Commerce is no longer just about selling to customers—it’s about businesses earning the right to be part of a continuous stream of customer engagement.  According to new research from IT services provider Mindtree and Vanson Bourne, only 28 percent of decision-makers from about 900 companies surveyed said their organizations are investing in personalization features that consumers want, including improved search and compare/aggregate functions. Instead, they’re focusing on features such as shopping lists, wish lists and social features. The report, Winning in the Age of Personalization, also found that when businesses…

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Start with your business needs, not your software’s features. A good CRM plan starts with your business and its needs. What are your business goals? What are your weaknesses where CRM can help? What do you need to do to make your business a success by your definition? Stated that baldly, it seems obvious. Unfortunately many businesses implementing CRM put the cart before the horse. Instead of starting with what their business needs, they start with the features of the CRM package they’re installing. At best this is suboptimal and at…

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My ZDNet colleague and PC hardware expert Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote an interesting speculative piece today about Apple’s future and whether augmented and virtual reality hardware is where it is likely to make significant future investments. In the past I’ve touched on where AR and VR is likely to play out in consumer as well as in enterprise and vertical tech, and in particular I have been interested in the overall impact on our society that this technology is likely to make — good or bad. I don’t know for certain that Apple is going to go…

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One of the most persistent questions I hear about Windows 10 involves what happens when the free upgrade offer ends. Is Microsoft going to start charging subscription fees? After a close look at the company’s financials, I’m convinced the answer is an emphatic no. We’ve had this advice drummed into our heads for years: If a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That guideline is usually correct, which probably explains why I continue to hear from skeptics convinced that Microsoft’s free Windows 10 offer is a…

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Companies are already actively using big data. They just don’t call it that. While the phrase has problems, the technology is becoming more intrinsic to business. It turns out that no one knows what the heck big data is, and about the same number of companies are actually doing anything meaningful with it, according to a new study from Dresner Advisory Services. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. After all, despite years of big data prognostication, most companies still struggle to even put little data to use. This isn’t to suggest that…

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MIT researchers have developed a GPU called Eyeriss that could enable algorithms to run locally and instantly, instead of sending raw data into the cloud. This means that a future version of Siri could get you answers much faster. Ask Apple’s Siri, “What does the fox say?” and there’s a notable pause. It’s not because Siri, too, is stumped by the question, but because your speech is raced off to Apple servers in the cloud, where its meaning is analyzed by a collection of processors — known as a “neural network,”…

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Has the landscape of small business security improved over the last few years? This is the question I’m asking myself as we roll into 2016. As a former IT administrator for my friend’s small drafting company, which involved a wide breadth of IT related tasks from managing their five desktop computers to securing their network firewall, I’ve witnessed first-hand the types of IT challenges a typical small business faces on a daily basis. A common phrase echoed by politicians and economists is, ‘Small business is the backbone of the economy.’…

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