Punching Soup - Tag: software

The Long, Winding Road to Online Collaboration

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:39:23 -0700

For the past two years, Adobe has been evolving a suite of online collaboration tools at its Acrobat.com website (the first services came online in June 2008). The latest iteration launches today with the release of Acrobat.com Workspaces. This new service lets users create virtual workspaces where they can share files and folders with others [...]

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Product Update: Workday 10

Naomi Bloom — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:15:25 -0700

You may well wonder why I’m writing about this when Workday’s newest release (yes, those releases are coming three times a year when PeopleSoft releases are coming every 3 years) has already been covered by several of the top enterprise software analysts, including Altimeter’s Ray Wang, InformationWeek’s Doug Henschen and Strativa’s Frank Scavo, and many more have full research [...]

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Friday’s Feature: Workday Release 10 Moves Users One Step Closer To ERP Replacement

R "Ray" Wang — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:49:47 -0700

Workday Continues To Pioneer SaaS Success In The Enterprise Founded by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri in March 2005, Workday has grown the company to over 135 customers with 80+ companies in production, 17 enterprise payroll companies, and over 400 employees in 50 countries worldwide. Key industries include services, technology, financial [...]

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Microsoft: Back In The Mix. Developers, Developers, Developers Reprised

James Governor — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:07:24 -0700

When you attend a conference there is always a danger of going native, enjoying the Cool-Aid a little too much, so it pays to give it a couple of days before commenting. I wasn’t able to make Microsoft MIX this time around but I did follow it on the web. Unless I am much mistaken, [...]

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Salesforce.com Is Into SAP – Ask FinancialForce

Paul Greenberg — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:25:37 -0700

I ran across this rather interesting press release this morning from TMCNet saying: “FinancialForce.com Announces Out-of-the-Box SAP Integration for Sharing Financial Data.” All I have to say in this case is kudos to a. salesforce.com b. and especially FinancialForce.com. This is not an insignificant integration when it comes to the evolution of salesforce.com in particular. Thus, a [...]

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Mars rover gets smarter with age...and software

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:14:00 -0700

Thanks to new software uploaded into its memory, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is now able to make decisions about what rocks it should fully investigate.

Ada Lovelace day. Two academics.

Thomas Otter — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:11:38 -0700

I’m featuring two academics for this year’s Ada Lovelace day. It is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Firstly: Dr Sue Black. I’ve not met Sue, except on twitter, but I have admired her efforts to support Bletchley Park for some time now. She blogs about them here. I [...]

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The Expanding Gap Between On-Premise and SaaS Solutions

Brian Sommer — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:32:17 -0700

SaaS and On-Premise solutions are growing further apart, not closer. The innovation within SaaS vendors is fast, furious and focused. It's also embarassing to on-premise vendors.

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Ubuntu One Music Store Goes Into Public Beta

Last 100 — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:32:06 -0700

Last week, we reported on Canonical’s moves to incorporate a music store into Ubuntu. Ahead of Ubuntu’s April release of “Lucid Lynx”, Canonical have officially announced the public beta of their desktop music store. The key to the music store’s infrastructure is Canonical’s cloud storage solution, “Ubuntu One”. Purchased MP3’s are initially sent from [...]

Google Maps Experiment with Hotel Prices – Just Remember to Check In

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:39:50 -0700

How many times were you looking for the right hotel at the right price, close enough to your conference, customer or just a particular location? Finding the right one typically includes juggling multiple sites – hotel search, price comparisons, many with teaser prices that turn out to be unavailable, maps, reservation systems…etc. Not for long, [...]

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Coupa Heads for the Clouds — eProcurement, T&E and Beyond (Part 3)

Jason Busch — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:36:00 -0700

In this post, I'll continue my analysis of Coupa's T&E capabilities by walking through a typical submission and approval process (read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series here). I know this sounds like a deathly boring subject for many, but trust me, it...

