Software : Salesforce1 Sales Reach to enable one-to-one campaigns from mobile devices |
- Salesforce1 Sales Reach to enable one-to-one campaigns from mobile devices
- Industry voices: Apple's partnership with IBM: A potential game-changer for business ICT
- It's all mobile, all the time for 30% of Facebook's 1.32 billion users
- Apple will reportedly flush out the year with 12-inch MacBook, 4K iMac
- Amazon Prime Music just visited the virtual record store
| Salesforce1 Sales Reach to enable one-to-one campaigns from mobile devices Posted:  Salesforce.com will launch a tool designed to provide sales representatives with the ability to send one-to-one marketing campaigns directly to prospects and leads from a mobile device. The tool, Salesforce1 Sales Reach, will be available in 2015. Sales Reach combines the Salesforce1 Sales Cloud automation tool, Pardot's b-to-b marketing automation tool, and the social selling platform Communities. The three integrated tools provide sales teams with a solution designed to deliver mini marketing campaigns on-the-fly from a salesperson's mobile device. In addition to micro campaigns, Sales Reach also provides sales representatives with real-time notifications to let them know if prospects are browsing a website, downloading content or engaging with products. The sales representative can then send out a micro campaign to offer a discount or to notify the prospect of special offers. Salesforce1 Sales ReachSales Reach also features a mobile lead tracking dashboard that enables sales representatives to access 36 hours worth of prospect interaction data. The information can then be used to tailor campaigns and offers to prospects directly from a mobile device. Salesforce lists Borrego Solar, Newell Rubbermaid and Precor as Salesforce1 Sales Reach launch customers. Salesforce1 Sales Reach is planned to be available the first half of 2015, the company said in a statement. Pricing will be announced at the time of general availability. Salesforce1Salesforce1 launched in November of last year. At the time, Salesforce said the tool would be the first true CRM offering for developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), end users, admins and customers looking to build and administer mobile apps in the cloud. In May, Salesforce launched the Salesforce1 mobile app, which gave Salesforce1 users direct access to reports, dashboards and accounts on the go. This month, the CRM company added mobile reporting to the Salesforce1 app development tool. The addition gave developers access to real-time performance data on mobile devices. |
| Industry voices: Apple's partnership with IBM: A potential game-changer for business ICT Posted:  No one ever gets fired for choosing IBM. It's one of the truisms of business. And indeed for the corporate IBM has always been the 'safe' choice. Received wisdom remains that if an IT administrator chooses an IBM system and something goes wrong, people will put it down to the nature of computing technology. People might grumble, but the incident will probably be forgotten. Apple, on the other hand, is often regarded as expensive and if you aren't a designer or a show-off buying its products, is somewhat synonymous with 'spending more than you need to'. Big business doesn't routinely use Apple's consumer focussed products. At first glance, it's hard to imagine a more unlikely partnership - Apple, the epitome of cool consumer electronics and mobile computing and IBM, the epitome of the opposite – an enterprise focussed software and services giant and the 'safe' choice. However the partnership seems actually to be the result of a fantastic piece of gap analysis. Both companies need to broaden their appeal to grow, they don't compete, and together they drive accessibility and functionality into the hands of corporate - and probably SME - customers. It's a very clever deal. It's all about mobilityMany businesspeople use Apple hardware, however integration with other systems hasn't been that successfully implemented. It has got better with the arrival of Microsoft Office on IOS, but it doesn't go much deeper, certainly not for the enterprise. I don't think this announcement changes that problem, it sidesteps it. IOS devices are a window onto data or entertainment, with the added spice of IBM apps fronting enterprise services they can become a seriously useful business tool. Someone asked me after I tweeted about this announcement if I thought it could be bad for Apple because they'd be seen as a hardware company. I think they already are. And now that Silicon Valley has realised that, nowadays, good hardware is harder to do than good software, it isn't a bad thing. The partnership between two of the world's global technology giants will see Apple stepping up its efforts to transfer its dominance in the consumer market to the highly lucrative business user market. At the same time, IBM will bolster its enterprise offerings and gain a route to market for SMEs and its applications will become available via the App Store. Big Blue as an Apple resellerIBM will also become the first systems integrator to sell iPhones and iPads coupled with industry-specific "solutions" -- apps, services and other software -- to enterprises worldwide. Governments and several public sector organisations could have their heads turned by bespoke apps and business services on iPads and iPhones backed by IBM's famed big data and analytics expertise. As things stand Apple enjoys enviable consumer, 'prosumer' and SME cut-through, while IBM enjoys huge market share in the enterprise arena. In short Apple brings the hardware and IBM brings the business ready software, so on paper it is a match made in heaven. Traditionally one of the obstacles to businesses adopting iOS has always been a lack of enterprise-grade applications. The combination of IBM, its cloud delivery mechanism, and its understanding of enterprise-level support will certainly make it much more of a viable option for businesses going forward, Carrenza included, I think that is probably the same for most organisations.
