According to a recent Gartner research report, global spending for all enterprise software (including CRM) will be $304 billion in 2013, with growth of 6.4 percent over 2012 spending. The market research firm said demand is being driven by strength in software suites offering customer relationship management, supply chain management, and social networking, as well as Web conferencing, and collaboration.

Gartner predicts that CRM specifically will grow to be a $36.5 billion market by 2017. That's on a compound annual growth rate of 15.1 percent between 2012 and 2017, and is dramatically up from a Gartner forecast earlier this year of a $20.6 billion market by 2017.

While those numbers are key to the CRM software makers, what's most important to customer service managers and sales directors is how to leverage the CRM platforms to really improve the customer experience in ways that boost customer satisfaction, sales and profitability. If you don't manage the customer experience well from a human resources front, all that spending could be in vain.

Melding Business and Customer Strategies

To learn more about how companies are using CRM software not only manage customer relationships, but also to shape the overall customer experience, we spoke with Colosa CEO Brian Reale. His company develops ProcessMaker and ProcessMapper -- open source software for Business Process Management, workflow management, and related analytics. His perspective reflects how CRM software can be used most effectively as part of a broader Business Process Management (BPM) approach.

Reale describes Customer Experience Management as a classic example of a knowledge-worker discipline.

"Today's knowledge worker needs the ability to quickly find and utilize customer information in order to deliver the...

There are still controversial, even sexist, communications being produced, such as a recent JWT India print ad for Ford that caricatured Italy's former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, grinning at three young women bound and gagged in the back of a Ford Figo. And Swiffer just felt a big backlash when it re-imagined Rosie the Riveter, an icon for strong working women, out of the factory and back in her housekeeping role with a steam cleaner in her hands.

How to address such problems is a hot topic at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the ad world's trade show and awards event.

Many large companies are using the festival as a forum to discuss how to bolster communications to and about women, as well as how to help them climb the corporate ranks.

AOL held two events focused on women. On Sunday, it hosted a panel that looked at women's accomplishments and hurdles. Activist Gloria Steinem spoke. On Monday, it co-hosted with Omnicom Group, an advertising holding company, a panel about communicating with diverse consumer groups. A focus of that event was marketing to women.

On Tuesday, AOL will announce an expansion of its Makers initiative, which uses video to tell the stories of famous women such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Oprah Winfrey, as well as lesser-known female pioneers such as Barbara Burns, one of the first female coal miners.

In February, AOL will host a women's empowerment conference in Southern California. Participants will include high-profile people who have been featured on Makers videos, including Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and...

Requests for user data that investigative agencies in the U.S. made to Yahoo from Dec. 1, 2012, to May 31 numbered between 12,000 and 13,000, including both criminal requests and those under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is the authority the NSA uses to seek information. Yahoo said the most common requests for user data concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings and other criminal investigations. Yahoo did not specify how many user accounts were involved in the requests.

"Democracy demands accountability," Yahoo said in a statement authored by CEO Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell. "Recognizing the important role that Yahoo can play in ensuring accountability, we will issue later this summer our first global law enforcement transparency report, which will cover the first half of the year. We will refresh this report with current statistics twice a year.

"As always, we will continually evaluate whether further actions can be taken to protect the privacy of our users and our ability to defend it. We appreciate -- and do not take for granted -- the trust you place in us."

Apple Data Requests

For Apple, from Dec. 1, 2012, to May 31 the company received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. investigative agencies for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. Apple said the most common form of request came from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer's disease,...

Engaging interface. You'll love the way it keeps you focused on work!

Not only the new UI brings the speed of operations to the new level, but it changes completely a paradigm of work with business software. This became possible due to the following innovations:

Context-Sensitive Interface

Information is intelligently put into the context of your current task. E.g. when you work on an opportunity, BPMonline solution will show you relevant products for a cross-sell, loan options and special offers for these products. At the same time, all irrelevant data is kept hidden.
What is more, you can set business logic to define what data you want to be displayed for a specific kind of task.

Human-Centered Design

BPMonline 7.0 has been designed with the user in mind that is why the interface is as simple as your favorite social network. The elegant minimalistic design is free from redundant information and keeps you focused on what is relevant. The solution is so intuitive and visually appealing that working with the application is just as easy as browsing through a photo album.

Als Online-Marketing-Experte sollte man ein Gefühl dafür haben, wie die breite Masse das Internet nutzt. Dieser Blick geht einem manchmal verloren, wenn man sich in seinem Umfeld nur mit anderen Heavy Internet Usern unterhält. Daher sind wir für Euch auf die Straße gegangen und haben 30 Passanten gefragt: â??Was ist ein Browser?â?? Diese Frage hat [...]