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Tuesday’s Tip: Understanding The Many Flavors of Cloud Computing and SaaS

R "Ray" Wang — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:16:01 -0700

Confusion Continues With Cloud Computing And SaaS Definitions Coincidence or just brilliance must be in the air as two esteemed industry colleagues, Phil Wainewright and James Governor, have both decided to clarify definitions on SaaS and Cloud within a few days of each other. In fact, this couldn’t be more timely as [...]

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Wiki Tuesday: Wikis at RBC

Sandy Kemsley — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:39:28 -0700

Yes, I know that today is not Tuesday, but this is about our previous Toronto Wiki Tuesday, a monthly meetup where we have a presentation on wikis, lift a few pints and hobnob with wiki specialists such as Martin Cleaver (who also organizes Wiki Tuesdays) and Mike Dover (co-author of Wikinomics). The presenter at this session [...]

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Open Source and the PaaS Paradox

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:26:47 -0700

In the same way that open source developers work to the same platform and can share and exchange bug fixes, insights and innovations, so hosted cloud runtime platforms — commonly known as platform-as-a-service — allow developers to share knowledge and swap code. In some ways, PaaS gives them even more freedom to collaborate on and [...]

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Global 360’s analystView Simulation

Sandy Kemsley — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:41:00 -0700

It’s the first day of Gartner’s BPM summit in Las Vegas, so expect to see a lot of vendor announcements this week. Some, like Global 360, had the decency to arrange for a briefing for me last week so that I could write something about their announcement in advance; others, who shall remain nameless, waited [...]

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Usability doesn’t mean UI

Thomas Otter — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:20:05 -0700

I have mentioned many times that the latest, coolest UI technology doesn’t mean that an application has good usability. Good design requires ingenuity and creativity but it also requires discipline and a focus on details. I you want to check how seriously a vendor takes usability, do this simple test. Have a look at the error [...]

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crewing mama: mcdonald’s japan to use nintendo ds to train employees

lambert v. — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:11:04 -0700

Greet the customer! Ask for order! Offer apple pie! According to Nikkei, McDonald’s Japan is developing a Nintendo DS training program for part-time employees. The program is called eSmart, and will cost the fastfood giant upwards of ¥200,000,000 (approx. $2.2M USD). McDonald’s hopes that the software will cut training time by half, because just about…

Is SaaS the same as cloud?

Phil Wainewright — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:30:21 -0700

From the customer’s perspective, it’s all the same. If it’s provided over the Internet on a pay-for-usage basis, it’s a cloud service. Within the industry, we argue about definitions more than is good for us. Customers look in from the outside and see a much simpler array of choices. Why is this important? It matters to [...]

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Amazon finally releases Kindle software for Macs

Stephen Schenck — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:27:00 -0700

With the ship date for Apple iPads creeping up on us, it's hard not to speculate about just what impact the long-awaited tablet will have on how we use mobile gadgets. One group that may have more to fear than others from an Apple upset to its marketplace is the companies manufacturing e-book readers. Apple's made it clear that, e-ink display or not, digital book downloads are to be an integral part of how its customers use their iPads. Perhaps as an attempt to reach over to that Apple-user market in advance of the iPad's release, Amazon has finally ported its Kindle software over to the Mac.

You could read Kindle downloads on your iPhone or iPod touch for some time now, but if all your home computers were also Apple gear, you were stuck with your books on a tiny screen. With this software release, Amazon may win the attention of Mac users who had been holding off on building a Kindle library until they had some more viewing options. And with April 3 still a couple weeks away, a user who buys a few Kindle books before then might be tempted to just keep using Amazon's storefront, rather than transition to Apple's bookstore and have to manage two different collections of downloads.

The software is available now for users of Mac OS X 10.5 or higher. Check out Amazon's site for the download.

