Articles by Erika

Walmart wants to get the jump on e-tail competitors such as Amazon by widely offering same-day delivery for online purchases, executives told Reuters in an exclusive interview. Instead of contracting with a shipping provider, it would use one of its most plentiful and never-ending resources: the customers who stream into its 4,000 stores every day.

If you have been thinking lately that the chief marketing officer has been driving CRM purchases more than the IT department, you're right. "This is the era of the CMO," Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and Web experience at IBM, told CRM Buyer.

Walmart ratcheted up the e-competition a notch with the announcement Tuesday that it would soon begin offering a locker service similar to the one Amazon recently rolled out. There appear to be few differences between the two offerings: Both provide secure locations, available 24 hours, where consumers can pick up purchases they made online. Users...

After six years of watching helplessly as competing providers basked in the iPhone's glory, T-Mobile is going to start offering the coveted device as well. The carrier made the much-anticipated announcement at an event Tuesday morning, where it also revealed plans to step up its 4G network rollout. The announcement about the iPhone, though, was th...

Consumers give hotels, airlines and car rental companies high marks in customer satisfaction for the mobile experience they provide, according to the "ForeSee Mobile Satisfaction Index: Travel Edition." Online travel agencies, however -- not so much. Specifically, of the measured travel categories, hotel mobile sites and apps had an average scor...

As initial public offerings go, Marin Software couldn't have asked for much better than its Friday debut on the New York Stock Exchange. Late Thursday, it priced its stock at US$14 per unit, higher than the anticipated range of $11-$13. Then it sold 7.5 million shares -- half a million more than originally expected -- raising about $105 million. I...

CoreMotives is a marketing automation platform that operates completely within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Acquired by Silverpop about a year ago, CoreMotives remains a separate offering from its parent's flagship Engage platform, which features its own Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration CoreMotives has been tweaking its feature set and steadily global...

Times are changing for BlackBerry. ...

Salesforce.com this week rolled out the latest iteration of its Chatter app designed specifically for the mobile environment. The company launched the first mobile version last year.

Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, on Tuesday introduced legislation to provide stronger privacy guarantees to email. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2013 calls for the government to get a search warrant before gaining access to email or other digital communication channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

The Federal Communications Commission last week issued citations to two service providers for delivering unauthorized robocalls -- that is, automatically dialed calls with prerecorded voice messages -- to millions of wireless phones. The companies that received the citations are the Dialing Services and Richard Gilmore's Democratic Dialing. The ca...

Verizon Communications is proposing a novel and potentially disruptive fee structure for its FiOS pay TV service: It wants to link the fees it pays to television channels to how much traffic they get, according to a Wall Street Journal report Verizon is in negotiations with several mid-tier and smaller media companies over a fee structure based on...

Microsoft opened Convergence 2013 Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Microsoft Business Solutions President Kirill Tatarinov -- and the debut of an upgraded CRM application. With 11,000 attendees, this is the largest Convergence Microsoft has held to date, said Seth Patton, senior director of marketing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

A U.S. District Court judge from the Ninth Circuit found that the government's controversial use of so-called National Security Letters violates the First Amendment and the concept of separation of powers. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing the national security letters and to stop enforcing the gag order. Ill...

KXEN has launched Predictive Offers, a real-time next best action tool for customer service and call center agents, on Salesforce.com's AppExchange. The product's goal is to improve customer retention, boost upsell and cross-sell, and improve the overall customer experience by providing agents with the best recommendations for the customers they...

Samsung Electronics has named two new chief executive officers, bringing the number of company heads to three: Joining the current CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon as coCEOs will be Boo-keun Yoon and J.K. Shin. They are the head of Samsung's consumer electronics and mobile divisions, respectively. Both men have scored notable achievements in their roles. Under Y...

IBM pushed deeper into the customer experience space with the launch on Thursday of its Customer Experience Lab. The lab brings together various elements of IBM's expertise, technology and staff to integrate mobile, social, cloud, Big Data and advanced analytics for its users. The end goal is to provide the tools and strategies to personalize mar...

BlackBerry announced that an unnamed customer has placed an order for 1 million BlackBerry Z10 smartphones, making it the largest-ever single purchase in its history. Shipments are to begin immediately. BlackBerry executives hailed the order as a "tremendous vote of confidence" in BlackBerry 10.

Andy Rubin, the man who helped maneuver Android into the No. 1 mobile OS position, is stepping down as head of Android at Google. Taking Rubin's place will be browser and applications chief Sundar Pichai. The reshuffling effectively folds Google's mobile OS, applications and Chrome browser into one operation.

The Time of a Mobile Ad's Life, Part 1 Does it matter what time of day a mobile ad is displayed? If a generation's worth of lessons learned from email marketing mean anything, the answer is... maybe. Truth is, there are coherent arguments to be made on both sides.