Its interesting to note that Google one of the newest major corporations reshaping the world of advertising has reeled in Verizon Communications to resell Google AdWords at a local level.

Small Business used to purchasing ads in Verizon’s Superpages (yellow pages) will now be coached by Verizon agents on how to place their ads with keywords in Google’s AdWords.

AdWords is a service provided by Google where advertisers bid online to place their advertisment according to the keywords or page viewers most likely to be associated with the ad. They compete for placement according to others bidding on the same keywords or online viewers. Highest bidder gets the ad.

Its not mentioned specifically, but the article hints that these local placements will be geographically restricted somehow.

Verizon online directory in ad deal with Google - Yahoo! News:
“‘We’re pleased Verizon is an authorized AdWords reseller and helping local small businesses take advantage of the opportunities of search advertising,’ Google said in a statement.’”

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What happens when super mega corporations and the interests groups that go with them collide?

Ebay is fighting off a landmark patent case tomorrow (Wednesday Mar 29, 2006) against a company named MercExchange.

Ebay’s “Buy it Now” feature is contended to infringe on 2 patents, which Ebay does not own.

The situation demarks the two sides to the argument:

1. Technology companies looking to protect themselves from intellectual property holders
RIM and Ebay in recent cases have fallen in to this camp.

2. Technology companies looking to protect their intellectual property
Microsoft, RIAA, Pharmaceutical companies fall into this camp

The battle ground happens to be the process or legal mechanism that allows this protecting to occur. It’s the Injunction.

All the talk and paperwork, and patents and copyright symbols in the world aren’t worth a hill of beans unless there are three things in place: 1. A law to define the system, 2. A judiciary to decide upon questions in the law, 3. A mechanism to enforce the law - Injunction

Lots of focus is routinely placed on the laws themselves and even in the way a judge acts in creating or not creating new case law.

However, the injunction and how its enforced is now at stake.

If the injunction process is weakened, Pharmaceutical patent holders even copyright holders like Microsoft could be protected less harming their business.

If its maintained, companies argue that they can be harmed by frivolous or unmerited patent claims (reminiscent of the lawyer that created a patent for Phone menu’s and later sued for lost profits 10 years after they had been in use.)

The old saying goes, don’t pick a fight you can’t win. In this case, Ebay a technology company with patents and copyrights of its own, might be better served settling and not disrupting the status quo from a strictly financial perspective. However, if they have to chase an ideology, we’ll sit back and watch the collision.

Channelweb Exclusive News

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ShadowRam of CRN trade magazine from March 13, 2006, made a short comment about the lackluster of the Origami device.

ChannelWeb: “Origami is nothing more than a device from Samsung and other vendors running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition version 2.0 with enhanced touch screen and better navigation. In other words: yawn. ”

It would appear the comment is negative, however, its a bit of a forehanded criticism. Talking about how there is nothing special about the Origami unit by describing what is special. It would seem to be Anti-Microsoft code for, you cand hand it to Microsoft for doing something right because they are Microsoft.

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For an interesting low tech way to use mind maps, take a look at this site offering a Daily planner with map like buble templates.

It would be nice if this were incorporated into an electronic version, that could be printed on daily planner paper and dropped into a planner each week. Note to Mindjet, investigate the market opportunities for pushing maps to Daily Planners. Even if it only requires a quick tutorial.

Correction: The original post offered a link through BlogExplosion, which is not endorsed by this site.
For more information from the original site, you can see the original blog http://mybubblelife.blogspot.com/ or at the authors site at http://www.myspace.com/MyBubbleLife and now they also have anordering capability with additional examples athttp://stores.homestead.com/BubbleUp/StoreFront.bok

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Richard Snow writing for Intelligent Enterprise Magazine in his article titled The Changing Face of Customer Relationship Management makes the following Assessment,
“Assessment
The CRM world is changing, from both process and technology points of view. Customer contact and customer satisfaction are no longer seen as just the responsibility of the call center. A company needs to identify all its customer touch points, what process changes have to be made and how to handle all the points of contact consistently and cohesively, no matter where or when they occur or through what channel they arrive. Correspondingly, Ventana Research believes that CRM technology should no longer be viewed as a single application but rather as an integrated family of applications that in aggregate can support the handling of any customer interaction. We believe that some new technologies, such as speech recognition and analytics, can help drive process change to bring about much improved customer relationship management. Ventana Research therefore recommends that companies that truly want to become customer-centric take a careful look at some of the newer and more innovative products coming onto the market.”

I encourage readers interested in the good and bad of customer relationship management to view his article as it walks through both the history but also the issues and benifts along the way.

Through my experiences with CRM tools and organizations, I’ve seen many organizations that throw money into the processes of capturing CRM data. However, they do very little to capitalize on the valuable information they have taken. They struggle to find a way to leverage the information and integrate it with their ERP systems. Their key managers are often left unaware of how to use the information and mine it for trends whether they be a customer complaint or a request for a slight variation on a product.

Similarly, many sales organizations pay the tool lip service, partly because they get caught up in meetings and travels, and don’t take the time to document thoroughly the progress or information they have achieved or gained.

This is also partly to blame on the era of the PC. Professionals have very powerful computing tools that allow them to keep just enough information readily available at their fingertips. However, there is no reason or incentive for them to make extra effort to share the information, post it online or a number of other options. Salesforce.com has helped push this along, however even Salesforce.com one of the largest online CRM tools, provides a product that is a little to two dimensional in look, feel and navigation. This creates a learning curve that is rather long and tedious and decreases the likelihood of a successful implementation as a given group starts to get lost, stalled or rebel against the tool.

Newer tools are starting to offer a more generic way to stay in touch. It provides users from multiple organizations to post contact information to websites, where paid subscribers from other organizations might gain access to the information. Individuals can alos update their own contact information online.

This is very good for keeping the tedium of contact details limited, but many of these services don’t include the integration of scoping out projects, accounts, sales, tasks and more.

As Microsoft SQL server 2005 rolls out and as more companies start harnessing the power of Data cubes or OLAP’s the potential to tie a CRM tool together with an ERP system and a logistics system and create a truly useful Business Intelligence roll up becomes more practical.

The touches to the customer gained through solid CRM packages are only as good as the nervous system utilizing its senses. So as we see an improvement in nervous system capability, the brains, boards, and business leaders will be able to start evaluating what the organism or ogranization is doing. This might drive a top down emphasis on CRM with more kick as the results as the leaders start living for the benefits received from new Business Intelligence.

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