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According to the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, Delta and Northwest Airlines may announce a merger within the next 48 hours. The New York Daily News had a similar report yesterday. Last month’s merger attempt failed when Delta’s 6000 pilots rejected the proposal. DAL and NWA may press ahead this time, regardless of the pilots.

The merger would create the world’s largest airline. Delta and Northwest have been linked for years through code sharing and marketing agreements.

No word on what the combined airline might be named. Creating a new brand is risky and expensive. The usual pattern is for the stronger airline to provide the branding, although America West decided to adopt the US Airways brand after their merger. TWA didn’t exist for very long after its merger with American.

Both airlines fly into Honolulu. In this morning’s Honolulu Advertiser, there’s a long front page article about a possible reduction in the airport’s modernization plans. Honolulu needs a better airport. The current facility wasn’t built to handle long lines of passengers in the security screening areas. Moving sidewalks, more buses and a train system are key success factors for large international airports. No one flies to Honolulu to visit the airport, of course, but the airport is the first and last thing that visitors to Honolulu will see before they leave the state.

Sure, there’s a 14% dip in passenger seats after Aloha and ATA closed down. Other airlines will fill the gap. Hawaiian and United have already added flights. I’d expect a combined DAL-NWA would follow suit.

Related posts on billso.com

• 8 April 2008: Aloha cargo flights disrupted - is Hawaii’s economy next?
• 3 April 2008: ATA Airlines shuts down
• 2 April 2008: Aloha cargo sale and neighbor island mail service in jeopardy
• 2 April 2008: Still on track?
• 30 March 2008: Aloha Airlines shuts down

According to the New York Times, UK company Phorm has developed the long-feared ultimate ad-serving cookie.

The term “cookie” is a nickname for persistent client-side web browser data. Cookies solve one of the earliest problems of the commercial World Wide Web: storing user information in the web browser for multiple pages of the same web site. Wikipedia’s article is rich with details, and has a good reference list.

Most Web browsers allow users to erase their cookies, usually through a setting in the privacy or security settings. But users are lazy, so most browsers are left in their default, cookie-storing state. Some web sites recommend the defaults, so users do not have to reenter their credentials during their session.

Advertising revenue

Web advertising firms sell third-party cookies, which work on several different web sites. This helps advertisers track users, so that the ad firms can serve up appropriate advertisements to each users. Users can opt-out of these third-party cookies by finding an opt-out page that itself sets a cookie in their browser.

Google’s main source of revenue is advertising. So is Yahoo’s. In fact, many large web portals, blogs and magazines rely on their advertising revenue to survive. So anything that can provide more precise targeting of advertisements might improve revenue.

Phorm’s cookie technology relies on ISPs. Phorm installs hardware in ISP networks that helps Phorm track individual users at the web page level, no matter what site they access because Phorm’s cookies are linked to the third-party advertiser cookies.

For more details, read the articles at Open Rights Group and Richard Clayton’s blog. The Wikipedia article on Phorm has many more references.

Clayton’s security analysis of Phorm’s Webwise technology is also available as a PDF document, with even more technical details. Clayton doesn’t like the technology at all, for very good reasons:

Phorm assumes that their system “anonymises” and therefore cannot possibly do anyone any harm; they assume that their processing is generic and so it cannot be interception; they assume that their business processes gives them the right to impersonate trusted websites and add tracking cookies under an assumed name; and they assume that if only people understood all the technical details they’d be happy.

Here’s an interesting article about an academic study that affirms a popular belief – that eBay is a good place to find bargains. According to this summary on ZDnet, eBay shoppers saved an estimated US$8 billion dollars in 2004. The study by Wolfgang Jank and Galit Shmueli will be published in a future issue of the Journal of Information Systems Research.

Graduate students should make a habit of reading at least one peer-reviewed article a week, especially if their degree program requires a thesis or professional paper.

eBay’s next CEO, John Donahoe, hopes to bring sellers and buyers back to the service by offering better search options and a more secure marketplace, as I discussed on 23 January 2008.

As The Register points out, eBay’s lower listing fees are balanced by a hike in the final sales fees. While it will cost sellers list to relist an item, sellers will pay eBay more money if and when that item sells.

From Wired: developers are launching a beta version of QTrax, after reaching deals with the major music labels to allow free music downloads.

QTrax is an ad-supported P2P application that works within the Firefox web browser on Windows computers. Internet Explorer and Safari are not supported. Macs will be supported on 18 March, according to this article from New York’s Silicon Allwy Insider.

That article also reveals that Universal was the final of the 4 major labels to sign with QTrax.

The music files use Windows Media DRM, so they probably won’t work on iPods. A QTrax spokesmen claims iPod compatibility is high on the service’s list, and this Associated Press article says that QTrax has developed a workaround for iTunes compatibility. Apple has released patches to break previous iTunes workarounds by other companies.

QTrax has signed over most of the music revenues to the labels, so the service will earn the bulk of its margin by selling highly targeted web advertising. Of course, it is trivial to block ads in Firefox web pages by using an extension like AdBlock Plus. Whether AdBlock will work with the QTrax Songbird engine is another question. OpenDNS should block the ads, as I mentioned on 3 September 2007.

When I checked QTrax.com a few minutes ago, I saw a single image that claimed the service was overwhelmed by demand - check in tomorrow.

Forbes recently published an article by Jack Trout on something I call “feature creep”. There are many examples of products that are feature-packed but difficult to use.

Trout spends a good chunk of his article discussing smartphones, including the BlackBerry. Smartphones tend to excel in one area, while sacrificing performance in others. Without mentioning the term “key success factor”, Trout does point out that smartphones must be excellent, reliable mobile phones – otherwise, what’s the point of having a smartphone?

Of course, it is possible to cobble together a smartphone from existing hardware and software. The Bluetooth protocol was created for just that purpose, after all. There’s a growing number of web-based services that will add features to data-capable mobile phones, too.