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The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has issued an advisory warning consumers about the risks of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. The bureau "is working to identify and understand potential consumer protection concerns raised by these emerging technologies to determine what action, if ...

Salesforce.com will shell out $350 million in common stock for RelateIQ in a deal expected to close by October. It will provide another $40 million dollars in stock for its cash balance. RelateIQ will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce, according to an SEC filing. Many of Salesforce's pa...

As many as a quarter of the world's consumers were victimized by card fraud in the past five years, and financial institutions are losing customers as a result, suggests ACI Worldwide research. ACI and the Aite Group, which jointly surveyed more than 6,100 customers in 20 countries, also found that ...

Apple has bumped up the discounts offered in a loyalty program available to customers who spend at least $5,000 on its products over 12 months. It reportedly added unlocked iPhones and Apple TVs to the program as well. Two weeks ago, Apple improved its iOS management tools, and speculation is that t...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said last week that his main rivals were the new generation of cloud companies, and that IBM and SAP were no longer in his gun sights. Oracle is focusing on cloud infrastructure companies such as Amazon and SaaS providers such as former ally Salesforce.com. "Oracle may have ...

Salesforce on Wednesday kicked off its Salesforce1 world tour, touting the allure of the social, mobile and cloud customer platform to clients. Launched in November, Salesforce1 drove a 96 percent increase in mobile app active users and a 46 percent increase in active users of custom mobile apps, Sa...

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Parature, which provides customer engagement solutions as a service. Parature's technology will add self-service, support ticketing and other capabilities to Microsoft Dynamics. Microsoft reportedly will pay $100 million for the company. "Once the ...

Microsoft has topped the Reputation Institute's Global CSR RepTrak 100 Study for the second year in a row. The institute surveyed 55,000 consumers worldwide about their attitudes toward the reputations of companies in terms of corporate social responsibility. Google, which was No. 2 last year, fell ...

Marine liability insurer The Shipowners' Club has signed up to get IT service management from Axios Systems on a SaaS basis. It wanted to remove the cost and complexity of security, backups, implementation and upgrades while retaining full ownership of its data. That, in a nutshell, is why companies...

Why buy when you can lease? That's a question businesses are asking both externally, as they offer products ranging from software to food, and internally, as they look at billing, ERP and other operations. The upshot is that corporations are moving toward a subscription-based business model both ins...

Zuora, which offers a billing, commerce and finance PaaS for businesses using a subscription-service model, has raised $50 million in E series funding from some major players. Next World Capital, Vulcan Capital and Northgate Capital are the latest additions to the company's crowd of believers. Zuora...

Businesses depend on their customers, and it would make sense that good customer service would translate into loyalty and sales, but high-tech vendors don't seem to have gotten the message. The average customer experience rating for tech vendors fell from 58 percent to 52 percent since last year, in...

Zenmonics has announced mobileBanker, a tablet solution that lets bank staff interact with customers on the move by tapping into a bank's back end servers. Among its benefits: customer identification and authentication; the ability to serve customers outside the teller line; paperless processing; an...

Just weeks after purchasing Neolane, Adobe on Thursday pushed further into marketing automation with the launch of Adobe Social, an application that expands the company's integrations with social networking sites and pretty much gives users a 360-degree view of their customers. Integrated with Flick...

SAP on Wednesday unveiled a rapid-deployment solution for marketers. It lets users analyze customer sentiment from social networking sites, communities, wikis, blogs and other sources. Users can combine the information with CRM text data and, if they so choose, business intelligence applications to ...

Salesforce.com is reportedly close to acquiring social media marketing manager Buddy Media for about $800 million. Buddy Media's main business is helping corporations manage their brand presence on Facebook. It has branched out to other social media platforms, including Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn...

Small CRM players have a chance to get their names out in the market if they win top spot at the second annual CRM Idol competition, which kicked off Monday. Hopefuls have until 6 p.m. Pacific time on May 25 to file their submissions. Contestants will be assigned a mentor to help them prepare the b...

Computer software requires an enormous amount of support. That fact has enriched companies such as Oracle and SAP, which levy annual support fees of about 20 percent of the sale prices of their applications. That's one of the things that just sticks in the craw of Clint Oram, chief technology office...

A woman in Florida was floored recently by a T-Mobile cellphone bill that reportedly totaled nearly a quarter of a million dollars. After intervention on the part of a local TV station's news department, though, the carrier slashed Celina Aarons' bill from $200,000 down to $2,500. The charges were i...

The long-simmering feud between Oracle and Salesforce.com leaped off the back burner into the open Tuesday, when Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted that Oracle head honcho Larry Ellison had canceled the keynote address that Benioff was scheduled to make Wednesday at OpenWorld, Oracle's annual confe...