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Two Cents: Your experience shopping for furniture online?	18 August 2007
Susan Templer, San Francisco I bought two desks from Furniture.com several years ago. I liked the look and style and could not find anything locally that I liked as much for as good a price. When they arrived, I was unhappy with the quality, and that has not...
American Express plans business, consumer buy site	15 May 2007
(InfoWorld) - Code-named Purchasing Portal, American Express is expected to launch a consumer service in the fourth quarter that will give American Express cardholders access to American Express's own negotiated rates for thousands of products that it buys annually. In addition, plans calls for a service that will monitor consumer cellular phone bills and help recover funds when a network provider makes a billing error or overcharges. American Express spends approximately $1 billion per year on MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) products. MRO typically includes everything from furniture, electronics equipment, and computers to mops and cleaning supplies. The new service will aggregate dozens of MRO shopping catalogs from suppliers such as Staples, Best Buy, and Dell into a single master shopping catalog. "Once you get a finite set of about 100 catalogs, you have basically all the catalogs that exist," said Rion Needs, senior vice president of global financial operations and business transformation at American Express. The master catalog will be hosted by American Express and will allow users to comparison shop but still buy directly from the various vendors without having to "punch out" to individual catalog sites. The idea behind Purchasing Portal stems from a little-noticed announcement American Express made last week when it launched two new b-to-b services, Contract Audit & Recovery and Catalog Pro, as part of its Source-to-Settle suite of hosted applications. One industry analyst said that these services could have far-reaching repercussions for b-to-b business, retailing, and consumers.  By passing on the value of American Express's aggregate spending to the individual, it could dramatically increase the amount of online spending, according to Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting. "This could give consumers confidence that they are getting the absolute best deal by shopping online rather than with a big-box retailer." Online retailers may also benefit if American Express is willing to guarantee the validity of the card. At present, the merchant eats the whole price of an online purchase if there is fraud. "If it is an unsigned deal, the credit card company doesn’t lose a penny." The service would also vastly simplify the procurement process, especially for smaller businesses where integration from the sell site to the numerous different procurement engines companies use is always an issue. The second service American Express announced last week for businesses will also have a consumer component but one not planned for 2007. The Contract Audit & Recovery service is an online service that automates the accounts payable and purchase order process. The audit service monitors and manages all purchasing aspects of a contract and identifies when pricing is at variance with current pricing schedules based on the supplier-buyer contract. According to a recent study by Aberdeen, 22 percent of all negotiated savings put into contracts never come to fruition because of leakage between implementation and payment process, said Needs. The service will identify discrepancies and billing errors and will help in the recovery from a supplier of any funds owed. If a client is large enough, American Express will send along its own executives with the client to the supplier site to broker a settlement, according to Needs. Needs said American Express used its own system to save $55 million on $1 billion of purchases made last year. The service is free, with American Express receiving a percentage of the savings. According to Needs, Audit & Recovery is also planned as a service to consumers, with Needs citing as an example the classic problem with cellular phone bills. "That is one of the biggest opportunities," said Needs. Whenever there is a large transaction volume and complex pricing, as in wireless, the consumer finds it hard to understand what all the numerous fees are. Take, for instance, a cellular phone bill. The service automates the process by inputting all parts of an individual's or a business's cellular service contract, matching those contract agreements against the monthly bill. American Express has a reputation for high-touch customer relationships that usually takes the side of the consumer over the vendor until it is proven differently, said Greenbaum. If American Express uses the same business model for consumers for its Audit & Recovery service that it uses for its corporate customers, getting paid a percentage of recovered funds, then Contract Audit & Recovery may turn out to be one of its most popular services to date.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from over 800 sessions. Register today!
