Month: July 2002

Yesterday, Campbell, CA-based Fineground Networks announced that Walgreens has implemented their Condensor application accelerator product.

Fineground was founded by Nat Kausik, a good friend who also founded Arcot Systems. Nat invented the approach that is implemented in the Condensor suite. It’s a very cool software application that gets placed between the network and the web server within an enterprise. Condensor then dynamically monitors the network traffic (HTML data) flowing between the server and client browsers — and transparently compresses the data so that network bandwidth requirements are minimized and response times are significantly improved — without any desktop, application or web server changes required. The privately held company is backed by New Enterprise Associates and Worldview Technology Partners.

The 28th annual edition of Best of the Bay from the Guardian.

David Strom reports on Dan Geer’s talk at the recent Burton Catalyst Conference in San Francisco.

Federation frustrates accountability. It is harder to keep track of what happened, and who penetrated your defenses, when the attack can come from anywhere in the world, use any protocol, and anyone can be the attacker, just as long as your system trusted them long enough to establish their credentials. No single person in your corporate network universe will be able to understand the entire picture of your applications infrastructure, and trying to debug some design error could be a troubleshooting nightmare, particularly if your developers have written very modular code that pulls in data from all over the place and uses all sorts of trusted nodes or users. This is exactly the kind of design ethic that those federation guys are pushing for. All of a sudden, complexity becomes corporate enemy number one.

A brief update on mobile payments in Korea.

Lee Kidder from TowerGroup writes about the classic “chicken and egg” problem of many new services.

In this non-zero-sum game, all or most parties stand to gain as a result of participating, making the net result positive. EIPP is therefore a win-win proposition for all, and lockbox is dead. The end.

The only problem with this scenario is that isn’t happening now and won’t happen in five years despite the interest and activity in EIPP and in business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce in general.

Following its earnings announcement and conference call yesterday, Concord EFS is trading down almost 20% this morning. Analysts were pleased with revenue growth at the company but questioned the cost structure of the business and the pressure it’s putting on margins.

Concord EFS’ largest competitor First Data Corp. is also trading down over 10% this morning.

Mosaic Software‚s Postilion and SmartTrust‚s Delivery Platform (DP) products have been integrated to make it possible for mobile operators and financial services providers to accept authenticated payments from a mobile handset. The solution employs SMS or GPRS messaging to create a secure payment channel from the handset‚s SIM card through to its user‚s bank account.

Scotiabank has announced a new cash-back feature on its Classic Visa cards.

The Commerce Department is out this morning with new figures on the US economy — more specifically, on how the economy’s growth in the second quarter slowed far more than had been expected. They also revised (downward, naturally) earlier estimates for the first quarter and all of 2001.

What the Commerce Department does with these revisions reminds me of Dave Winer’s comments about re-writing weblogs! It’s like the Commerce Department also “edits in public”! Those responsible at the Commerce Department go to some length to explain their fuzzy process for putting together the GDP estimates.

To stimulate interest in its web services tools, BEA has launched a developers’ contest giving away free t-shirts and other special prizes.