SMS

Nokia is making Skype available for the Symbian platform. A joint announcement Wednesday by the world's largest handset maker and the maker of the most popular VoIP calling software means that owners of select Nokia devices will be able to make phone calls over Wi-Fi or a mobile data connection at a fraction of the cost for normal calls.

BlackBerry users are still fuming over the near-total collapse of e-mail this week, and the impact on manufacturer Research In Motion could last a lot longer than a New Year's Day hangover. Users got an early piece of coal in their stockings Tuesday when many BlackBerry smartphones -- now deemed "Crashberries" by some wags -- stopped sending and receiving e-mails.

There's no doubt that Windows 7 and the iPhone 3G will top the list of the most-remembered products of 2009 -- and deservedly so.

But the shadow cast by those headline-grabbing superstars obscured the emergence of several other products that were groundbreaking in their own right. The good news, though, is that those relatively undiscovered products are still around, just waiting to make your life easier. Here's a rundown.

Google Voice

Google told the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday that it has developed an engineering work-around that allows it to switch off selected telephone numbers to prevent Google Voice users from calling adult chat lines and other high-cost "traffic-pumping" services. The search giant noted that such services disproportionately raise Google's operating costs for the free service, which is currently available by invitation only.

Google Voice, a service that lets users consolidate and simplify the ways in which they make and receive phone calls, has taken a step to alleviate what many observers saw as a key problem. Until now, users have had to use a Google-supplied telephone number. That was considered an inconvenience since the number would have to be circulated to friends and business associates.

Adobe Systems announced Monday new services that will allow advertisers and content publishers to "promote, measure and monetize" Flash-based applications over "social networks, desktops and mobile devices."

Apple released a king-sized security update for Mac OS X on Thursday, a separate fix for its just-released Snow Leopard, and an update to the iPhone operating system. Some of the updates fix problems, but others seem to cause new ones.

Thursday's updates fix 33 vulnerabilities in the Mac OS X Leopard operating system involving third-party applications such as Adobe Flash, Samba, MySQL and PHP. The Leopard update also addresses potential security vulnerabilities in Alias Manager, CarbonCore, CUPS, ColorSynch, ImageIO, Wiki Server, CoreGraphics and Launch Services.

Denying earlier media reports, Apple said Friday that it's still evaluating Google Voice for iPhone as a possible addition to its Apps Store. On the other hand, the software from Google raises concerns about its impact on the iPhone user experience, said Apple Vice President Catherine Novelli in a written response to the Federal Communications Commission.

These are challenging times for creating, developing, and maintaining customer relationships. More than ever, every customer -- one who is willing to spend (and pay on time) -- is golden. At the same time there are new channels: mobile and social media that customers are choosing and must be opened and maintained. Meanwhile the costs of attracting and keeping each customer must be minimized to maximize net revenues.