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This just in: Females outnumber males on social networking sites. The site Pingdom did a survey and concluded that 16 out of 19 (84 percent) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have more men on them, but the more popular sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all have more women visiting them. ...

I am still thinking about the George Soros quote from a recent posting. The billionaire financier and philanthropist was quoted in Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money saying that "Every bubble consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner." ...

I was re-reading Eric von Hippel's excellent book Democratizing Innovation and found something in it that might help explain the popularity of cloud computing and Platform as a Service (PaaS). I am on the way to Dreamforce and have little visibility into what Salesforce.com might announce in the next day or two, but no doubt there will be a lot about the cloud, so this might be a good opportunity to make my point. Regardless, I will have more to say later...

Sage convened its fall user group meeting in Atlanta this week. The event was set in the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center, a complex of three starship hangars left over from the Intergalactic Olympics. The facility is beautiful and very big. ...

I got a dose of reality last week when I took a briefing from TmaxSoft, a Korean company that specializes in mainframe conversions. I hadn't thought about a mainframe in a long time and assumed they were no longer an issue, but it turns out that they continue to live on. ...

Contact center operations are constantly under scrutiny. They're complex, they're expensive to run, and employee retention and training can be problematic, to say the least ...

I just finished reading The Black Swan, a book that has been on my list since it came out in 2007, and I highly recommend it, though it is not easy reading. There is a great deal of set up before you get to the whole point of the book in the last 50 pages ...

Colorado Springs is an interesting place. Despite the name, there are no "springs" -- it's an arid place in a valley surrounded by the southern Rocky Mountains and Pikes Peak National Park (for sticklers, "Pikes" really should be "Pike's," but the official U.S. naming convention eliminates the apostrophe). The springs were an invention of the railroads seeking to establish a destination for vacationers. Good idea; it's a nice place...

I have been studying sales forecasting and forecasting tools a lot recently, and I have come to the conclusion that we need better tools as well as better ways of using them ...

With the introduction of Fusion applications, Oracle has joined the cloud community. You might want to argue that the company has been involved in the cloud for many years as one of the key technology underpinnings of many of the biggest SaaS companies. That was one of Larry Ellison's big points at the Churchill Club. Cloud computing still needs a ground station to serve it, and Oracle has been at the top of that market for a long time. For example, Salesforce.com uses the Oracle database to support its service, and many other companies do too. ...

In the continuing discussion of cloud computing, Salesforce.com occupies a unique place. While most cloud vendors have kept to one component of cloud computing, Salesforce has inserted itself into all areas, and the company is using its flagship CRM applications as its first case example ...

As luck would have it, I knew nothing about Larry Ellison's rant at the Churchill Club on Sept. 21 about cloud computing when I wrote last week's piece on cloud computing. I saw it on YouTube. ...

I have an ongoing conversation with an industry executive about the nature of on-demand, SaaS and cloud computing. The central question is, what is it exactly? Our conversation is always thought provoking, and I come away from it with at least some additional perspective. Sometimes I think the discussion is incredibly philosophical, like the question about a tree falling in the forest -- does it make a sound if no one is there to witness it?...

Some think of it as just an offshoot of CRM. Others view PRM, or partner relationship management, as interchangeable with sales force automation. The reality is PRM is coming of age in its own right, as manufacturers and technology companies struggle to manage their highly complex -- and constantly shifting -- channel partnerships. ...

Modularity is next to motherhood, hot dogs and apple pie in the pantheon of unarguably good things. However, for every rule there are exceptions, and in technology, at least, we may have entered the age of demodularization. For the moment, hot dogs and all the rest are safe, at least at my house ...

What is it about customer service that drove three major CRM companies to make announcements about their service products within days of each other last week? Oracle and Salesforce.com each announced new or completed development of functionality, and RightNow said it bought HiveLive, a social networking solution provider. In fact, every company's announcement had something to do with social media...

There is a lot of unspoken information in last week's announcements by Sage and Salesforce.com about their respective contact managers. Each is creating a disruptive innovation that affects the other, and the symmetry of these dual and dueling announcements is frankly beautiful in a funny way ...

Last week, I made the suggestion that we have overdone our reliance on customer experience as a customer intimacy tool -- something that I stand by. The idea of customer experience looms large, and there is no denying its power as a theme in CRM. But if our interpretation of customer experience is off the mark, as I think it is, then what is the right approach?...

Last week I was doing some research for a speech, and I remembered something from a weekend stint at a cooking school that I decided to run down. I was trying to make a point about customer experience when it occurred to me that the idea has ancient roots ...

Beagle Research did some market research earlier this year that we are now announcing. The project aimed to understand some of the nuances involving scheduling appointments for services and walking in. What we discovered was in some cases reassuring and in others surprising, and I present some of our findings here ...