Zoho adds sophisticated management, customization features

Summary: The small-business apps provider thinks enterprise with enhancements for managing territories, integrating deeper with social media and adding custom modules.

Customization modules allow for additional features or workflows without coding.

Strictly speaking, the latest enhancements to Zoho CRM aren't really being pitched at super small companies.

But any team that wants to get more granular about managing sales territories or adding custom modules to their customer relationship management application will appreciate the changes all the same.

Here's a high-level recap of what's been changed:

A new territory management option lets your company organize customers and prospects according to geographies, industry types, product lines, anticipated sales or divisions. This lets you change how you manage forecasts.A new social interaction tab allows salespeople to watch "conversations" on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn profiles from within the Zoho CRM applications.The updates allow for creation of custom workflow features, so that when certain activities happen, the CRM record is automatically updated. And, there are custom modules that allow users to export or import relevant data as necessary.Also, users can check out Zoho Campaigns results from within the CRM application.

Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist, said all Zoho users will automatically receive the social media updates. If you want to use the territory management or customization capabilities, you'll need to invest in the Enterprise plan, which is priced at $35 per user, per month.

Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist specializing in transformative technology and innovation

LiquidM raises $5 million for the management of mobile advertising

Summary: The start up United States has a new addition to the market ad tech: a white label platform.

Illustration courtesy LiquidM

Boot LiquidM ad technology company revealed itself to the world today, promising a management platform of mobile advertising's white label that can be configured to the specific needs of the companies.

Called "management of mobile advertising platform" - Yes, are straight-shooters there - the company's flagship product is a "normalized" and "open" software-as-a-service ideal for people without technical knowledge and promising bid in real-time, multimedia, third time of monitoring and information transparent envelope.

According to some estimates, the mobile advertising market is worth almost $17 billion, and accounts for about 14 percent of digital advertising all passes. While more time is spent on mobile devices, that figure is likely to change in favour of the young company.

"More mobile advertising companies are seeking to increase their competitiveness by turning to a technology provider stack full announcement," said CEO Christof Wittig. "While some in the market still believe that scale and more sales people will solve their problems, a new generation of companies is looking for comprehensive and integrated technological support to exploit the promise of this great opportunity."

The San Francisco-based company is backed by $5 million, Blumberg Capital, Earlybird and Asset Management. It revealed the existing customers in M & C Saatchi, Orange, Fetch, media Madvertise and company offices in New York, Berlin and Singapore.

Andrew Nusca is a contributor to CNET, ZDNet and SmartPlanet editor, ZDNet sister site on innovation. In 2013, its coverage will focus on business startups. It is based in New York.

Pay what you want for Zoho's new contact management

Summary: Latest offering from small-business apps provider includes native mobile applications for Android and Apple iOS.

You probably have heard of the Zoho CRM application: now, the cloud applications provider has created software for providing central management of your business contacts. And after a free trial, you can pay whatever you want to use it.

The new offering, called Zoho ContactManager, is designed to keep all of your company's business contacts in one unified location instead of scattered between all the different mobile phones and desktop organizations that your team is using.

It integrates with Google Apps and includes native mobile applications that allow for viewing or editing from an Apple iOS or Android mobile device. The application also works with the Zoho Card Scanner application for iPhones, which lets you "scan" business cards into a digital form by snapping an image of them.

Here are some of the other features:

Multi-user management, which lets different team members add and organize their contacts in one locationCentralized view of any tasks, outreach or "events" that are related to a contactThe ability to distribute follow-up tasks related to interaction with a contactA "sharing" feature that alerts the team whenever there's something new going on

I wasn't kidding about the pricing model: Zoho has adopted a policy called "Pay What You Want."  After the trial, you can set the per-user price where you want, down to a minimum of $1 per user per month.

Collectively, Zoho's applications are used by more than 8 million users. The company also sells IT management software (ManageEngine) and a network management suite (WebNMS).

Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist specializing in transformative technology and innovation

Most workday well timed ed management tools

Jornal plans to launch a management platform of higher education designed to promote the participation of students, improve management through budget cuts and focus on results as of 4 years, placement and skills graduation rates.

The efforts of higher education, together with the work to the white Government plans, it is likely that serve as a template in other vertical markets. Specific industry sales will be of key battleground as companies like Oracle and SAP working day objective. The efforts of the industry are being led by workday co-CEO Dave Duffield. Higher education platform is nicknamed analytics student day and features and modeling object to manage the academic student of the cycle.

Also: would play large workday: entrance to finance drug?

Workday said that it plans to launch the first components of the management system ed superior in the first half of 2014 and have GA in 2016 and add tools to a steady pace. Workday higher education management effort comes at an interesting time. Student debt, budget cuts and the need to serve a diverse student base in the midst of reconversion and workers who need new skills, higher ed traditional business model is under fire and probably unsustainable.

Liz Dietz, Vice President of product and strategy in working time management, said that the company aims to be a registration system "for being the first to bring the participation of students from first" mobile and big data. "Higher education is trying to adapt to the new normal," said Dietz, who joined the working day in April and sparked rumors the company might build a management of the education system.

Primary task of working hours: eradicate the legacy vendors such as Oracle and Ellucian in higher education deployments. Primary tone of day's work is that it will have a mobile management platform first student to optimize schedules, surf the debt and use analytics to help seek out older and graduate on time. Dietz argued that previous higher-ed applications have been build from the administrator point of view. "We will make students and faculty and what they really need people who use the system every day," said Dietz.

Initial design partners are Broward College, Yale University, Tallahassee Community College and the University of southern New Hampshire. These clients deploy and help design the modules on the cover.

The big question for the day's work is if the institutions of higher education - not the vertical more agile on the planet – will be breaking their legacy tools. "There is enough of the market forces and the pressures that if there is a better way to move," said Dietz. "In private meetings has been an enormous amount of interest. We believe that we can really help to transform institutions who have not had these decisions before."

Zenoss, service level management and Hadoop

Summary: Zenoss has been known for using big data and predictive analytics tools to gain a deep understanding of operational systems. It is now expanding the reach of its products to be able to handle huge amounts of data. It is also working to focus on service level management from its current focus on unified performance management..

Alan Conley, CTO of Zenoss, dropped by the other day to bring me up to date on the company. Zenoss, like a number of competitors gathers a large amount of operational data from workloads, application frameworks, virtualization tools, databases, storage systems, networking equipment and systems. Then the company uses "preditive analytics" to gain a deep understanding of performance, user experience and to detect potential and actual issues.

While the company has developed tools allowing a unified view of all of the operational data that is collected, its customers demanded the ability to manage larger amounts of data quickly and easily. So, Conley said, the company's newest version of its software will use Apache Hadoop. This, he pointed out, will also allow customers to develop their own uses of this operational database using both tools supplied by Zenoss and other Hadoop-oriented tools. The move to Hadoop should allow the next generation of Zenoss' products to manage five times the operational data.

Zenoss customers that I've spoken with almost always comment on the usefulness and timeliness of the information they get from Zenoss' products. I expect the broad expansion in scope and product performance will be of great interest for them. I hope to speak with one of them in the future.

Daniel Kusnetzky is a distinguished analyst and the founder of the Kusnetzky Group LLC. He's also the managing partner of Lux Sonus LLC, an investment firm.