Key findings from a recent Forbes.com study regarding the Internet usage of C-level executives:

- C-level executives spend an average of 16 hours per week on the Web, excluding email.
- 64% of respondents visit eight or more Web sites a month in search of business and financial information.
- 6 out 10 respondents spend more time at business and financial sites than any other sites they visit on the Web.
- Among C-level executives, Internet advertising ranked above over all other media measured (TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines) for the following qualitative attributes. "Where I prefer to find our about new products." "Where I prefer to receive information about companies." "Where modern, up-to-date brands advertise."
- Internet and Magazine advertising are viewed equally above other media for the following attributes. "Have advertising that is rich in information." "The advertising helps me decide what to buy."

Posted by Reid

3:11 PM 0 comments

Currently, 20% of US households are banking and/or paying bills online. That number is expected to increase to 33% of US households by 2005. Source: onlinebankingreport.com, February 2002

Not as much as I would have thought, but security is still an issue for a lot of people.

Posted by Reid

5:47 PM 0 comments

Take a look at how the Internet impacted taxes this year by reviewing the numbers of the market leader: San Diego's own Intuit's TurboTax.

Intuit reported total federal tax returns completed via TurboTax for the Web reached 3.2 million.

Paid TurboTax for the Web federal units completed through these partner sites increased more than 45 percent over last year and Web revenue through partners grew 120 percent over the prior year.

In addition, through Intuit's agreement with Yahoo!, TurboTax for the Web became even more accessible to millions of new customers nationwide via the Yahoo! Finance Tax Center. Yahoo! Finance saw a significant increase in the use of its Tax Center, including a 175 percent increase in online filings compared to last year.

"The strength and reach of our partners is part of the continued success and rapid consumer adoption of TurboTax for the Web," said Allanson. "Partners drive new customers to TurboTax for the Web and this year, delivered more than 100 million impressions across online and offline media, greatly increasing awareness of TurboTax products. Through these valued relationships, we continue to focus on how we can collaborate to better serve shared customers."

Good stuff - look for another increase next year.

Posted by Reid

12:02 PM 0 comments

ZDNet: Tech Update: Enterprise Applications / Internet standards must be royalty free

Posted by Kelly Abbott

11:09 AM 0 comments

Microsoft TechNet
Summary
Who should read this bulletin: Database administrators using Microsoft® SQL Server™

Impact of vulnerability: : Run code of attacker’s choice

Maximum Severity Rating: : Moderate

Recommendation: : Apply the patch immediately to affected systems

Affected Software: :

Microsoft SQL Server 7.0
Microsoft SQL Server 2000

Posted by Kelly Abbott

11:06 AM 0 comments

Q42WYSIWYG Editor of web pages in real time from within the browser. Wow.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

9:41 AM 0 comments

Google AnswersLike a librarian. Only, on the web. And for a fee.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

9:28 AM 0 comments

W3C Give Blessing To New Privacy Standard

P3P works automatically with an enabled Web browser to alert consumers when the browser encounters an online privacy policy that does not meet a user's preselected preferences. Those preferences are chosen from a form designed like a multiple-choice quiz. Answers received by the program then are used to measure a users' privacy preferences when a privacy policy is confronted online.

Privacy and Security standards? A pretty good idea, I guess. Anything that helps make internet best practices a lawyer-free zone is a good idea. The assumption is that the lingo for provacy will necessarily become open source. Bravo. Let's not stop there. How about Fair Use?

Posted by Kelly Abbott

8:58 AM 0 comments

Read Darwin -Charting the Virtual World - GRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Mapping the internet. A fascinating idea: that in translation to a visual language (there are 9 versions on display including a 1969 'map' of ARPanet) can help one understand the lay of th eland, as it were. Fun reading for geeks and cartographers alike.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

8:39 AM 0 comments

Satmetrix Systems - On-Line Fact Kit
Customer Satisfaction Self-Test, Benchmarks, Brochures, Case Studies and White Papers from an industry leader in CRM.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

8:31 AM 0 comments

The DMA and the AIM show a return on Internet investments:

The Direct Marketing Association polled its online and offline members, as well as its subsidiary, the Association of Interactive Marketing, and found that 55% of respondents' Web sites were making a profit, either from direct sales or from the use of information gathered from visitors.