News by company:: Amazon, Apple

News by brand:: Apple iPod, Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, Apple Mac OS X, Amazon Kindle

Profile pages:: Apple iPod touch, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Kindle 2, Kindle for iPhone, Amazon Kindle DX, Apple iPhone 3GS, Apple iPad

Conversations:: Amazon Media Room: News Release [phx.corporate-ir.net]; Ahead of iPad Launch, Amazon Announces ‘Kindle for Mac’ - Digits - WSJ [blogs.wsj.com]; Amazon stealthily releases Kindle app for Mac [The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]; AppleInsider | Amazon releases free beta of Kindle for Mac eBook reading software [appleinsider.com]; Amazon Releases Kindle For Mac - The Consumerist [consumerist.com]

Security risks of multi-tenancy

Phil Wainewright — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:16:10 -0700

To dispel some of the confusion about security and to help people evaluating whether to go multi-tenant, here is a quick overview of the main risks.

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IBM, Red Hat adopt “VMware Pattern” for Cloud. Disruption Strategy Emerges

James Governor — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:16:35 -0700

IBM this week clarified its plans to handhold enterprises into the cloud, working with Red Hat to bypass VMware with the announcement of Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud. I have been talking for a while about what I call The VMware Pattern, in posts such as Amazon Web Services: an instance of [...]

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Software pricing - Don’t Just Roll the Dice

Ayende Rahien — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:00:00 -0700

I found this ebook very informative. I very happy to learn that I at least thought about most of the things that the book recommend, but I wish I read it two years ago.

If you are an ISVN, I highly recommended, because it is not just some dry academic reading, it contains examples that you can easily relate to, probably examples that you are already familiar with.

PSA/PPM Goes Vertical – Better Time to Value for ChangePoint Solutions

Brian Sommer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:25:47 -0700

Compuware Changepoint has created a faster time to value solution for technology firms. PSA and PPM solutions are getting deeper vertical chops.

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3D on Android Phones! Sorta…

Mari Silbey — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:50:10 -0700

I’m always looking for new games on my Android phone. Right now I’m addicted to a simple word app called Target and still waiting for an Android version of Jewel Quest. However, a 3D gem popped up the other night while I was surfing through the marketplace. Remember those old Magic Eye pictures? Magic Eye [...]

IBM Cloud Strategy: Collaboration, Dev/Test Environments, and Virtual Desktops

Sandy Kemsley — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:04:00 -0700

Today, IBM announced their cloud strategy and roadmap; I was at the analyst update last week and had a chance to hear about it first-hand from IBM execs, a customer and a partner. Erich Clementi, who heads enterprise initiatives at IBM, started the briefing by showing their cloud evolution over the past year, and plans for [...]

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the beardme iphone app: do you want the mustache on or off?

range — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:58:57 -0700

This is way more fun than useful, but the BeardMe iPhone app enables you to quickly add facial hair to people who don’t have any! Imagine, no more inking in mustaches with that Sharpie pen! This app is by Chris Auyeung and Vijay Mathews and their BeardMe iPhone App (iTunes link) was made because they…

Google’s Control Panel is its Killer App

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:53:52 -0700

Google last week brought the spotlight back onto on-demand application marketplaces with its launch of the Google Apps Marketplace. Until the search and online advertising giant waded in, the territory had been a quiet backwater, dominated for the past few years by Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. It’s hard now to credit just how much excitement surrounded the [...]

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Salesforce Releases Force.com Visual Process Manager

Sandy Kemsley — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:12:00 -0700

A couple of months back, there was a private discussion amongst the Enterprise Irregulars about who Salesforce.com was going to buy next, and there was a thought in the back of my mind that it might be a BPM vendor. Since that time, two BPM vendors have been acquired, but not by Salesforce: instead, they [...]

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Oracle’s On Demand Procurement Launch

Jason Busch — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:46:00 -0700

Earlier today, Oracle announced the formal launch of its On Demand suite of procurement products. These solutions, which Oracle labels as Oracle Procurement On Demand should be no surprise to Spend Matters readers (check our recent coverage here and...

