crm

Microsoft buys analytics firm Netbreeze, readies CRM updates

Microsoft has acquired Netbreeze, an analytics company whose social-monitoring tools Microsoft plans to integrate with its CRM offerings.

Microsoft officials made the acquisition announcement on the opening day of the company's annual Convergence CRM/ERP conference in New Orleans. Microsoft executives declined to discuss the price or other particulars of the purchase.

The Softies also shed light on the next two updates to its Dynamics CRM offerings during the keynote presentation.

The first update, code-named "Gemini," will be an updated version of the MarketingPilot marketing-automation technology that Microsoft acquired last fall when it bought MarketingPilot. The new … Read more

Cloze gives relationship scores to everyone you know

Has it come to this? Do we need corporate CRM tools to manage our individual relationships?

The startup Cloze has launched a utility that scores every relationship you have with your e-mail contacts, based on when and how you communicate with people. The scores look like Klout numbers, but they're personal to you. Cloze uses those scores to rank your people, flagging the top-scorers for followup when you don't respond to their messages. Creepy? Maybe. But fairly handy.

Cloze was designed as a work tool. Founders Dan Foody and Alex Cote said they wanted to create … Read more

Marketing-automation company Marketo secures $50 million

Marketo, a marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) company, has raised $50 million in a new round of funding, the company said today.

Marketo provides several marketing-automation services designed for businesses of all sizes. One of the key facets of the company's services is to facilitate interactions between its customers and their own clients through its CRM solutions.

The financing round was led by Battery Ventures. The company's existing investors--Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund, and Storm Ventures--also participated in the round. The cash infusion has brought Marketo's total funding to $107 million since the … Read more

Parsing Facebook's new lexicon (Q&A)

Facebook is expanding its vocabulary.

Recently at f8, Facebook's developer conference, the company introduced a series of action verbs into its social platform. "Read," "Watch," and "Listen," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained, were added to help build a "language for how people connect."

The one missing word, of course, was "Buy." That's really why Facebook and its army of content partners from news, publishing, music, and film and TV are rushing to set up shop on the famous platform with 750 million users. The overriding idea is that … Read more

This Day in Tech: Data leaked from BART police union Web site; Turning toys into medical devices

Too busy to keep up with the tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Wednesday, August 17.

It looks like hackers haven't given up on BART. Last week, SF subway officials shut down cell phone service and have since taken the media spotlight as hackers respond to the communication lockdown. Today, data containing full names, passwords, e-mail addresses, and passwords was leaked from the BART Police Officers Association's Web site, making it the second site, affiliated with BART, to be hacked.

And of course, here's more news on Google's Motorola … Read more

Totango set to enhance SaaS sales tools

As enterprise users grew tired of installing massive suites of on-premise customer relation management software and Internet-oriented businesses began to rise, Salesforce.com came along and turned hosted applications, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), into a multi-billion dollar market.

Following in Salesforce's wake came lead-nurturing tools like Constant Contact, Eloqua, HubSpot, and Marketo that have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding, and have ostensibly added value to their customers' relationship.

This week we see the launch of Totango (pronounced like "to tango"), which bills itself as a "real-time customer usage analysis platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) … Read more

Customer relationships managed

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of the most significant applications of information technology to modern business practice. CRM hasn't replaced critical personal contacts but enabled and enhanced them. NCH Software is leveling the playing field for CRM database systems with its Reflect CRM technology, a multiuser CRM package that happens to be free. It can track customer information, accounts, leads, and more. It can import and export data as CSV files, too, and is compatible with other programs, databases, and files, including PDFs.

Reflect CRM Free is a compact download that installs quickly. The setup wizard prompted us … Read more

Fellowup: The grandma-approved social service you should use

Your grandmother--the one with the birthday book, so she never forgets a family member's special day--would approve of Fellowup. It's a modern-day version of the same thing. It watches your contacts on Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as your Google mail and calendar, and gives you a clear dashboard showing you which of your contacts could benefit from the personal touch today. In addition to grabbing birth dates from social profiles, it also keeps an eye out for things like relationship and job status changes, and news articles that mention your contacts. It will show you an alert when these things come up, so you have an excuse to make personal contact.

The service also lets you create your own dossiers on your contacts, adding private tags for a person's interests, for example. With upcoming Google Calendar integration, Fellowup will also be able to ask you for feedback after a meeting with a contact, so you can enter your impressions or to dos.

Fellowup lets you post directly to your contacts' Facebook walls from within the service, which makes it even easier to pretend you remembered a contact's birthday. It can also send e-mails. … Read more

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 arrives

The latest version of Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 2011 service, a program that helps midsize businesses track their clients, is now available for on-premises use, as well as through Microsoft's partners as a hosted solution.

The news comes roughly a month after the company made available a version of the service that was hosted on its own servers. Rollout for this particular version had originally been planned for the end of this month to allow for additional testing.

Dynamics CRM makes up one part of Microsoft's Dynamics offering, with the other part of the line focusing on enterprise … Read more

Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 2011 hits the cloud

The latest offering in Microsoft's Dynamics business, Dynamics CRM 2011 Online, is being released to customers this morning, following a four-month beta program that consisted of more than 11,500 businesses around the world.

The CRM software, which is being released first as a hosted service through Microsoft, hits 40 different markets in 41 languages today, with an on-premises and partner-hosted version of the software to follow on February 28. That delay can be chalked up to extra testing on Microsoft's part to make sure it will work outside of the company's data centers.

"One reason … Read more