The Strange Case of Vitaly Borker and The Googleplex

I urge you all to read this piece from the NY Times from November 26th 2010 entitled "A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web".

The reason is apart from the unsavory business practices of Mr Borker and his alias Mr Tony Russo - is that the Googleplex clearly has few protections for this sort of behaviour.

Whether or not he committed a crime is not for the Professor to determine. Whether Google failed in its responsibility to protect the consumer is also not for me to determine. However the fact that Google's system can and still is easily manipulated for ill-gotten gains is something that should affect all of us.

In my view - Google failed the standard of care for its user communities and that is a responsibility it should not be allowed to shirk just because the web is an easier place to do bad things.

Cheers

Payment Processing - A New Frontier

For many travel suppliers and sellers - one of the last major hurdles in cost is the payment processing.

Costs related to payment processing come from a variety of sources but it is important to understand the big 3 - which are interrelated:

Processing Costs from provider
Internal and Manual costs
Fraud

Each of these have to be managed very carefully. If you miss any one it will kill you. Of course regulatory compliance is another big issue.

I urge you to go to this website and download the presentations from the recent Travel Payment Summit that was held in FRA earlier this month.

Many of the presentations are available online. It's important that you get acquainted with the subject matter. This is a rapidly evolving subject matter area.

http://www.airlineinformation.org/AI_conferences/TPS2008/index.html

Cheers