Scott Loftesness

A call for papers has been issued in connection with the 2002 ACM Workshop on XML Security, to be held November 22, 2002 at George Mason University, Fairfax VA, USA.

This Motley Fool article by Rex Moore highlights that stored-value cards just represent loans from consumers to big companies — such as Starbucks — and wonders if they’re really worth the convenience. The article appears to have been stimulated by a Reuters article on Friday.

The Smart Card Alliance announced this morning that Randy Vanderhoof has been named Acting President and CEO.

In late February, Donna Farmer, formerly President and CEO of the Smart Card Alliance, resigned to start a new company.

The SCA’s web site has a whole section including a white paper devoted to “Secure Personal Identification Systems” which advocates smart cards as the best technology for implementing such systems.

Last week, MasterCard announced OneSMART, a major new initiative for smart cards in the United States. There’s a lot of supporting material available on this site including a brochure and an FAQ. The question that has plagued smart cards for so long has been finding the right combination of functionality to justify the huge expense of reader deployment. MasterCard indicates interest among U.S. card issuers is driven primarily by product differentiation opportunities. Obviously, the key will be in finding and exploiting those opportunities for differentiation.

NACHA is holding its annual payments conference early this week. Watch this page for news from the conference. The conference schedule is available here.

Kara Swisher continues the analysis of Bob Pittman and AOL in her Boom Town column. She talks about many of the things that are wrong with AOL from a customer’s point of view including endless ads in your face, weak software upgrades, etc.

Saul Hansell reports on how reality has caught up with AOL. As someone who heard Bob Pittman speak at CompuServe’s HQ in Columbus after AOL’s acquisition of CompuServe, about all I can say is how amazed I am that he stayed so long. As of last week, he’s now back in charge of AOL.

I admired Pittman for his exploitation of “reversals”. When he arrived at AOL, he flipped the business model on its head. Instead of paying content providers, he charged content providers to have their content delivered on AOL. Almost overnight, the online industry economics changed. In parallel, he became addicted to advertising deals — selling exclusives for this and that to those who thought they had to be on AOL.

Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal adds to the commentary. It’s now all coming home to roost for Bob Pittman.

The San Jose Mercury News reports today on the dramatic impact the tech recession has had on Silicon Valley companies.

Gretchen Morgenson reports on GE’s difficulties this past week. Lessons learned from this article include the difficulties of penetrating GE’s financials (must look at both the mother company and GE Capital’s reporting) and the importance of looking at both revenue and cash flow trends (cash flow fell dramatically for GE in the first quarter — a red flag).