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Last week Oracle bought the HR SaaS company Taleo for US$1.9 billion, which to me means it's time to do you-know-what to the fire and call in the dogs. This hunt is officially over and out ...

There's been a lot of activity on the Web and in our industry in the last week, and I thought it might be fun to try and tie at least some of it together. Much of it in one way or another involves Facebook -- or "FB," as the proposed ticker symbol suggests ...

TeleTech, a provider of business processing outsourcing solutions, has been placed in the "Leaders" quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant: Customer Management Contact Center BPO, Worldwide, 2011. ...

I take briefings from all sorts of vendors every day, from established companies with a new release to emerging companies with what they hope will be The Next Great Idea that the market will seize on. I am always happy to give my opinion and advice, and sometimes it's even taken. But I am usually reticent to write about most of them simply because it's not my job to provide free advertising, I don't want to be a cheerleader, and often the idea the company represents may not be in my wheelhouse. ...

My Aussie friends have an interesting saying that seems part compliment and part benediction: "Good on you." They pronounce it with an accent on the second word so that the phrase becomes a single word in the mouth, more like "goo-don you." At any rate, good on you ...

CSC and Infovisionix announced a new agreement at the Retail's BIG Show 2012 in New York City. ...

Customer experience is leading off the year as an idea that we need to pay more attention to. In the last week, two important publications have surfaced that highlight this importance. ...

There is an interesting discussion brewing about the nature of Silicon Valley companies. Are they "tech" companies, as Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo asserts, or are they "... companies in other industries that happen to make heavy use of technology," as CBS Money Watch blogger Erik Sherman says? ...

It's the beginning of the year, time for sales kickoff meetings and presidents' clubs at some location within 10 degrees of the equator. These signal events will reward those diligent and fortunate enough to have made or exceeded quota while focusing the attention of everyone on this year's mission. Typically that includes higher quotas and some new faces determined to ramp up before their draw runs out...

Peter C. Whybrow, M.D., is a neuropsychiatrist and director of the Semel Institute for Neuorscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, or at least he was when he published American Mania: When More Is Not Enough in 2005. In the book he quotes numerous economic thinkers and writers from the last 300 years, including Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) and Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), as he analyzes how we behave in modern business...

The CRM landscape is shifting gears -- and it looks as though 2012 will be the year that will see investments in technologies to cash in on a veritable explosion of social media, mobile and integration opportunities ...

Welcome back to the discussion ...

This story was originally published on Oct. 19, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series ...

There was an interesting article in the January 2012 edition of Vanity Fair, a magazine I've come to enjoy though for many years regarded as another of those things my wife would like more than I would. But VF carries an interesting blend of current events and politics, as well as the glossy pictures and stories of pop-culture icons that seem to be necessary to sell a magazine these days. ...

Every year around this time, I write two columns -- one on the year that was and another on what I expect the new year to bring. ...

Forrester Research has been heating up the marketplace lately with a string of interesting reports and forecasts that impact CRM and the front office generally. One that I saw, "Capitalizing on Live Video Chat" by Diane Clarkson (Aug. 23, 2011) talks about the bright future of using video (obviously) rather than text chat in sales, service and support...

I was sitting in the "blogpound" at Cloudforce New York, the seating area where Salesforce.com considerately places press, analysts and bloggers along with tables, power and WiFi, when it dawned on me: Despite all the articles, blogs and books (and Paul Greenberg's ceaseless public speaking) dedicated to the social media phenomenon in CRM, we may have been under-reporting its importance all this time...

Economics is a social science, much to the chagrin of neoclassical economists who prefer to think of it as a hard science, like physics, full of equations and certainty. I think of myself as a Keynesian, and while I can see the equations, the certainty eludes me. What I see mostly are people, all of us, with our reptile brains wrapped in a layer of mammalian sensibility trying to satisfy our needs. Economists refer to us as "rational actors," but we are hardly that...

On an otherwise slow news week, I spotted a story emanating from a Gartner analyst, Dennis Gaughan, at a recent Gartner talk in Australia. The article was on Business Insider, and I found it interesting ...

There was a guest post on the Forbes Magazine blog last month that I can't get out of my head: "For Enterprise IT, Time to Move Beyond SAP." ...