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Latest feature for Silicon.com

The last 18 months have no doubt been challenging for sales and marketing pros, with customers reluctant to spend during the economic downturn.

Yet advances in technology mean there are now many new, effective ways to connect with customers and partners.

Here we look at the tech trends taking hold in sales and marketing departments.

All eyes on social networking
The rise of social networking has provided a new channel for innovative companies to reach their customers. Some of the more traditionally minded marketing departments may have struggled to understand how social tools mesh with their existing web plans but others have been happy to experiment.

“Facebook is central to our social media strategy,” says Robin Auld, marketing director of Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland.

The latest addition to this strategy is a Superfans application on the company’s Facebook profile page. Loyal fans of Domino’s on Facebook are rewarded with a promotional code which can be used to get discounts on pizza deliveries. “This application will enable us to leverage the importance of brand advocates in growing our customer base,” explains Auld.

According to recent research from analyst Forrester, use of social networking tools by marketing departments is set to increase throughout 2010 and beyond as companies search for ways to reach out to, and extend, their customer base.

“Social technologies allow for accessible innovation where the risks and costs are not as high, but the return is significant,” says Forrester Research vice president and research director Christine Overby.

For more go to Silicon.com

From our new eWEEK Europe UK writer Teresa Green

Business secretary Lord Mandelson may be about to add MC to his already extensive list of titles.

In a press release issued this week, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills said it planned to increase its efforts to combat the threat of illegal downloading and file-sharing by releasing a single highlighting the problems featuring Mandelson himself on vocals.

Fight For Your Right – To Profits

While the news that Mandelson plans to rap on the track may surprise some, it is believed that the business secretary is a secret fan of hard-core hip-hop acts including Dr Dre, Eminem, and Snoop Dogg. According to sources close to the BIS, the idea of Mandelson rapping on the track was first suggested by David Geffen during a meeting between the two last year in Corfu.

The track in question is believed to be a cover of the popular Beastie Boys track “Fight For Your Right” with Mandelson replacing the word “Party” with “Profits”, to reflect the hard times which record labels have found themselves in of late, thanks to the rise of illegal downloads.

Fight For Your Right (To Profits), featuring MC Mandelson, will be released on Geffen records to coincide with enforcement of the Digital Economy Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, and the UK release of Apple’s iPad later this month.

For more go to eWEEK Europe UK

Latest column for NHS Resource Centre:

Improving efficiency is all about doing more with the same or less. In the run up to the election, the oppostion is keen to present the last 13 years of Labour government as doing exactly the opposite.

Its allegation is that the government has been throwing fistfuls of cash about with no obvious results but noise, heat and wasted energy.The government, meanwhile, is trying to make the case that its spending has had tangible benefits.

The health service, for example, has never been in better shape according to health secretary Andy Burnham. Speaking after last week’s Budget he said: “After a decade of record investment, the NHS is today more resilient, has more capacity and provides better care than ever before.”

The political scrapping is only going to intensify in the run up to the election. Yet, if economic experts are right, whoever gets into power is going to have very little wiggle room when it comes to policy change.

Given the size of the UK’s deficit, future commitments to voters may look very like Henry Ford’s commitment to car buyers. Ford said they could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black. Ministers may find themselves saying: “You can have any new spending commitments you like, as long as they don’t cost anything.”

For more go to: NHS Resource Centre

The head of information policy and security at the UK Highways Agency has urged caution when it comes to the adoption of hosted or cloud applications such as Google Apps and Windows Live, which he believes should not be used for critical tasks at present.

Speaking at the  European Computer Audit, Control and Security (EuroCac) conference in Budapest this week, Ray Butler, a former information systems auditor at HM Customs for more than 25 years, told an audience of audit and IT specialists that hosted applications were still an unknown quantity in terms of security.

Asked by eWEEK Europe UK whether he believed web office applications such as Google Docs were inherently more insecure than local applications, Butler said that it depended on the circumstances but he wouldn’t advise using such tools for confidential or critical information.

