-year national contract with I.D. Systems, up to 460 USPS facilities can order the Wireless Asset Net system. The 16 new facility orders are valued at approximately $5.6 million.

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A new ABI Research study titled “RFID Annual Market Overview: Vertical Market and Application Market Overviews for Tags, Readers, Software and Services” is now available.

It provides a high-level, but still “detailed,” examination of RFID technologies, applications, and addressable vertical markets by region, and is intended to give readers a general outline of the broad RFID market.

According to Erik Michielsen, Director, RFID and Ubiquitous Networks Research, “RFID shows nuances across technologies, active and passive designs, and a wide range of frequency bands. This study not only explains these technologies, but also identifies the relevant applications for them and how vertical markets are building use-cases for them within application and business process environments.”

The research also highlights the differences between low-growth RFID applications such as access control, animal tracking and vehicle immobilization, and high-growth applications such as personal identification documents, contactless point-of-sale and item-level RFID tracking.

“The study includes a number of vendor profiles,” adds Michielsen, “and it’s worth pointing out they are not intended to be any kind of ‘Top 30’ list; rather, they have been chosen to reflect the wide range of specializations, company sizes and global locations that characterize the massive RFID ecosystem.”

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The number of businesses embracing hosted software has grown steadily, especially in the last couple of years, with small businesses leading the charge, writes the Project Management Blog.

According to the Yankee Group, the applications that SMBs are most often implementing via a hosted provider are marketing, project management, time and billing, accounting/financial, CRM, merchant services, inventory management, messaging and payroll.

More good stuff at the blog.

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