CRM Update – Feb 24 : 3:53 pm

Even the tightest budget allows for an investment in culture. Here’s what I mean.I’ll admit it. I’m cuckoo for the fun stuff we do around here, at the Beryl Companies. Mainly because I know that when combined with training, education, and our core values, it gives our people the best chance to do a fantastic job for our clients. Plus, I see a lot of smiles whenever I’m in the office. Smiles are a currency that never devalues. Now, I didn’t always have the checkbook to make big expenditures on culture…

Company selects easy-to-use solution to increase employee productivity, improve client experience and support growth.

MasterCard has rolled out a new global initiative that aims to help financially underserved consumers access their financial information via mobile.
The MasterCard Mobile Money Partnership Program was developed to help the under banked. The company is working with Comviva, Sybase 365 and Utiba on this mobile initiative.
“In emerging markets, where only a small proportion of the population is banked, the banking infrastructure is not well developed,” said Mung Ki Woo, group executive of mobile at MasterCard, New York…

What do you do when you want Marty McFly’s hoverboard from Back to the Future so badly you can almost feel yourself floating around on it? You do what French artist Nils Guadagnin did: build one yourself.
As you can see in the video above, Guadagnin created a life-sized floating replica, using a couple of electromagnets along with a laser guidance system. That tech allows the board to lift off the ground just like the “real” thing. Never mind that it can only lift 5 pounds so far — Guadagnin calls it a “work in progress…

3 Examples of Content Marketing That Get Customers Talking
Is your content marketing social media shareworthy? In other words, does your non-promotional content invite readers to participate and extend the conversation by commenting and sharing it with their family, friends and social media colleagues? Further, when your content’s shared, is your brand readily discernable on other platforms or via other channels (such as email)?

To help you develop social media friendly content marketing, here are three examples that use social media to engage prospects and extend their reach along with related content marketing lessons…

We’ve all heard of solar power and wind power, but researchers at Wake Forest are developing another alternative form of power: thermoelectrics. They’ve created a fabric — comprised of tiny carbon nanotubes — that can convert body heat into an electric charge.
The device, called Power Felt, uses temperature differences to create electricity.
“We waste a lot of energy in the form of heat. For example, recapturing a car’s energy waste could help improve fuel mileage and power the radio, air conditioning or navigation system,” graduate student Corey Hewitt Hewitt says…

Team Santa Rosa aims to fill companys former site

Top North American deals provider, Dealfind has announced the launch of “Product Deals”, providing consumers in Canada and the U.S. with discounts of 50 to 90 percent on items such as electronics, clothing, cosmetics, jewelry and household goods. So now, right along with the tabs for the daily deal, everyday deals and travel deals, users will find a tab for some very nice product offers.
“We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response to the product deals we’ve featured so far, so we want to give our customers more of what they love and want,” said Dealfind Co-Founder and President Gary Lipovetsky…

Apple’s annual shareholders meeting is providing little in the way of juicy news, but there appears to be an undercurrent of change in both the statements of executives and the votes of shareholders. Could this be a sign of a change in how Apple operates? It certainly seems so.
In his first Q&A with shareholders since becoming CEO, Tim Cook yet again acknowledged that Apple has “more [cash] than we need to run the company”. At close to $98 billion, it’s quite the chunk of change. Cook failed to specify, however, what the company plans to do with the money, only sharing that there are “active discussions” among the board on Apple’s next steps…

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Marc Horne.  Marc is a co-founder of DailyDealBuilder.com, provider of daily deal software, solutions, and training.
“Cause” marketing or cause-related marketing refers to a type of marketing involving the cooperative efforts of a “for profit” business and a non-profit organization for mutual benefit. The term is sometimes used more broadly and generally to refer to any type of marketing effort for social and other charitable causes, including in-house marketing efforts by non-profit organizations…