Posted by Reid

6:35 PM 0 comments

Time for a little crossover...

TV STATION LAUNCHES CUSTOM NEWS
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) - Interactive television has taken another step forward. Beginning this week, KSTP-TV (http://dev.kstp.com/) will give Web-surfing viewers the ability to produce their own custom newscast. The St. Paul-based station will feature "5Cast" allowing the would-be "producers" to edit and string together a streaming video comprised of previously aired stories. A free service, "5Cast" will let users choose portions of the station's Eyewitness news Morning, Midday, 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts, as well as special investigative, consumer and health reports. These stories should be available on the Web about one hour after they appear on TV, Trey Fabacher, KSTP general sales manager, told the Pioneer Press.

Posted by Reid

2:18 PM 0 comments

AOL OFFERS IM TO WEB SITES
AOL Time Warner (AOL) will expand the use of its Instant Messenger service by making access available from consumer Web sites. PresenceWorks Inc. (http://www.presenceworks.com/), an Alexandria, Va. Company, said it has an agreement with AOL to enable sites to embed AOL's Buddy List in their pages, so IM users can see who among their contacts is available for messaging. The AIM service reportedly has 140 million registered users. Affinity Web sites and Web directories are considered likely users of the technology. "Web sites can display presence information along side other contact data for each person listed, enabling viewers to see whether a person is available and to instantly chat with them," said Matt Smith, PresenceWorks founder.

Posted by Reid

5:42 PM 0 comments

Microcontent News: "Why Google Loves Weblogs"

Posted by Kelly Abbott

4:11 PM 0 comments

Crackers Exploit PHP Vulnerabilities

Open source does not mean perfection. Rather it means early detection and early solutions.

Security researchers have found seven separate vulnerabilities in several versions of the widely used PHP scripting language and warn that crackers are circulating exploit code for at least one of the flaws.

The problem lies in the way that PHP handles multipart-data POST requests, through which users can upload files or other content to a Web server. Specifically, there are several flaws in the php_mime_split function that an attacker could use to run arbitrary code on a vulnerable server, according to a bulletin released by Stefan Esser of e-matters GmbH, of Koln, Germany, and a member of the PHP development team.

The PHP team has released an updated version of the language that fixes the security problems.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

4:10 PM 0 comments

developerWorks: Security : Building secure software: Selecting technologies, Part 1

One of the main principles of software risk management is making the right technology tradeoffs by being directly informed by the business proposition. This is particularly essential when it comes to choosing software security technologies.
This article is about comparing and contrasting technologies, and coming up with those that best meet derived requirements. Obviously, this is something that must usually be done early in the lifecycle, most often during the course of specifying and designing a system.
Designers and programmers conscientiously select technologies, but only the rare few consider all the possible tradeoffs when selecting a technology. Nowhere is this problem more apparent than in security. Of course, the process of selecting technologies can be boiled down easily: Do your homework, and try to stay objective.

Nonetheless, thorough research on a technology is difficult to do. In this article, we attempt to save you from some of this background work by discussing a number of the most common choices that technologists and security practitioners must make, and how those choices impact security.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

4:08 PM 0 comments

Clash of the Titans - SQL Databases

Choosing where your most important business data will live means marrying into a database's strengths and weaknesses till death do you part. The resources that go into learning database languages, design, and client software make switching platforms as much fun as an across-the-board operating-system upgrade. When you can't fail and you can't switch, you have to be extra cautious, do careful research, and prototype your options before saying "I do."

