In the pages of IT Week I regularly report on the latest and greatest web-related products and services, and for the most part it is pretty impressive. In the e-commerce world we cover everything from flashy site design using the latest Ajax technology to improve the user experience, to real-time performance monitoring, analytics and search optimisation techniques. And at the cutting edge many e-retailers have really got it together, revenues continue to soar and industry body the IMRG produces ever-more impressive stats month-by-month to show the inexorable rise of online shopping. But there is a problem; if you have a full-time job, and your purchase won't fit through the letter box, you're screwed.

Like most consumers nowadays I am vendor agnostic when it comes to online shopping, just give me the cheapest one, which I find first through Google and then a price comparison site. Having narrowed down my choices for TVs under £200 I came to Duck.co.uk, submitted my payment details and waited. And waited. And then went on holiday for a few days. When I returned, the delivery man had beaten me to it and left the requisite calling card; the TV had been left miles away at the "nearest" depot in Charlton. Any attempts to secure redelivery were thwarted by the firm's inability to narrow down a time between 9 and 6, when most normal people are at work, and the automated booking system which asked me "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?" five times before I disconnected the phone and threw it out of the window.

When I reconnected the phone and finally got through to a human being, or something resembling one, I was told the TV could be redelivered to a local Costcutters down the road for 50p. Bizarre as this sounded, mine was not to question why. Then the next day some geezer called me back and said this would actually cost £5.70, and would I prefer delivery to a local Post Office instead, the nearest of which is half a mile away…

The moral of this tale, and there is one, believe me, is that online retailers need to get their act together with delivery systems. If most online customers now value the shopping experience above all else (apart from price), as we're so often told, then this final piece in the purchasing jigsaw is vitally important, but sorely missing with many firms. The IMRG is trying to rectify this situation with its Internet Delivery is Safe kitemark, which denotes retailers who meet the requisite standards including offering convenient delivery options and delivery within the agreed time frame. But only when consumers start voting with their feet will e-retailers get the message. Right, I'm off to find a shopping trolley I can wheel to the Post Office.

September 29, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes I wonder what the IT press would do without phishing; what a great story it makes, aside from being a headline-writer’s dream. With every new report into the threat landscape, and every high-profile phishing attempt, the predictable stories start doigntheir rounds on the web, and yesterday it was the turn of Symantec’s bi-annual Threat Report. “Phishing attacks up 81 percent”, screamed the headlines. I eschewed these results in favour of something in the report that would actually be news to IT managers (I hope) – that Web 2.0 applications and technologies, like Ajax, could be a target in the future, while some old favourites like polymorphic viruses, are set to make a comeback.

But while the phishers are becoming increasingly professional, using information gleaned from keyloggers on users’ PCs and launching targeted attacks which even the most vigilant user may fail to spot, others are still relying on a more sedate manner of fraud. My dad, for instance, got a letter the other week which he kindly passed on to me, from a Mwagale Christine of St Mark’s College in Uganda, a 19 year old student whose parents were brutally beheaded by rebels when she was just 14. Luckily she escaped with her sister and found shelter at the home of a kind elderly lady, who paid for her education and upbringing. But here’s the thing; apparently the old woman is very sick and now Mwagale needs some of my Pa’s hard-earned to finish college. Well, wouldn’t you, Christian Friend? To be honest, the sort of person who falls for this really should not be allowed to keep control of their assets anyway, although some people obviously do because the letters keep on a-comin'.

Snail mail however gives you time to think, mull it over, show a family member and come to an educated decision; email less so and IM not at all. The immediacy in electronic communications, as discussed many times over, can sometimes be its users’ downfall.

September 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Another day another rolling buffet; and another hotel I don’t have chance in hell of being able to afford staying in. This time it’s the turn of Gartner, everyone’s favourite analyst firm, and its IT Security Summit – you know you’re getting old when you start to remember the annual summits as they roll around again.

Writing about security I find things go in peaks and troughs. They can last for months or years, the troughs that is, when there is nothing genuinely new to write about, everything is heard-it-all before, variations-on-a-theme blah blah blah. Then something new comes along and we saturate our publications with it. Gartner’s hype cycle doesn’t quite move to this beat – its five high impact security risks for firms to watch out for are (hope you’re sitting down); viruses (yawn), ID theft (done it), spyware (yes, anything else?), social engineering (come on phishing is sooooo last year), and targeted threats.

To be fair to the analyst firm though, we probably get ahead of ourselves a little in the IT press, because I get the genuine impression at these events that the view from the conference floor is still a little way behind ours. At one of the presentations, on better risk management, one attendee seemed enthusiastic but a little dismayed that he didn’t know one firm who actually had a comprehensive risk management approach to security in the first place, let alone want to know how to better it.

