The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a CD I burned which works surprisingly well -- reggae and dub songs by The Clash, mostly from the Sandinista! album, "Junkie Slip," "Washington Bullets," "Let's Go Crazy," stuff like that, mixed in with reggae standards from the likes of Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley and the Wailers, "Pressure Drop" versions from both Toots & The Maytals and The Clash:
The Analysis Corporation, a vendor of counterterrorism and anti-crime systems and services, and Infoglide Software Corporation, a vendor of operational business intelligence solutions, have announced a strategic alliance to "enhance the services the two companies offer to the intelligence community," according to TAC officials.
Infoglide's Bladeworks enterprise software is used in transactional CRM, compliance, enhanced data connectivity, and enhanced data mining.
TAC will now be able to deploy and maintain Bladeworks products for intelligence, counterterrorism, law enforcement, defense, and homeland security customers. Under the agreement, Infoglide Software will integrate TAC's Celatro suite of products, including Fuzzy Finder, Russian Name Search, and Arabic Name Search with Bladeworks.
TAC provides expertise in mission critical data management systems, client support, and analytic services for the agencies and organizations protecting national security. Get ready for the usual objections to any efficient anti-terrorist methods from the ACLU, Congressional Democratic leadership and The New York Times, which gets all twitterpated whenever terrorists are actually arrested or foiled.
Celatro features exact, inexact, and linguistic-based algorithms designed to rank and order results based on their similarity to a specified pattern. Fuzzy Finder was designed to match inconsistent, incomplete, or erroneous alphanumeric data.
Since its creation in 1990, Fuzzy Finder has been continuously operational within the government and has been a very effective tool for finding the names of suspected or known terrorists in various databases. Hold your breath for the inevitable New York Times editorial strongly condemning it on the grounds that it interferes with what the Times sees as terrorists' inalienable constitutional rights.
Fuzzy Finder was extended with Arabic Name Search in 1997 to search terrorist watch lists maintained by the government, a move no doubt frowned upon by Congressional Democrats on the grounds that it gives the government "unfair advantages" in dealing with terrorists. In 2000, it was further enhanced with Russian Name Search as part of a government effort to fight Russian organized crime.
"Infoglide Software's Bladeworks provides the ideal technical platform for applying sophisticated analytic tools to sensitive data, enabling the government and corporate users to create new knowledge and to make critical decisions in a timely fashion," says John O. Brennan, president and CEO of TAC. "Our combined capabilities will enable us to provide our customers an exceptionally powerful analytic solution to complex challenges."
Bladeworks is an enterprise software platform that accesses, analyzes, and delivers relevant information to appropriate resources in real-time. Much to the American liberal elite's chagrin it helps intelligence analysts make better decisions by understanding constantly changing, distributed data, while preserving data ownership, confidentiality, and existing IT investments.
Bladeworks can discover similarities and non-obvious relationships in data in real-time and apply the results of data analysis to an operational environment. Its open framework enables organizations to easily incorporate multiple technologies, analytics, software components, and both internal and external data sources. The system performs tasks such as decision automation, transaction processing, and extraction of knowledge from data sources.
"We are excited that TAC will deliver our technology into the intelligence marketplace," says Michael Shultz, Infoglide Software president and CEO. "Their deep relationships within the Intelligence Community will enable more agencies to implement robust risk management applications based upon our Bladeworks technology. Adding their Celatro algorithms to our open framework improves our ability to offer just the right combination of analytics for our customers' data analysis needs."
Incorporated in 1996, Infoglide Software is a privately held company headquartered in Austin, Texas.
After what company official say are three years of testing and development, 5square.com has released completely integrated software that manages the entire process of selling a car.
For some reason selling cars isn't one of the tasks that's covered by much of the CRM studies, except at the high end like tracking Mercedes' service programs, one feels it's almost like it's too dirty shirt of an industry to merit serious coverage. That's puzzling to First Coffee, since it's one of the industries well-suited to CRM, one in which customer loyalty is of great importance.
The Web-based system automates every part of the sales process, including lead management, CRM, showroom control, desking, F&I, inventory, customer marketing campaigns, and dealership analytics. It guides the sales team on every lead and every deal, improving sales processes, customer satisfaction, and closing ratios, and integrates with both ADP and Reynolds and Reynolds DMS systems.
NADA statistics show that the average dealer spent $571 in 2005 on advertising and lead generation for each new vehicle sold. This investment dwarfs the cost of all management systems combined -- DMS, CRM, Desking, F&I, etc.
"How the dealership manages its leads and its sales process determines whether this investment is a gusher or a dry hole. Effective follow-up will substantially increase sales," said Yuri Pikover, 5square.com chairman and CEO.
5square.com integrates the entire sales process and company officials claim the product "has demonstrated consistent results in improving customer satisfaction, closing ratios, and gross." They point to a recent five-month study of eight pilot dealerships which "produced a 21 percent increase in closing rates, equal to 34 additional units per month per dealership."
According to John Anderson of the California-based John Anderson Group (which includes one of the largest Honda dealerships in the world), 5square.com's structured sales process and improved follow-up has, as good, salesperson-friendly CRM always does, help sell more cars and improve closing ratios: "We're capturing more than 90 percent of the ups, as opposed to 50 percent with CRM only software. Salespeople are happy to log an up because it guarantees them protection on the deal."
Chinese CRM vendors PacificNet Inc. have announced the appointment of Joseph Levinson as Chief Financial Officer.
Tony Tong, Chairman and CEO of PacificNet said Levinson's "extensive experience working in China and Hong Kong, his experience as a manager in a Big-4 accounting firm, his US-China language skills" and other qualifications aided in the selection.
Levinson is proficient in Mandarin Chinese. He came to China 10 years ago to take an executive position at Hong Kong-listed China Strategic Holdings, one of the earliest foreign venture capital firms involved in China. He then went on to work at KPMG, and later Deloitte and Touche.
In the last 5 years, Mr. Levinson has held senior positions in Chinese companies, including CFO of a China-based media company, a consultant for various Chinese companies seeking to list overseas, and most recently, as the CFO of an OTCBB-listed Chinese pharmaceutical company.
Tong said Levinson's hiring is an effort "to expand our accounting staff and improve our procedures to assure on time earnings reporting and complete transparency as a public company."
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