Top o' the morning here at the top o' the dial on Radio CBM 98.6, all Lyle Lovett all the time, the pride of the Boundary Waters with all the CRM News That Fits.
First up in the batting order is Silverpop, announcing the integration [1] of its Engage B2B, which you might have known as Vtrenz, platform with NetSuite. It's built using the NetSuite Business Operating System and is supposed to help users score sales leads, nurture them through the pipeline and measure campaign return on investment.
Basically it lets marketers access a custom lead-score record in NetSuite "populated with various components of a contact's score as calculated in Silverpop Engage B2B," company officials say, which lets you report or search contacts according to their score within NetSuite to prioritize new contacts for follow-up.
If that's the sort of thing that appeals to you. We're not saying it's better than dumping a fishbowl of business cards from the last trade show on someone's desk, it's a personal preference.
Software spending by medium businesses over in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam reached $233 million in 2008 [2], a hair over ten percent of that coming from CRM, according to research done by AMI-Partners. AMI officials described the spending as "nascent," proving that you do actually use SAT vocabulary word lists in real life after college.
The AMIers say CRM software spending grew by 21 percent since 2007 and is set to continue growing even in the current economic situation, which they described as "atrocious, direful, parsimonious and antidisestablishmentarian."
Singapore has the highest penetration of CRM in the region at 18 percent, and in terms of CRM modules adopted by medium businesses in ASEAN, sales force automation and call centers are the most popular. However more than half of the currently deployed CRM is home-grown, and SaaS-based CRM contributed somewhere between one and two percent of total deployed SaaS. CRM is expected to grow in 2009 at 18 percent over 2008.
In politics the House of Representatives voted 252-172 not to investigate [3] House Speaker Democrat Nancy "Pinocchio" Pelosi's claims that the CIA misled her about interrogation techniques used on captured terrorists. Although government agencies lying to Congress is a serious crime, House Democrats said an investigation isn't warranted at this time because "any four-year old knows the Speaker's lying." Democrat leaders promised "vigorous and full" investigations in the future of "anything that makes Republicans look bad."
EWinery Solutions and WineCircle Consulting have announced a new partnership [4] offering wineries "strategies and tactics" to increase direct sales and channel sales.
Led by Peter Grossman, former Senior Vice President and General Merchandise Manager at Beverages and More!, WineCircle Consulting [5] provides analytics, channel sales support and other services for wineries. "Many wineries offer high quality wines but cannot get to first base with retail and wholesale buyers," said Grossman, wisely declining to press the metaphor to its logical conclusion.
Welcome to Social Media, #59: Oblivious to the fact that online polls are there to be punked, Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman recently announced an online contest for Nebraska citizens to select the state's new license plate.
According to Charles Hull, president of Lincoln, Nebraska-based design firm Archrival [6], which certainly had no ulterior motive for wanting the project tendered to a local design firm, the state didn't pay local companies—such as, oh, Archrival—to submit designs, submitting one design from a Nebraska DMV employee and one from the plate vendor among what Archrival considered four "laughably bad," i.e. "not designed by Archrival," designs.
So on May 7th CollegeHumor.com [7], noting the Twitter and Facebook chatter, Hull says, posted a "Ruin this Poll" notice on their site, "encouraging their national subscribers to vote for the universally accepted worst of the four designs," the one submitted by the license plate vendor.
Sure enough, the lousy design grabbed 41 percent of the vote and won [8]. Second place went to "Ron Paul."
The vendor's design, which detractors noted said "Florida" and featured pictures of Disney World and orange groves instead of saying "Nebraska" and featuring football players in a cloud of dust, was characterized as "negotiable" by the vendor, which defended the design, saying "we heard they wanted to upgrade their image."
In sports former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick returned to his Hampton, Virginia home [9] to begin serving the probationary term of his sentence for dogfighting conspiracy. Vick's lawyer, Lawrence Woodward, said the line of dogs applying for a job as guard dog at the Vick house was "impressive, I bet a mile long."
Telligent, a "social network software" vendor, announced that veteran software entrepreneur and executive Patrick Brandt was named chief executive officer [10] and a member of its board of directors, effective immediately. Brandt succeeds Rob Howard, Telligent's founding CEO.
Howard accepted the title of chief technology officer and will focus on product development and strategy. Brandt, founder and chief executive officer of Skywire Software, says his first priority will be to get people to "stop putting 'In' in front of the company name."
And if you were looking for a way to capture and analyze visitor interaction with non-browser-based Adobe AIR applications, check out Speed-Trap's launch of their online analytics software product [11] billed as doing just that.
Speed-Trap officials say the product can capture and process data on users' interactions with Adobe AIR applications "despite their being based on the desktop, not in the browser."
As of February 2009, company officials claim, Adobe AIR had been installed over 100 million times. The company's technology, found on its Speed-Trap Version 7, records such events as selecting a check box, clicking an image, entering text or selecting a tab as a real-time stream. They say it works on mobile, iPhone, PDA and gaming console technology as well as Web sites.
That's the show for today, we're off to check our bank account [12] again. Just in case.