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Standing Cloud Launches Trial Edition

Brad Feld — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:45:04 -0700

Not long after I posted about Dave Jilk’s experience with the Pogoplug, he started using the phrase “Pogoplug Simple” to describe one of the goals of Standing Cloud. The idea is that technology products should be so easy to set up and use that the experience is vaguely unsatisfying – you feel like you didn’t [...]

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Monday’s Musings: Avoiding Failure In Social CRM Projects Requires Ecosystem Coordination

R "Ray" Wang — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:05:20 -0700

Recent Conversations With Executives Confirm Demand For Social CRM Good news! Organizations see an opportunity to tap into the proliferation of social networking channels for their CRM initiatives. Speaking with 23 business leaders over the past 10 days, it became obvious that Social CRM initiatives were top of mind for a few reasons: Pressure from the boardroom. [...]

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Supplierforce: Supplier Information Management and Beyond (Part 2)

Jason Busch — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:23:00 -0700

A couple of weeks ago, I re-introduced Spend Matters readers to Supplierforce, a Dublin-based Spend Management software/SaaS suite provider and consultancy with particular strengths in the area of supplier information management. Today I'll conclude ...

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ARISalign Online Process Modeling and BPM Community

Sandy Kemsley — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:28:00 -0700

There has been much speculation in the BPM world about Software AG’s online BPM community, originally dubbed AlignSpace, or as it has been recently renamed, ARISalign. Originally launched in a private beta months ago, those of us on the outside have been anticipating a look at how they plan to “combine social networking tools with [...]

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Can Paremus Make OSGi Nimble?

James Governor — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:45:21 -0700

One of the great unsolved Java problems is a lack of modularity. OSGi is a technology designed to solve the problem. Wikipedia says: The OSGi framework is a module system and service platform for the Java programming language that implements a complete and dynamic component model, something that does not exist in standalone Java/VM [...]

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Friday Rant: When Data Misleads and Becomes Disruptive

Jason Busch — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:33:00 -0700

If someone pinned me down and asked my opinion about the broadest and most universal trends in procurement in recent years, I'd have to say that organizations of all sizes and sophistication are gaining access to an ever-increasing amount of informat...

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The Awesomeness of a Hackathon

Brad Feld — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:06:39 -0700

Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons. These are typically day long events where everyone in the company works on whatever cool new ideas they have. On Monday night I got a note from a company I’m on the board of about a hackthon they just completed. [...]

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Enterprise Apps User Interface – the wrong discussion

Sig Rinde — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:38:49 -0700

Imagine an Enterprise App with UI design lifted from World of Warcraft? A tad gothic? But games work, kids dive into them in droves and never seem to scratch their heads. Electronic games now being a bigger industry than the...

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Google Launches Apps Marketplace

Zoli Erdos — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:00:00 -0700

I’m at the Google Campfire One event where they’ve just announced the Google Apps Marketplace. The site is live now, feel free to browse. The speculation is now over, this is Google’s answer on whether they will enter the Business Applications market – they just did, with an entire ecosystem of Partners. The new Marketplace fills [...]

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Four pillars of the transition to SaaS

Phil Wainewright — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:51:18 -0700

One of the most interesting phenomena to arise when you bring as-a-service providers together is the instant sense of camaraderie and a shared outlook. Barriers come down and people start to discuss their challenges and experiences, relieved to discover that others are encountering similar questions. It’s especially noticeable at gatherings in Europe, where opportunities to [...]

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SugarCRM Announces New Open+ Partner Program

Peter A. Prestipino — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:12:00 -0700

Open source customer relationship management (CRM) software SugarCRM announced its Open+ Partner Program today.

According to the official release statement, “The Open+ Partner Program will expand SugarCRM’s market reach by empowering its channel partners with a wider variety of incentives and resources to deliver SugarCRM solutions to customers around the world.”

The “incentives and resources” for SugarCRM VAR and reseller partners include a market development program, access and support for SugarCRM’s Open Cloud platform, a new referral program that rewards partners for each qualified lead referred to SugarCRM, improved partner engagement services, and a new customer reference program to spotlight partner success stories and aid the sales engagement process.

