TeleTech has been placed in the "Leaders" quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant: Customer Management Contact Center BPO, Worldwide, 2011, and Yesmail has announced the release of its "Look Book" in celebration of its recent awards for mobile-scalable email design. Meanwhile, West Interactive and VBrick Systems have released major upgrades.

Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its forthcoming service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which will be released in Q2 2012. The service update will build on Microsoft's rollouts last year in such areas as social CRM and mobile. "We are on the path to deliver a significant new set of capabilities," said Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM's product management group.

You don't need to go very far in IT nowadays to find people who are diligently working to do more with less, even as they're working to transform and modernize their environments. One way to keep the interest high and those operating and investment budgets in place is to show fast results, and then use that to prime the pump for even more improvement -- and even more funding -- with perhaps even growing budgets.

Google has rejected the request of European regulators that it delay the implementation of its new privacy policies to give authorities time to review the changes and ensure that users' data will remain secure. The European Commission's Article 29 Working Party asked Google to hold off on launching its new policies until after the committee could analyze the changes.

Facebook is reportedly working on a system to put ads in its mobile services. The news comes just days after the social networking giant filed for an initial public offering, hoping to raise $5 billion. In its IPO filing, Facebook stated that the number of active mobile users of its social network is growing.

Look out Netflix, a new video service has swaggered into town. Rumored since December, Verizon's partnership with Coinstar, the parent company of Redbox video rental kiosks, became official on Monday. As with Netflix, customers will be able to choose between physical discs and streaming. The physical discs, however, will need to be picked up and returned to a Redbox kiosk.

Identity theft and privacy breaches are reported almost daily. For example, last month two utilities in New York reported that an employee of a software contractor allowed unauthorized access to a database containing social security, date of birth and other information. That same day the DoJ reported the arrest of three women in California for engaging in a scheme to use stolen identities to illegally collect tax refunds.

As Facebook prepares for an IPO of its stock that may value the company at US$100 billion, it's important to know what sport it's in and if, like the Chicago Bulls with Jordan, dynasties can last. Michael Jordan was probably the best basketball player to play the game of hoop. He had a halo effect. But baseball just wasn't his sport at the level basketball was.

Amazon is planning to launch a retail store in Seattle in the coming months, according to reports published by Bloomberg and Good E-Reader. The endeavor is meant to serve as a pilot project for a possible chain of stores that would sell Amazon Exclusive books, as well as its Kindle Fire tablet, line of e-readers, and related accessories.

There's been a lot of activity on the Web and in our industry in the last week, and I thought it might be fun to try and tie at least some of it together. Much of it in one way or another involves Facebook -- or "FB," as the proposed ticker symbol suggests. It's widely assumed that its IPO will make the very earliest buyers a nice pile of profit, but what about those looking for a longer-term investment?