Read the SLA's fine print before...

...you sign up for hosted CRM. In the aftermath of a series of outages affecting users of Salesforce.com Inc.'s online CRM service, Natalee Roan, chief marketing officer at Salesforce.com rival Entellium Corp., advises CIOs to take a hard look at any software-as-a-service vendor's service-level agreement (SLA) before signing up. Roan says you need to know three things: What is the vendor's specific time commitment for resolving an outage? Does it offer an automatic cash or service-credit rebate after an outage? And how frequently does it back up your data? She says you need to get the answers in writing. If you can't, Roan warns, you should be suspicious of the hosted service's stability. Needless to say, Seattle-based Entellium claims it answers those questions in its SLA.

Are you a gadget geek but ashamed...

...of admitting it? Maybe you need a wardrobe upgrade via the TEC clothing line from ScotteVest LLC in Ketchum, Idaho. ScotteVest says its Milan jacket boasts a plethora of hidden pockets to fit your "Blackberry, iPod and Bluetooth [devices] into its Razr-thin patented personal area network." That way, you'll always be connected, but no one has to know it. Since this is Version 4.0 of their fetching fashions, let's hope they've eliminated most of the bugs.