News, Other themes

Tourism Trust Fund of Kenya insists on legalizing electronic payments that at the moment are represented only by Kenya Airways that succeeded owing to its cooperation with South African Banks. All the local banks are avoiding e-payments due to the threads of online fraud.

The study about the popularity of and the general interest in voice verification conducted by Harris Interactive for Nuance Communications revealed that consumers welcome this technology for protecting their personal information.

The study found that almost two-fifths of the consumers surveyed would prefer dealing with a company that provides voice verification; the number grew to three-fifths at the end of the survey and after reviewing its benefits.

Molson, Canada's oldest brewer acquired iCongo's Business-to-Consumer Retail E-Commerce Platform to introduce its online shop-window http://www.shopmolson.com/. On the site customers can view and chose favorite goods of different brands like Molson Signature, Molson Canadian, Molson Dry, Molson Export, Coors Light, Pilsner and Rickard's.

eBill online program was launched in the city of Naperville to enable customers to pay their monthly utility bill over the Internet in 2001. At that times initially there were some problems where residents were being double-billed.

The eCommerce Merchant Trade Association recently has approved BoldChat, a leading live-communication provider, as an official solution provider for online merchant's partnership worldwide. The aim of ECMTA is to maintain working partnership between merchants all over the world by providing online retailers a package offer which enables real-time chats, visitor-monitoring and proactive invitations at price that would pay back quickly.

The leader of Asian e-commerce market, Chinese company Alibaba.com, has announced about its partnership with Intel Corp in order to provide E-commerce PCs especially for small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China.

Now due to online shopping service launched by Citi in Singapore, customers have a good chance to make purchases on US shopping Web sites.

Earlier it was problematical for an overseas customer to find a proper US e-commerce web site by means of which he/she could easily ship goods outside the country, as most of such sites didn't accept foreign credit cards.

A number of private businesses today are asking customers' Social Security number when processing their credit card purchases which is very objectionable with the consumers. The latter are concerned about businesses' trend to collect personal information that may result in identity frauds.

Emirates Securities and Commodities Authority (ESCA) issued an E-trade license to Direct Broker for Financial Services (Mubasher), the premier provider of e-financial solutions in the region and a subsidiary of the National Technology Group (NTG). Mubasher is the first major firm among over 100 similar brokers to acquire such a license.

People in Philipsburg are now able to receive their utility bills by e-mail. This became possible through the online billing service of utility services GEBE.

At the moment there are 1,500 subscribers in St. Maarten, Saba and St. Eustatius who are using the service.