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Paul Greenberg's engaging experiment in highlighting CRM vendors from around the world has concluded today, with the announcement of the winners of his CRM Idol contest. You can view the finalist entries on his website here. There were entries from all over the world, and today two finalists were announced.

Yes, it is hard to believe, but email turned 40 last month. No one can question that email has transformed the way business is conducted. According to Radicati group, the average worker processes more than a hundred daily emails, and business email accounts make up only about a quarter of the total of more than 3 billion. Sometime in the next few years, Radicati predicts that the number of IM accounts will exceed email for the first time.

Email and my own working life have been closely intertwined as well. I started using email in 1983 and over the years I have used more than three dozen different systems and sent thousands of messages. So I thought I would put together some important milestones of my own usage and show you how email has changed from those early days. In my working life, I published my first book on corporate email use (seen at left), published a weekly email newsletter and wrote many articles about various email products for dozens of publications, including this one.

RSA SecurID token authentication system will now be integrated with two important identity services: the Microsoft Windows Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 as well as Citrix Receiver VDI client. There will be no additional charge for this integration and this is available starting now. The announcements extend the notion of centralized authentication, authorization, and single sign-on to Web applications and services located virtually anywhere, including external networks and cloud-based services.

If you have purchased a Ford with its SYNC software package in the past several years, starting early next year you can upgrade your car to the latest version that it will be shipping in its 2013 models, and for free. Yes, finally there is a car company that operates like a computer company, and I mean that in all the good aspects. (Note: I have test driven numerous Ford and Lincoln models, and own one myself.)

Five years ago, the complaint against Microsoft brewing before the European Court of First Instance was that it was not contributing enough knowledge about Windows' source code to let others develop services for it. That didn't make sense to the European Commission, which openly asked, what good is an operating system if it doesn't operate anything except itself?

Yesterday, the organization responsible for the Free Software-licensed system of file and print services called Samba - the group that had helped keep Microsoft in court for over six years - acknowledged that a distribution that showed up in Samba's respositories on October 11 contained interoperability code for Windows from Microsoft itself.

Yesterday's groundbreaking proposal by IBM for a new and open-source asynchronous protocol for machine-to-machine (M2M) Internet communication, called MQTT, cites a projected 1000x (put another way, 100,000%) increase in broadband device-generated traffic by the year 2020, and the need for a formal protocol for managing it all. Now, a study from the University of California San Diego's Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) projects, using data supplied by numerous sources including the FCC and network systems leader Cisco, suggests that bandwidth of that magnitude doesn't just simply fall out of the sky.

A new Forrester report that surveyed nearly 5,000 American IT workers has found that few of them are actually using social media for work-related activities. Checking their personal Facebook pages aside, we are still at the early adopter stage for many of us when it comes to using these tools in business. The report, The Enterprise 2.0 User Profile: 2011 was written by TJ Keitt and based on research conducted during May 2011.

I'll start with my disclaimer up front: These are my opinions you're about to read, not necessarily those of ReadWriteWeb. Now, maybe you've noticed this yourself already, but I actually don't read much "tech news" on the Web on a regular basis, besides what we publish here and what some friends and colleagues of mine produce elsewhere daily. There is news about technology and there is "tech news," and most of the time, they come from separate planets.

Many a colleague and some regular readers have read from me, or heard me say, the following: If a pro sports site like ESPN.com were to turn its attention to producing a technology news publication, it could improve the genre immensely. This week, the sports-minded folks at SB Nation are proving me right by providing a new and better platform for Joshua Topolsky and company to produce The Verge, the successor to Topolsky's version of Engadget.

Earlier this fall Visa announced a new credit card in Europe that comes with its 48x8 pixel LCD panel on the back, just above where your signature would normally go. Called the CodeSure Matrix Display Card, the idea is to have a more secure credit card, that can be used for online shopping where you have to use your card without swiping it at a retail payment terminal. This is what the credit industry calls "card not present" and they charge higher per-transaction fees to the merchants because of the fraud potentials seen.

For those of you that cut your teeth on graphical OSs and have never had to use a command-line terminal emulator, this article isn't for you. There is no Flash here, no OCD multi-tasking, cutting-and-pasting from one window to another. If the term "command line" reminds you more of the movie Tron than of something you actually use everyday, then perhaps you won't find much joy from reading the following post.

But for the rest of us that grew up when PC DOS first came into corporations and when mainframe programmers walked among us, you might enjoy this trip down memory lane.