“Our partnership with SugarCRM has been the foundation of our revenue growth, and we are excited to take that growth to the next level with the benefits provided with Open+,” said Doug Guilbeau, managing director with Levementum, a SugarCRM Gold Partner. “SugarCRM is one of the clear leaders in CRM. Its comprehensive offerings have allowed us to offer a broad array of services to a rapidly growing market.”

“Open+ creates even more distance between SugarCRM’s award-winning channel program and those of other CRM providers,” said Jeff Campbell, vice president of worldwide sales, SugarCRM. “SugarCRM offers unmatched value for VARs looking to build sustainable revenue streams in the Cloud.”

A Simple Hint Why SaaS Is Better

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:30:17 -0700

When I pressed send this morning on an email message, Gmail popped up a dialog box asking whether I’d meant to attach a file. “You wrote ‘find attached’ in your message,” it gently mentioned, “but there were no files attached.” Of course, as so often happens, I’d finished the message and pressed send without remembering [...]

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Monday’s Musings: Decoupling Support From Maintenance – What Apps Vendors Can Learn From Microsoft Dynamics

R "Ray" Wang — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:30:24 -0700

Who Says Support Has To Be Bundled With Maintenance? About a decade back, vendors would offer support and maintenance as two separate line items on their contracts. Support would run about 5 to 10% the license fee and so would maintenance. Keep in mind, average support and maintenance fees were under 15% back then. Here’s a [...]

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Supplierforce: Supplier Information Management and Beyond (Part 1)

Jason Busch — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:08:00 -0700

In years past, I introduced Spend Matters readers to a little-known supplier information-management vendor, Supplierforce, which is based in Dublin (you can read previous posts on Supplierforce here and here. Supplierforce has moved beyond its SIM pa...

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Warning Signs ‘Flash’ing for Adobe

Chris Selland — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:54:10 -0700

What does the Flash vs. HTML5 debate - over the future of web video - mean to Adobe's future?

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Webciety and Enterprise 2.0: A snapshot of today’s social computing conversations

Dion Hinchcliffe — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:55:38 -0700

Though smaller than in year's past, Germany's CeBIT trade show in Hanover this week remains one of the giants of the industry and is a must-attend event for much of Europe's technology leaders. For the last two years, I have been participating in Webciety, a show within a show that explores the emerging 21st century digital lifestyle. Here is a breakdown of how Europe is looking at Enterprise 2.0 adoption and how it affects us as well.

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Let the March Madness Begin Again

Mari Silbey — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:51:51 -0700

TiVo, blah blah, TiVo, blah blah blah. Let’s move on to something important, like March Madness. With the best month in college basketball kicking into gear, I thought I’d take a look at my options for following all of the NCAA action. First up is the official March Madness On Demand Player from CBS [...]

Can Enterprise 2.0 Apps Stand Alone?

Phil Wainewright — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:56:39 -0700

Socialtext, one of the earliest and most established pureplay Enterprise 2.0 vendors, released the latest version of its flagship suite this week, and it set me thinking. Is there a future for standalone Enterprise 2.0 software suites, now that the functionality they offer is increasingly being offered within established enterprise application software suites? The independent survival [...]

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Are Apple’s Competitors Stealing Its Patented Inventions?

Brad Feld — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:48:05 -0700

...

Socialtext Made Group-Forming Ridiculously Easy

Ross Mayfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:56:40 -0700

Ridiculously easy group-forming matters because the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction costs. Now that group-forming has gone from hard...

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SAP – The Message Back on Target

Paul Greenberg — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:00:11 -0700

(Just a brief note. I’m writing this with a TERRIBLE cold and I don’t feel particularly sharp. In fact I feel about as sharp as a bar of soap – proof positive is this awful analogy). I’m not a Kremlin watcher when it comes to most large companies, though I do admit to an unhealthy curiosity [...]

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