Articles by Erika

Facebook is introducing a tabbed interface as part of its ongoing effort to keep its profile page fresh-looking and streamlined, in contrast with many other social networking sites This latest change, which is currently in beta, will introduce separate tabs for a personal news feed, photos, applications and information. The company designed these s...

SugarCRM is repackaging its functionality to target both companies that wish to resell SugarCRM to their own customers as well as large-scale enterprises that wish to manage multiple instances of the application through one console Its new product, Sugar Data Center Edition, bundles existing software, systems management, monitoring, subscription an...

Results of a customer satisfaction survey released this week are timely for one industry in particular, as it faces a perfect storm: the collision of potentially stringent new regulations affecting customer service with a host of economic factors that are driving perception of that service deeper into the ground The industry is, of course, the airl...

Sage Software owned the CRM vendor conference spotlight this week, with Insights 2008, held in suburban Washington, D.C. Sage updated attendees on its product road map and better acquainted users and partners with the new CEO Sue Swenson. She is not a software person, writesBeagle Research Managing Principal Denis Pombriant in his blog post Insig...

The never-ending Microhoo saga has left many investors feeling downright whipsawed as they watched events careen from one extreme to the other -- and that was after the merger was supposedly dead in the water Since Microsoft walked away from the deal, 1) Yahoo has hinted that it maybe, possibly would like to be acquired if the price were right; 2) ...

It is difficult to think of an area where the pharmaceutical industry is not under siege these days. Regulators spawning new rules, governments putting price caps in place, safety advocates demanding more information on side effects, health maintenance plans implementing their own cost controls, and expiration dates on patents coming around -- all are putting the squeeze on Big Pharma, and it has been reflected in industry earnings.

For the past five years, the Recording Industry Association of America has been prosecuting people -- and threatening to prosecute many more -- for sharing copyrighted content online without authorization. Its lawsuits have been based primarily on two legal arguments: downloading copyrighted content from unauthorized sources such as peer-to-peer (...

Billionaire investor and Yahoo shareholder Carl Icahn is taking steps to revive the Microhoo deal that last week was all but dead in the water Icahn will be launching a proxy fight at Yahoo's July 3 annual shareholders meeting to replace 10 of its directors with his own slate in order to bring Microsoft back to the negotiating table, according to a...

A federal court has awarded MySpace nearly US$230 million in its suit against Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines -- aka the "Spam King." The judgment -- especially given the size of the award -- represents a decided victory for e-commerce sites in their costly battle against spam. This is the largest award since the enactment of the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003...

HP is placing a US$13.9 billion bet that it can wrest a piece of the tech services outsourcing market from IBM. It has announced it will acquire EDS for that sum "The combination of HP and EDS will create a leading force in global IT services," said HP CEO Mark Hurd in announcing the proposed acquisition....

SAP held its massive annual conference, Sapphire, last week and made the usual flurry of announcements and presentations to its 15,000-some attendees. Still, as is typical of most conferences, the best information filtered out between the official scheduled events CRM guru Paul Greenberg reports on some of these in two blog posts: Random Gems from...

Most health insurance companies have plowed resources into self-service Web sites for their policyholders -- Web site portals that display page after page of details on coverage. A handful even provide systems for maintaining electronic health records. Yet the general perception, even among many industry insiders, is that health insurance provider...

MySpace has forged agreements with other popular Internet sites -- Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter -- to permit MySpace users to migrate their data. Profiles, videos and friend networks are among the content that can be ported. They can then access the partner sites using their MySpace user names and passwords. For example, MySpace users who...

A few days after the seeming culmination of its failed bid to acquire Yahoo for US$47.5 billion, Microsoft appears to be contemplating an entirely new Web 2.0 strategy: a partner-free, organic approach to besting Google. The news was delivered by none other than Chairman Bill Gates, who made the comments to reporters in Tokyo on Wednesday. "Now at...

IBM plans to launch an initiative that centers on a Linux-based platform and a Web-based marketplace tailored for small and medium-sized businesses. Set for later this year, the rollout will provide users with a range of products and services from independent software vendors. It will also allow them to tap into IBM's computing horsepower....

The collapse of this weekend's negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo looked like game over. When the news first broke that Microsoft was walking away from its US$44 billion bid, it seemed as though Redmond was the loser: It had tried a high-stakes, high-profile acquisition gambit and failed.

SAP and Research In Motion announced last week that they were partnering to develop a native BlackBerry client to link to SAP CRM, and then, eventually, to the firm's other business applications The move is a no brainer for SAP, writes Vinnie Mirchandani, an ex-Gartner analyst and founder of the advisory firm Deal Architect....

The stock market is making its after-the-fact adjustment to the end of the Microsoft-Yahoo saga, which culminated this weekend. After last minute negotiations failed, Microsoft walked away from its bid to acquire Yahoo for slightly more than its original offer of US$33 per share. To recap: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was adamant that the company was wort...

SAP and Research In Motion are partnering to develop a mobile CRM application. The first output of this venture will be a native BlackBerry smartphone client that links SAP CRM with BlackBerry applications such as Email, Address Book and Calendar. To be precise, they are developing a native RIM client that will sit on the BlackBerry and communicat...

SugarCRM has released version 5.1 of its open source CRM platform, building on functionality it debuted in last year's milestone 5.0 release, which included new development tools, a new Ajax e-mail client, and a new multi-instance on-demand architecture Among the new features in version 5.1 are enhanced reporting, a mobile client and a new interfac...