CRM and ERP News

Sony Ericsson announced on Wednesday it will begin manufacturing low-end color screen and music playing mobile handsets in India through an agreement with its global outsourcing manufacturing partners, Flextronics and Foxconn. The phones, intended for local distribution, will not only offer a competitive price, but will also include features customized for the Indian market, such as local content and specially-designed keypads, the company said.

Shopping carts that scan purchases and total up the bill may soon become reality as a result of research making radio frequency identification technology more accessible, a published report said on Tuesday. Researchers at the Institute of Microelectronics said their work could cut the cost of each RFID reader from $1,000 to $100. They have also reduced the size of the readers from a small notebook computer to that of a credit card, according to details of the innovation.

In the upcoming 2010 census, the Census Bureau for the first time will equip its temporary work force of 500,000 people with hand-held computers made by Harris to help them make a more precise count of more than 300 million people living in the 50 states and Puerto Rico. Every decade since 1790, the government has painstakingly counted the residents in each household. They do a pretty good job, with historical accuracy to half of 1 percent, according to Preston Jay Waite, associate director for the Decennial Census.

---

Free E-Mail News Alerts from ECT News Network
Keep up with the latest breaking business and technology news from ECT News Network. Receive real-time alerts as stories break -- or a daily version dispatched once each day. Easily add or eliminate keywords and modify service right from your inbox. Target your news today!

---

Here are several excerpts from a post in Gar Reynold's Presentation Zen weblog, Can I Trust You If You Do Not Trust Me?:

Many years ago a Japanese friend of mine was dining in Tokyo with her mother in a famous five-star hotel. After they paid and lingered a bit in the elegant lobby, they began walking out the front door when the assistant manager came and stopped them asking them if they had paid for their meal, subtly implying that they had not. They were taken aback by this and shocked that they had to explain that they had of course paid. After some conversation the assistant manager accepted their word. But it was too late. The joy of the mother-daughter birthday lunch was now replaced by a very bad taste indeed. Later the hotel would try to apologies by phone (but only after the daughter wrote a formal letter of complaint), but even screwed that up by "appearing insincere," she said. Today my friend will not only never enter that hotel again (in any country) but has since influenced many of her friends with her story. "They didn't trust me and my mother," she said "so why should I give them my business ever again? I hate the very thought of that place." Trust is a big deal, and what a fragile thing it is.

All the services you offer, all the hours spent on employee training, and all the details your business or organization sweats can all be for naught if people sense you do not trust them. Trust is not everything in a relationship, but it's the first thing. Interpersonal relationships without trust fade away pretty quickly. Can not this apply even to teachers and professors? Will not even the best lesson plan fail if a student feels that the teacher does not trust the student. If you don't trust me, how can I trust you?

Gar concludes his post by noting that:

My default is to trust, yet this is a risky and fragile thing. As John Maeda points out in his book, "[I] trust unquestionably...but I am open to UNDO-ing that trust whenever deserved."

As a service provider, I can truly say that I trust my prospects and on-going clients.  But as an employee and consumer, I've just been burned so many times that for me, trust is something that has to be earned.  It's critical to understand that regardless of your own personal approach to trust, the people you deal with may trust you at the get go or require that you earn their trust; so, the golden rule always applies: teat others as you would want to be treated.

For more on this subject, be sure to check out Gar's complete post.

Salesforce.com wants to be the next Internet. No, that's not the way the company describes its plans. But a year ago, Salesforce rolled out AppExchange, a Web site for on-demand applications built by other vendors but running on top of Salesforce's own software.

Recently, the company launched a preview version of Apex Code, a Java-like language for building those apps. Salesforce executives say they want Salesforce to be a platform, not just a software-as-a-service product.

How serious are they about this? Serious enough to cannibalize Salesforce's own hosted applications business. If someone else builds a better Salesforce on top of the Salesforce platform, that'll be fine -- or so the company says.

That's a little tough to believe. IBM wasn't willing to do that when its mainframes ruled the I.T. landscape. Microsoft makes sure its own Windows applications always have an advantage over those of other vendors.

There's lots of money in applications. That's how Salesforce has built everything it has. Why would Salesforce risk a profitable and growing business just to turn itself into a platform and let others make money with it? Why would Salesforce do anything differently from IBM and Microsoft?

It makes no sense -- at least not without the Internet.

See, in the mainframe world, you leased everything -- hardware and software, from the infrastructure on up to the applications (which you leased or built). So IBM wanted to lease you as much of that stack as possible.

In the PC world, you buy everything -- hardware and software, from the infrastructure on up through the apps. So Microsoft wants to sell you as much of that stack as possible.

But in the Internet world, you don't buy or lease the infrastructure. Somebody else owns and runs that. And somebody else owns and runs most of the software in the middle, whether...

Google has updated its Mini search appliance in a fresh bid to win new small and midsize business customers to the all-in-one corporate search product.

The Google Mini is designed to connect to an enterprise network and provide secure search capabilities for employees hunting for documents, applications, and other corporate data. The Mini also can be interfaced with a public Web site so external visitors can find information more quickly in a collection of company-owned content.

New features in the Mini include letting site administrators link search results with a Google-created analytics application, created to provide more detailed information about how people use search on a Web site.

Another improvement comes in the form of the appliance's OneBox feature, which attempts to identify the intent of searches to create a digest of related data. Security also has been upgraded for the Mini, which for the first time will recognize established access settings for users and documents.

Small Business Search

Google's push to bring the Mini to small and midsize businesses is not a new strategy. First introduced in 2005, the Mini underwent some changes in March 2006 in an attempt to make the appliance more attractive to smaller companies.

At that time, Google noted that SMBs tend to have tighter budgets and do not need the same type of high-powered search functions used by larger enterprises. These were realizations that led the firm to begin offering search appliance at lower prices and with different sets of features so users would not have to pay for features they did not want.

With the introduction of several versions of the Mini, the battle for search became a heated one indeed. The SMB market is an attracive one in particular, noted Yankee Group analyst Jennifer Simpson, where appliances are increasingly valued for their ease of use and quick...