Alonzo A. Martinez, Chief Operations Officer of AweSumation Inc. unveiled the new look of AweSumation and shed light on the company's plans for the remainder of 2006 today.

Founded in 2004, AweSumation sells on-demand products for managing people and projects online. AppTrax gives small and mid-market professional service organizations a powerful EEOC compliant product for talent acquisition and management. Connects-Us CRM is an on-demand application for managing leads, clients and the resulting work/job orders.

The "unique look of AweSumation's interface drove the design concept" for the company's identity redesign, Martinez said.

AweSumation partnered with Cognizant Designs to develop its new look. Zach Meyer, lead designer for Cognizant Designs said his intention with the redesign was to, "preserve the essence of AweSumation's original concept but modernize the look."

AweSumation's identity "had been established before and I didn't want to force them into adopting a brand new look and feel that was too foreign; I was able to take existing materials and rework old concepts into my new design to produce a fresh look that was dynamic and familiar at the same time," said Meyer.

Martinez believes that the redesign reflects the intuitive nature of AweSumation's products and acts as a springboard for the company's future projects.

Why should you buy Microsoft stock? According to Zacks.com, it's considered the best large-cap stocks to own for the long term, not in the least because of its CRM.

The company posted fiscal fourth quarter earnings per share of 31 cents in July, excluding items, on revenue of $11.8 billion, and it "attributed its strong finish to the fiscal year to customer demand for its recently-launched products of Xbox 360, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0," according to Zacks.com officials.

The company said upcoming launches position it to continue delivering strong revenue growth in fiscal 2007. For the year, Microsoft expects earnings per share between $1.43 and $1.47 on revenue of $49.7 billion to $50.7 million.

RealMetrics, LLC, a vendor of objective performance metrics based on systematic testing of online service providers, has announced the addition of a new metric for monitoring the performance of technical support response time for Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting providers.

In addition to Web Hosting providers, RealMetrics plans to roll their performance monitoring technologies across multiple other categories in the near future. These will include email service providers, online backups, web conferencing and CRM.

RealMetrics monitors and reports Uptime, Web Speed, CPU Speed, Disk Speed and now the Technical Support response time of web hosting companies. The RealMetrics process is driven by establishing actual hosting accounts and then conducting systematic tests on several parameters of online service.

RealMetrics conducts over 60,000 tests per day on actual web hosting accounts.

"Adding the Technical Support response time metric brings a necessary and critical balance to our existing uptime and speed metrics" thinks Rick Ralston, RealMetrics President and Chief Executive. "For web hosting consumers to make as informed decision as possible, it is crucial to evaluate the response time of the web hosting providers. We attempt to present this critical information in a format that is easy and straightforward."

SMS operator TynTec has announced the launch of a new product to guarantee secure, scalable and reliable SMS delivery for the financial services sector.

The new Banking Grade SMS product uses TynTec's technology infrastructure to let banks send customers' information via SMS. This means financial institutions are now able to distribute account information such as balance statements, overdraft alerts, transaction notifications and authentication information for services such as online banking through a mobile interface.

The product can also integrate with a range of diverse back-end systems such as CRM and ERP, meaning that it can work alongside bank's existing systems with hopefully minimal integration hassle.

The deployment of SMS in the financial services industry has been hampered by the limitations of the technology, TynTec officials think: "Ordinary" SMS as provided by general purpose SMS resellers or operators can often be delayed or even lost en route to the customer, officials charge, calling it "an unacceptable level of unreliability in a critical area such as personal financial information."

Consumer electronics seller Circuit City Stores, Inc. has picked AT&T for support in offering its customers service when they interact with any of Circuit City's sales channels -- retail stores, online store and call center.

To assist Circuit City with its multi-channel customer service, AT&T implemented a converged multi-media networking product that accommodates voice, video and mission-critical enterprise applications on a single network infrastructure. Circuit City also uses AT&T's high-speed Internet access service to provide retail customers and store associates with access to Web-based resources, such as http://circuitcity.com/.

These AT&T products allow Circuit City to share data between locations and to deliver on its 24/24 Pickup Guarantee. Items that are ordered online can be picked up at a specified store within 24 minutes of the order being placed. If the order is not ready, the customer receives a $24 gift card.

Circuit City also uses features provided by AT&T's toll-free voice network for customers calling the Circuit City customer contact center.

The question is, "How many versions of 'Wild Mountain Thyme' does a man need?"

Hard to answer that one, I've downloaded about thirty so far. Even took Joan Baez's version, although that phony falsetto on the "and we'll AAAAALLLLLLL go together" irks the crap out of me. Al Petteway's has a drone going the whole time, gets disorienting, you think your speakers are on the fritz.

This is a song First Coffee made quite a bit of money on during his days busking in the Boston subways. Found it works better in the afternoons than the mornings, there's something people like about hearing it on their way home from work that doesn't appeal on their way to work.

The Byrds do a surprisingly bad version, someone called Papa M does a surprisingly good one. The great debate is whether or not it should be "all around the blooming heather" or "all around the purple heather," he solves it by singing "all around the blurple heather."

And although the song can be found among iTunes' Alternative, World, Blues, Folk, Children's Music, Rock, New Age and Country classifications, I refuse to listen to any version with wave sounds, birds or such bushwa in the background. I avoid weepy gals with harps too -- on iTunes, as in real life.

Best one I've got? The Dust Rhinos, who bill themselves as something like Saskatchewan's Greatest Bar Band. Whatever, man, they tear into that song.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.