By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Hank Mobley’s underrated Soul Station album:

Well, all I have to say is that while J.K. Rowling did a pretty good job at the end of Deathly Hallows — don’t worry, no spoilers here — much of the earlier part of the book was slow reading. And while she claims this is the last one, she certainly left herself ample dangling plotlines for a sequel.

But overall well done, thanks for the terrific novels, and First Coffee’s amazed to pause to consider, again, the entire Harry Potter phenomenon, what a wonderful surprise Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was and how admirable a job Rowling did with the series. A tip of the coffee pot is in order.

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The Turkish elections are over, and here’s wondering if anybody else sees it as an ominous sign that the AK Party got 47 percent of the vote?

The party, more Islamist in public image than actual practice, actually returns to Parliament with ten fewer seats than they had before. Turkey’s not turning into Iran any time soon, if you want to get worried about "creeping Islamization" in Turkey you can, but if you want to think secularism’s pretty well-established here you can do that too.

One reason why a pro-Islamic party like AK Party keeps winning is the other secularist parties are so spectacularly incompetent and glaringly corrupt, so much more interested on petty bickering and penny-ante spoils than actually governing well, is that there’s really no competition. The AKP takes care of the pothole issues and is as competent and honest as you’d reasonably expect a government in this part of the world to be.

If the secularist politicians here would stop acting so childish and selfish and cooperate they could easily put AKP out of business, but they don’t, they just figure the army’ll step in and hand them power if AKP goes too far with the Islamist routine. If you want to blame someone for the AKP winning here in Turkey blame the secular politicians who prefer selfishness and spite to the greater good of Turkey’s stable secular future.

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InvisibleCRM, a vendor of technology provider of tools engineered to "bridge the gap between enterprise and personal productivity applications," according to company officials, has announced that Nucleus Research has selected InvisibleCRM customer deCarta as a 2007 Technology ROI Award winner.

DeCarta achieved a 5,653 percent return on investment — not a bad number to bandy about at cocktail parties: "Well, Smithers, we’re pleased with the return, I believe the bean counters peg it at 5,653 percent. How’s your system shaping up" — Nucleus Research determined, by implementing InvisibleCRM’s SalesDesktop, a MS Outlook integration for Salesforce, which paid for itself in first 0.02 years.

DeCarta implemented InvisibleCRM in response to the challenge they experienced getting users to adopt their CRM system instead of staying with their desktop systems. By "invisibly" synchronizing the MS Outlook and desktop with the Web-based CRM, InvisibleCRM effectively bridged that gap.

As a result, deCarta increased user productivity and adoption, improved data quality and raised the visibility of their sales operations, company officials say.

"It was important that the CRM we chose was tightly integrated with MS Outlook, a workplace our sales reps spend a great deal of time using to organize their productivity efforts," said Christopher Yates, senior business development director, deCarta. "By driving more Salesforce usage, SalesDesktop helped our sales people dramatically increase their efficiency, and also improve data quality and visibility in the Salesforce CRM."

DeCarta is a geospatial software platform powering Location-Based Services applications such as those deployed at Google Maps, Ask.com, Verizon and Sprint.

InvisibleCRM is a technology provider of tools engineered to increase user adoption and ROI of enterprise applications. It was launched in 2005, and has designed and delivered products for salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Webex, EMC Documentum and Amdocs.

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Customer Effective, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and provider of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, recently won the East Region U.S. Partner Award for Teamwork at the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference held in Denver.

The Teamwork award reflects Customer Effective’s "continued commitment to partnering with Microsoft and other members of the partner community" to provide "business products centered on deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and complementary application technologies," according to company officials.

This teamwork approach was recently demonstrated through the "Integrated Innovation" series of seminars conducted with Microsoft partners OmniVue and ThoughtBridge. During these product seminars, role-based customer service, marketing and sales management scenarios were demonstrated through an integration of Microsoft technologies including SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Outlook, Excel and Performance Point Server.

Microsoft East Region Dynamics Director Jamie Tozzi said partners like Customer Effective "play a critical role in delivering customer success with Microsoft CRM."

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Aprimo, a vendor of Enterprise Marketing Management products, has announced planned integrations with Salesforce CRM applications for the Aprimo Enterprise EMM suite, and Aprimo Professional, an on-demand version tailored to departmental and mid-market Marketing Resource Management needs.

Aprimo Enterprise’s integration with Salesforce will provide a connection between the campaign planning and execution capabilities of Aprimo to the sales prospecting and account management functionality within Salesforce SFA. This integration will allow Salesforce customers to develop and execute communication plans that generate leads to Salesforce without marketing effort.

The Aprimo Salesforce Adaptor will synchronize campaign, lead, contact, account, and opportunity data across systems.

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Group 1 Software, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pitney Bowes, has introduced what company officials call the new Customer Communication Management (CCM) Editions. The CCM Editions are unique products which allow for specific enterprise and industry-specific requirements in customer communications. This powerful and flexible set of software products helps empower enterprises to productively and efficiently optimize and simplify intelligent communications across all customer touch points.

The CCM editions are available in two different specifications — Business Value Editions and Vertical Editions. The Business Value Editions address the business requirements in enterprises, and has a few different editions.

Among other editions, The Production Edition is to create "high-volume output for print/digital communications and integration of intelligent customer information," the On-Demand Edition "helps you produce real-time communications for in-person interactions" and the Customer Service Edition "is a complete product for customer service reps, agents, and brokers to view documents and outbound communications sent to a customer, plus manage accounts and payments."

The Vertical Editions are to "address business problems in vertical markets, such as financial services, telecommunications, insurance, utilities, government or any organization interested in establishing an effective CCM strategy."

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By the way a friend of mine, a certain lawyer in New Hampshire, must be feeling rather smug. He called the location of the seventh horcrux correctly soon after finishing The Half-Blood Prince. Look at the top line of page 551 of the Deathly Hallows, to see his correct prediction for where it would be.