Entries tagged as 'e-commerce'
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Posted Thursday, 5 June 2008
Vanity Fair has published a long oral history of the Internet entitled How the Web was Won, and based on interviews with a variety of notable folks. Here’s links to the single page versions of the article and a photo portfolio. If I had been interviewed for the article, my response would have looked a lot like this:
My first direct connection to the Internet was through my faculty office computer at Marquette University in 1993. I was a visiting assistant professor on a one-year contract, teaching business ethics and management courses.
The main Internet service that I remember using at Marquette was Gopher, a text-based system that used menus instead of hyperlinks. In some ways, it resembled CompuServe, which I had used since 1981. CompuServe was a well-organized walled garden that had a nice variety of content, while Gopher was a rag-tag distributed network of university computers and a few commercial servers.
I became familiar with BITNET while I was at the University of Georgia. Both systems offered portals to Internet services. The first items I ever purchased through e-commerce were a Shriekback CD on CompuServe in 1987, and a Dead Runners Society t-shirt from a listserv in 1990.
In early 1994, the university installed a demo workstation that ran Mosaic. That was the first time i accessed the World Wide Web on a graphical browser. Later that year, I built my first web page, and I’ve had a presence on the web ever since.
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Posted Monday, 2 June 2008
I briefly used a PayPal security key, but it was a frustrating experience, simply because I kept leaving the key at home. PayPal’s integration with eBay is not good, which is surprising as eBay owns PayPal.
When I decided to stop using the key, I was able to cancel the PayPal key online in a matter of minutes. It took a 15 minute live chat with an eBay rep to remove the PayPal security key from my eBay account. Perhaps that was a security step by eBay. However the frontline system for canceling the key on eBay’s site did not work properly.
The worst part of the PayPal key: I had to pay US$5 to get one in the first place. If PayPal really wanted business users to have multifactor keys, the first key would be free of charge.
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authentication,
e-commerce,
eBay,
mobile,
multifactor,
openid,
password,
paypal,
trust
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Posted Sunday, 1 June 2008
After breaking away from Amazon back in 2006, Borders has finally unveiled its new e-commerce web site. This may be a last-ditch effort for Borders, whose revenues are insufficient to service the company’s mounting debt, as I noted in this billso.com article of 28 March 2008.
Borders will try to reestablish its web presence after 7 years of outsourcing by offering free shipping on orders of $25 or more, just like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Borders will also offer free shipping to its stores, where customers can pick up their books. Border’s in-store kiosks will be connected to the new site, so customers can access their wish lists.
See these articles from the Associated Press and the New York Times for more details.
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Amazon,
book,
e-commerce,
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textbook,
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Posted Tuesday, 13 May 2008
The mobile phone is an excellent device for two-factor authentication. Most Internet users already have a mobile phone. A user might not notice that they’ve lost a dongle. security token or smartcard. That’s one reason adoption has been difficult for multifactor authentication schemes.
JanRain announced on 9 May 2008 that it is launching a phone-based multifactor authentication service, CallVerifID, that works with its myOpenID service.
The phone verification service lets a user designate a specific phone number that JanRain’s partner, PhoneFactor, will call when their username requires verification. The user can press the pound (#) key on the phone to confirm the login, or use the incoming call to report that their username has been compromised.
Users can designate a mobile or landline number for their verification calls by setting up their myOpenID account preferences with the appropriate number.
The system isn’t perfect. Someone could still learn the users OpenID URL and passphrase, and arrange to intercept the confirmation phone call somehow. This might take a greater level of physical access than stealing a security key or snooping a keyboard. The call verification system could easily be improved by asking the user to enter or speak a second passphrase on the phone.
As Chris Messina pointed out in December 2007, several large Internet content companies have announced that they will support OpenID. Their implementation has been delayed. for several reasons, including branding, although ma.gnolia finally came through in March 2008.
CallVerifID is more evidence that OpenID can become a trusted authentication platform for content and blogging sites, and perhaps for e-commerce sites as well.
See CenterNetworks and Mashable and for more details.
Mobile phone image courtesy of besto-Baker on Flickr, through a Creative Commons license.
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authentication,
blogging,
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voice
ism tech
Posted Sunday, 13 April 2008
Smells like… depseration! The New York Times reports that three of the largest recording companies will sell digital music through an updated MySpace music store. ReadWriteWeb has more details on the updated store, which EMI is avoiding for now.
While MySpace does have a large user base, the site can’t offer the easy integration that Apple’s iPod and iTunes have developed.
Previous efforts like Helio might have survived if MySpace had done a better job with its earlier music sales sites. See this 4 September 2006 New York Times article and an earlier article from Mashable for more details.
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Tags:
Apple,
audio,
e-commerce,
helio,
iPhone,
iPod,
iTunes,
MP3,
music,
mvno,
myspace,
network,
social,
value-chain,
video
