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On-demand business-to-business marketing vendor Genius.com has developed a new collaborative e-mail marketing module that focuses on lead qualification and prioritization. MarketingGenius brings together the sales and marketing departments. To a certain extent, it adds a service element, as the prospective lead receives personalized attention from...

Publicis Groupe announced a new initiative Wednesday with which the French media holding company aims to boost the performance of advertisers' marketing investments. It's a move made to enhance Publicis' profile in the continually expanding global digital and new media markets Dubbed the "VivaKi Nerve Center," the new platform will leverage Publici...

Contact center managers for years have been using tried-and-true efficiency-oriented key performance indicators to measure contact center success, such as average call handling time and cost-per-call. The Aberdeen Group completed a benchmark survey in May that examines the trend of Fortune 100 Best-in-Class companies that are transforming their c...

In March 2008, online product sourcing directory SaleHoo conducted an e-commerce behavioral survey of its members. SaleHoo's members are dedicated online sellers and retailers, and they are knowledgeable and savvy e-commerce users. The survey was comprised of eight questions -- four demographic questions and four individual response questions -- and it was a follow-up to a similar survey conducted three years earlier.

Casinos have been on a roll when it comes to customer relationships. The house has learned it always wins when it places its bets on the fact that humans are creatures of habit. Unlike other industries, however, the gambling lot does not leave the odds to a stack of faceless data mirroring only transactional data. In the eyes of the likes of Harrah's and its competitors, knowing the sinner is far more profitable than simply making a record of his sins...

Part 1 of this two-part series discussed hardware for the small to medium-sized business. Part 2 tackles software aimed at the SMB The continuing growth of the SMB market is pushing vendors to adaptor lose sales. Vendors are tweaking their more costlyenterprise-grade offerings to feature sets and price levels SMBcustomers can afford.

T-Mobile is adding Voice over IP (VoIP) to its list of offerings, the wireless carrier announced Wednesday. The new service, T-Mobile @Home, will enable subscribers to switch from traditional wireline plans but continue using their current telephone, the service for which can be rolled into another T-Mobile service plan, the company said The cell p...

For most companies, a corporate ad that spreads virally on YouTube is nothing short of a dream come true. Not so for JCPenney, which is protesting a racy and unauthorized ad that took the video sharing site by storm -- until YouTube removed it. The purported ad, titled "Speed Dressing," shows two teenagers timing themselves at home as they race to...

LucidEra, a provider of on-demand analytics for sales professionals and managers, is bringing marketing into its fold with the addition of LucidEra Lead Insight. This is an analytics application with more than 65 prebuilt metrics focused on marketing performance -- specifically, how effective the marketer is in converting leads into sales opportun...

An election looms, and the candidates' talking points are being set: war, the economy, the environment. Now a new advocacy group wants the next president and lawmakers to add one more item to their to-do list: a national broadband policy that ensures high-speed Internet access for all Americans The group, InternetForEveryone.org, features an array ...

A new study is raising questions over how radio frequency identification chips could be interacting with hospital equipment. The report, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests RFID chips could cause some medical devices to fail when in close contact. RFID chips have grown in popularity for corporate invent...

Call it a Route 128 SOA date. Progress Software is buying Iona Technologies for a little more than US$100 million in actual value, broadening Progress' service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio significantly and catapulting Progress into the open source software infrastructure arena Progress said Wednesday it is offering $4.05 per share in cash...

Behind every effort and every move of any company of any size lies a very simple and powerful fact. That is, the outside world responds to the name identity of a company before they decide to spend their money. Customers are influenced by the personality of the name identity, what it says, connotes, projects and what kind of secret or hidden messages it has embedded in its alpha-structure.

Last week, and for many other weeks, I discussed CRM 2.0, but today I am thinking more about the world beyond 2.0. Maybe it will be CRM 3.0, or maybe some wise guy like Paul Greenberg will change the numbering and call it "CRM 20xx," who knows? My reading and research tells me that there will be a need for something else, partly because the market ...

A few years ago, it became clear that Google was gunning for a big chunk of Microsoft's empire. Now, the undisputed king of search is targeting another online category with the release of Ad Planner, a package of free Web analytics, research and media-planning tools. Ad Planner essentially helps advertisers find appropriate Web sites for their mes...

Microsoft announced Tuesday that while it will move forward with its plans to discontinue sales of its Windows XP operating system, it will continue to provide support for the software for another six years Microsoft announced in 2007 that it would extend the sales period for Windows XP until June 30, 2008. With that deadline set to expire in less ...

Virgin Mobile USA will roll out a new unlimited wireless calling plan next month in a bid to undercut similar unlimited plans from the big four wireless carriers -- AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. In a flurry of activity earlier this year, the big four in close succession announced unlimited voice calling plans for just under a US$100 a month....

Fifty-one of the country's 60 largest metropolitan areas made gains in tech employment in 2006, the most recent year from which data was available, according to the American Electronics Association, a technology trade group The report is the first comprehensive survey on the state of high-tech jobs in cities by the AeA since 2000 -- just prior to t...

Google and Salesforce.com have rolled out a Force.com toolkit for Google Data application programming interfaces that's designed to help developers integrate Google Apps data and content with Force.com's database, logic and workflow capabilities. These open source tools and services, which are modeled after the Java Client library for Google Data,...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will vote this week in Paris on a plan to radically open up the procedure for assigning top-level domain names. The international nonprofit group, which has regulated the use of Web site names since 1998, may lift current URL (unform resource locator) restrictions so much that the onl...