The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends album. Bridge Over Troubled Water gets all the props, maybe rightfully so, but this is an underrated and unjustly overlooked gem from 1968. Paul Simon's songwriting grew by leaps and bounds from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme to this, moving from a straight "folky" style to a full rock/pop sound as heard on cuts such as "Mrs. Robinson" and "Hazy Shade Of Winter," and as a result Bookends has their strongest album cuts outside of Bridge:
SAS is announcing help for marketing campaigns looking to deliver "maximum return on increasingly limited investment with minimal technology support," according to company officials: a new Internet-based software product.
SAS Campaign Management, already offered as licensed software or a custom-hosted product, is adding a preconfigured version for rapid creation, modification and management of marketing campaigns, "ranging from simple to sophisticated, multichannel efforts," company officials say. The SaaS offering is probably most likely intended to be used to define more targeted segments, use SAS predictive models to improve response rates, and do stuff like prioritize selection rules, manage multiple channels, automate lights out and triggered campaigns and report on campaign success.
Jeff Levitan, General Manager of SAS' Global Customer and Retail business, describes the product as being useful for marketers looking to zero in on appropriate segments, retain selected customers and drive incremental revenue through acquisition, cross-sell and up-sell programs "without IT or large infrastructure investments."
The product has prepackaged analytical models for improving customer insights and focusing marketing programs on whatever customers you deem important. It also has templates, prepackaged reports and analytics built in. And as befits a well-constructed SaaS product, "a Web browser is all that organizations need to manage customer lists and start creating campaigns," SAS officials say.
It includes response models predicting clients' likelihood to accept certain offers, customer segmentation models identifying the most profitable customer segments and opportunities to migrate customers into more profitable segments, campaign checklists showing tasks required to complete any given campaign, approval steps providing necessary checks and balances in the marketing process and e-mail notifications alerting users to campaign status.
And if -- let's hope -- your company's requirements grow over time, SAS officials say that businesses can migrate to a more customized hosted product or to an on-premise implementation.
...
Soffront has announced today that Technology Marketing Corporation's Unified Communications magazine named Soffront's CRM a recipient of its 2008 Product of the Year Award.
"We are proud to receive this prestigious award," said Manu Das, Founder and President of Soffront. Rich Tehrani, TMC President and Editor-in-Chief of Unified Communications magazine, noted that Soffront "has proven it is committed to quality and excellence while addressing real needs in the marketplace."
A full list of Product of the Year winners will be published in the March/April 2009 issue of Unified Communications magazine.
Soffront basically focuses on selling CRM to the mid-market. Its product capabilities include sales, marketing, customer service, knowledge base, help desk, project management, order processing, defect tracking and the like. Soffront is privately held, debt-free "and profitable," company officials say.
Launched in July 2007, Unified Communications magazine is devoted to "educating enterprise decision makers on why and how they need to deploy unified communications," according to TMC.
...
Wolters Kluwer Health has announced that its customer service organization has earned the "Center of Excellence" certification from Benchmark Portal and the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University. The company was specifically noted for its service to its global health industry customers, including students, professionals and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.
The certification followed an audit benchmarking operational performance in WKH's Hagerstown, Maryland customer support center against the performance of comparable facilities. Auditors measured a variety of areas including call center metrics, operational costs, and customer satisfaction. WKH officials say "many" of the facility's 150 employees were interviewed to evaluate work environment, organizational culture and corporate philosophy.
The results placed Wolters Kluwer Health's performance among the top 10 percent of more than 20,000 customer service centers evaluated.
The Wolters Kluwer Health Hagerstown operation handles all domestic and international requests for Wolters Kluwer Health's medical journals, clinical and educational books and online products. The center also provides technical support for all of the company's nursing Web sites and online portals for its numerous books and journals.
The "Center of Excellence" designation is awarded to organizations that, in the eyes of the center, meet "objective and quantitative criteria standards" set by Benchmark Portal researchers, who look at things like operational efficiency, service level standards, process management, customer satisfaction, leadership resources and employee training.
Benchmark Portal is the custodian of the Purdue University Center for Customer-Driven Quality database of contact center metrics, the largest in the world.
Wolters Kluwer Health is a division of Wolters Kluwer, a global information services and publishing company with 2008 annual revenues of $4.9 billion and operations in over 35 countries across Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Headquartered in Amsterdam, its shares are quoted on Euronext Amsterdam and included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices.
...
CompanionLink Software, a vendor of synchronization products, has announced a two-way sync product between ACT! by Sage and Google.
When used together with the free Google Sync service for phones like iPhone and BlackBerry, CompanionLink for Google, according to company officials, "works as a connector between ACT! by Sage, Google and the latest smartphones." It basically lets ACT! users sync their contacts, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, calendar events, calendar details, contact notes, and alarms and reminders with their Google or Google Apps account: "Complete two-way sync ensures that any change to data in either ACT! or in Google is automatically updated."
Once ACT! data is in Google, users can use the free Google Sync (Beta) service to push data to their iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device. CompanionLink for Google ensures that any changes made on the phones will show up in the ACT! database.
