NewsFactor Business

Barnes & Noble Nook E-Reader Will Arrive After Christmas

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:21:55 -0500

In what may remind many consumers of the Amazon Kindle's early days, Barnes & Noble expects shipments of its nook e-book reader to be delayed. On Friday, the giant book retailer said it has sold out its first batch of nooks amid high demand -- and new shipments won't be available until after the holiday shopping season ends.

"While we increased production based on the high consumer interest, we've sold out of our initial nook allotment available for delivery before the holidays," the company said.

A Certificate for the Holidays

Running out of hot products isn't new in the technology world. Beyond Amazon's Kindle, Apple has also had issues keeping iPhones in stock at launch. Sony is also facing shortages of its Daily Edition e-book reader.

Barnes & Noble customers who order the nook won't get the device until January. The next batch of nooks will ship the week of Jan. 4, according to the company. Consumers who want to purchase a nook as a holiday gift will receive a certificate that highlights the January availability.

Sony's Daily Edition is available on a first-come, first-served basis and Sony isn't making guarantees about holiday delivery of its latest e-book reader. As a result, Amazon may be the big e-reader winner this year. Amazon has a strong supply of various versions of the Kindle.

"Part of the problem with the delays is that Barnes & Noble is not a device company. So they are working with suppliers and getting into businesses that they are somewhat unfamiliar with," said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis. "I also think they are dealing with a category that is emerging, and therefore it is incredibly hard to predict the demand. But new e-book readers are debuting at CES, so if they wait too long there will be more competition."

Getting to Know...

New Pogoplug 'Personal Cloud' Does Social Networking

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:46:25 -0500

On Friday, Cloud Engines released its newest version of the Pogoplug, a small "multimedia sharing device" that connects hard drives to the Internet and allows a user to access the files remotely. The company described Pogoplug as "your own personal cloud that broadcasts safely from your home."

You connect Pogoplug to your router by Ethernet, attach hard drives or USB flash drives, and then access files by logging in from anywhere through a browser. You can also securely give access to others for downloading or uploading, the company said.

Drives Can Appear Local

The shared content can be searched remotely by file type or other parameters and, with a downloadable desktop application, the drives can work as if they were local to whatever machine you happen to be on. Mobile-compatible devices include iPhone, BlackBerry and Android-based phones.

The newest Pogoplug offers multiple USB ports for as many as four external drives, a drag-and-drop interface to create slide and audio shows, and capabilities for sharing with friends on social-networking sites.

Essentially, Pogoplug is a gateway to deliver your content to yourself or others from a home or office through the Internet. Cloud Engines CEO Daniel Putterman said the company is "giving our customers the best way to access their data from anywhere in the world."

The newest incarnation of this product enables Pogoplug to sync with a Mac or PC, so content can be automatically imported from iTunes, Windows Media Player, or iPhoto. With this "set it and forget it" feature, users can access new photos, videos or music remotely.

Network-Attached Storage

The new model also allows creating a slideshow of photos, videos and music, and then sharing the show via a link. There's an address book to share e-mail addresses, and global search across multiple Pogoplugs and drives. Videos can be played back directly from Pogoplug.

Ross Rubin, director...

TreeHouse Enhances Marketing View Tool

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:21:31 -0500

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah -- TreeHouse Interactive�, the technology leader in on-demand partner relationship management (PRM), channel sales force automation (CSFA�) and demand generation solutions, announced today new functionality in its Marketing View product that will give marketing and sales teams better tools to target campaigns; qualify, capture and score leads; and create dynamic nurturing triggers. These tools include extensive bi-directional salesforce.com integration, download resource management, and the ability to publish remote forms.

