Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

More than a quarter-of-a-million Hotels.com customers are now at high risk for credit card theft after a password-protected laptop computer containing their credit card information was stolen from an Ernst & Young auditor’s locked car in what appears to be a “randon petty theft,” a Hotels.com spokesperson was quoted as telling the Associated Press. The Seattle incident at Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com, is just the latest in a series of data-identity cases recently centering not around criminal hackers but around the garden-variety thug breaking into locked places.

Just as E-Commerce players are getting used to the idea of people buying products using their cellphones, whether in a physical location beaming right to a POS or making purchases online, the cellphone wants to make the next leap forward. Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, which will theoretically allow cell phones to directly serve Web content.

According to a report in LinuxDevices.com, Nokia installed its experimental port, initially, on a Nokia 6630, which it then accessed over a Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). This proved somewhat useful, in that it brought “the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard.”

However, the project’s goal was to enable access to the phone of the cellular network, the story said. This proved challenging due to firewalls explicitly deployed by operators to prevent such access.

This is the logical next step with the growth of the Web. The Internet’s early days were made powerful because of the networking of millions of PCs around the globe. The potential to expand that now with the networking of huge numbers of connected cellphones is, to say the least, powerful.

Just what major retail E-Commerce sites need these days: Security holes associated only with their site. The Washington Post reported today that the security hole, which has existed for more than two weeks on the Circuit City site, created a “back door” for hackers to assume control of the victim’s machine and use it to send SPAM. The problem, which only reportedly impacted users who were not current with their Internet Explorer patches, lived on Circuit City’s customer-support portion of its site.

Users are tolerant of–nay, even used to–browser and OS security holes. But when the fears start routinely becoming site specific, E-Commerce players may finally take patches and security seriously.

Some of the largest Web retailers—including including CircuitCity, CompUSA and RitzCamera–use the same product-comparison database. But a comparison of those sites with each other—and with the full database—show what they’re choosing to keep from their customers.

The vision of convergence circa 2000 was a remote control influencing live network broadcast action. That never happened, but BET has gotten close, But BET’s executives found the profit rested in knowing the particulars of its large niche audience. What will this mean for E-Commerce? Will broadcast, cable, cellphones and PCs finally learn to play together, with smart advertisers along for the ride?

With the latest allegations that The White House and the National Security Agency have been secretly collecting the telephone call records of tens of millions of Americans, backers of the program have routinely cited a legal concept known as “expectation of privacy.”

The world’s largest retailer wants to attract more customers and it sees selling computer parts as one way. That includes PCs with no operating system and spare parts to create your own desktop. But it shows a lack of understanding of how people buy technology.

When federal authorities started unsealing court documents about the Secret Service’s Operation Rolling Stone, they also gave a peek inside how they are trying to combat cyber-crime.

In sharing information about an undercover federal investigation of Web frauds involving credit cards and stolen tax refunds, the Secret Service demonstrated that it can adapt with the times.

The seven initial arrests stemming from what the Secret Service has dubbed “Operation Rolling Stone” show that federal investigators have started to learn how to crack through deceptive IP addresses and encrypted IM communications.

Although the market for content for cell phones and PDAs is still in its infancy, the two applications that are expected to seize major market-share the fastest are reservations for airplane seats and hotel rooms.

Like every major sales and communications advance that preceded it, e-commerce’s 12-year existence has moved along in phases, as it slowly abandoned earlier methods to accept the new reality.
Offline and online brands were initially kept distinct, then they were awkwardly merged. Initial e-commerce efforts were flashy brochure sites, with rudimentary shopping carts and checkout.

With more home deliveries and installations, retailers and restaurants are facing the point-of-sale challenge of verifying payments away from the POS while paying higher credit card fees for card-not-present purchases.

One of the more intriguing movies with a technology theme in the last few decades was a 1983 flick called “WarGames,” starring Matthew Broderick in his second movie.
Critics of the movie from the IT community at the time said that the film’s plot—about a sophisticated war game computer that confused its NORAD masters into thinking that a simulated nuclear attack was real—was unrealistic because every computer has more failsafes than the one in the story.

In what Yahoo is carefully characterizing as mere research, the portal is asking some of its users whether they would be willing to perform all—or at least most—of their searches on Yahoo in exchange for discounted music downloads, frequent flier miles, video rental discounts and even charity donations.

One of the Web’s first search engines, Yahoo has taken a distant number two position behind Google in search market share, while MSN is a distant third.

The IT director at bath products retailer Crabtree & Evelyn wants to move away from the homegrown applications that run point-of-sale and back-office systems, but he says he’s trapped.

The multimillion-dollar cost of moving to off-the-shelf apps would easily outweigh the cost of sticking with apps that work quite adequately.

The National Security Agency, whose NSA initials are typically preceded by “super secret” or a similar cool-sounding phrase, is known as the home for code-breakers extraordinaire.

After 9/11, the NSA was given even more freedom to do whatever it takes to track terrorists and identify their plots. The New York Times recently reported about their efforts to conduct more domestic surveillance without warrants or any court authorization.

The ease of use of a gift card is making them popular, with e-commerce sites expecting a tidal wave of gift card redemptions during the holidays.

The question is whether they will be met with a similarly enthusiastic number of thieves hoping to use replicas of the cards in brick-and-mortars and the numbers themselves online.

Betting that price comparison sites will play an increasingly prominent role in e-commerce, credit information vendor Experian was spending almost half a billion dollars to take over PriceGrabber.com.

Following on the heels of the June 2005 purchases—just days apart—where E.W. Scripps paid $525 million for Shopzilla and eBay paid $620 million for Shopping.com, Experian’s move seemed to continue a trend.

Trust and credibility—often associated with a brand—are arguably the most powerful assets of any e-commerce site. Without it, the Web is just an electronic version of the Wild West, with the shootouts won by the lowest-price site, until that site is shot down by another low-cost site.

Consumers and B2B shoppers purchase from a branded site because they have faith they will be treated fairly and honestly.

The Internet continues to take its toll—both pro and con—on the U.S. Postal Service, but the post office may be starting to win the fight.

In 2005, for the first time in several years, the USPS reported an increase in first-class shipments, albeit a nominal one of one-tenth of one percent.

Major retailers were given a teaspoon of good news that their sites fared well during what was expected to be a super-intense traffic day.

But the real wave of intense traffic was expected to hit in late December, so the strong Black Monday performance might have proven to be a brief-lived cause for celebration.

Several Web sites have popped up—like the thermometer timer on a turkey—to announce to the world Black Friday retail specials before the retailers want them to. Is this nature’s way of telling the retailers to grow up?

Old ways die hard, and there’s no industry that is more resistant to change than retail.

E-mail is a wonderfully flexible and powerful application, but have corporate users bent it so far that it’s about to break? More to the point, have users forced e-mail to do so many things that it’s no longer any good at its core function?

This is not an academic discussion. In 2006, e-commerce sites that use e-mail extensively are going to have to evaluate alternative communication and distribution methods.

The argument that e-commerce allows price and product quality to trump large marketing budgets has been crushed by, well, large marketing budgets.

One of the core beliefs among e-commerce cognoscenti is that the Web serves as the great equalizer, allowing 20-employee retailers to effectively compete with Fortune 100 giants with $100 million ad budgets.

When Office Depot sued Staples over search engine keyword purchases, it touched on more than marketing strategies.

The suit could force the discussion of the ethics of Web advertising tactics, a discussion that many in the industry would rather not have.