Articles by Erika

An Ottawa-based provider of CRM for small and medium-sized businesses,The Long Reach Corporation has a surprisingly far-flung customer base, with clients in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan That is likely due to the special niche it fills for SMBs, a corporate constituency that does not typically have a wide selec...

StayinFront has shifted its CRM application to .Net architecture in what is the first major overhaul of its flagship product in two years The new product, StayinFront CRM 10, migrated from a client-server model to a platform that allows it to integrate with other software applications more easily and to deploy across multiple platforms, including L...

A tech association representing such industry stalwarts as Google and Microsoft is taking aim at what it sees as a stealth campaign to intimidate consumers from exercising their fair use rights with respect to copyrighted material TheComputer & Communications Industry Association has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission stating that ...

Shoshanna Berman, an intern in New York City, is happily dating her ideal future husband: a nice, young -- and tall -- Orthodox Jewish man who is also outgoing and easygoing On date two, they bonded while scalping tickets at a Knicks game. Date ten, she remembers, was an all-night drive to Philadelphia....

A report commissioned by the Florida Department of State has found flaws in Diebold's e-voting software that could compromise the integrity of its optical scan and touch screen machines. Although Diebold corrected many flaws previously identified, significant vulnerabilities remain, found researchers at Florida State University's Security and Assurance in Information Technology Laboratory...

Sun Microsystems has chalked up its third profitable quarter in a row, a testament that the company's turnaround plan is taking hold Profits for the server company's fourth quarter were US$329 million, or 9 cents a share -- a significant step up from the 5 cents a share analysts expected. It is also a 180-degree turn from where the company was a ye...

Genius.com has released Genius Team -- a new edition of SalesGenius, the marketing and sales application it debuted last year. The new team application automates many of the tasks in SalesGenius and provides a venue for greater administrative control, according to Felicity Wohltman, vice president of marketing for the firm "A lot of our users had e...

A test of three electronic voting systems certified for use in California has uncovered serious security flaws. Researchers at the University of California conducted the tests at the behest of Secretary of State Debra Bowen under a US$1.8 million contract Their mission was to try to compromise the integrity of the voting systems provided byDiebold ...

Microsoft announced plans to acquire online advertising exchangeAdECN -- its latest move in an aggressive strategy to build out its advertising platform Although the financial terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, "all of the shareholders are extremely, extremely happy with the deal and acquisition price," Henry Wong, an AdECN board member and ...

Oracle released its latest semiannual upgrade of its Siebel CRM On Demand product. Unlike previous releases that focused on smaller changes and tweaks, Release 14 incorporates substantial improvements to its architecture and integration capabilities. In fact, it is the product's most significant update yet, according to Anthony Lye, senior vice president of CRM On Demand...

If executives at MySpace expected to win praise as good corporate citizens for ridding their Web site of 29,000 registered sexual offenders, those hopes have vanished by now Since the news came out, criticism of the social networking site only seems to have grown among public officials, parent and watchdog groups, and the general public....

With its sex appeal, direct conduit to YouTube and ability to store videos and music -- advantages hardly conducive to productivity in a work environment -- it would not seem likely that many businesses would want to incorporate the iPhone into their operations Then there is the not small matter of security; the latest news is that a bona fide vul...

It is the rare political debate in which a winner is definitely declared. Sure, there have been a few in which candidates delivered zingers that resonated -- or stung. The Carter Reagan debates ("Are you better off now than you were four years ago?") and the vice presidential debates between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen ("Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy") top the list...

Avaya is extending its mobile applications to give users of Nokia Eseries business devices the ability to switch back and forth between private WiFi and public cellular networks The application enhances a company's productivity and cost savings, Steve Hardy, Avaya director of product marketing, told CRM Buyer. It is designed for large corporate cam...

SAP's profit rose 8.2 percent thanks to a surprising increase in license sales. In response, the company's stock surged to record highs not seen in the last 18 months For the quarter, SAP posted net income of 51 US cents a share, or $620 million, from .47 cents a share, or $573 million, a year ago....

Google is expanding the size and scope of its newspaper advertising program to include users of its online AdWords service In the immediate term, the expansion will increase the number of marketers using Google's Print Ads service. In the long run, the move could help meld the once-disparate audiences to create even larger efficiencies of scale. I...

Salesforce.com has introduced its Summer '07 release, dubbing it a "Platform as a Service" product because of the presence of the developer code Apex in the application While Apex has been released before, this is the first time it has been live for customers in a production environment. The multiple sandboxes included in the release are another co...

Epicor has released its first major overhaul of its CRM application since the company shifted its product line to the .NET platform. At that time, in 2002, Epicor introduced new CRM functionality that played upon the benefits of moving away from a client-server environment. This release focuses more on integration with third-party productivity applications as well as connectivity with such functions as computer telephony...

NetSuite is the first of the Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors to introduce support for Apple's vaunted iPhone. Called "SuitePhone," it provides native support for Safari, the iPhone's browser, as well as NetSuite's own product line and its role-based dashboards Using SuitePhone, users can remotely access invoicing, accounts receivable and payro...

Sony Pictures Entertainment has recast Grouper, a video-sharing Web site it acquired last year for $65 million, to attract a more professional caliber of contributed content The strategy is to differentiate Grouper, which has now been renamed"Crackle," from the more amateur video-sharing sites such asYouTube. This not only will help Crackle's conte...