Salesforce.com Advanced Integration Enhances Communication with Prospects and Partners

Earlier this year, TreeHouse announced Marketing View integration with salesforce.com and availability on the AppExchange. This Salesforce.com Basic integration from TreeHouse allows marketers to pass sales-ready leads to salesforce.com based on multi-layered triggers from landing pages or micro sites. It enables dynamic mapping of landing page data to contact or lead objects in salesforce.com and allows for de-duplication. The new Salesforce.com Advanced integration from TreeHouse goes far beyond this, enabling real-time, bi-directional synchronization of lead and contact data between Marketing View and salesforce.com. It enables sales and marketing teams to launch nurturing campaigns directly from salesforce.com based on any change in any lead or contact field in salesforce.com. The Salesforce.com Advanced integration from TreeHouse also incorporates revolutionary new search term and search engine functionality to allow customers to better track, target and nurture prospects based on any search terms used to find a website and to better understand the effectiveness of paid and organic search terms, search engine and landing page efforts.

"We expected sales and marketing teams to use the new functionality to keep contact databases synchronized, determine how and when to nurture leads and to send unqualified leads back to the demand generation system for further development," said Erich Flynn, CEO, TreeHouse Interactive. "We are pleasantly surprised with the innovative ways companies are using the integration. One company...

Nexsan Boosts Capacity of SATABeast Storage System

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:17:13 -0500

Thousand Oaks, Calif., -- Nexsan, a leading storage system provider today announced at the company's NexStep EMEA VAR conference that it has doubled the capacity of the award-winning SATABeast� storage system from 42TB to 84TB in only four units (4U) of rack space. Built to provide the best power efficiency and space efficiency in the industry along with meaningful cost efficiency, the SATABeast enables midsized organizations to achieve both exceptional capital and operational cost savings. The highly efficient SATABeast is the ultimate solution for data intensive storage applications that require 24x7 online data access.

The Nexsan SATABeast is an enterprise-class RAID system designed to deliver exceptional performance, reliability and simplified operation in a very dense storage footprint. With a customer reported system reliability rating of more than 99.9%, the high density SATABeast is the premier option for both primary and secondary storage applications, including content archiving, disaster recovery and disk-based backup.

The system's chassis design reduces hard drive stress with unique anti-accumulative rotational vibration and horizontal midplane cooling technology supporting one of the lowest storage system maintenance rates in the industry. As with all of the company's storage systems, the Nexsan SATABeast features AutoMAID� (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology for policy-based power management that cuts energy demands up to 70% without impacting storage performance.

"Midsize organizations are challenged with continued data growth and seek solutions that not only reduce upfront costs but also lower day-to-day operating expenses. They want to use systems that provide greater power, space and cost efficiencies to drive down their total costs of ownership," said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Nexsan's latest generation of products, including the enhanced SATABeast, reflects the company's steadfast commitment to deliver such improvements; with capabilities that will help their customers to save money - and their...

Virtualization for Service Management Providers

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:46:53 -0500

Newport Beach, CA � November 19, 2009 -- LiveTime Software, a leading provider of Web based ITIL 3 Service Management and Help Desk software, today announced the release of the LiveTime Virtual Appliance 6.0. The new virtual appliance has been specifically designed for SaaS-based Service Management providers, offering full isolation and a simple menu driven interface. Each appliance can operate in as little as 512Mb of RAM and can scale the number of virtual processors and memory to meet the needs of any customer.

As a standalone platform, the LiveTime Virtual appliance also includes an auto update facility so customers can automatically remain current with the latest LiveTime release. Simply choose the update option and LiveTime will automatically download and install the latest release direct from the console.

Designed around open standards the LiveTime Virtual Appliance includes Apache 2.2, Tomcat 6.0, Java 6 and LiveTime 6.0, optimized for LiveTime service delivery. Version 6.0 includes an updated kernel and support for VMware vSphere 4.0 and Citrix XenServer 5.5 with guest tools for each environment. In addition, LiveTime supports the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and Microsoft's Hyper-V environment.

Organizations can now leverage LiveTime's highly scalable ITIL Service Management software with the ease of installation of traditional software. The virtual appliance provides the necessary scalability and security that is difficult to achieve when deployed on existing hardware and operating systems. Since the system has been hardened at the operating system layer, LiveTime provides Just Enough Operating System for its needs. This makes the system easy to update and maintain and provides a very small footprint and a 200Mb download.