The post Was ist ein Browser? appeared first on SISTRIX.

The technology to make these mobile payments has been available for years -- so why isn't everyone using it?

In short, it's because the market is young, highly competitive and not yet standardized. Fledgling start-ups and corporate behemoths alike are all vying for a piece of the pie.

The biggest issue is a lack of consensus over which specific technology should spearhead the market, sort of like the old VHS-Betamax war. However, mobile payment may involve even more service sectors -- from banks and payment processors, to network operators and third-party software developers -- making for a complex, highly competitive field.

Large companies are pushing for a set of mobile standards called near-field communications (NFC). This hardware-based technology can transmit small amounts of data over a short distance -- between a smartphone and a payment terminal, for instance -- making it perfect for what the industry calls "contactless" transactions.

Plenty of current smartphones come with built-in NFC chips, including the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC One. Apps such as Google Wallet allow users to make contactless payments at NFC-enabled terminals -- like any of the 300,000 MasterCard PayPass locations, including McDonald's, Rite Aid and Hess.

If that sounds like a hassle -- buying an NFC-capable phone, to use with a specific app, which only works with specific payment terminals -- it's because it is. There are simply too many variables.

This high barrier to entry has persuaded some major players, including Apple, to forgo NFC altogether. And when the maker of the world's best-selling smartphone isn't on board with something, consumers just...

But given the revelations spilling out into the media, there hardly seems a single aspect of daily life that isn't somehow subject to spying by the U.S. agency.

For some, it's a matter of indifference who or what is rifling through their electronic records. Others, mindful of spy agencies' history of abuse, are more concerned.

Here are some basic tips to avoid having your personal life turned into an intelligence report:

ENCRYPT YOUR EMAILS

Emails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they're readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your Internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe -- not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient's side of the world.

To beat the snoops, experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they're unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for "Pretty Good Privacy." PGP is effective enough that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.

Disadvantages: Encryption can be clunky. And to work, both parties have to be using it.

USE TOR

Like emails, your travels around the Internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you're trying to reach. TOR, short for "The Onion Router," helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.

Originally...

Featured with photos and hashtags -- #jazzfest, #rainboots, #nola -- the first batch sold out in two hours. "I knew there would be a feeding frenzy for rain boots," she says. "We had a stampede of women."

Like many natives of New Orleans, Poitevent chose to move back from New York after Hurricane Katrina ravaged her hometown. In rebuilding Feet First, founded by her parents, she turned to the usual, and requisite, e-commerce tricks -- a Web site, online shopping cart and Facebook page -- that have helped the business rebound.

But recently, her attention increasingly is on mobile to engage social media-savvy customers. Her Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Snapette (a local fashion app) accounts are updated frequently with products and promotions.

Next on her to-do list is developing a Web site optimized for phones, though she also wonders getting a costly app built might be worth it. "We need to start looking more closely at what devices (customers) are coming from," she says.

Poitevent's quest reflects the interest and changing priorities of small-business owners as mobile marketing tools offer more channels to reach nearby customers, as well as the risk of scrutiny by nitpicking critics.

Mobile search capabilities and shopping options quickly have advanced to the point at which customers can be found -- and served targeted ads -- based on everything from demographics to the roads they're currently driving on.

From large corporations to local entrepreneurs such as Poitevent, money is pouring in. U.S. mobile spending rose 69% in 2012 to $6.7 billion, according to the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), and this year will be $10.46 billion.

Mobile marketing can be particularly effective for small...

Sure, they're as likely as ever to post photos of themselves online, as well as their location and even phone numbers, say those who track their high-tech habits. But as they approach adulthood, they're also getting more adept at hiding and pruning their online lives.

Despite their propensity for sharing, many young adults also are surprisingly big advocates for privacy -- in some cases, more than their elders.

That attitude showed up most recently in a poll done over the weekend for the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post. The poll, tied to the disclosure of broad federal surveillance, found that young adults were much more divided than older generations when asked if the government should tread on their privacy to thwart terrorism.

Fifty-one percent of young adults, ages 18 to 29, said it was "more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy."

But 45 percent said personal privacy was more important, even if it limited the ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.

In contrast, less than a third of adults, age 30 and older, told pollsters that preserving personal privacy was more important, while about two-thirds placed higher value on permitting terror investigations, regardless of privacy infringement.

The young adults were much more in line with their elders when asked about the government monitoring specific modes of communication. Pollsters found that a slight majority of adults -- including 18- to 29-year-olds -- said it was "acceptable" for the government to secretly obtain phone call records.

But a similar...