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Sure they are, at least according to Palm, and to Amazon, where they are available for exactly that much, as long as the buyer is willing to sign a two-year service contract. The Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi Plus are both on sale for a single red cent (U.S.) in conjunction with the service agreement. The original Pre price on Amazon was $699.98 and the Pixi was offered at $399.98. The service agreement is through Verizon Wireless. Sponsor The customer reviews on the site are all positive, though some have issues with the battery life. Of course, one of the reviewers may stand in for the others when he says, "I am a huge Palm fanboy." Given that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing sometimes in even small companies, to say nothing of companies the size of Palm, and given the news that Palm is apparently for sale , it's impossible to decide that this is part of an overall strategy or just a little left-hand action. Discuss
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Palm Phones: Not Worth a Cent?
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SAS introduced a social media analytics program today that will compete against the major metrics players such as Radian 6 and WebTrends . The new service shows once again how blogs and social networks are deeply influencing marketing, customer support and product groups within the enterprise. The SAS Social Media analytics service is different than many of the social technologies we look at in our coverage. It's a hosted service that SAS builds for the client. The client develops the parameters for what they want to analyze. Rules are established that then server as the framework. Results are viewed through a web page that SAS sets up for the client. Sponsor Most of the services we see are delivered as a SaaS solution. For example, Salesforce.com went live recently with Chatter that integrates Twitter, Facebook and other services. But SAS is a company with analytics at its core. It will take about a year for the company to build up the IP, the data, for specific market verticals. After that time, down, the road, it's a service that could be delivered from the cloud. But the learning behavior may be its key differentiator. Mark Chaves, product manager, SAS, said the service can be optimized to learn, based on inputs. For example, the sentiment analysis can be changed to reflect what has been learned. With most services, the sentiment analysis parameters are defined within the application and can not be altered. The service reminds us a lot of what we see emerging in data analytics for the enterprise. The SAS service imports data from internal and external sources. It can archive and analyze more than two years of information from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discussion forums, blogs and other sources. It is designed to provide a form of predictive analytics that can be applied, for example, to develop marketing strategies such as brand development. Some of the other features include: Analyzes structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources. Quantifies influence, forecast future volume of social media conversations, and then predict their impact on the business. Multiple language support. Web-based dashboard. SAS Social Media Analytics platform shows how deep social technologies are filtering into the enterprise. It's important to identify data from social networks as additional data points that when integrated can provide insights, for instance, into campaigns and CRM environments. The SAS offering reflects the DNA of the company. The focus is on data analytics. That seems like a logical approach. Social networks are producing data at an exponential rate. The SAS offering reflects how it is becoming more of a science to analyze the information from these networks and how its outcomes affect the entire enterprise. Disclosure: SAS paid for a train ticket and hotel room for Alex Williams to attend the the SAS Users Conference in Seattle.] Discuss
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Social Media Analysis: SAS Makes Its Play
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Soon, Twitter users will be in a better position to get satisfaction with the companies that they do business with. This morning, SalesForce.com is announcing that the Chatter beta developer preview has grown to 500 companies and is integrated with its popular Service Cloud offering. The company has shown its ability to leverage the disruption of social media - rather than be disrupted by it. We had a chance to review the new tools and experience what an end-to-end social media driven customer experience looks like. It was eye-opening for us - and is coming soon to the 70,000-plus customers of SalesForce platform. Sponsor The first thing we learned in our briefing with SalesForce is that the company has fully digested the reality of the new web. The company talks about how it started on a mission to bring the power of great web applications like Amazon.com to enterprise customers. Now, ten years later, the web and the company have moved on towards the new dominant engagement model on the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Here is a graph the SalesForce team shared with us on the emerging trend of Internet usage, a key driver in how the Chatter product has been considered. SalesForce makes a case that a fundamental shift is underway and its completely re-factoring the engagement model. The company calls it the "Facebook Imperitive", which we interpret as "be as social and easy to use as Facebook, or whither". Reminiscent of the Wired Magazine's "Wired: Tired" lists SalesForce shares its observations of the fundamental shifts in the industry. We see Amazon.com as the old incumbent leader of the Internet being replaced by Facebook. Also series of observations that show the landscape change dominated by mobile, location, and web standards. Here, we see a Chatter enabled service desk, where we can easily see the different channels that have