About LiveTime Software

Headquartered in Newport Beach, California, LiveTime Software, Inc. is a vendor of Web 2.0, Open Standards based ITIL service management, help desk and support software for medium to large enterprises such as Verizon, NEC and...

Office 2010 Integrates with the Web, But Weakly

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:14:51 -0500

With the public beta of Office 2010, Microsoft is offering an intriguing future for the world's most popular productivity suite. The new version features integration with web-based, lightweight versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint; a mobile version; and social-networking features bolted onto Outlook.

One long-awaited development is Office Web Apps, Microsoft's competition for Google Docs and other online office suites. While the current beta only makes Excel and PowerPoint available to consumers via Windows Live, Word and OneNote are available to businesses via SharePoint Server. By the time Office 2010 launches in mid-2010, all apps will be available online to both sectors.

But based on the current versions, a PC World reviewer said, Office Web Apps are "no match" for Google and Zoho. "For example, Excel can't create charts, Word has no support for revision mode, and the slide-creation tools in PowerPoint pale next to the wealth of choices in Zoho Show," Yardena Arar wrote.

The problem with web apps has always been how can Microsoft compete with Google's free offerings without cannibalizing sales of its flagship desktop products? "The availability of Office compatibility with the web actually supports the web-apps approach that Google is taking," Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, said in an e-mail. But the company really has no choice. "Microsoft needs to do this; it's the direction the market is going in," Sterling added.

Taking Office Mobile

The approach continues to be to make the online software an adjunct to the real desktop. "The offerings' lack of features suggests that Microsoft isn't trying to create a web-based productivity ecosystem so much as it is attempting to give customers a Microsoft option for basic editing when they don't have access to the desktop software," Arar said.

The beta also includes a version of Office for Windows Mobile devices,...

You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:44:21 -0500

Are organizations obsessed about being rich and thin? You bet. It's as top of mind for today's business and government leaders as it was for international jet setters back when the Duchess of Windsor first coined her iconic phrase. To prove the point, consider McKinsey's 2009 executive survey where results reveal the top two steps companies are taking to manage through the global economic turmoil are: (1) reduce operating costs and (2) increase productivity � in essence, to become richer and thinner. So how do you effectively make changes to your enterprise to improve costs and productivity? Business process management is worth considering.

Here are three proven BPM practices to help you succeed:

Go where the wild things are

Over the past decade, improvements have been made automating order-to-cash processes using tools like EDI (Electronic Document Interchange), ERP systems, and financial application packages. However, these tools do not significantly help where documents and decision-making must span system and organizational silos, and straight through processing is not possible or practical. In these circumstances, untamed processes form to fill gaps among the primary end-to-end business processes and act as bridges between departmental process silos. Case in point is the claims dispute and settlement process between consumer goods companies and their retail customers. This "untamed" process area is a perfect target for applying Lean disciplines along with BPM to focus on value to the customer. With this approach you can combine relevant document content and intelligent workflow to create an effective decision making environment.

Case Study: Before applying BPM to its accounts receivable claims process, Revlon struggled to keep up with the workload of its high claims volume (over 1000 per...

Intel Leads Big Retreat in World Markets

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:12:12 -0500

World stocks slid Thursday after analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch reportedly downgraded their recommendations on a series of U.S. technology stocks, including Intel Corp. That feeded mounting concerns that current valuations are not justified by the pace of the global economic recovery.

In Europe, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares closed down 74.43 points, or 1.4 percent, at 5,267.70 while Germany's DAX fell 85.43 points, or 1.5 percent, to 5,702.18. The CAC-40 in France ended 67.94 points, or 1.8 percent, lower at 3,760.22.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 149.72 points, or 1.4 percent, at 10,276.59 around midday New York time while the broader Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 19.12 points, or 1.7 percent, at 1,090.68.

Technology stocks in the U.S. were at the sharp end of Thursday's retreat in the U.S. after Bank of America Merrill Lynch downgraded their recommendations on ten stocks, including Intel Corp., Texas Instruments Inc. and Marvell Technology Group Ltd, said David Buik, markets analyst at BGC Partners. Intel was down over 5 percent, making it the biggest faller on the Dow.

