Supply chain management has grown in company importance and value contribution from its roots as “shipping and receiving”.

A marketing agreement between business communications firm Avaya and SAP America will see the companies jointly market products in the customer relationship management space; meanwhile a year has passed since the start of the AMQ project, which aims to create an open messaging queuing solution.

Like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft has had to adjust its business practices to suit Chinese government information control personnel, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I love this story. Grayson Wheatley, a cardiovascular surgeon at the Arizona Heart Institute, is giving his patients iPods loaded with video podcasts about diet, exercise and the heart.

After being a media piata over the course of the week, Google has come back firing at its critics, led by a lengthy post by its senior policy counsel, Andrew McLaughlin.

A few recent blogging tools I’ve been testing that are worth sharing include Feed Digest and blogbeat. A little info on each and how they can help with marketing your blog:

A bird flu in the hand is worth two in the bush and if money grew on trees, then you may expect to find two birds there too, allowing scientist to track money and birds and thereby killing two birds with one stone. Let me explain. No, don’t. Let me start over.

Visitors to the Yahoo Search Blog can post questions for Broder, who recently joined the company to serve as a research fellow and vice-president of emerging search technology.

If Kevin Ross is to be believed, there is no more chance Yahoo will buy the popular user-generated news site Digg than it will Opera Software for its browser.

With the second post in his PR is dying series Tom Foremski is saying that the agency world has a future as bright as Larry Fortensky’s.

Cell phone phenom Nokia said they’re going to wait and see what happens with the mobile WiMax market before they take the big leap. They are planning their release for 2008 giving time for the market to be established.

Reasserting itself as a “no-market-out-of-reach” company, Wal-Mart launched an MTV-style online/in-store hybrid music service. Dubbed Wal-Mart Soundcheck, studio performances and interviews with musicians and bands will be viewable every week at store promotions and downloadable from the company’s website.

Nice to see the new MSN Spaces. I’ll ask Maryam what she thinks. Dare Obasanjo (who works on that team) links to the relevant details.

Bloggers who use MSN Spaces for their posts can place advertising on their blogs now, with options for Amazon associates and Kanoodle ads offered.

After Brett Crosby of Google Analytics teased me from the audience about the “tricks” search marketers use to optimize web sites, during my session, I was looking forward to heckling him during his session on web analytics. Alas, Brett’s role was mostly as moderator and the opportunity to return the favor, was limited.

Not so very long ago adding a graph or chart to a web page or application required a fair amount of programming knowledge and was rather time consuming for even the most experienced.

Instead of waiting for a stolen Apple Powerbook to show up on eBay, a firm in Sydney, Australia chose to post it themselves and inform the world of the crime.

Thomas Hawk: “Last Night Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft’s Platforms, Products and Services Division met with a small group of bloggers and technologists here in San Francisco for dinner.

Over at MobHappy comes word of some PR professionals who tried to pull the wool over these bloggers’ eyes and now are paying dearly for it.

Richard Edelman has a really smart byline up about what he calls the Me2 Revolution.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced earlier this month the addition of Gnash, a new open source Flash movie player and Firefox plugin, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). “Open source” indicates that developers can build on top of earlier software to add features or tweak the old ones.

Peter Caputa has written a hysterical fictional conversation between a PR consultant and a prospect interested in possibly blogging.

This had to have come out of California-or Japan where all things cute and stupid sell like snow cones in Hell at high summer. First it was doggie sweaters, now it’s iPod lingerie. Yes, you just saw those two words together.

This article was written in September 2005 but was not published at the time. In light of recent events, though, we thought it especially pertinent.