Uncategorized

Lyris has upgraded its flagship product and rolled out a new application for the marketing and advertising industry. The enhancements to Lyris HQ pave the way for a steady addition of collaboration and social networking tools this year. Lyris HQ for Agencies, meanwhile, will provide an inroad into a...

You're the manager of a Hilton Garden Inn, and it's the height of family vacation season. The lobby is abuzz with kids toting skateboards and moms pushing strollers; your front desk agents are overloaded with check-ins. In the middle of all this, a harried business traveler calls to the front desk f...

Over the past year, the business intelligence landscape has transformed drastically. Formerly, this market was comprised of a vast collection of solution providers, but it has evolved to just four major players -- IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. These BI titans have expanded through acquisition, sna...

Google and Microsoft have teamed with Intuit, WebMD and a consortium of more than 100 healthcare providers, insurers and consumer and privacy groups to develop a framework of practices governing online personal health record services. Under the leadership of the Markle Foundation, the Connecting for...

On-demand business-to-business marketing vendor Genius.com has developed a new collaborative e-mail marketing module that focuses on lead qualification and prioritization. MarketingGenius brings together the sales and marketing departments. To a certain extent, it adds a service element, as the pros...

Contact center managers for years have been using tried-and-true efficiency-oriented key performance indicators to measure contact center success, such as average call handling time and cost-per-call. Aberdeen completed a benchmark survey in May that examines the trend of Fortune 100 Best-in-Class c...

Casinos have been on a roll when it comes to customer relationships. The house has learned it always wins when it places its bets on the fact that humans are creatures of habit. Unlike other industries, however, the gambling lot does not leave the odds to a stack of faceless data mirroring only tran...

LucidEra, a provider of on-demand analytics for sales professionals and managers, is bringing marketing into its fold with the addition of LucidEra Lead Insight. This is an analytics application with more than 65 prebuilt metrics focused on marketing performance -- specifically, how effective the ma...

Last week, and for many other weeks, I discussed CRM 2.0, but today I am thinking more about the world beyond 2.0. Maybe it will be CRM 3.0, or maybe some wise guy like Paul Greenberg will change the numbering and call it "CRM 20xx," who knows? My reading and research tells me that there will be a n...

Google and Salesforce.com have rolled out a Force.com toolkit for Google Data application programming interfaces that's designed to help developers integrate Google Apps data and content with Force.com's database, logic and workflow capabilities. These open source tools and services, which are model...

The Google-Salesforce.com partnership grows ever more intertwined. The latest development occurred Monday when Salesforce.com released a Google Data client library for the Force.com platform that provides access to the full suite of Google Data APIs using Apex code, allowing developers to integrate ...

Oracle has reached an agreement to buy Skywire, a firm that makes software for the insurance business, as the database and applications giant continues to build out its menu of industry-specific tools. The purchase of Skywire marks the second consecutive acquisition in the insurance space for the vo...

The Internet has seen massive adoption. Online retailing has continued to dramatically build its customer base and more and more companies are sending their offline customers to the Internet for service and support. To service both these old and new customers, the Internet has already had an abundan...

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission reportedly is expected to rule against Verizon in a complaint filed by three cable companies against the telco. The FCC plans to tell Verizon it cannot try to talk phone service customers into staying instead of switching to a cable competitor, according to...

The launch of Healthline Networks' HealthSTAT last week is one more indication that the Internet ad platform wars are far from over. To be sure, Google remains the giant to beat -- and it looks as though it's settling into its role as the long-term dominant player. However, HealthSTAT may be on the ...