Internet World

Posted by kdownie @ 11:11am GMT

The tagline in the Conference Board press release that crossed my desk last week was chilling yet clear: "Growing Numbers Are Buying Less Online." A recent Gartner survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers echoed this theme, noting that security breaches "are exacting a steep toll on consumer confidence and will inhibit three-year U.S. e-commerce growth rates by 1 percent to 3 percent." With horror stories of data breaches hitting the wire on an almost weekly basis, a growing number of people are simply too scared to shop online. Sadly, the paranoia seems more justified than it used to be.

After years of double-digit, exponential growth in e-commerce, online retailers are facing a serious problem that we all hoped would go away with the
"wild west" days of the early Internet. According to the FTC, identity theft is the fastest growing crime in America, and the Conference Board study concludes that more than 13 percent of all Internet users or a member of their household have been victims of identity theft at some point in the past five years. To make matters worse, the number of phishing attacks -- the harvesting of personal and financial data through scam emails and bogus Web sites -- grew 28 percent this year, according to the Gartner survey.

Posted by kdownie @ 1:54pm GMT

Buying on the Web is nice, isn't it? Unless you live in the same state an e-
commerce site is based in, you don't have to pay sales tax. (Technically, if a
sales tax is not collected, you're supposed to pay use tax, but nobody does.) This
can be very convenient, especially for big purchases, and is certainly one factor
that drives people to shop on the Web. But states are complaining that they're
losing billions of dollars a year in much-needed revenue, and some municipalities
have been forced to levy additional local taxes to pick up the shortfall for public
schools and other government services. The truth is that most e-commerce
companies don't even come close to doing taxes right, and companies that have
been able to skirt state and local sales tax for years will have to start paying the
piper once federal support for the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) kicks in.

Posted by kdownie @ 3:53pm GMT

2004 may have been the year of Internet search, but this year it's all about the desktop. Users have their choice of desktop search utilities from just about any logical player you can think of, so as of yet no company has cornered the market. But it's a safe bet that Microsoft will, when the next version of Windows (currently dubbed "Longhorn") arrives. What's more, Apple's "Spotlight" search feature in its new operating system, Tiger, is already being lauded as the wave of the future. Longhorn comes out in exactly one year - or so we're told -- and from then on it's a new playing field on the desktop. So why are so many smaller players scrambling to compete in this arena?