opened tickets for customer service. A case that has been opened via Twitter is seen in the dashboard here. It can be shared among team members, or escalated. We think this is an interesting evolution of the "follower" mechanic borrowed from Twitter. In this case, you can be assigned a topic to follow, since in the enterprise there is a job to be done. Here, we see the familiar Twitter interface as the origination point of the case being managed internally. From what we learned, several marquee customers such as Bank of America plan on rolling out Chatter plus Service Cloud. Shown here is the Bofa Twitter feed responding to individuals in the public forum. Some of the productivity benefits offered by Chatter plus Service Cloud offered by the company are listed here: "Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business" We think there could be several big winners with SalesForce Chatter release. SalesForce may have found its way into the entire enterprise, where it becomes essential to connect departments and individuals together in the best collaboration model possible. Twitter seems like a big winner here, where it is now being demonstrated as the front end to customer service relationships. This pattern has been developing for several years with leaders like Comcast servicing customers with Twitter . Now, its moving to the next level where when you Tweet an issue, you'll essentially be opening a ticket. And, where tickets are opened, you can be sure that it is someone's job to close them. It seems that Twitter being cemented into enterprise processes just like the telephone of yesteryear. Consumers win by getting faster answers with less searching in document bases, or waiting in call center queues. Consumers also win by bringing speed and transparency to the process. No longer, will we wait on hold all alone, as we're bringing our followers with us with every Tweet. IT departments that have invested in document management and other solutions will now be able to extend their reach Customer service departments that have the job of closing tickets and meeting SLAs (Service Level Agreements) Welcome to the future of customer service, no telephone required, but your smart mobile device is definitely invited. Do you believe SalesForce.com onto the next big shift in enterprise computing with the upcoming launch of Chatter? Photo credits: Salesforce.com Discuss
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This Tweet is Priority 1: SalesForce.com's Chatter is Transactional Social Media
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Twitter just launched an updated, more dynamic homepage . The old, static homepage that didn't really explain how Twitter really works and just showed a list of trending topic and a search form. The new homepage, on the other hand, features a scrolling list of trending topics, a constantly updating view of tweets from popular Twitter users, a random sampling of suggested users and a new explanation of what Twitter is. Sponsor We have to say, though, that Twitter's new explanation of itself sounds a bit odd: "Twitter is a rich source of instant information. Stay updated. Keep others updated. It's a whole thing. You choose and customize every aspect of the service. Lots of people like it. We'd love it if you joined us." Interestingly, Twitter de-emphasizes the social networking features of the service here and stresses that Twitter is a source of "instant information." The old homepage simply said: "Share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world." According to Twitter's own announcement , the company wants to stress that Twitter is "not just for status updates anymore" The new homepage also now feature a link to Twitter's FAQ for business users . A Better Homepage for Novice Users? Given that Twitter has always had a hard time converting new users to regular users, this new homepage is clearly an attempt to better explain the service's features and functionality to new users. We will have to wait and see if this new homepage will do a better job at converting visitors to regular users. The new explanation of Twitter on the homepage could surely use some tweaking, but the new focus on interesting tweets and users will immediately give newcomers a good idea of how they can use Twitter themselves. Discuss
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Twitter Gets a New Homepage - It's a Whole Thing
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Not too long ago, spam on Twitter was quickly becoming a serious issue that made searching for any popular topic on the service's own search engine almost pointless. Spammers would regularly hijack popular terms by polluting the search results with nonsensical tweets that included the popular keyword and a link to a spam site. Since Twitter started implementing better spam controls last year, however, the number of spam messages on the service has gone down dramatically. According to the latest data , the percentage of spam tweets per day is now down to under 1%. Sponsor According Twitter's chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury , the company's Trust and Safety team is "constantly battling against spam to improve the Twitter experience and we're happy to report that it's working." Between May and October 2009, the percentage of daily of spam messages on Twitter regularly exceeded 9% and spiked to over 10 on a few days. As Twitter's primary monetization strategy currently involves selling access to its firehose stream to search providers like Google and Microsoft, it is definitely in the company's best interest to keep the number of spam messages as low as possible. Report a Spammer If you want to help Twitter in its fight against spam, remember that you report a spammer directly to Twitter 's anti-spam team from every user's profile page. Just look for the "report for spam" link in the right sidebar or in the drop-down actions menu. Discuss
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Twitter is Winning Its Fight Against Spammers
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