For a larger version, click here. For meme playing pieces, click here. For a playable online version, click here.
If you like memes and alcohol, you’ll love this new drinking game that uses 24 memes as spaces of a board game. Cheers to that! Reddit‘s kc_sharky unveiled the game Thursday on the popular news aggregation site.
“Meme Drinking Board Game” starts with the Rent Is Too Damn High meme and ends with the Success Baby meme. Sandwiched in between are memes such as Lazy College Senior, Annoying Facebook Girl, Scumbag Steve, Philosoraptor, Angry Ass Wolf and more…

A murder-for-hire plot that started with a Facebook message resulted in a prison sentence for Ohio residents Christine Metter and her 77-year-old father. Metter stared at the courtroom floor on Thursday when a judge sentenced her to 10 years in prison for attempting to hire a man on Facebook to kill her ex-husband.
Metter, 41, of Ohio and her father Al Zombory, 77, were convicted of conspiracy to commit aggravated murder in January. Zombory was sentenced to nine years in prison on Tuesday…

Steve Jobs who would have turned 57 today, succeeded in making the world more beautiful. If we go by Charles Mingus’ definition, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity,” Jobs was an extremely creative person. He believed in the importance of form as well as function. This made him turn the purely utilitarian computer into an iPad – a personal digital device that provides entertainment, enables communication, and more…

Apple’s iCloud and MobileMe push services have been taken down for users residing within Germany due to a patent lawsuit from Motorola, the company has announced.
“Affected customers will still receive iCloud and MobileMe email, but new messages will be downloaded to their devices when the Mail app is opened, or when their device periodically fetches new messages as configured in iOS Settings. Push email service on desktop computers, laptop computers, and the web is unaffected, as is service from other providers such as Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync,” says Apple on its official support page…

By Ron Kurtz
There are many ways that weak research, combined with poor analysis, can lead to bad conclusions.
Research among “luxury” and “affluent” consumers is vulnerable to errors in various areas. For example, the lack of an objective or universal definition of “luxury” creates uncertainty as to what respondents understand the word to mean.
In addition, the level of “affluence” associated with true luxury consumers is subject to various differences of opinion among researchers…

iPhone 5 Concept by Ciccarese Design

Click here to view this gallery.
The iPhone 5 might not be arriving any time soon, but that hasn’t stopped artists and design firms from creating their own mock-ups.
After analyzing the various iPhone 5 rumors, Italian designer Federico Ciccarese came up with these gorgeous renders.
Ciccarese’s vision of the iPhone 5 predicts a slightly curved back. The body of the phone, in fact, looks similar to Apple’s Magic Mouse…

Extract, engage, entice.

Nick Przybyciel is a graduate degree candidate at Northwestern University’s Medill School, where he is studying the intersection of technology and journalism as an interactive publishing student. You can connect with him on Twitter @nicprz.
It wasn’t too long ago that Simon Ribeiro would have been considered an odd political candidate.
Ribeiro’s de-facto campaign nerve center is inside a classroom at Chicago’s Gordon Tech High School, where he is a rookie teacher, having finally scored a full-time job after six years of substitute teaching…

LG is gearing up to unveil a new line of smartphones that will be focused on sleek design.
The company will be revealing three smartphones under a new line called L-Style next week at the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The Android-powered devices include the 3.2-inch Optimus L3, the 4.0-inch Optimus L5 and the 4.3-inch Optimus L7. The Optimus L3 will debut in the European market in March, while the other two devices are expected to become available in the first half of 2012 and will run on Android’s latest mobile operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) 4…

I must admit to only becoming aware of this new social media phenomenon fairly recently and, having done a bit of research, I thought I’d write about it in case any of you also fall outside the 11M+ registered subscribers it has up to now.
How Does Pinterest Work?
Pinterest is essentially a picture sharing site where subscribers ‘pin’ images to their own ‘pin board.’ This can be anything you like – it can be random stuff that you just have an interest in and want to share with others or it can be multiple images relating to a passion you have…

