By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is still Bob Dylan's new album Modern Times. The more I listen to it the more I like it, whereas the more I listened to his last two, Love and Theft and Time Out Of Mind, the less I liked them.

For sheer enjoyable listenability this might be his best since Oh Mercy or his underrated folk cover albums, World Gone Wrong or Good As I Been To You, or even Slow Train Coming.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the second cup of coffee (actually a Diet Coke) this morning, and the music is Dusty Springfield's Dusty In Memphis album. There's more good stuff here than "Son Of A Preacher Man," too, although that's like saying there's more good stuff in Tupelo, Mississippi than Elvis's birthplace:

Hummingbird Ltd., a vendor of enterprise content management and network connectivity products, has announced the general availability of Hummingbird Enterprise eDOCS for Microsoft SharePoint, which, according to company officials, "provides access to and interaction with content managed by Hummingbird Enterprise through Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003."

So if that's what you're looking for, this is the place.

EDOCS for Microsoft SharePoint will also integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 when it is launched.

The product lets organizations use their investment in Hummingbird Enterprise, by providing workers using SharePoint Technologies with access to Hummingbird's document management and records management capabilities in support of regulatory compliance.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the second coffee this morning, and the music is Eric Clapton's Timepieces collection:

Not a great morning to try to get work done, in addition to this being the height -- or depth -- of holiday season, as news is pretty thin on the ground, and it's also First Coffee's birthday and his Ever-Loving And Wonderful Wife™ bought him The Complete Cartoons Of The New Yorker, whose hundreds and hundreds of pages sit here oh so temptingly…

The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer: The book, great as it is, does not have the complete cartoons, but the two accompanying CDs do, all 68,647 of them. And most importantly, all 1,000 by Charles Addams, the best cartoonist that magazine's ever seen.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Sonny Rollins's "Moritat," which you'd recognize as "Mack the Knife:"

Gulfshore Technologies, Inc. has announced that Facial Esthetique, a medical spa facility in Bonita Springs, Florida has selected their collaborative InternetOffice.Biz suite of products to manage their eCommerce website and their in-house Point of Sale, as well as to meet their Content, Contact, CRM Management and growing back office needs.

Didn't know some place named "Facial Esthetique" needed CRM, didja?

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning here at Radio KCRM 98.6, All Aimee Mann All The Time:

We're big fans of the detective fiction genre, would much rather read anything by Raymond Chandler than Moby Dick and eagerly await Robert Parker's next Spenser novel. So imagine our pleased surprise to see JX2 Technologies, a business software company owned by Macdonald and Spillane, two of the greatest names in American 20th century crime fiction.

John D. Macdonald created the towering Travis McGee character, endlessly imitated but never improved upon, and Mickey Spillane's creation, Mike Hammer, is one of the most well-known fictional crime-solvers not living on Baker Street.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Loudon Wainwright III's great live album Career Moves:

Wow, it's, like, so unlike salesforce.com to announce good news, we're surprised here at First Coffee to see the normally media-shy, reticent founder, Marc Benioff, out in front blowing the company's horn announcing results for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2006.

"As we soar past the half-million paying subscriber mark, we stand on the cusp of another remarkable achievement: a half-billion dollar annual run rate. These are historic milestones for salesforce.com and the industry that we are leading," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com in a rare public appearance.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music, in honor of PR maven Ryan Zuk's getting a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert cancelled out from underneath him in Phoenix, is a Crosby, Stills and Nash threefer – Crosby, Stills and Nash, Déjà Vu and CSN – and Neil Young's Live Rust:

Kyliptix, which claims to be "the first company of its kind to adopt a utility-style, usage-based billing model that eliminates the upfront investment associated with software acquisition," although "of its kind" is left tantalizingly undefined, has announced the launch of Kips CRM.

The product's pitched at small businesses, and Kyliptix is marketing it as allowing SMB's to "gain a competitive advantage by employing the cost-effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality previously available only to larger organizations."

Fellow SMB workers, unite!

