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Who Will Be the Next CRM Idol? August 17, 2011 
The CRM Idol competition starts this week. If you aren't aware, here's the basic rundown. It's the brainchild of Paul Greenberg, who is no stranger to the speaking circuit and a believer in making CRM entertaining. Idol, as the name implies, is a competition focused on emerging companies, and its purpose is to identify one of the hottest emerging CRM companies on the planet.
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Xactly Greases the Gears in Express 2.2 July 29, 2011 
Xactly has updated its Express product, a sales compensation management application designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Xactly Express 2.2 comes with more ways for sales reps to customize their dashboards and more features for administrators to manage the information flow to the reps.
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Sage CRM Gets Wise to Social Media July 08, 2011 
A year or so after it rolled out v.7.0, Sage CRM has updated its application with social media functionality, more interactivity, and tighter integration with email marketing, including a subscription-based service for managing email marketing campaigns. The latter, in particular, is of high value to customers, many of whom are small businesses that primarily market in-house.
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Seeing Clouds Everywhere June 10, 2011 
I'm still surprised by the range of companies and nonprofit organizations moving to the cloud, and pleased to hear about the business benefits they are gaining from their decisions. An illustration of this growing movement is a series of webcast interviews I recently conducted of CXOs from a variety of "mainstream" small-and mid-size enterprises on behalf of SAP.
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i4i Claims Victory for Innovation in SC Ruling Against Microsoft June 09, 2011 
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that found Microsoft unlawfully infringed on i4i's document-editing patents by incorporating its technology in some of its Word products. The $290 million penalty is small change for Microsoft, but the verdict could have more troubling implications for the company, as well as for fellow tech giants Google and Apple, which supported Microsoft's appeal.
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PartnerOption Offers SMBs a CRM/Social Networking Cocktail May 13, 2011 
The Kaden Group has launched a new social CRM application, PartnerOption.com. The startup is hoping to carve out a niche by targeting small businesses with a product that combines free CRM functionality -- for now -- with an organized, easily portable business social network focusing on sales leads, distribution and reseller opportunities.
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Reverse Mergers: A Valid IPO Option? May 05, 2011 
If your company has decided that the time is right for an initial public offering, it should consider the options available to it. There are ways by which a company can become publicly traded without the lengthy and costly process that usually accompanies an IPO. A common alternative to an IPO is a reverse merger, sometimes referred to as a "reverse IPO."
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VCs and IT Security Firms: Not Much Love in the Air April 22, 2011 
Although security breaches make the headlines regularly and Washington has plans to upgrade the security of the United States' national infrastructure, up-and-coming IT security companies are having difficulty securing investment funds. The U.S. Defense Department, for instance, plans to spend $500 million on researching new cybersecurity technologies.
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Microsoft's Office 365 Beta Takes On Google Apps April 18, 2011 
On Monday, Microsoft opened Office 365 -- a cloud-based version of its productivity apps -- to the public for beta testing. The beta version contains Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online. The trial is available in 38 countries and 17 languages. The Office 365 suite is billed as an always up-to-date cloud service.
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Agilyx Alchemists Turn Plastic Into Black Gold April 04, 2011 
Plastics make our lives convenient, but they're the gift that keeps on taking -- they pollute the environment, and they're often difficult to get rid of in an ecologically sound way. Plastics don't break down readily, which is why they're such a nuisance. Worse yet, some of them contain chemicals that give off noxious fumes in a fire.
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Design Dogma, Mobile Musings and the Social Sweet Spot at Web 2.0 March 31, 2011 
Succeeding with social media marketing was one of the keynote topics at the Web 2.0 conference Thursday. Others involved tips on going mobile, while some touched on the subject of design, which seems to be gaining new importance, judging from the number of keynotes focusing on that topic at the conference.
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Web 2.0: The Useful, the Viral and the Just Plain Strange March 31, 2011 
It was a generally interesting day of keynote speeches at the Web 2.0 conference Wednesday, although a couple of the presentations were real mind-benders. One keynote laid out how developers can use core concepts of gaming apps to create better products. Others dealt with creating infectious action, going viral successfully, and data and Web 3.0.
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Ignoring Angel Investors' Advice and Other Web 2.0 Pearls March 30, 2011 
At first glance, the Web 2.0 conference, being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, appears tailor-made for today's audience. Keynotes are kept short -- about 20 minutes each -- and follow each other in rapid-fire succession. They're posted on the Web. The audience is mainly young and armed with multiple mobile devices -- several had smartphones and iPads, for instance.
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Making Mobile Payments Work for Your Small Business March 28, 2011 
Businesses are constantly searching for ways to reduce costs and improve revenues. Mobile technologies can provide incredible value because they offer immediate business interactions from almost anywhere. Mobile payments can expand your sales channels by helping you meet customers where they are. Processing mobile payments is extremely easy.
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Reaching the Untapped CRM Market: Talk About Problems, Not Apps March 24, 2011 
As hard as it may be for CRM veterans to accept, there are still a great many businesses out there who don't have an application to track the customer and to feed data to sales, marketing and service. These businesses -- mostly small -- are not in the position to afford an employee designated as the CRM decision-maker or implementer.
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Kraft: A No-Nonsense Office Assistant That Gets Straight to Work March 16, 2011 
Operating a small business or home office is always fraught with tasks based on creating and maintaining office documents. Often, entrepreneurs are stuck using different apps to handle each phase of record-keeping and pricing business proposals for each customer. Why stretch those tasks over multiple business apps when Kraft can do it all in one package?
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SalesLogix: The Papa Bear of Sage's CRM Portfolio March 14, 2011 
Sage offers companies a choice of CRM options for sales automation, including Sage ACT, Sage CRM, and SalesLogix. The company currently has about 3.6 million users and serves about 80,000 businesses. "Sage has a portfolio of CRM solutions," said Joe Bergera, executive vice president and general manager of Sage. "We have mobile solutions for all our CRM products."
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Avoiding the Crowded Startup Graveyard March 03, 2011 
A recent study that I just read shows that the startup success rate over a period of 10 years is about 30 percent. This obviously means that about 70 percent of startups are out of business after a 10-year period! There is no doubt that the failure rate of startups is stunning and, in my opinion, will continue to be so into the foreseeable future.
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A Patented Method to Create Jobs February 16, 2011 
As the U.S. begins to limp through another anemic year economically, we see more government regulation hampering innovation -- this time engineered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office through its new fast-track process. A fee of $4,000 (increased from the base fee of $1,090) would expedite the process from an average of 35 months to 12 months.
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Tech Titans Ally With White House on Innovation Effort February 01, 2011 
AOL cofounder Steve Case is teaming up with the Obama White House and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to launch Startup America, a partnership to "foster innovative high-growth firms in the United States," said Kauffman representative Benjamin Branham. It "is designed to marshal more resources from private sector partners that in turn will be steered directly to startups and entrepreneurs."
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