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http://www.zoovy.com/ Zoovy.com is an e-commerce provider that requires all customers using their mail service to use restricted SPF records for their domains. This has cut down on our SPAM being sent both to and more importantly *from* our domains by spammers considerably.

The problem is most ISP's and other hosting providers don't control the entire e-mail application stack enough to implement it without an army of technical support people, it's just not economical. That and diagnosing mail problems is too freaking difficult for low level helpdesk people.

It's like credit card fraud, the entire system will need to be retrofitted before it can be significantly reduced or even eliminated, but the short term of cost of dealing with fraud outweights the long term upfront cost of retrofitting billions of dollars worth of swipes, magstrip readers, and point of sale systems.

Eventually the problem will get bad enough and/or a big mail provider (hotmail, gmail, yahoo) will grow a pair and start flagging email that arrives at domains without SPF as spam. Either that or something like Y2K will happen again and require everybody to update to stuff that supports SPF, this could be as soon as 2010 when we run out of IP addresses.

Wouldn't hold my breath though ... my prediction is it will probably happen sometime after IPv6 is rolled out.

I dont underestimate the iPhone's impact, rather I disagree with most people posting here about how either won't matter, or will require every custom U/I Web 2.0 site be rethought immediately.

While it's true that it's Apple's responsibility to ensure compatibility - can we all be honest and say "they won't." Apples image is all about being edgy and fun, and DIFFERENT and if that means that some conformist IE "tested" sites don't work, it's not their problem. Apple has a track record of introducing disruptive products, so I don't think breaking a few websites will cause them to lose any sleep.

The reality is that the Web 2.0+AJAX is around to stay, and big popular sites offering "rich content" which utilize the latest and greatest technology to deliver a better experience will end up with more users, regardless of their impact of the iPhone. If your site gets enough traffic, you can afford to detect the browser type (even if it's just Safari in general and screw the rest of the mac population - let 'em use firefox) and then redirect + downgrade the experience e.g. http://www.safari.domain.com/ -- this will be necessary in order to monetize the most traffic possible - it's just common business sense.

If you run an e-commerce site, looking into a platform that offers a CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to have one product & content database, with multiple different websites is certainly what you're looking for if you want to maximize your revenue. Platforms like Zoovy http://www.zoovy.com/ offer the ability to display different sites to different users pretty easily, in addition to being able to do very cool A/B multi-variable testing. This makes supporting everything between Web 2.0/AJAX & .mobi domains incredibly easy. I'm not sure if anybody else in the e-commerce industry does that yet. ??

But having multiple websites built from the same content is relatively easy.
Hope that helps.

If you're looking for something next generation then your best fit is probably http://www.zoovy.com/Zoovy.com.

Pros: Both a .Net desktop client (Vista friendly!) specifically for order entry and warehouse management, as well as a very powerful website hosting content engine that is fully AJAX / Web 2.0.

Remote staff can also login to the web interface which is Web 2.0/Ajax to manage orders and do other tasks such as update the website.

Also works with Amazon, GoogleBase, eBay, etc. to increase your visibility online.
Been in business for 7 years, and keeps current - subscription model, no upgrade fees to stay on top of the latest and greatest.

Cons:
Closed source, but with plenty of developer hooks via REST/SOAP.
Certainly not free (as some of the other solutions here are) but has good support.

To all those who think my above comment was "Flamebait" or a "Troll":

Firstly, I'm a Mac fan. I'm not a PC lover, a Microsoft fan, or a troll. But that doesn't prevent me from seeing the realities of my chosen community, and yes, Mac/Apple fans ARE still trendoids, far more so than PC folks.

Submitted as evidence:

Would the PC world pay forty bucks for a glorified volume knob? No, but these things have been on the Mac market for quite a while now.

How would a $100 trackball fare in the PC community? Pretty piss-poor, but these guys (and their ADB predecessors) were mainstays of the Mac community for years.

Fancy a thousand dollar low-end laptop? Mac fans buy them in droves. I've bought several.

Maybe a sixty dollar ONE-BUTTON mouse? Mac users buy 'em. By the thousands.

How about a $2,500 monitor? You'd be hard-pressed to find a Mac fan who wouldn't buy one if they had the money.

Thirty-five bucks for a small rubber sleeve? Three hundred bucks for a small pair of flat panel speakers? All of these things would fail miserably in the PC world, but there's a market for them in the Mac world.

That's not to say Mac fans (including myself) are stupid, merely that they (we) like gadgets, and are willing (if not always able) to pay a premium to get shiny goodies.

So, yes, Mac users are trendoids, but not stupid trendoids. If you want to talk about stupid trendoids, look at the "audiophile" morons buying $300 power cables.

Your plea omits one important appeal:

"Just say no to large gifts and other bribes sweetening this offer."

