And a fine good morning to you from Radio CBM 98.6, the pride of the greater Jacksonville metro area, all Aimee Mann all the time:
First up on the ol' TelePrompTer this morning is the news that nGenera Customer Interaction Management is partnering with LiveLook [1] to gussy up the capabilities and usability of its nGen CoBrowse module, which lets users co-browse with their customers to provide hands-on service via screen sharing and remote control tools while on the phone or chat.
We hear you: "Co-browse? Like, let somebody else... make my Minesweeper moves for me?" Easy there, bro, it's nowhere near that invasive. First off, the nGen CoBrowse will be fully browser-based, so techno-doofuses don't have to worry about installing software, and it won't step on your firewall or anti-malware triggers, In fact, nGenera CIM officials promise that the product "will exceed the strictest security standards -- even those of financial services organizations."
For an extra fee you get their Absolute Top Neatest Keenest Secret Security Standard, the one used by American Idol to keep losers from blabbing about who won before the show airs.
RightNow Technologies has unveiled defense-ready hosting capabilities [2] designed to support both the Department of Defense and civilian government and intelligence agencies—we're not naming names, of course—that require stringent, evolving levels of compliance and security. The US Army, US Air Force and America's Got Talent are the first to commit to these new offerings.
Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow, says the secure hosting lets DoD clients "tap into the cloud," noting that the DoD "requires a more intense level of security than most civilian agencies except, of course, for Survivor." Gianforte notes that RightNow is "excited and honored" to work on the upcoming Survivor: East St. Louis.
In sports legendary NFL coach and color commentator John Madden announced his retirement from broadcasting [3], explaining that "the Denny's in Memphis just switched to a $3.99 All You Can Eat buffet on weekends, so I'll be tied up Sunday afternoons from now on." In a tearful press conference he thanked "all those who've made it possible for me to spend my life doing what I love," adding that ever since longtime Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre is all but retired, "there just aren't any real men worth watching left in the NFL."
Advocates of social media were "stunned" to discover that a recent study by the British organization A Beta Life - Youth found that some members of the 12-24 year old demographic are actually spending portions of their lives offline [4].
In fact, "the offline world is still the primary influence and driver of young people in how they conduct their lives, including interactions with friends, family, entertainment media, communication technologies, advertising and brands," the study found.
The research, conducted by OTX [5] in association with Nokia, MTV Networks, 20th Century Fox, Fox Mobile Group, and Channel 4, shows that digital technology "plays two main functions in young people's lives—as a means of improving their enjoyment of and access to traditional offline behaviors, but more significantly in the creation of commutainment—a hybrid of communication and entertainment where the act of communicating itself becomes a form of entertainment."
Rodney Bugeye, president of the OnlineIsLife consortium, slammed the study's findings, sending a text message to say his research shows that, once North Korea, most of the Sahara Desert and the Amish are excluded, "fully 98.3 percent of all 12-24 year olds are either texting, surfing, Tweeting or updating their Facebook pages 24/7." He termed "thinly-supported conjecture" A Beta Life's conclusion that young people's immersion in technological devices, and the time spent on them, "is not due to an obsession with the technology per se, but to the gadgets' ability to enhance their enjoyment of traditional pursuits."
Graham Saxton, Managing Director, Media and Entertainment Insights, OTX, noted that young people "are only interested in technology as a means to an end. The traditional world remains the go-to destination for meeting their friends and entertainment and real, offline destinations and pastimes still rate higher than the online space."
Of course the study also found that 34 percent even text the group of friends that they are physically with, a statistic Bugeye found "reassuring."
In politics President Barack Obama decided that President Bush [6] was right and that waterboarding terrorists is okay after all. Enraged mobs of registered Democrats crowded the offices of municipal election officials demanding their votes back.
NetSuite is trying to piece off some of the action falling through the cracks of enterprise CRM installations, introducing NetSuite OneWorld for large SAP enterprise customers [7] "at the divisional level."
The idea here is that yeah, large corporations aren't going to rip out everything and install NetSuite, but that there's an opportunity in the fact that vendors like SAP generally don't have a cost-effective product for smaller sites.
Bruce Richardson, Chief Research Officer at AMR Research, says NetSuite can provide a way to link the hub and spokes via the new SuiteCloud Connect for SAP: "This is a product and services offering that allows SAP customers to roll up transactional data generated by NetSuite applications, including invoices, purchase orders, shipments, inventory adjustments, invoicing, and order and payment integration with point-of-sale systems," he says.
Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite, says NetSuite OneWorld for SAP lets large companies "cling desperately and pitifully to black hole investment in bloated, inefficient, wasteful legacy business application junk," while deploying a Web-based business application suite that "actually does the work these other clunky dinosaurs can only dream of doing." Nelson denied suggestions that his comments were meant to disparage SAP or Oracle products.
That's the show for today, we're off to invest in old Singer sewing machines [8] and chuck our day job.