September Procurements

Acquisitions are such a frequent occurrence these days that at the end of each month we are sure to face lots of exciting, eye-catching deals. September biggest acquisition cost $8.3 billion. It’s so interesting, when a company buys a startup for a “little” sum, we never know about the amount, but in case the deal cost $billions, it’s publicized everywhere.

September activists are Yahoo and Google with two acquisitions each. The list goes from Silicon Valley to biotechnology; mobile and games and lots of cloud, cloud and cloud. Let’s start with the first deal made by Genesys.

September 03 - Genesys Acquires CanaPlus Consulting

Genesys - the market leader in multi-channel customer experience and contact center solutions in the cloud and on-premises announced the acquisition of Singapore-based CanaPlus Consulting - a leading systems integrator that brings over a decade of expertise implementing Genesys solutions in the APAC region for large, multi-national financial services companies and other leading regional organizations.

September 05 - Yahoo Acquires, Shuts Down Luminate

Yahoo is buying Luminate, a startup founded in 2008 by LiveOps, Netscape and Yahoo alums that has created a platform for interactive, tagged images-or, as we have called it in the past, an AdSense for images.

September 11 - Google Buys Lift Labs

Google has bought Lift Labs, the maker of a tremor-cancelling spoon aimed at improving the lives of people suffering from Parkinson’s and essential tremor. The acquisition marks a further move into the biotech industry for the Silicon Valley giant -and Google said it hopes to explore how the technology could be used in other ways to improve the quality of life of people with neurodegenerative diseases.

September 11 - BlackBerry Acquires Movirtu

BlackBerry has acquired a UK-based mobile technology start-up whose software allows users to have multiple phone numbers on the same device. The purchase of Movirtu helps BlackBerry ramp up its portfolio of services to cater to the needs of its core base of corporate and government clients. Movirtu's virtual SIM technology allows an individual to have both a personal and business number on a single mobile device, with separate billing for voice, data and messaging usage on each number.

September 13 – Google Acquires Polar

Google is bringing Polar over to Google+ in the hopes that the team behind the popular opinion-tracking service will be able to heat up Google's social network. Polar was founded approximately two years ago. Its current line of business, which it will be shutting down at the end of the year, is just what its name suggests: easy-to-use polls that can be filled out via various Web services and apps.

September 15 - Microsoft To Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang 

Microsoft announced it will buy Minecraft maker Mojang for $2.5 billion. The Mojang team will join Microsoft Studios, maker of popular video games Halo, Forza and Fable, among others.

September 22 - SAP To Acquire Concur Technologies

German enterprise software vendor SAP SE announced that it will acquire Concur Technologies for $8.3 billion, marking it its biggest purchase ever. Concur Technologies is a leading provider of integrated cloud-based travel and expense management solutions who has over 20,000 clients around the globe and is accessed by over 25 million users. Through the acquisition, SAP intends to further strengthen its presence in the networked economy. 

September 22 - Yahoo Buys Bangalore-Based Tech Startup Bookpad 

Yahoo has bought Bangalore-based Bookpad, a startup that's barely a year old and founded by three youngsters who passed out of IIT-Guwahati over the past three years. Bookpad's enterprise software product, DocsPad, allows users to view any document (like PDF, Word, Powerpoint), as also edit and annotate it, within a website or app. It works across devices, and does not require downloading of plug-ins or desktop software.

September 22 - Red Hat's Acquisition of eNovance

Red Hat acquired OpenStack pioneer eNovance to help bolster its global OpenStack portfolio. eNovance a leading provider of open source cloud computing services. Combined with Red Hat's existing leadership in OpenStack, the addition of eNovance's systems integration capabilities and engineering talent is aimed at meeting growing demand for enterprise OpenStack consulting, design and deployment.

Smile and Make Your Customers Smile!

Today when it’s the World Smile Day I’d like to make all my readers realize how beautiful our life is and smile for a second. Smile, even if you’re very tired. Many people smile not because they are very happy, but to hide their sadness.

The idea of World Smile Day was initiated by Harvey Ball, a commercial artist from Massachusetts. He is known to have created the yellow smiley face in 1963. The world's first World Smile Day was held in 1999 and has been held annually since.

Good customer service starts with a smile

Smile is the inseparable component of a good customer service. Remember how many times you made your customers change their mood or even anger with just a little smile as most smiles are started by another smile. It costs nothing, but gives so much.

Even if you are an agent on the other side of the line, the customer feels your smile; it warms him and makes it possible for him to change his attitude towards you.

Smile plays magic!

