E-Business

Web Anti-Fraud Measure Ineffective

February 5, 2007

An article in the New York Times today discusses a recent study by MIT and Harvard that examines the efficacy of the technology called site-authentication images. (If you do online banking, you may be familiar with this technology. You are asked to choose an image, and create a phrase that goes along with the image, and you are advised not to proceed with your online transaction unless you see both the image and the phrase when you log in.)

As it turns out, there's actually nothing wrong with the technology itself, it's merely that users tend to disregard the directives. During the course of the study, 58 out of 60 users logged into their accounts anyway, though they did not see their picture and phrase.

Posted in E-Business

Post-Mortem Service Charges?

January 29, 2007

A friend sent this e-mail to me today. I have no idea if it's true or just one of the many frequently circulated urban legends that strike a chord in all of us. But knowing what I know about many companies' customer service policies, I can believe that somewhere, some time...it just might have happened.

An elderly lady died in January last year, and a large financial services/credit card company billed her for February and March for their annual service charges on her credit card, and added late fees and interest on the monthly charge. The balance had been $0.00, after the fees were added, it totaled about $60.00.

A family member placed a call to the bank.

Posted in E-Business

Web Site Security

January 18, 2007

Anyone ever had this happen before? This is new to me.

At lunchtime, I visited Citibank's Citicards Web site to check my balance and see if my Vonage and NetFlix charges were posted yet, so I can pay my card balance off.

The moment I arrived on Citicard's Web site, however, Firefox (my browser) popped a message on me that it had been reported that the site was being hijacked by fraudsters, and warned me not to enter any personal information (user name and password) onto the site, because it could be used by criminals. I retried three times and received the same message each time before I gave up. This afternoon, the message was gone and I was able to successfully log in to my account.

I'm not sure if the problem was truly with the CitiCard site, or whether it was Firefox being overzealous.

Posted in E-Business

Mercado Improves E-Commerce

January 16, 2007

E-merchandising company Mercado today announced the launch of Mercado 4.0 – a solution the company is positioning as a "new generation of intelligent e-Commerce." According to the company, version 4.0 combines the best site search and navigation technologies with sophisticated merchandising and actionable reporting. It can provides e-commerce merchandising managers with the knowledge, tools and control that they need to immediately obtain maximum return on their online retail site.

Merchandising managers can deploy auto-ranking formulas that self optimize product ranking according to dynamic metrics such as inventory levels, conversion rates and product freshness. Mercado 4.0 automates the process of aggregating and analyzing data and affecting changes to e-commerce site behavior, helping save time and ensuring information is acted on according to a company’s formulas and merchandising campaigns.

Posted in E-Business

Technology's Watchful Eye

January 16, 2007

Posted in E-Business

Executive Pay Lunacy

January 3, 2007

Did you read about the resignation of Home Depot's CEO, Robert Nardelli today? It appears that activist shareholders are being pesky and want to know why Home Depot sends all its profits home in ridiculous levels of executive pay while stock prices are flagging. So...to quell those ludicrous executive pay accusations, the company is letting Nardelli walk with essentially $210 million dollars. The New York Times reports that, "Under an agreement with the company, Mr. Nardelli will receive a severance payment of about $210 million, an amount that includes cash, the acceleration of unvested stock awards and options, bonus payments and incentive awards and various benefit programs.

Posted in E-Business

Canadians Buying Online Less Than Americans

December 22, 2006

Posted in E-Business

Google Goes To Space

December 20, 2006

It seems that Google would like to do for space what it has done for maps. Who does a company turn to as a partner when it wants to make all manner of space information available to the general public? NASA, of course.

The Financial Times (and many other media outlets) have reported that, "Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley on Monday announced a “Space Act Agreement” with Google that would include collaboration on large-scale data management and massively distributed computing as well as focusing on making the most useful of Nasa’s information available over the Internet."

What kind of information would be available? Only the coolest stuff in the world (said she, a life-long science fiction geek).

Posted in E-Business

One Percent Porn

November 15, 2006

A U.S. government-commissioned study had claimed to have discovered that, based on search engine indexing, the Internet is comprised of one percent porn. As the conventional wisdom is that the Internet is 99 percent junk and one percent useful content (news sites, TMCnet, newspapers, retail Web sites, scholarly research, etc.) what's the other 98 percent of drivel? Teenagers' MySpace pages?

Posted in E-Business

Phishing Is Phlourishing

November 9, 2006

Posted in E-Business

Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next

The Readerboard

E-Business