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This is an interesting time of year for me, mostly because there's so much to watch. I call it "analyst season," not so much because of anything I do, but because the big guys tend to publish a lot of new reports documenting their view of the pecking order. Like everyone else, I will be publishing some new research this month as well, though I won't be ranking vendors this time...

Consumers have long exhibited a preference for physical forms of media, and they just love those shiny round disks, said Anton Denissov, another Yankee Group analyst "Disks are very versatile. They are very easy to use. They are very portable. I can take a disk to my friend's ...

In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a US$31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. ...

I am sitting on a train heading to New York from Boston for a CRM conference. Not driving, not flying -- I prefer the train for this trip for a bunch of reasons. Rail brought us traveling troubadours like Woody Guthrie, circuses and baseball, and it helped define a job type: the traveling salesperson. I am riding today with the knowledge that this mode of travel is going to again become the standard for business travel in the years ahead...

"Social networks now know they can't take people's private information and make it public without asking for permission first," Denise Shiffman, author of the Web 2.0 marketing and business book The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture, told the E-Commerce Times. Generally people are happy with these networks when this basic control is in place, she said.

This week, Sage Software is bringing out version 11 of ACT, its high-flying contact management software. ACT has been around since the mid-1980s and has been through multiple incarnations and owners in that time. ACT was what you used back then if you were tired of keeping notes on paper and wanted to improve the way you sell. I can remember a DOS (disk operating system) version of the product that would look almost alien in comparison to today's slick GUI (graphical user interface) version. ...

Kathleen Gilroy, cofounder of Swift Media Networks in Boston, eats, lives and breathes Web 2.0. Not only is her latest business venture focused on Web 2.0 services for conferences, but she's also used just about every Web-based tool there is to run her own various startups. With five full-time staff members, she has become a well-seasoned user of blogs, wikis, collaboration tools and just about any other free or low-cost service she can leverage.

This summer, I have been doing a lot of research into sustainability and have developed some thoughts that relate to CRM, especially CRM 2.0 ...

Firing up a brand-new PC is a magic moment that can never be recaptured. The flawless performance, the lightning-fast speeds, the uncluttered desktop -- they're a thing of beauty. In time, though, just about all PC users will have to cope with their share of problems, from sluggish download speeds to out-and-out system failures ...

Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom (BT) on Tuesday for US$105 million in cash. As deals go, that might not seem like a lot, but given the fact that it's all cash and given the relatively slow market for "liquidity events" these days, it's worth pondering ...

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. ...

"There are never too many things you can imagine to do with a cell phone. It's a very interesting concept because it fits into the idea of sharing. It fits into the next evolution of the social norm with people putting their stuff on Facebook and MySpace. It's definitely an interesting idea," Anton Denissov, a Yankee Group analyst, told TechNewsWorld...

Despite the changed competitive landscape, other vendors will likely increase maintenance fees as well, Denis Pombriant, principal with Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer. The overall inflation rate and huge energy price increases will be the culprits "In a company like SAP that...

On my blog, I have been writing about my experience with my new computer: an iMac. In addition to the usual functional comparisons, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole cultural difference between the Windows world and the Apple world. As a longtime user of Windows, I felt I knew and understood that platform pretty well and the jolt of cutting over cold turkey was both surprising and refreshing...

Part 1 of this two-part series examined the effects phishing can have on a business as phishers target smaller businesses. Part 2 looks at its impact on Web users ...

"Prodagio gives business users control of their destiny without requiring IT intervention. Ultimately, one leader emerges in each category, and we believe Prodagio has set the stage to take the lead in off-the-shelf business applications," Denise Crown, director of marketing for Prodagio, told TechNewsWorld...

Ease of use and software simplicity have been mainstay messages in CRM for many years. I have watched as this messaging has alternated with financial benefits for a long time, and I am not sure if it's random alternation or if there might be economic undertones, but it seems like we're trading themes at the moment ...

It's been on the radar of USA Credit Union's IT department for three years. They all knew about it. They were watching it every day. They had also heard rumblings that more and more of their industry counterparts had fallen victim to the attackers, Daniel Schneider, the credit union's senior manager of IT, told TechNewsWorld ...

Recession talk is all around us, and CRM has a role in helping any company get through the slump. How? Take our quick quiz ...

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? ...