Start your day with a smile and see how the magic begins to work. People smile back at you; you feel happier, and you also make others happier. 

Another magic of a smile:  “Every smile makes you a day younger”. Why not look younger and at the same time spread your positive mood on your family, friends, colleagues or customers. It’s the only thing that can fit all people, as everybody smiles in the same language.

Brighten your day with someone else’s smile!

What do I usually do to make my day? I follow the saying that became my motto: “If I could make someone laugh, my day will be complete”.

I’d like to brighten your day a little bit with some of my beloved quotations:

·         A smile is an inexpensive way to change your looks ~Charles Gordy

·         A smile is the light in the window of your face that tells people you’re at home ~Unknown

·         A smile is the universal welcome ~Max Eastman

·         Keep smiling - it makes people wonder what you’ve been up to ~ Unknown

·         Smile! It increases your face value ~Robert Harling, Steel Magnolias

·         A smile is happiness you’ll find right under your nose ~Tom Wilson

·         The world always looks brighter from behind a smile~  Unknown  

·         If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it ~Andy Rooney

·         A smile takes but a moment, but the memory of it lasts forever~Anonymous

·         Smile with your lips, smile with your eyes, smile with your heart and your soul and your life ~Terri Guillemets

Imagine that your smile may become sunshine in somebody’s life. If you don’t have a smile I’m ready to give you one of mine!

The True Cost of a Great Customer Service

We used to speak about all possible effects of bad customer service, but seldom refer to the real cost of a good service, that’s because a human being thinks about negative things more than good ones, right?

A few days ago I entered a shop to buy some decorations for the upcoming holiday. I knew what I needed to buy and entered the shop very confident, just the way people behave when they are sure what they want. I was short of time too. It’s needless to say when I left the shop. And only then did I realize what a good customer service can cost. I bought so much stuff, spent all the money I had with me and that was a result of a great service I never met before.

Here you can see how customers respond to good service:

Majority think that customer service is an easy job that can be accomplished by nearly everyone. In fact it’s so, everyone can do it, but how?  It’s difficult enough to prepare a savvy staff for that. That’s why only about 10 percent of companies deliver great customer service. Although 80 percent of companies think they deliver superior customer service.

When you realize the full potential of a good customer service, you do understand that the game is worth the candle. 

Good customer service is a two-way street, where both can be happy – as when you create some value for someone else, you yourself become happy. And don’t forget that it can cost five times more to buy new cus­tomers than retain exist­ing ones.

Remember - customer service starts with you and you can be that change to the better!

August – another “Google” month!

So many exciting acquisitions take place every passing month! And social acquisitions became an inseparable part of my mentions – Twitter and Facebook continue growing their kingdoms. 

But it’s the second time I call my list a “Google” month, as most important acquisitions occurring in August were Google’s achievements: in May Google had 6 acquisitions, in August - 5, starting from a travel guide to cloud-based software. Who is the target for the next month?

August 1 - Twitter Buys Password-Sharing Startup Mitro

August started with Twitter acquiring password-sharing startup Mitro. Founded in 2012, Mitro’s primary product is a web browser extension that allowed users to store  and share passwords.  Mitro team will join Twitter’s location team in New York, focusing on a variety of geo-related projects!

August 6 - Google Acquires Emu, Texting With Built-In Assistant

Google has acquired Emu - the app creates reminders from messages based on time and location, as well as showing movie times and schedule restaurant reservations from text message.

August 6 – Google Acquires Directr, An App For Shooting Short Films On Your Phone

On August 6^th Directr has been snatched up by Google. It helps users and businesses shoot videos that were a bit longer than your average Vine — think ads, or promo clips, or family holiday videos. The Directr product will live on under its own branding, but the team behind it is joining YouTube’s video ad team.

August 7 - Facebook Buys Secure Server Technology Provider PrivateCore

Facebook announced to acquire PrivateCore, a Palo Alto-based secure server technology company. PrivateCore’s early users have included large financial institutions and a Non-Governmental Organization funded by the US government. PrivateCore’s technology, however, could protect Facebook users’ private data better.

August 17 - Google Acquires Smart Travel Guide Startup Jetpac

Google is buying the travel app startup JetPac founded in 2011. The technology is a system of algorithms that can be trained to recognize different elements within photos, creates visual city guides by analyzing photos from social media to infer key information about the places they were taken. Google will integrate the app's artificial intelligence technology into its image search and map services.  