"We wanted to extend Google's free over-the-air sync service to the ACT! community," said Rushang Shah, Director of Marketing at CompanionLink Software. "With CompanionLink for Google, users can get a two-way sync between ACT!, Google and their phones for less than thirty bucks."
CompanionLink for Google sells for $29.95 -- less than thirty, what the man said -- and comes with free technical support. The software supports two-way sync with both personal Google accounts and Google Apps accounts. A 14-day evaluation version of the software is available at www.companionlink.com/google.
CompanionLink Software sells data synchronization products for mobile phones, PDAs and CRM software. They're also an OEM synchronization and products provider for companies like Sage Software, NVIDIA, Google, and Royal Consumer Electronic Products.
...
Integra5, which sells "next-generation communication experiences" across TVs, PCs, mobile and DECT phones, and Sybase 365, a subsidiary of mobile messaging services vendor Sybase, have announced a partnership to "allow mobile operators to extend their reach" by putting social, SMS-centric applications across multiple devices using Integra5's new MediaFriends application suite.
According to CTIA, American SMS traffic grew to more than 75 billion messages per month in 2008, up from 7.2 billion per month in 2005. Boy, if that were the basis of the American economy we wouldn't be worrying 'bout no stinkin' recession. Combining Integra5's ability to deliver communications with Sybase 365's mobile messaging technology is an effort on the part of both firms to respond to the evolving communications patterns, and to give mobile operators more ways to drive consumer usage and increase SMS messaging traffic -- "at an even greater rate than today."
There you go, there's a goal, because hey, 75 billion messages per month isn't up to snuff. Office pool on which month hits 100 billion. First Coffee has March 2012.
Deployed in the mobile operator's network, Integra5's platform routes SMS messages between the Sybase 365 mobile messaging platform and users' mobile phones, TVs, PCs and DECT phones. In addition to mobile operators, the partnership lets video providers and programmers deploy TV-based services that incorporate SMS, such as Integra5's MediaFriends TV Chat, with no wireless network requirements.
Gregory Dunn, vice president, Americas, Sybase 365, said his company "plans to continue innovation in integrated mobile messaging, and realizes the synergy between social media networking and SMS as a fertile bed for continued development."
Integra5's MediaFriends is a suite of social media applications that allows users to participate in real-time group or one-on-one chats using mobile phones, TVs, PCs and DECT phones. The first phase of the suite, MediaFriends TV Chat, lets viewers, using a remote control, invite friends to watch TV programming together and engage in chats by sending text messages via their mobile phone and view the conversation directly on the TV. The next phase -- MediaFriends PC Chat -- lets users view and participate in multi-device chats directly from their PCs.
SAS is announcing help for marketing campaigns looking to deliver "maximum return on increasingly limited investment with minimal technology support," according to company officials: a new Internet-based software product.
SAS Campaign Management, already offered as licensed software or a custom-hosted product, is adding a preconfigured version for rapid creation, modification and management of marketing campaigns, "ranging from simple to sophisticated, multichannel efforts," company officials say. The SaaS offering is probably most likely intended to be used to define more targeted segments, use SAS predictive models to improve response rates, and do stuff like prioritize selection rules, manage multiple channels, automate lights out and triggered campaigns and report on campaign success.
Jeff Levitan, General Manager of SAS' Global Customer and Retail business, describes the product as being useful for marketers looking to zero in on appropriate segments, retain selected customers and drive incremental revenue through acquisition, cross-sell and up-sell programs "without IT or large infrastructure investments."
The product has prepackaged analytical models for improving customer insights and focusing marketing programs on whatever customers you deem important. It also has templates, prepackaged reports and analytics built in. And as befits a well-constructed SaaS product, "a Web browser is all that organizations need to manage customer lists and start creating campaigns," SAS officials say.
It includes response models predicting clients' likelihood to accept certain offers, customer segmentation models identifying the most profitable customer segments and opportunities to migrate customers into more profitable segments, campaign checklists showing tasks required to complete any given campaign, approval steps providing necessary checks and balances in the marketing process and e-mail notifications alerting users to campaign status.
And if -- let's hope -- your company's requirements grow over time, SAS officials say that businesses can migrate to a more customized hosted product or to an on-premise implementation.
...
Soffront has announced today that Technology Marketing Corporation's Unified Communications magazine named Soffront's CRM a recipient of its 2008 Product of the Year Award.
"We are proud to receive this prestigious award," said Manu Das, Founder and President of Soffront. Rich Tehrani, TMC President and Editor-in-Chief of Unified Communications magazine, noted that Soffront "has proven it is committed to quality and excellence while addressing real needs in the marketplace."
A full list of Product of the Year winners will be published in the March/April 2009 issue of Unified Communications magazine.
Soffront basically focuses on selling CRM to the mid-market. Its product capabilities include sales, marketing, customer service, knowledge base, help desk, project management, order processing, defect tracking and the like. Soffront is privately held, debt-free "and profitable," company officials say.