Posted by Kelly Abbott

4:05 PM 0 comments

SOHO Security

How are you fixed for network security? If you use a router with NAT, keep your anti-virus software updated, and never download attachments or preview unexpected e-mail, are you safe enough? Unfortunately the answer is, "Probably not." If you're connected to the Internet, especially with a high-speed, always-on connection, at the very minimum you need a firewall outside your network. If employees or others are allowed access to your network from remote locations via the Internet, the best bet is to implement Virtual Private Network (VPN) support. There are additional security measures you can take, but a smart first step is to use a network security appliance with a built in firewall and protected VPN support.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

4:05 PM 0 comments

Macromedia - Press room : Macromedia Unveils Macromedia Flash MX

San Francisco, California—March 4, 2002—Macromedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: MACR) today announced Macromedia Flash MX, the latest version of the Macromedia Flash development environment, which will usher in a new generation of rich Internet content and applications. With support for video, application components, and accessibility (see separate release), this milestone product builds on the track record of Macromedia Flash for enabling the creation of expressive online content and applications. Macromedia Flash MX will be available on March 15. For more information, please visit www.macromedia.com/go/flashmx/.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

4:04 PM 0 comments

eWEEK Announces eXcellence Awards Winners

Posted by Kelly Abbott

4:03 PM 0 comments

Jugglezine - From Herman Miller

Linked from Zeldman yesterday. This Herman Miller site offers good writing, good design, and good ideas galore. A friendly approach to portalization is this newsletter-slash-zine geared to digital drones like us. If you work in an office, you should take a gander. If you consider your happiness inseparable from work, you should bookmark it. If you are looking for a way to convince your boss to use the web more effectively, this is an important case study. Indeed.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

3:57 PM 0 comments

Boxes and Arrows: Cross-cultural IA

What does “usability” or “clarity” mean in a culture like Japan? Have you ever ridden a Tokyo subway? If you have, I’m sure you’ll remember those ads, stuffed to the nonexistent margins with bright yellow copy against black backgrounds, sporting celebrity headshots, bikini girls, cute mascots and entire forests of exclamation points.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

3:55 PM 0 comments

Micropayments Pushed in Norway : evolt.org, News

In the next fortnight or so, Internet content providers in Norway are preparing something of an experiment that could bring new fortune to their struggling online brands. An alliance of over 80 media companies is attempting to push the Internet users of Norway into micropayments in exchange for the provision of content.

The alliance covers roughly 80% of companies in Norway providing media and entertainment content online. At the proposed date, they have agreed to restrict access to specialised content to those with certain accounts which allow easy micropayments. Given that they'll make the switch all at once, users may have little choice but to accept the push, and pay up.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

3:54 PM 0 comments

FT.com | Micropayments in Norway

To date, most of this kind of content has been free, and the groups have been forced to think about payment because of the decline of web advertising. But they are worried that the telephone operators, which take up to 60 per cent of the revenues generated by, for example, SMS messaging or ringtone downloads, might take a large proportion of their revenues through the billing system.


Last year the media companies asked for bids to build a simple, robust and low-cost micropayments systems. The winner was e-Solutions, an Oslo-based software house, whose system gives each customer an account that can be charged with up to NKr1,000 (just under Pounds 80) and then gradually used up as content is viewed..


As Erik Langaker, head of the e-Solutions advisory board points out: "As the contract includes all major content providers in Norway, the winner was assured of very interesting trading volumes from day one.".


Typical content could include a Pounds 1 charge for 20 hours of database searching, interviews with Olympic heroes and "hot shots" cut from broadcast television.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

3:52 PM 0 comments

Troubled economics of Web video

Online news clips are going pay-per-view. Earlier this month, AOL Time Warner Inc.’s CNN Interactive unit said it plans to begin charging for access to its streaming video, making it the most high-profile site yet to make such a move. Already, ABCNews.com and FoxSports.com are charging subscription fees for much of their video, and other big sites may soon follow suit.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

3:51 PM 0 comments

eWEEK - Print Article

eWEEK Labs has discovered that Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer Version 5.0 and higher—as well as the company's IIS Web server—has a significant security incompatibility with other major Web browsers and with the Apache Software Foundation's Apache HTTP Web server.

The incompatibility lies in how Microsoft has implemented digest access authentication, a World Wide Web Consortium standard (RFC 2617) that specifies how users can securely log in to Web servers. Digest authentication is widely acknowledged to be the best available Internet standard for this purpose.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

3:45 PM 0 comments