How much does it cost to rent/buy a public official in Brazil these days anyway?

http://csis.zoovy.com/product/0892064153

I work for an an e-commerce software company that processes several million dollars in sales a month.

In the past few weeks we've had scam artists targeting our customers offering to do free SEO analysis only to get in and download their customer base.

They claim to be partners of ours, and they tell the business they need admin access to do the study and they'll give them a free report.

Of course they get in, as admin, then they download the order history and customer list and start calling the customers saying "we had a problem with your order can you please verify your credit card number ending in [last 4 digits]" and most honest people happily oblige by repeating the valid credit card number over the phone. Then they ask for the CVV/CID # Yeoch!
Fortunately a lot of our sales go through Paypal which isn't subject to that sort of phraud.

I figure a single break in could easily net them 50,000 valid credit cards. Very scary.

I suspect the calls originate from hacked out IP Phones.

Here's how we fixed the problem so that our customers they could verify the identity of our staff and our legitimate partners:

http://webdoc.zoovy.com/info/index.php?GOTO=guide/ authkey.php

Not necessarily together (although, that is amusing as well).

I find that nerf guns work well not just for frustration, but for boredom as well... Especially if you have a good target at a decent distance -- whiteboards are particularly good, as you can draw various sized pictures to shoot at.

If people take objection to guns, or the noise of the darts hitting targets, you can switch to shooting rubber bands.

But I also keep a few 260Qs (the standard size for twisting balloons) on me, for those times I'm really bored. However, some people take issue to the squeeking noise, or are afraid of them popping, so might not look kindly on it. You also get odd looks from people when you do it in an airport waiting lounge. [but I can't carry tools on me to knit chainmail at the airport, like I used to].

Balloons also come in handy when you find out at the last minute that it was someone's birthday, or some other occassion.

how many hours it will take for someone to figure out how to hack it to run Linux. It should be mostly the same as Xbox-Linux

But, I still would never pay 600 bucks for it when I can still get the Linare PC for 200 bucks and is comporable, if not better.

I work for an e-commerce company Zoovy.com (http://www.zoovy.com)- we've had this "did they read it" functionality built into our product for over 5 years. We use it to determine if we should leave people negatives on eBay because they're just ignoring the payment reminders.

This is nothing novel, new or innovative.

I bet they'll try to patent it though. Arrgh..

indeed... maybe metal wallets will become a popular deterrent.

Pioneer DVR-105 Speedzter5 External Firewire/USB 2.0 Combo Drive for PC or MAC - PIDVR105SPD5

Also, the high-end watch world disdains pretty much everything that isn't 100% mechanical -- no quartz movements.

That's because they are all about craftmanship and using quartz movement is cheating in a way. I just wish I could afford one of them. I have received many compliments for the watch that I do have though.

I understand that being a system admin for a mom and pop store can be fun, you get to be the hero, you get to put your mark on the world. But you're also costing mom and pop a lot more to have someone on staff to patch the system if problems crop up. You're also tying yourself to all the responsibility, becoming a single point of failure for their online business. Nobody ever likes being the single point of failure for anything. Are you sure you really want to own the software and the hardware?

There are a lot of e-commerce services out there... you may not 'own' the hardware or software for them, but any of them worth their salt will allow you to export all of the crucial information into file formats that can be read into another piece of software. Yahoo Stores takes this model, and so does my employer Zoovy. Better still, you have a company that you can hold accountable in case something goes pear-shaped. They consolidate the resources of administering the systems, patching the e-commerce software, and making security upgrades, saving mom and pop money. For the same reason that managed hosting is useful, so is going for an e-commerce service that doesn't require you to maintain everything. Who actually enjoys dealing with SSL certificates, DNS hiccups, troubleshooting credit card gateways, backing up databases. A service can take away these not-so-fun parts all while giving higher availability, leaving you to play around with HTML templates and finding better ways to make the store make money. And making money is what you're there to help mom and pop do, right?

Portable CD/MP3/DVD players can be had for under $100. The only link I can find has them for $107, but my local Target has one on clearance for ~$70.

Wow, somebody's going to have 160 gig hard drives soon... but what about the 180 gig drives that are already out?

From an episode of Farscape (paraphrased):

Chrichton (human): OK now count, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi...
Dargo (big alien with tentacles): One Mippippippi, two Mippippippi, three Mippippippi...

At the ecommerce company I worked for, Zoovy, I wrote the shopping cart system used by a few hundred merchants. I wanted to make a completely innocuous egg since it would be used on stores selling everyting from dildos to bibles. If the merchant turns on international orders (so the state selection in checkout turns into a box instead of a dropdown), and you type in Mippippippi, it corrects it to Mississippi. I know, I know, boring... :)