Launched in July 2007, Unified Communications magazine is devoted to "educating enterprise decision makers on why and how they need to deploy unified communications," according to TMC.
...
Wolters Kluwer Health has announced that its customer service organization has earned the "Center of Excellence" certification from Benchmark Portal and the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University. The company was specifically noted for its service to its global health industry customers, including students, professionals and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.
The certification followed an audit benchmarking operational performance in WKH's Hagerstown, Maryland customer support center against the performance of comparable facilities. Auditors measured a variety of areas including call center metrics, operational costs, and customer satisfaction. WKH officials say "many" of the facility's 150 employees were interviewed to evaluate work environment, organizational culture and corporate philosophy.
The results placed Wolters Kluwer Health's performance among the top 10 percent of more than 20,000 customer service centers evaluated.
The Wolters Kluwer Health Hagerstown operation handles all domestic and international requests for Wolters Kluwer Health's medical journals, clinical and educational books and online products. The center also provides technical support for all of the company's nursing Web sites and online portals for its numerous books and journals.
The "Center of Excellence" designation is awarded to organizations that, in the eyes of the center, meet "objective and quantitative criteria standards" set by Benchmark Portal researchers, who look at things like operational efficiency, service level standards, process management, customer satisfaction, leadership resources and employee training.
Benchmark Portal is the custodian of the Purdue University Center for Customer-Driven Quality database of contact center metrics, the largest in the world.
Wolters Kluwer Health is a division of Wolters Kluwer, a global information services and publishing company with 2008 annual revenues of $4.9 billion and operations in over 35 countries across Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Headquartered in Amsterdam, its shares are quoted on Euronext Amsterdam and included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices.
...
CompanionLink Software, a vendor of synchronization products, has announced a two-way sync product between ACT! by Sage and Google.
When used together with the free Google Sync service for phones like iPhone and BlackBerry, CompanionLink for Google, according to company officials, "works as a connector between ACT! by Sage, Google and the latest smartphones." It basically lets ACT! users sync their contacts, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, calendar events, calendar details, contact notes, and alarms and reminders with their Google or Google Apps account: "Complete two-way sync ensures that any change to data in either ACT! or in Google is automatically updated."
Once ACT! data is in Google, users can use the free Google Sync (Beta) service to push data to their iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device. CompanionLink for Google ensures that any changes made on the phones will show up in the ACT! database.
"We wanted to extend Google's free over-the-air sync service to the ACT! community," said Rushang Shah, Director of Marketing at CompanionLink Software. "With CompanionLink for Google, users can get a two-way sync between ACT!, Google and their phones for less than thirty bucks."
CompanionLink for Google sells for $29.95 -- less than thirty, what the man said -- and comes with free technical support. The software supports two-way sync with both personal Google accounts and Google Apps accounts. A 14-day evaluation version of the software is available at www.companionlink.com/google.
CompanionLink Software sells data synchronization products for mobile phones, PDAs and CRM software. They're also an OEM synchronization and products provider for companies like Sage Software, NVIDIA, Google, and Royal Consumer Electronic Products.
...
Integra5, which sells "next-generation communication experiences" across TVs, PCs, mobile and DECT phones, and Sybase 365, a subsidiary of mobile messaging services vendor Sybase, have announced a partnership to "allow mobile operators to extend their reach" by putting social, SMS-centric applications across multiple devices using Integra5's new MediaFriends application suite.
According to CTIA, American SMS traffic grew to more than 75 billion messages per month in 2008, up from 7.2 billion per month in 2005. Boy, if that were the basis of the American economy we wouldn't be worrying 'bout no stinkin' recession. Combining Integra5's ability to deliver communications with Sybase 365's mobile messaging technology is an effort on the part of both firms to respond to the evolving communications patterns, and to give mobile operators more ways to drive consumer usage and increase SMS messaging traffic -- "at an even greater rate than today."
There you go, there's a goal, because hey, 75 billion messages per month isn't up to snuff. Office pool on which month hits 100 billion. First Coffee has March 2012.
Deployed in the mobile operator's network, Integra5's platform routes SMS messages between the Sybase 365 mobile messaging platform and users' mobile phones, TVs, PCs and DECT phones. In addition to mobile operators, the partnership lets video providers and programmers deploy TV-based services that incorporate SMS, such as Integra5's MediaFriends TV Chat, with no wireless network requirements.
Gregory Dunn, vice president, Americas, Sybase 365, said his company "plans to continue innovation in integrated mobile messaging, and realizes the synergy between social media networking and SMS as a fertile bed for continued development."
Integra5's MediaFriends is a suite of social media applications that allows users to participate in real-time group or one-on-one chats using mobile phones, TVs, PCs and DECT phones. The first phase of the suite, MediaFriends TV Chat, lets viewers, using a remote control, invite friends to watch TV programming together and engage in chats by sending text messages via their mobile phone and view the conversation directly on the TV. The next phase -- MediaFriends PC Chat -- lets users view and participate in multi-device chats directly from their PCs.