New lastminute tool gives more flight flexibility	28 November 2007
Online retailer claims to offer cheapest online return flights
It was right to extradite NatWest Three	28 November 2007
ANDREW FASTOW’S allegation that the NatWest Three were involved in the financial deceits which brought down Enron does not mean the men are guilty. But it does mean that they have a case to answer — a case which is rightly being tried in the US. <br/> <br/> The US has had no particular beef with British businessmen. It seeks out suspects of white-collar crime whoever they are, wherever they are. Kobi Alexander, the chief executive of Comverse Technology, was apprehended this week in Namibia, ending his two-month flight from American law enforcers seeking to prosecute him for the back-dating of stock options. The “perp walk” — the US practice of hand-cuffing and frog-marching a multi-millionaire American executive out of his office and into a waiting police car in full view of the waiting, tipped-off camera crews — has become a regular feature of the nightly news in the US. Foreigners who do business in America know full well that the Land of the Free is not nice to criminals, nor even criminal suspects. <br/> <br/> The public outcry over the extradition of the NatWest Three — Gary Mulgrew, David Bermingham and Giles Darby — has from the outset felt like a misplaced, sometimes mendacious venting of national frustration at Washington. <br/> <br/> The fact is that this case has nothing to do with the war in Iraq, with the presidency of George W. Bush, with Tony Blair’s Atlanticist inclinations. Even the esteemed British chief executives and chairmen who signed up to the letter calling for fair trials abroad looked like suckers: their campaign seemed to put patriotism, even a huffy anti-Americanism, before the due process of law. <br/> <br/> Certainly, they had a just complaint: the British Government agreed an extradition treaty without securing reciprocity from the US. But, for that, more fool the British Government. It knows a pledge from the Administration will not necessarily be honoured by Congress, particularly involving the issue of extradition. <br/> <br/> Fastow’s claims against the three British men may be suspect. The quiet chief financial officer of Enron has made a second career for himself shopping his old acquaintances. In 2002, he was indicted on 78 counts of fraud, money-laundering and conspiracy. Thanks to his “co-operation with the authorities”, he has been sentenced to six years in prison. <br/> <br/> Nonetheless, Fastow’s legal deposition describes a “close, personal relationship” with Mulgrew. Enron collapsed in 2001, undone by an intricate, ingenious web of financial fraud. Fastow claims that, in his financial dealings with the men as late as 2000, they “knew what I expected”. The deposition seems to skewer the argument that the men should be tried in Britain. They may have to face allegations of defrauding their former British employers too, but if they played a part in Enron’s downfall, then they have a case to answer in America as well. There is a principle at stake, one which underpins global capitalism and one which is as dear to every Briton as it is to every American: respect for the due process of law.
'Loud' carols prompt police call	28 November 2007
Police confirm they were called to a shopping centre after complaints children were singing Christmas carols too loudly.
Programming less	28 November 2007
A programming lesson I keep relearning. The design of the central data structure of an app determines the quality of the app, in every way. Any extra thought that goes into this, will pay off in: 1. Maintainability of the code. 2. Size of the code (you'll write less code with a well thought-out central data structure). 3. Simplicity of the user interface (the structure inevitably shows through in the UI). 4. Ability to respond to feature requests. 5. Adapt to new hardware, OS changes, other apps. 6. More "it just works" experiences. This is why it's sometimes the right thing to start over from scratch. Programmers often want to start over because they look at the code and it looks complicated, and they think they can make it simpler if they start over. They're right, of course, it will be simpler when they start over, because it won't do nearly as much as the mature product does. Once they finish building out the feature set, it may well be just as complicated. It's a judgement call. I remember looking at the source of Unix kernel for the first time as a grad student in Wisconsin, and being amazed at the simplicity and obviousness of the code. I couldn't believe something so simple actually worked. Your code at its kernel level must have this simplicity. But at the edges, where you're accomdating the minds of users, inevitably it gets a little messy. The key thing to look for is how hard is it to add a completely new feature. It should be easy to do that. If it's not, it's likely because of a poorly organized (and therefore not well-understood) central data structure. I've rewritten apps many times, over many years, because when I wrote the first or second versions, I didn't understand the problem well enough, and the code had turned into a morass of patches and workarounds. Right now I'm recoding the internals of a special-purpose aggregator. I've written many of these, over the years, always quickly, trying to get something running fast, and then lived with data structures that resulted. This time I'm going slowly and carefully, with an installed base of one (me) and ripping up the pavement whenever I find even a slightly better way of doing something. I have other users who are waiting, but that's life. 5/7/97: "When a programmer catches fire it's because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed."
Online Holiday Shopping Season Off to a Fast Start	28 November 2007
If the statistics are to be believed, Americans are flocking to their computers to do their holiday shopping this year. They spent $733 million on the first day of the e-tailing season.
Congress' "anti-extremist" bill targets online thoughtcrime	28 November 2007
Warning that the Internet "aids" in promoting extremism and radicalization, the House has voted to create a commission to prepare a classified report on the topic. This may not turn out well.
Dell's plan for Zing	28 November 2007
The PC maker bought the small audio streaming company in August and recently applied to trademark the name of an online portal. What does Dell have up its sleeve?
Phoenix news team "investigates" new teachers' MySpace pages	28 November 2007
Here comes the online networking generation gap, moving from college into the working world.