The times, they are a-changin’, and you must stay nimble to succeed in the food and beverage industry. New York City’s top chefs explain how they stay current.When even the legendary Le Bernardin is changing things up to remain relevant, all restaurateurs would be wise to consider tweaking things. Two Manhattan restaurants—one, La Mangeoire, a long-time neighborhood eatery, and the other, La Silhouette, a bistro opened in 2011—have managed to adjust to the changing economy and remain profitable, despite not having a celebrity chef or the buzz of a super-trendy hot spot…

In this video I interview Tom Webster, vice president, strategy and marketing at Edison Research.Tom shares insights into current trends in social media.You’ll also discover why you need to know how research is carried out and how to interpret social media trends.Tom gives you the questions you need to ask before following these trends to drive your business forward successfully.Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:Where to expect growth in social media in the futureThe challenges of conducting social media researchWhy you need to know what you don’t knowHow non-response bias impacts research dataHow businesses should make sense of social media researchWhy you should not develop answers based on researchAsk your customers “Hey, is this a problem or not?”The roles of social media monitoring: real-time data and “slow data”Why you need to also do research on changes over timeWhy you need to look at data and ask what’s missingConnect with Tom on Twitter @webby2001, at Edison Research and check out Tom’s blog: Brand Savant…

Ontario 211, the phone line that has helped well over 4 million callers find help in the social and human services sectors since it launched a decade ago, is now province-wide. And Ontario is the first province in Canada to be able to make that claim.

New add-on lets users to initiate a live click to chat link within a company’s Facebook page.

Have you ever wondered about the specific brand rules that regulate product placement and on-air sponsorships of products on TV? Yeah, us either. Until Stephen Colbert spent the entire second act of his show last night dissecting and mocking a memo from Nabisco spelling out precisely how Wheat Thins can be consumed and presented on the program.

So what should you know before you show Wheat Thins on television? No overconsumption. The serving size is 16 crackers, and a bowl of Wheat Thins shown on TV can’t have any more than 16 crackers…

Current economic turmoil is so severe that it’s even reaching the magical realm. A survey of parents found that, on average, they were slipping a bit less money under the pillows of their gap-toothed munchkins.

LiveScience, citing the Original Tooth Fairy Poll, reports that kiddies’ rate of return for lost teeth dipped to $2.10 last year, down from $2.52 in 2010. The story cites figures that say 90 percent of parents give their kids money for their teeth, with the most common gift being $1…

Doctors at Houston’s Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital have made medical and social media history by live-tweeting an open-heart surgery for the first time.
Yes, you read that correctly.
On Tuesday, Dr. Michael Macris performed a double-coronary artery bypass on a 57-year-old patient. Dr. Macris’ colleague, Dr. Paresh Patel, provided 140-character updates throughout the procedure and answered questions submitted by followers of the hospital’s @houstonhospital Twitter account…

Biz Stone, a cofounder of Twitter, told an audience in Montreal this week that spending up to 12 hours a day on the platform is not necessarily a great idea.
“To me, that sounds unhealthy,” he said on Wednesday at the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal business conference, according to a report in The Guardian. Stone told the audience that users should leave the site after they found the information they were looking for.
“I like the kind of engagement where you go to the website and you leave because you’ve found what you are looking for or you found something very interesting and you learned something,” Stone said, according to the report…

If you've created a custom entity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (or CRM 4 for that matter) you've noticed the "Name" field of this entity is a required field. What if this field serves no useful purpose for your users. It could just be an extra field that the user must populate in order to save a new record.
You could easily auto populate that field with a static value; however, since this field shows up (and is required) in many of the system views and well as the Lookup field on related forms, this is probably not the best option…

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories.
Apple Acquires Discovery Engine Chomp
Apple has acquired app discovery engine Chomp, TechCrunch reports. The acquisition could lead to a complete revamp or at least big improvements to Apple’s App Store. Chomp’s 20+ employees will all be joining Apple’s ranks; the company CEO Ben Keighran has already joined iTunes Marketing…