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| It's all mobile, all the time for 30% of Facebook's 1.32 billion users Posted:  The House of Zuckerberg put on the quarterly dog and pony show for investors today, and while there's plenty of cash to go around, the real story is how many of Facebook's users are ditching the desktop for greener pastures on mobile. Facebook announced earnings for the second quarter of 2014, and one thing is clear: The social network is fast becoming a mobile-centric company, with a full 62% of advertising revenue now generated from smartphones and tablets. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg's former Harvard University project is now home to 1.32 billion users, with people flocking to the social network at a rate of 14% year over year. The thing to pay attention is just how many of those users are exclusively logging in from mobile devices: 399 million, or about 30% of the site's total user base, with plenty more apparently on the way as mobile growth increased 31% in the last year. By the numbersAll of the above translated to bigger quarterly profits for Facebook, with a 61% increase to $2.91 billion (about £1.71b, AU$3.08b) in revenue, handily beating Wall Street analyst expectations with earnings of 42 cents per share for the second quarter, which ended June 30. Facebook also somehow managed to spend less over the last three months, more than doubling quarterly profits to $791 million (about £464m, AU$838m), a 138% increase over the same period last year, which eked out a mere $333 million profit (about £196m, AU$353m). Not surprisingly, the majority of Facebook's quarterly revenue ($2.68 billion, about £1.57b, AU$2.84b) came from advertising, a 67% increase over last year's June quarter, with a whopping 62% of ad revenue generated from mobile devices. Facebook executives plan to leverage video-based advertising to help grow future revenue, and expects to keep operating in an aggressive "investment mode" through 2015 on the heels of the recent Oculus Rift and WhatsApp acquisitions.
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| Apple will reportedly flush out the year with 12-inch MacBook, 4K iMac Posted:  Apple may have a very busy end of the year schedule with larger iPhones, thinner iPads, OS X Yosemite and now more rumors of 12-inch MacBook. Sources have told 9to5 Mac Apple is working on a smaller 12-inch MacBook Pro featuring a much thinner and slightly lighter aluminum body and a Retina display to boot. Supposedly Apple believes its new Retina MacBook will be another significant leap in the laptop industry. In the past Apple has come up with novel designs for its notebooks, like the unibody MacBook Air first announced in January 2008. This design bled into Apple's larger MacBook Pro line up and eventually led to the company abandoning optical drives all together. Seeing as there are so many laptops trying to emulate MacBook Air and Retina Pro's shape, Apple could cause another upheaval in the industry with this rumored thinner model. Super high-resolution iMacsThe same sources also suggested that Apple is working on a new 27-inch iMac or standalone to feature the hardware makers' first 4K display. 9to5 Mac claims the pixel-doubling technology of the current 27-inch iMac and Thunderbolt displays aren't up to snuff, but that could change with Apple's next line of products. If anything the sharper interface of OS X Yosemite provides evidence that the Cupertino company is already laying the groundwork for new Retina machines. On the apps-side Apple is also purportedly working on updates for iMovie and Final Cut Pro to get them ready to work with quadruple HD footage. Optimized to the maxThe last bit of titillating rumor surrounds Apple's plans to continue working on OS X Yosemite until the last possible second. Supposedly Apple will continue releasing updated Developer Previews from the first version it seeds on September 29 all the way to early October. To get a sense of how close this will be to Yosemite's actual release, Apple will purportedly release a golden master build (the version ready for commercial distribution) sometime around October 10. Also rumored for an October unveiling? The iWatch. OS X Yosemite just released into a beta and its already showing a lot of promise from our hands on review. With a down-to-the-wire development process the final release could be something truly spectacular - or potentially filled with tons of last minute bugs.
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| Amazon Prime Music just visited the virtual record store Posted:  Amazon kicked off its own streaming music service, Amazon Prime Music, in June, but critics lamented its limited music library. Now the bookseller is attempting to remedy that by adding hundreds of thousands of songs - no exact figure given, unfortunately - as well as hundreds of new curated Prime Playlists. The new artists being added and artists' catalogs expanded in this update range from Kendrick Lamar and Skrillex to Nick Cave and Ella Fitzgerald, according to a press release. Makes you wonder, does Amazon need to visit a record store, or does it just order new music from itself? With free shipping, tooIt's unclear at this time whether these additions address the main complaint with Amazon Prime Music at its launch: that it only features songs that have been out for six months or longer. We've asked the company to clarify this point, as well as on exactly how many songs have been added, and we'll update if we hear back. Nevertheless, "the response we've had to Prime Music has far exceeded our expectations and we're excited to make Prime Music even more valuable for Prime members," Amazon VP of Digital Music Steve Boom said in the release. He added that Amazon has received positive feedback regarding Prime Playlists as well. Amazon Prime members in the US have full access to Prime Music, with unlimited plays, offline playback and ad-free streaming on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HDX. Plus, you know, all the other benefits of Amazon Prime membership. There's also a 30-day free trial available for non-Prime members. |
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