Articles by Joe

Electronic payment systems create an ecosystem -- the actions of one participant have an impact on all. This has been seen repeatedly when a single organization fails to protect consumers' payment data, resulting in increased costs for all retailers and banks Each time there is a breach, such as the one impacting TJX, all card issuers must increas...

The pharmaceutical industry has garnered more than its fair share of media attention following headlines exposing the recent Vioxx drug recall, elderly American patients purchasing drugs from Canada, accusations of drug manufacturers price gouging in the face of the AIDS epidemic and Fen-Phen anti-obesity drug lawsuits Consequently, speculation con...

Brick-and-mortar merchandisers' shift from a product-centric to a customer-centric mentality is examined in a recent report from Gartner. By starting backwards from the known profiles of shoppers in every ZIP code, merchandisers can create extremely granular assortments for each store -- even down to sizing and color choices -- to increase sales and create loyalty...

Online shopping is the fastest growing multibillion-dollar business in the world. Yet, the customer experience of online shopping is much the same as it was upon creation, more than a decade ago -- essentially an online catalog Instead of finding ways to excite and entertain shoppers through rich and expressive sensory experiences, as retailers do ...

Corporations appear to be spending more time and money on regulatory compliance now than at any other time in recent history. In fact, the largest U.S. corporations spent an average of US$4.6 million implementing Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) section 404 controls in their first year of implementation, and Forrester Research estimates the five-year cost of Basel II implementation for the largest banks to be $150 million...

Just how is Web 2.0 affecting retailers? I recently spoke at the Electronic Retailing Association's annual mid-winter conference about Web 2.0. Based on the conversations I had there, a couple of trends were clear to me:...

It used to be that armed guards, locked file cabinets and vaults were the tools for securing currency, as businesses operated in a physical world. Today, information is the currency of the global economy, as consumers pay through electronic card swipes, employees are paid through direct deposit, and businesses sell a good deal of their wares online. More than ever before, companies are now challenged to find ways to protect "currency" as it is exchanged with people inside and outside secure corporate networks...

When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was originally passed in 2002, many companies were less than enthusiastic about it. Concerns about the additional accountability and the internal changes that would need to take place weighed heavily on the minds of many company executives. These concerns turned out to be well founded. Some companies struggled to make the deadlines, and others missed them completely. Reasons included the high cost and enormous effort involved. In some cases, department directives were even changed to focus on meeting compliance...

Imagine strolling through the front door of your favorite department store, but instead of finding yourself amid a comforting cacophony of display counters, merchandise, and bustling people, you're instead all alone in a strangely geometric room featuring a series of doors labeled "Women," "Men," "Kids," "Casual Wear," "Formal Wear," and "Cosmetics."

You hear it all the time: "You can't make money off free software."Actually, companies are making quite a bit of money from free software. IBM and HP, for example, have reaped billions of dollars in revenue from Linux. True, they are doing so by bundling open source software with servers and support, but Linux is the glue that binds the entire package together.

Despite the ugly economic conditions facing IT, there are a few brightspots, and the computer gaming sector is one of them. Computer games continue to sell at a brisk pace, and the hot trend right now is online gaming. Ultima Online, EverQuest and Neverwinter Nights have developed huge fan bases, and more offerings are on the way. "It's doing very...

With more and more people adopting broadband, and larger national ISPs swallowing up smaller regional ones, one might think independent ISPs are on the ropes Bob Parker, senior analyst at AMR Research, said that may be true. "We may be seeing the age of the independent ISP going away over time," he told the E-Commerce Times. "From a consumer point ...