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We're coming back. We aren't out of the proverbial woods, but we should be on the upswing from the long downturn. According the Labor Department, the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in December, bringing the unemployment rate down to 9.4 percent. Jobs are traditionally a lagging indicator, so even better ...

The cost of business travel is going up and up and up and, oh yeah, Happy New Year ...

Recessions are always a good time to rebuild your competitive infrastructure, and the slow growth/recession of the last couple of years has been no exception. ...

"Call rewrite!" ...

It's amazing to me how we overuse words. Bothering to notice is an occupational hazard of the writing life, I suppose. For instance, consider the word "unique," which means one of a kind. If you add "very" or any other modifier to it, you get mush. ...

"Salesforce.com is the leader in this market, and the most different," Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer Microsoft's attack may backfire, he opined. "Microsoft can't attack others without hurting itself," he said....

"When a company like Salesforce buys a company like Heroku, it's not for the technology, despite the fact that this is a good product," Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer "CRM is a maturing market; the interesting things that will happen next are at ...

It's sort of like the funny story about a young person discovering that Paul McCartney was in another group before Wings. Marc Benioff had another company sandwiched in between his Oracle days and founding Salesforce.com. So for those of us who knew that, Database.com had the same kind of retro vibe when it was announced at Dreamforce. ...

Though evidence abounds of cloud computing moving from the hype stage to successful adoption and deployment, many enterprises are still not clear on how to adopt cloud and make it part of their enterprise IT strategies. ...

Well, that was interesting. 2010, that is. When I started doing a year-in-review column, there was an emphasis on quantifying accomplishments -- tangible things that somehow added up to the year in review. But with the economy still lurching and not many major accomplishments, I thought I'd try something different this year. ...

This story was originally published on Aug. 25, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

This story was originally published on Aug. 11, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series ...

Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual user meeting and thought leadership confab, is two weeks away, and the anticipation for this event is palpable. In a tough economy, people are looking for the company to do some magic and lift our spirits ...

Denis Anson, director of research and development at Misericordia University's Assistive Technology Research Institute, disagrees. "This is not a threat," Anson told TechNewsWorld. "Requiring that you pay for a product, like an app or an iTune, is just commerce." Legal and go...

I spent part of last week in the Seattle area at a small meeting Microsoft organized for analysts. The purpose was to brief us on product positioning and plans, and much of the meeting was covered by non-disclosure. Consequently, I am at a loss for how much I can divulge in this setting, at least until things are announced. ...

One of the more interesting developments of the last week has been the announced acquisition of ATG (Art Technology Group) by Oracle. ATG is one of the leading suppliers of e-commerce solutions, and Oracle liked their stuff well enough to plunk down a cool billion bucks for the logo ...

Salesforce.com, one of the major players in the CRM space, has offered social site monitoring tools for a while, Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer. "Salesforce has some nice functionality in the service cloud that monitor social sites and identify issues," he elaborated. "It's a blend of customers helping customers, a knowledge base, and vendor employees helping customers."

A lot of information is coming together this quarter that begins to put a new spin on social CRM. While we've all been busy getting networked in our personal lives and professionally, a huge mountain of data has been accumulating that will make our work in social technology more valuable ...

It's often hard to maintain high visibility in the marketplace if you happen to be a private company, and for good reason. Private companies tend to be small, and they often do not attract the attention of the financial press precisely because the financial press thrives on the transparency and numbers that small companies prefer to keep to themselves.

I get a lot of email. It's not all because of my job or because I publish my work frequently. Some of it is like that, but it seems like my email address is on a lot of lists, and I am one of the people who get spammed whenever there's a webinar to fill. Perhaps you know this feeling. Last week I was invited to a webinar for a sales product, and it made me think about why we aren't more successful and what might be done about it. ...