The downgrades fed into a growing feeling in the markets that stock valuations are now pricing in too rapid an economic recovery.

Stock markets have rallied strongly since March's lows as investors reined in their economic doomsday expectations to factor in a swifter than anticipated global economic rebound, but recent disappointing U.S. housing figures have dented the optimism.

Figures Thursday from the Mortgage Bankers Association showing that more than 14 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage were either behind on their payments or in foreclosure at the end of September added to the gloom.

Mixed earnings from some of the country's leading retailers have also weighed on sentiment as household spending in the U.S. is key for recovery -- it...

Sony Ericsson Closes Sites as HQ Moves

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:14:19 -0500

Cell phone handset maker Sony Ericsson will move its North American headquarters from North Carolina to Atlanta and close a half-dozen sites worldwide as it retrenches against what it expects will be a tighter market and cuts about 1,600 jobs globally.

The joint venture between Sweden's LM Ericsson and Japan's Sony Corp. will consolidate product development operations by closing sites in Research Triangle Park; Seattle; Miami; San Diego; Kista, Sweden; and Chennai, India, spokeswoman Stacy Doster said.

The site closures are new elements of a plan announced in April to cut a worldwide staff of 10,000 by 20 percent, Doster said. About 400 jobs have been cut since then and about 1,600 remain to meet that goal by the middle of next year, she said.

The cost-cutting follows the loss of 2,000 jobs last year.

The 8-year-old company has about 425 workers left in Research Triangle Park after shedding hundreds of jobs in the past year. Operations include customer support, sales, finance and research and development.

Doster said she did not know how many were employed at other locations the company planned to close. She also did not know how many would be added in Atlanta when that site takes over North American headquarters functions.

"There's a project team looking at what makes sense in what areas of the business," Doster said. "We've got to figure all that out across the whole organization."

Atlanta was chosen in part because of its proximity to AT&T Inc., one of the company's largest customers, Doster said. The city also is desirable as a "gateway into Latin America" because of its international connections through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, she said.

Product development would be consolidated in Sony Ericsson operations in Redwood Shores, Calif.; Lund, Sweden; Tokyo; and Beijing, Doster said.

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue said the headquarters relocation "will be another boost to...

Sony Chief Executive Outlines Turnaround Plan

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:15:32 -0500

Sony said it aims to be profitable in gaming and flat-panel TVs by the fiscal year ending March 2011, pushing 3-D technology as a way to showcase its strength in entertainment and surface from deep losses.

"Our work is already bearing fruit," Chief Executive Howard Stringer said Thursday in outlining Sony's turnaround strategy at the electronics giant's Tokyo headquarters. "We still have more work to do."

The maker of the PlayStation 3 game console is headed for its second straight billion dollar loss in the current fiscal year ending March 2010, battered by the global slowdown and sliding prices of gadgets.

Sony Corp. has been uniting its sprawling businesses, bringing together purchasing for parts and other supplies, for instance, which had been previously divided and less efficient.

Stringer, who first promised a more nimble and streamlined Sony when he took the helm in 2005, said things would be different this time.

"This is a new Sony. The new team here is as digitally connected as our devices," he said.

Stringer said the latest restructuring was progressing ahead of schedule, resulting in a 500 billion yen ($5.6 billion) reduction in procurement costs, a 20 percent improvement from the previous fiscal year.

Job cuts were also ahead of schedule, with head count reduced by 19,500 -- or 12 percent -- in the last year to 146,800 in September, Stringer said.

Sony said it will aim for a 20 percent share of the global liquid-crystal display TV market by fiscal 2012.

New products in the works include 3-D TVs, targeting sales of more than 1 trillion yen ($11.2 billion) in 3-D related products by the fiscal year through March 2013. PlayStation 3 game home consoles will all be upgraded to 3-D, according to Sony.

"We see 3-D as a pillar of our strategy," said Hiroshi Yoshioka, a senior Sony executive, stressing that the...