Elsewhere at the event, John Meakin of Standard Chartered bank gave a typically bullish presentation, saying IT chiefs need to watch out or they will find their “stock dramatically reduced” in their organisation, unless they really try and lobby vendors to give them what they want. And this involves integrated products, which will save time and free up IT staff to do what they should be doing; more important stuff. He also grasped the bulls refreshingly by the balls, sorry, horns, and said infosecurity bosses also need to professionalise, and get over their traditional reticence to share information with peers. For if you don’t know what your peers are doing in the space, he added, you won’t have a very productive relationship with the CEO.

September 18, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I write this during my cattle class flight back from a Dell-sponsored trip to NYC, unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed, with the taste of stale booze still in my throat and a hangover of distant memories I can’t quite focus on. It’s a great city, a place where the lights never go out, the buildings stretch beyond the clouds and the people joyously slam car bonnets as they jay walk, screaming, “Hey buddy, I’m walkin’ here”.

Another thing they’ve got right there is service – always with a smile, albeit usually cringingly affected and accompanied by a sing-song soliloquy of banalities. But they try, and usually do so well that only the most obstinate customers could fail to tip generously (by our standards at least). Customer service is something American consumers take very seriously, and so they should, so should we all; pay for a service or a product and you expect to be treated courteously by efficient staff, and have any reasonable requests accommodated. It makes business sense and gives any firm the best chance possible to retain customers and foster brand loyalty – the holy grail especially for online retailers and service providers.

Good ol’ Dell has had problems in this area recently though, some within its control and some not, but it's all bad publicity and that is a serious issue for any vendor, especially one with an internet-only direct sales model. So quite rightly it is trying to up its game and improve matters for Joe and Jane Schmoe, with its Dell 2.0 strategy announced here. Alright, forget the cringeworthy moniker – I can almost see the marketing hotshots brainstorming that one; last cup of coffee, 3 am – its aims are laudable; becoming more responsive to customers’ needs.

This covers a multitude of things from improving the usability and design of products; branching out further into new-ish areas like printers and gaming; jumping on the eco-friendly bandwagon; and investing in online capabilities at back and front end to improve the customer experience and target marketing campaigns more effectively. Needless to say most of the filthy hacks at the event didn’t seem particularly bothered about these things; they wanted to know if CEO Kevin Rollins was getting the push anytime soon (no since you ask, according ot Mr Dell himself). There was also much interest in how serious the SEC’s ongoing investigation into the filing of irregular financial reports is becoming (it’s nothing to be too worried about, Dell reassured us); and the extent of AMD’s proliferation in Dell kit (less than 100 percent, more than one joked the big man).

Over yet another luke warm rolling buffet – sorry, smorgasbord of delectation – I spoke to one Yankee journalist from a well-known title and she seemed to think the whole strategy announcement smacked of desperation; the fixed grins and grand designs doing little to hide the fact that the once mighty firm is slowly unraveling. Well, although I’m a relatively young pup in this game, and also relatively uncynical I’d like to think that Dell 2.0 is more than just marketing spiel. I know every firm should really be focusing its efforts on customer responsiveness anyway, but acknowledging your weak points and acting to right them is rarely foremost in the minds of large multinational IT vendors. And in a way, the whole “customer is king” mentality Dell is striving towards is kinda Web 2.0 after all. A’right a’ready, I’m done. 

September 14, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

In my frequent dealings with the BSA and Fast in recent months to cover the thorny issue of software privacy, several initiatives have been promoted as effective methods of eradicating this irritation, sorry, deeply harmful and reprehensible practice. Harsher penalties, stricter enforcement, education and better software asset management have all been discussed, yet maybe these anti-piracy organisations should be taking their lead from Japan.

Having seen an advert encouraging, nay, scaring the hell out of Japanese consumers, in order to try and reduce DVD piracy, perhaps the BSA could fund their own version, a transcript of which can be found here. The girl is saying "watashi wa minai, watashi wa kawanai" (I won’t watch and I won’t buy them), which could be changed with little effort to “watashi ga tsukattara watashi no IT manager wa kubi ni naru” (I won’t use pirated software, or my IT manager could get the chop).

September 7, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

As most of you will have probably seen in the business pages, the papers are rubbing their hands in glee at the upcoming trial for stock manipulation of shamed Japanese entrepreneur Horie Takafumi. Mainly because we all love fall-from-grace stories almost as much as rags-to-riches ones, and to be reminded that humans are at heart irrational, greedy creatures. But above all else we like to see those at the top of the tree taken down a few branches.

For those not in the know, Horie, nicknamed Horiemon after famous cartoon character Doraemon, was the erstwhile chief of Livedoor, one of Japan’s premier internet companies – an ISP, portal and more besides – originally started by Horie in '95 as a web consultancy called, wait for it, Livin’ On The Edge. Presumably Horie took those words as his personal mantra, as the company regularly courted controversy in one of the most conservative markets in the world for its frequent acquisitions and stock swap mergers.