August 23 - Google Acquires Mechanical Engineering Firm Gecko Design

Google’s forth acquisition of the month became Gecko Design, a small, Los Gatos, Calif.-based company specializing in product design for consumer electronics. The five-person industrial design shop was founded in 1996, specializes in developing consumer-electronic products, working with engineers early in the process before manufacturing begins. Gecko’s clients have included FitBit, Logitech , Sonos and H-P , according to the company’s website.

August 26 – Google Acquires Zync To Bring Visual Effects Rendering To Its Cloud Platform

And the final Google acquisition in August was a Boston-based Zync Inc., the maker of Zync Render,“cloud-based rendering software.” That’s software that helps movie studios take simple, computer-generated pictures of things like a giant robot bashing through a wall and make it look real. Zync’s data and technology will be integrated into the Google Cloud Platform, and move off Amazon Web Services.

August 29 – Amazon buys Twitch
Amazon and Twitch have officially announced the deal, which will see Amazon purchase all outstanding shares of Twitch for roughly $970 million in cash. Twitch is the largest live-streaming website in the US, a live video-game-streaming site with more than 55 million users that's like YouTube for video games.

Customer Service - The True Face of Your Company

Have you ever thought who the face of your company is? Marketers think that they are the face of the company; support team thinks the same, Human Resource team, why not the founder of the company? It may turn out that every member of the company situates oneself to be the most important chain who establishes the face of the company.

On the other hand it may happen so that the founder of your company is a "guru" at business but not so good at being social. Or support team may deliver a great customer service without considering being the face of the company. After all, who is the real face, does it depend on the position of the employee, his dressing, good public speaking ability or anything else?

Employees are “internal customers”

From my understanding the face of the company cannot be a person or a team, but the company as a whole. Every member of the company should be involved in customer service and consider oneself being the face of the company to produce the best results. As every employee may once be delivering customer service which can be crucial for the company.

Being the face of the company is not enough

Now when we clarified the importance of every member of the company, let’s speak about one’s being such, as just being the “face” is not enough, one should be the “true” and “positive” face of the company.

That is why it’s difficult for the Human Resource along with management team to make a decision – one may be a pro in his work, but have poor speaking or relationship building abilities. Imagine, it’s so difficult to be “all in one” personality. There are cases when great relationship building ability is overdesired than the professionalism. Not to deal with the problem, today’s generation is being brought up in the proper way – psychology plus professionalism – here what we need. Yes, one of the most critical features every company should have.

Keep in mind - no matter how great your product is, if a customer feels bad experience with the company representative, he will look to competitors for a better experience.

July Deals

As promised in the beginning of 2014, I bring to your attention the most important technology mergers and acquisitions for every month passing. In July we saw different deals starting from social, music, mobile to cloud.  All top social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter had new achievements. As in previous months the mentions of technology giants Google and Microsoft became regularly repeating ones. How far are they planning to go?

July 1 - Google Acquires Songza

Google announced to acquire the much-loved music service Songza in a bid to ramp up its Play Music offering. Songza is a unique player in the streaming music space. Rather than providing users with a la carte access to songs and albums, it offers up expert-curated playlists around mood, time of day and general theme. The service is available on the web, for iOS and Android, and even on Chromecast. For now, nothing will change for Songza users however, in the coming months, Google will "explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music.

July 2 - Microsoft acquires SyntaxTree, creator of UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio

Microsoft announced acquiring SyntaxTree, the developers of the UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio. UnityVS enables Unity developers to take advantage of the productivity of Visual Studio to author, browse and debug the code for their Unity applications.

July 2 - Facebook Acquires LiveRail

Facebook has just bought video ad tech startup LiveRail, which connects marketers to publishers on web and mobile to target 7 billion video ads to visitors per month. A source tells us Facebook paid between $400 - $500 million for LiveRail, but Facebook refused to comment on the terms. The acquisition of the 170-person company could help Facebook own a bigger chunk of video advertising, the fasting growing Internet ad medium.

July 9 - ServiceNow acquires Neebula Systems for $100million

The enterprise cloud management platform ServiceNow announced it has agreed to acquire the Israeli startup Neebula Systems in a $100 million cash deal.  Neebula's flagship product, ServiceWatch, automates the discovery, mapping, and monitoring of IT-enabled enterprise services. Put simply, it allows a company to discover what kinds of systems and software are running in their IT environment, a preemptive step toward streamlining business processes. 

July 11 - Microsoft Buys Business-Focused Cloud Provider InMage

Microsoft acquired InMage, a startup that focuses on cloud-connectivity and data recovery for businesses. It’s working to integrate InMage's Scout technology into its Azure site-recovery service. The Scout product already works with Azure for data migration, and InMage will bring more business capabilities to the Microsoft service.

