Good morning friends and neighbors, this is Radio CBM 98.6, all Neutral Milk Hotel all the time, and I’m your host, Wills Conover. We’ll take our first call now, from Jeff in Tarzana:
“Yeah, like I’m wondering if there’s a part of the economy that’s stabilizing?”
Glad you asked that, Jeff, in fact there’s a report out now by CMS Watch, who evaluates content technologies, finding that enterprise search vendors have spent much of the past year digesting acquisitions and stabilizing their offerings.
The firm has produced the 2009 Cross-Check Chart, showing that “stability in the search technology market hasn’t brought about serious consolidation, but we’ve finally arrived at a point where there’s plenty of easy-to-install and relatively well-performing solutions,” according to analyst Adriaan Bloem.
Bloem said enterprises in need of search technology are still searching — rim shot — but have “a wealth of choices — in some cases, several from the same vendor.” In fact, the study found, many vendors’ “new features” are just retread licensed content type filters, connectors, or natural language processing components.
It could be that “search technology is stagnating or that vendors are innovating less,” said CMS Watch Principal Theresa Regli. President Obama immediately authorized a deficit-reducing $73.9 billion bailout for the search industry, since “we Americans invented searching, and can’t just walk away from it.”
Salesforce.com has announced its fiscal fourth-quarter net income nearly doubled, beating sales and earnings estimates, and sending the stock up about ten percent to $31 at one point. The company celebrated by lowering its fiscal 2010 revenue forecast range, attributing the move to “greater economic uncertainty.”
According to Dow Jones the stock has lost about half its value since September. Rumors which Radio CBM would certainly never repeat attribute the departure of President Steve Cakebread and other executives to sales deteriorating faster than expected, and Marc Benioff being spotted in downtown San Francisco holding a sign saying “Will Work For Mussels In A Saffron White Wine Sauce.”
In sports, Michael Vick will serve out the rest of his sentence under “home confinement,” since there’s not enough room at a halfway house in Newport News. A Virginia state penitentiary official said the line of dogs applying to provide security to ensure Vick’s compliance “is, oh, half a mile long, I’d guess.”
Amdocs has been selected by the Republic of Kazakhstan to provide customer relationship management functionality for its “Electronic Government” project. According to Kazakh government spokesman Borat, the product will serve as the front-end interface both for government agents processing and responding to citizen requests, “such as complaints about refuse not being collected, goats wandering loose, more Pamela Anderson pix and Uzbekistan not being bombed to hell.”
We’ll take another call now, Cletus from Augusta, Maine, you’re on the air.
“Um, I’m wondering what the fastest browser for my Mac is?”
Good question. Your answer comes from Little Green Footballs‘ Charles Johnson, who reviews the new Safari 4 beta release, saying “the Javascript engine is screaming fast. Pages with a lot of Javascript are much quicker. I haven’t encountered any rendering problems on any Web sites yet.”
In fact, as Johnson says, “CNET UK has run the numbers, and Safari 4 is now the fastest browser on the planet, being benchmarked as “42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3.” The prominent blogger praised Safari as the result of natural evolutionary processes, not any intelligent design.
Adopting the “just the one key” philosophy of life articulated by that blond guy to Andie MacDowell in Sex, Lies and Videotape, Zoho has announced single sign-on support for Zoho CRM, the company’s on-demand customer relationship management application for organizations not afraid to run their businesses online.
One Zoho account provides users with access to all Zoho applications, according to the the company, adding that the single sign-on advantage extends to Google and Yahoo users, who can now log in to Zoho CRM directly with their respective accounts. Users sign in just once to use all Zoho applications.
Surado wants to be one of the big boys: The vendor has released Surado CRM Online Professional Edition, which company officials say “directly competes with Salesforce, Microsoft, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Boeing, Unilever, ExxonMobil and the 82nd Airborne! Bring ’em on!”
The new product combines the core Surado CRM suite with your standard contact and account management, sales and opportunity management, marketing and customer service functionality. Company officials say one major difference is “the ability to start with the On Demand CRM and, when it makes business sense, move to an on-premise or a complete offline CRM.”
That’s the show for today, we’re off to find Zelig at Obama’s inauguration.