“It depends doesn’t it. I work collaboratively, not in Google Docs but in Huddle and Microsoft Office Live,” he said. “But I wouldn’t use it for anything that would screw me up or my organisation up if it got lost or improperly released or anything simply because I don’t know how good the security is.”

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

Microsoft is facing an ongoing legal challenge in Argentina from an open source company which alleges the software giant used its Windows Starter Edition to dominate the country’s operating system market.

Argentinian software company Pixart SRL launched the lawsuit in September 2008 but the possibility of the case being heard has become more likely in recent weeks, according to the company’s lawyer Dr Uriel Blustein of Estudio Blustein & Asociados.

“It is a suit filed in the ‘National commission for Fair Trading’, for an alleged abuse of dominant position,” Dr Blustein told eWEEK Europe in an email this week. “The Commission in is the process of deciding whether the trial will take place,” (i.e. whether there is enough evidence to justify an investigation).

Don’t cry for us Argentina, says Microsoft

Pixart alleges that the market share of its Debian-based Linux distribution, Rxart, has been undermined by uncompetitive pricing practices from Microsoft. In a document outlining its case against Microsoft, Pixart argues that the existence of PCs pre-installed with a cut-down version of Microsoft Windows XP, known as Microsoft Stater Edition, was effectively used to undercut machines loaded with Rxart.

“Microsoft decided in late 2007 to pursue a policy of aggressive pricing subsidies to try to recover the market economically and financially suffocating Pixart SRL, mainly through a version of the operating system called ’starter edition’,” the document states.

Pixart claims to have had an installed base of around 320,000 units in 2005 but that base has been gradually eroded by the existence of Windows Starter Edition, and more recently Windows Vista Home Basic.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

Confession time. I am a comic book fan. There I have said it.

Some prefer the term “Graphic Novels” but it’s always come across as a bit defensive to me. Comics are something to be ashamed of so let’s come up with a more grandiose title.  Then again lumping together the likes of Watchmen and The Beano because they both have speech bubbles is about as useful as saying The Exorcist and Home Alone are both films.

Apart from dipping into the occasional “graphic novel”, I haven’t been a heavy user of comics for a while. That is until last week when I started playing with my iPhone and found a whole HellBoy series posted in the App Store. Afters some more exploratory surfing, I discovered specialist comic reading apps such as ComiXology and iVerse. Rather than downloading comics straight from the App Store, these tools give you a neat user interface and a payment system. In the case of iVerse you get your own cute little wooden shelf in which all your purchases are lined up for your browsing pleasure. Each comic costs around 59p to download which is about equivalent to a music track – and is fairly reasonable.

But what is really neat is the display interface which means that you can choose to view a whole page of the comic – as you would do in the traditional paper-format – or by flipping the screen horizontally you can reach each panel blown up to full-screen. This panel by panel viewing of the comic format is really enjoyable – and feels even more natural than flicking through paper pages. What’s more, the iphone screen is almost the perfect size and resolution for viewing the images and text.

Now I realise comics aren’t everyone’s cup of Kryptonite but I think the iPhone – and it’s various imitators – could represent a real revolution for the comic book industry. Marvel has just this week licensed some of its top titles – Spiderman, Captain America, X-Men – internationally to ComiXology an indication that there is market share to be had.

Reading plain text on the iPhone or another e-reader is Ok but not exactly compelling. But the combination of images and text which comics represent feels like a natural fit for mobile devices such as the iPhone – and potentially the iPad. Combine this with the renewed interest in comics generated by the rash of recent Hollywood blockbusters based on graphic novels – The Dark Knight, Wanted, 30 Days Of Night, Watchmen – and before too long more comic book fans might be ready to reveal their secret identities.

For more check out this review on CNET

The head of Germany’s main IT trade body told the audience at the opening ceremony of the CeBIT technology exhibition that one in four of his countrymen are happy to have a microchip inserted for ID purposes.

Professor August Wilhelm Scheer made the comments at an event this week to announce the start of the show which runs until Saturday in the German city of Hanover. With around 4000 companies from over 70 countries expected at the event, CeBIT continues to be the largest tech show in Europe according to its organisers.