July 11 - Yahoo Acquires Video Streaming Platform RayV

Yahoo  acquired the video broadcasting platform RayV, built in 2005 as something of a Joost competitor, it is specialty lies in delivering high-quality video streams to a lot of people.

Jul 14 - LinkedIn Buys Newsle

LinkedIn is buying Newsle, a web app for surfacing news about people in your network. Newsle was founded three years ago and had about two million users at the time of the acquisition. The startup, which had raised more than $2 million in funding, uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to highlight news about your connections on Facebook and LinkedIn.

July 14 – Salesforce acquisition of RelateIQ a CRM game-changer

Salesforce acquires RelateIQ - a Palo Alto, Calif.-based intelligent computing startup for $390 million. It automatically captures data from email, calendars and smartphone calls to provide data-science-driven insights in real time, according to Salesforce's8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

July 17 – Twitter Acquires CardSpring To Power In-Tweet Commerce And Offers

Twitter announced it has acquired CardSpring to enable “in-the-moment commerce experiences.” CardSpring is an application platform that lets developers build card-linked offers electronic coupons, loyalty cards, and virtual currencies that work with credit cards and other types of payments. Twitter will keep the service open.

July 21 - Yahoo Buys Flurry to Jump-Start Mobile Business

Yahoo announced its buying the mobile ad exchange Flurry, a move that could augment Yahoo’s still-waning position in the mobile advertising market. Flurry is one of the biggest mobile ad firms in operation with a reach so vast it tracks more mobile phones than Google or Facebook. Such an acquisition would boost Yahoo’s ambitions to be a “mobile first” company, after it has struggled to match the growth of mobile ad revenues at rivals Facebook and Google.

July 23 - Google Acquires DrawElements

Google struck a small deal on Wednesday, agreeing to acquire a 3-D graphics company called drawElements. Based in Helsinki, Finland, drawElements produces a graphics test that helps companies make their software compatible with Google’s Android operating system. Google will fold the team into the suite of services that developers use to optimize their products for Android.

July 31 - Oracle Buys TOA Technologies

Oracle announced that it signed an agreement to acquire TOA Technologies - the leading provider of cloud-based field service solutions that optimize the last mile of customer service for enterprises by coordinating and managing activities between dispatchers, mobile employees and their customers.

June Acquisitions – Co-Browsing Month!

The technology world is filled with co-browsing news this month. One acquisition follows another. This, for sure, means that co-browsing became an important solution for many companies; really, as it simplifies the way companies engage with their customers, providing exceptional customer service with one click. Although the way different companies co-browse may differ, it increases customer satisfaction and first call resolution as well as decreases call handling time and much more.

That’s why I decided to dedicate this month news to co-browsing only, although there have been other acquisitions in June too, like numerous Google acquisitions, as Google + Skybox Imaging, mDialog, Alpental Technologies, Dropcam; Apple + Spotsetter; Yahoo + PhotoDrive; Alibaba + UCWeb and others.

The first co-browsing acquisition was on June 3rd, when LivePerson announced to acquire Germany-based startup Synchronite LLC.

“Our vision at LivePerson is to transform digital commerce by enabling brands to provide rich and innovative customer experiences. We're very excited to integrate Synchronite's exceptional co-browsing technology to LivePerson's platform to enable businesses to seamlessly offer high-touch engagement options to guide valuable customers through their online journey," said Robert LoCascio, CEO and Founder, LivePerson.

The second acquisition followed on June 9th with Pegasystems acquisition of college-student led start-up Firefly, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

"Today's organizations need to better engage their digital customers and deliver more personalized experiences," said Alan Trefler, Founder and CEO of Pegasystems. "Firefly's collaboration technology will empower our customers to provide superior dynamic co-browsing in a unified architecture and, in the future, chat and video capabilities."

And the final and the most important acquisition for me and my company took place on June 20th  - yes, a unique day for all of us at LiveLOOK! 

Oracle announced about its acquisition of LiveLOOK, a leading provider of cloud-based, real-time visual collaboration with state-of-the-art omni-channel enabling technology for co-browsing and screen sharing that improves the quality of customer interactions. 

“Consumers are increasingly conducting transactions across multiple digital channels such as web and mobile. Meeting consumer demands and exceeding their expectations for web and mobile service and support will improve customer satisfaction and enhance revenue,” said David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Product Development. “With LiveLOOK, the Oracle Service Cloud will enable customer service and sales agents to deliver exceptional customer experiences.”

If you haven’t tried co-browsing yet, visit us right now!