Now, there are always portrayed to be two trains of thought when it comes to the 'is-he-or isn’t-he guilty' question. In the yes camp is the establishment, which sees him as an arrogant, media-obsessed young upstart with no respect for the rules, who has the audacity to turn up to business meetings wearing a t-shirt and jeans and, horror of all horrors in the land of the rising sun, no shame. And on the other side is the nation’s youth, who view him as the embodiment of a free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit which has so long been missing from Japanese society; a spiky-haired rebel livin’ on the edge and not afraid to tell the grey-suited hordes where to stick their traditional business values. But in reality I know plenty of Japanese ‘youngsters’ and a fair proportion of them think he is a bit of a tool actually, or at best have no opinion either way.

But the media continues its obsession with this internet entrepreneur, tracking and analysing his every move. The Japanese public, we read, are also “obsessed” with the trial, although getting the Japanese public to obsess over something (cherry blossom, imperial heirs, internet suicide pacts, schoolgirls’ panties, the list goes on) is about as difficult as getting Gordon Ramsay to say f*** on TV. That said though, Livedoor was a big deal in its day, a dot com survivor that added search, gaming and e-marketing strings to its bow – imagine the CEO of Yahoo getting done for insider trading, for example. I’m sure we’ll all watch with interest to see if Horiemon can get out of this one. Or maybe not.

September 6, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

A week is a long time in IT journalism, I’ve come to realise, in fact five days is. Last Thursday I reported, along with most of our rivals, the launch of Browzar - a fabulous new internet browsing privacy tool thingy. The USP of this new product was that it would let users surf the web, bank online, log onto the corporate network and whatever else they might want to do on the internet, safe in the knowledge that although they may be using a shared PC, they would not be leaving a trail of information for some shady cyber criminal to mine. Now I know Firefox and Safari both have privacy settings, but to be honest most people use IE, and on a shared PC there is likely to be little in the way of choice, so hats off to Browzar, we said, kind of.

Now here’s the rub. Since then the blogosphere has been alive with the sound of discontent and accusations, on two fronts. Firstly, that Browzar does its best to persuade users to search via its own search page (the default homepage, which cannot be changed, is the Browzar search page) and then presents reams of paid-for-search results, which are not clearly marked as such. This means that the user often has to navigate to the second or even third page of results before organic searches can be viewed (and who can be bothered to do that?).

Secondly, some pasty-faced tech-heads have worked through the night with only a six pack of coke, a family sized bag of Monster Munch, a box of Kleenex and a well-thumbed copy of Nuts for company, to test Browzar’s claims. And it seems that the tool doesn’t entirely erase users' web histories. One blogger found evidence of his searches on the IE cache of his PC.

In Browzar’s defence, it is still in beta, so bugs will no doubt be ironed out in time – we all know that there is no amount of testing that can compare to throwing it out there and letting the public get its grubby little hands on the product and pick it apart. I know it’s a free tool and therefore needs paid-for-search just as Google et al do, but something needs to be done with the UI as it now stands….as I said, no one is going to be bothered to sift through even a page of Yahoo Overture-powered paid for results.

Perhaps they could give users the option to alter the default home page setting (possible), make paid-for-results more obvious(definitely), or even reduce the number of these (yeah right). The other point is that it is just a deterrent, you know? No doubt if a filthy crim wanted to get his or her hands on your web history they could with a certain amount of effort, but the thing, I suppose, is to make this harder. Perhaps the lesson here is to be careful about making such quixotic claims unless you’re sure the technology can live up to them. Or rather, beware the wrath of the blogosphere.

September 5, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I see Google is single-handedly attempting to sex-up English literature with the launch of its Book Search service. Following on from Google Videos, Images, Maps and bog-standard searches, it sits neatly with the firm's aim of democratising the world's information…(I'm not going to say 'unless you live in China', that would be too cheap a shot). But as Chas Moloney of Ricoh is suggesting, this might present a little problem for the IT manager who finds his bookish staff trying to print off vast environmentally unfriendly and expensive reams of PDFs from the office machine.

At the moment Google only has its multi-coloured paws on literature in the public domain and for which the copyright has expired, so publishers won't be sweating it just yet, in fact they might see the service as a useful indication of the market for this sort of thing. And according to search intelligence firm Hitwise UK, around 16 percent of downstream visits from Google Book Search UK last week went to websites in the 'Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds - Books' category, so the service may even be helping to promote book sales.

Not sure too many of us are going to be up for reading the complete works of Shakespeare on a PDA though. Anecdotal evidence from IT Week readers – although you lot might be in a minority, sitting in front of a computer screen a fair amount of the day – would suggest that most people like to give their eyes a rest from the flashing colours and dancing pixels and read something more tactile during their free time.

September 1, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)