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of my favorite recent musical discoveries -- Aimee Mann's Live At St. Ann's Warehouse. That voice, the female equivalent of Lou Reed; had Mann been on The Velvet Underground/Nico instead of Nico that album would have frozen water particles at fifty feet. It's a testament to Jim White's confidence that he let her sing backup on "Static On the Radio" and carjack the song at 65 miles an hour:

As part of the "Applications Unlimited" program, Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 9.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is… lessee, we don't have any music playing right now, let's fix that… turn on iTunes, go to Purchased, punch Shuffle, Play… the first song to come up is… "Can't You See" by The Marshall Tucker Band.

Microsoft has announced that Spy Optic Inc., a Carlsbad, California-based designer and manufacturer of eyewear and accessories, has selected Microsoft Dynamics GP for its new, overall enterprise resource planning and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage its customer and vendor relations.

The company, which has 125 employees, will use the technology to "streamline interactions with its European headquarters in Lombardo, Italy," according to Spy officials. Spy Optic distributes to more than 5,000 retail locations in the U.S., with plans to expand to markets in Australia and Europe.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Kinks' Misfits:

EmailLabs, a vendor of e-mail marketing solutions and a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation, has introduced EmailLabs 4.8.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Adam Carroll's album released a couple months ago, Lookin' Out The Screen Door:

Intelliworks, Inc., a vendor of CRM for higher education, has announced that Southern Methodist University, The Brookings Institution and University of Washington have all gone live on the Intelliworks CRM platform.

Frank R. Lloyd, Associate Dean, Executive Education SMU Cox School of Business, said they selected the system because "it was purpose-built for executive education programs, and it is being used by other top business school programs."

"It works and everybody else is doin' it." First Coffee's heard better reasons for choosing a software system, but believe me, I've heard a lot worse too.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, the music is Cross Canadian Ragweed's version of "Whiskey River," and that Rob McGrath has exactly one week to get me my deposit in Tanner & Haley back or… or else:

Selectica, a vendor of configuration, sales execution and contract management applications, has announced the release of a study titled "Contract Management in the Mid-Market" by Aberdeen Group.

The report was developed, company officials say, to help mid-market companies (in their eyes, if you're doing between $50 million and $1 billion you're mid-market) gain insight into "effective and efficient contract management methodology for both the buy and sell-side agreements."

By David Sims [email protected]

I didn't ponder the question too long
I was hungry and went out for a bite,
Ran into a chum with a bottle of rum
And we wound up drinkin' all night.

Time to rise and shine, friends, up and at 'em, sun never shines on a sleeping dog's butt, and worms taste good, lookit all those early birds suckin' 'em down out there eating your lunch, hey nobody ever delivers the early worm as takeaway, and here to help you get the lead out and switch on the ol' treadmill is Radio KCRM 98.6, All Jimmy Buffett All The Time…

… Bolder Minds Inc., a cutely-named Boulder, Colorado-based firm that provides business support products and services, has announced the signing of a technology reseller agreement with Toronto-based Book4Time Inc.

Book4Time sells web-based appointment scheduling and CRM tools for businesses that need to schedule client appointments -- gee, there's a niche market -- and manage internal resources used in delivering a service.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Kinks' blazing hot One For The Road live set:

And of course the top news story this morning is that a Doberman Pinscher named Barney, working as a guard dog at the creepily-named "Wookey Hole Caves" children's museum with security guard Greg West, destroyed a $75,000 teddy bear formerly owned by Elvis Presley. I’m ROTFLMAO, you?

"The rare Steiff bear, named Mabel, was due to form the centerpiece of an exhibition at Wookey Hole Caves near Wells, England," reads the Associated Press account.

By David Sims [email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is "Six Months In A Leaky Boat" by Split Enz:

Visitar, which likes to call itself "the first company to offer hosted communications enabled customer relationship management (CRM) products exclusively for the true small and mid-sized business," has announced two executive appointments, poaching some Avaya talent.

Stephanie Anderson has been named vice president of channel and alliance marketing; and Tommy Nijem joins as Visitar's chief architect and vice president of engineering.