As well as foretelling the imminent demise of the CD and DVD, Professor Scheer said that implanting chips into humans was going to become commonplace. “The speed of the development is not going to be reduced this decade,” he told an audience of tech execs and politicians including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Some developments can already be seen. CDs and DVDs are going to disappear as material sources of information. Wallpaper will be replaced by flat screens and many of us will have chips implanted beneath our skin by the end of next decade.

Rather than being based on pure speculation, Scheer said that his organistion BITKOM had actually conducted research which had shown that a quarter of Germans would be happy to have a chip implanted if it meant they could access services more easily.

For more go to eWEEK Europe UK

Smart businesses have always recognised the importance of maximising their most valuable asset – staff – with an effective human resources department. But amid the faltering recovery from the financial crisis, HR is increasingly being recognised for its strategic value as UK plc look towards growth.

To help HR meet this increasingly strategic role, proactive firms should investigate how IT can be used to make HR an even more precise discipline, says Richard Beatty, professor of human resources and leadership at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

“Only 15 per cent of positions – not people – really have a direct impact on the creation of customer and economic value in firms.” he says. “Unless you know and understand where that is happening and manage towards that through the smart use of data and analytics then you will probably under-perform as a business.”

But while Beatty sees the potential of technology to increase the sophistication of the HR, he has questioned whether this “people-centric” discipline has the technical pedigree to cope with a more data intensive role.

“The language of organisations is numbers; HR isn’t very good at data analytics,” Beatty told a recent CFO conference in Orlando. “They don’t think like business people. Many of them entered human resources because they wanted to help people, which I’m all for, but I’m also for building winning organisations.”

For more go to: Silicon.com

Start-up Israeli security company Trusteer claims to have hit on a different tactic when it comes to combating financial malware and making activities such as online banking more secure.

Rather than trying to eliminate every nasty from a user’s desktop, the four year-old company claims its Rapport software establishes a secure link between a customer’s desktop and the bank’s systems, excluding any malware in the process. The approach has been greeted with enthusiasm by analysts with a recent report from Frost and Sullivan neatly distilling the problem and Trusteer’s response to it.

“This new approach makes the basic assumption that the end user’s computer will always have active malware scripts and applications,” the report states. “In the battle of protecting information from malware, Trusteers’ solution takes the right approach of focusing on what needs to be done rather then fighting a lost battle.”

And it is not only analysts that are impressed. Banks including RBS and Natwest are already urging their customer to adopt the software, with HSBC becoming the latest financial services company to jump on board.

But despite its promise, Trusteer – and the customers using it – have come in from some criticism from more traditional anti-virus companies. Graham Cluley, a security expert with Sophos has blogged about dubious metrics used by RBS to encourage customers to adopt Rapport. He also criticised the decision by HSBC to allow its customer to save their log-in IDs locally – not connected to the Rapport software deal according to Trusteer – which he described as usability wrongly triumphing over security.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

Questions have been raised over some of the security measures introduced by HSBC to protect online banking customers, including the decision to allow ID information to be saved.

In a statement released this week, HSBC announced that it has introduced a security application called Rapport from tech company Trusteer – based in the US and Israel – for download by its customers. Despite being frequently described as “new software” in the HSBC statement, Rapport is already being used by several other banks including RBS, Alliance and Leicester and Natwest, according to Trusteer.

Commenting on the availability of Rapport to its customers, HSBC’s digital security manager Nick Staib said that downloads of the software had surpassed expectations. “I am delighted that so many customers share our interest in keeping personal and banking details safe,” he said. “Rapport is software that I use myself and I am happy recommending to friends.”

According to Trusteer and HSBC, Rapport works by “locking down browsers to prevent unauthorised access to web pages and to the confidential information that flows through the browsers”.

But despite the recommendation by HSBC, and Trusteer’s own claims, security experts have questioned some previous claims about the software. Consultant for rival security specialist Sophos, Graham Cluley said he wouldn’t comment on how effective Rapport was but referred to an earlier blog posting about RBS’s claims for the software.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK