• Gary Gnu (unregistered)

    Hmmm... you think with all the special synergies on the table with the two companies involved in this scheme, they could have come up with a set of secret hand signals to securely transfer customer credit card numbers back and forth.

  • (cs)

    Ahh I can't wait to see the Web 2.0 episode of that one :-D

  • Randyd (unregistered) in reply to WIldpeaks

    dopes like this have dried up the vc money for legitimate good new stuff..

    sickening.

  • (cs)

    Sooooooooooooooooooooo the WTF is that there was a dot-com bubble where there were millions of dumbassed decisions that were made resulting in a big boom?

    Seems like another run of the mill dotcom bust story. I think the TRUE WTF is that the company was able to recover from their loses and is still alive. 

  • sdfgsegge (unregistered) in reply to Randyd
    Anonymous:

    dopes like this have dried up the vc money for legitimate good new stuff..

    sickening.

    There's still a lot of VC out there.  Lots.  Our company used to get solicitations all the time just a couple of years ago.  We don't anymore because we told them to all take a hike.
  • (cs)

    Yawn........

    A CIO with no idea how a business runs, trying to implement something (that might have even worked) without knowledge?  Amazing.

  • Dear Lord (unregistered)

    The CTO/CTE should've layed down an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and utilized some Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) to communicate with the Payment Services Provider (PSP).  They could've replaced the core of their Two-Bit™ Operations (TBO) with some nifty Zero-Byte Encryption (ZBE) to get a hold of those credit card numbers.  ($captcha eq "error").

    ===

    I'm waiting for Web 2.1, Build 1568, Service Pack 2 with integrated Core2/AI 3G technology.  This new version should go a long way to obsfucating fixing my total lack of ability to get stuff done.

  • flatline (unregistered)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    This particular payment service provider worked like many others: when the customer was ready to make an online purchase, they would be transferred to the payment provider's website and complete the transaction. The merchant would never see the credit card number and would be later paid by the payment service provider. In theory, the plan sounded completely unnecessary and was a rather obnoxious way to interrupt the customer's shopping experience. It was exactly what their travel agency needed.

    Scuse me, but what's so radically different between this example and PayPal (which as history has shown, succeeded)?
     

  • Dear Lord (unregistered) in reply to Dear Lord
    Anonymous:

    The CTO/CTE should've layed down an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and utilized some Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) to communicate with the Payment Services Provider (PSP).  They could've replaced the core of their Two-Bit™ Operations (TBO) with some nifty Zero-Byte Encryption (ZBE) to get a hold of those credit card numbers.  ($captcha eq "error").

    ===

    I'm waiting for Web 2.1, Build 1568, Service Pack 2 with integrated Core2/AI 3G technology.  This new version should go a long way to obsfucating fixing my total lack of ability to get stuff done.

    What could they have done to be more successful?  There has to be an acronym that could've saved them!

    I know the answer lies somewhere within the realm of technology (or maybe "triangles"). 

  • my name is missing (unregistered) in reply to Dear Lord

    I know a "Systems Architect" at a former employer who's actually researching this very topic right now. I never saw his office to check out the bookshelf contents though...


    As I read the beginning of the story, I immediately figured a brother-in-law must be involved somewhere.

  • (cs) in reply to flatline
    Anonymous:

    Scuse me, but what's so radically different between this example and PayPal (which as history has shown, succeeded)?
     

    I don't know why PayPal succeeded where others failed. But that's not the WTF. The WTF is that the travel agency needed to have the customer credit card numbers itself, but didn't because the Chief Technology Eejit was stuck on the idea of using his brother-in-law's service, despite it being fundamentally unsuitable.

    Which in itself, family connections overriding business sense, is not uncommon. And no doubt welcome when one is on the recieving end of any money being transferred. 

  • Kenny (unregistered) in reply to flatline

    IIRC Paypal originally started as a way for people to send other people money for auctions and eventually integrated into a whole payment service.. Also don't forget, you have a PayPal account from which you can send other people money, while I believe the other services just transfered you the money directly.

    An example of such services that process credit cards is 2co.com (no recomendation though)

           

  • (cs) in reply to Randyd
    Anonymous:

    dopes like this have dried up the vc money for legitimate good new stuff..

    sickening.

    Investors who gave money to dopes like this are the ones at fault.  Never blame an idiot for being an idiot; they can't help how they were born.  The people who hand out money for free to idiots are even more foolish overall; as well as the people who hire them, promote them, etc.  Heck, these dopes may not even be idiots, a lot of these failed executives live a much better life style than I can ever dream of, and were probably offered leadership jobs elsewhere.  In the business world, the captain never goes down with the ship.

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to Kenny

    > IIRC Paypal originally started as a way for people to send other people money for auctions and

    > eventually integrated into a whole payment servicer

    Actually, they started as a palm app that allowed you to have pseudo currency amongst your friends.  You'd beam cash from from one friend to the next, helping to take care of things like food bills and the like.  This was backed by an account on a paypal server that held real money. (I still have a couple bucks in that account from 2000, it wasn't easy to convert to real cash).

    eventually they realized the whole palm thing was silly, the real cash was to be made not between small gadgets you have to fidget with to beam cash around, but online payments.  the rest is history.

     just shows how a silly idea can evolve .


     captcha= batman

  • (cs) in reply to flatline
    Anonymous:

    Scuse me, but what's so radically different between this example and PayPal (which as history has shown, succeeded)?
     

    Paypal doesn't deal with big business at all (they have a real merchant service provider arm for that). After all, most businesses don't want to make people sign up for yet another site just to pay them, which paypal does, plus there's the stigma of it being the low-budget solution. Most businesses will use someone like CardSystems... you know, those guys who gave away millions of CC numbers to thieves.

    If you just mean how does it differ from Paypal's business model, well, there's room for a few, but not for the hundreds vying through the dot.com bust. Notice how there's only PayPal and a half-dozen minor competitors that no one's ever heard of. (Though Google would like to change that.)

  • Lummox (unregistered)

    Go go nepotism!

     

    Captcha = awesomeness 

  • (cs) in reply to flatline
    Anonymous:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    This particular payment service provider worked like many others: when the customer was ready to make an online purchase, they would be transferred to the payment provider's website and complete the transaction. The merchant would never see the credit card number and would be later paid by the payment service provider. In theory, the plan sounded completely unnecessary and was a rather obnoxious way to interrupt the customer's shopping experience. It was exactly what their travel agency needed.

    Scuse me, but what's so radically different between this example and PayPal (which as history has shown, succeeded)?


    Target market.  PayPal is targeted at individuals and home businesses, who typically don't take credit cards.  Most payment providers were targeted at medium businesses, who have no trouble arranging to accept credit card payments.
  • Hill (unregistered) in reply to Lummox
    Anonymous:

    Go go nepotism!

    I tried to go to nepotism, but my stupid travel agency isn't processing my credit card payments successfully.

  • Drinkingbird (unregistered) in reply to Carnildo
    Carnildo:
    Anonymous:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    This particular payment service provider worked like many others: when the customer was ready to make an online purchase, they would be transferred to the payment provider's website and complete the transaction. The merchant would never see the credit card number and would be later paid by the payment service provider. In theory, the plan sounded completely unnecessary and was a rather obnoxious way to interrupt the customer's shopping experience. It was exactly what their travel agency needed.

    Scuse me, but what's so radically different between this example and PayPal (which as history has shown, succeeded)?


    Target market.  PayPal is targeted at individuals and home businesses, who typically don't take credit cards.  Most payment providers were targeted at medium businesses, who have no trouble arranging to accept credit card payments.

    Exactly. PayPal is designed to allow the easy and secure transfer of money between individuals or groups where neither side has their own payment provider to process the transaction, or to provide a trustworthy and familiar means of transferring funds in situations where a merchant is not reputable enough for customers to feel comfortable paying through the merchant's site, etc.

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    ...After spending millions to partially develop the "dot-com project," the agency canceled the project and threw it all out along with the Chief Technology Evangelist.

    Five years later, they've finally recovered from their losses and even managed to put up a modest web presence....

    <font size="+1">W</font>hat happened to Diez?  Did he stay, did he walk or did he get trashed with the CTE?

     

  • (cs) in reply to darin
    darin:
    Anonymous:

    dopes like this have dried up the vc money for legitimate good new stuff..

    sickening.

    Investors who gave money to dopes like this are the ones at fault.  Never blame an idiot for being an idiot; they can't help how they were born.  The people who hand out money for free to idiots are even more foolish overall; as well as the people who hire them, promote them, etc.  Heck, these dopes may not even be idiots, a lot of these failed executives live a much better life style than I can ever dream of, and were probably offered leadership jobs elsewhere.  In the business world, the captain never goes down with the ship.

    So basically what you're saying is:

     

    Who's the bigger idiot?  The idiot in charge of a business, that clearly has no business sense  at all, or the idiot who gives him millions of dollars in funding?

    I like.

     

  • Fonzy (unregistered) in reply to flatline

    Didn't PayPal succeed because of eBay? 

  • (cs)

    Apologies for bad formatting - I'm unable to get a preview.

    One of the more popular ideas from the dot-com days was creating a payment service provider company. It's hard to say why; perhaps their founders believed that we really needed yet another "layer of abstraction" in commerce?

    This is complete and utter rubbish. Banks are antiquated morons who still work in COBOL-influenced formats, and the sheer hassle that working all of that out involves is enough to make a number of people decide that taking credit card payments is not, in fact, their core business model. I worked at DataCash (UK PSP) when we battled with banks daily, and if I could afford to not have sold my shares, I'd still have them.

    That thing of not being able to work out some sort of handshake where you identified yourself as the people who did the previous transaction with a particular credit card, and could therefore do a repeat transaction with the same credit card, that's a pretty good WTF. And even the most clueless PSPs support that sort of thing these days.

  • Brady Kelly (unregistered) in reply to GoatCheez
    GoatCheez:

    Sooooooooooooooooooooo the WTF is that there was a dot-com bubble where there were millions of dumbassed decisions that were made resulting in a big boom?

    Seems like another run of the mill dotcom bust story. I think the TRUE WTF is that the company was able to recover from their loses and is still alive. 

    The true WTF is that this story is a WTF!  It's like saying, I stepped outside and it was raining, WTF?

  • klamath (unregistered) in reply to sdfgsegge
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    dopes like this have dried up the vc money for legitimate good new stuff..

    sickening.

    There's still a lot of VC out there.  Lots.  Our company used to get solicitations all the time just a couple of years ago.  We don't anymore because we told them to all take a hike.

    You mean to say, they really went out for a long hike ? Now, those VCs are getting realistic.

  • (cs) in reply to Gary Gnu
    Anonymous:
    Hmmm... you think with all the special synergies on the table with the two companies involved in this scheme, they could have come up with a set of secret hand signals to securely transfer customer credit card numbers back and forth.

    Not enough synergism. Hehe, I said jism.

    Just today I had to develop a website for a friend's client, and one of their "services" is to "develop synergistic flow between website, cdrom, and other product components"

    I rolled my eyes when I saw that.
  • Gnudiff (unregistered)

    Alex Papadimoulis:
    One of the more popular ideas from the dot-com days was creating a payment service provider company. It's hard to say why; perhaps their founders believed that we really needed yet another "layer of abstraction" in commerce? Perhaps they thought that merchants would sign up in droves when they heard about the opportunity to give away yet another percentage of each sale to a middleman?

    Erm, I am sorry, lacking context here. 

    Surely, there should be some company that provides possibility to make webshops/online purchases? Sort of back-end to which all those Amazons and others can have interface, so they don't have to deal with each of the multitude of banks seperately? I don't know, maybe in the US, VISA, AmEx or whathaveyoudo it directly , but down here where I live, we do have a BankServiss company, which does exactly that, and prior to them, there was no easy, inexpensive way to set up all those here-today-gone-tomorrow small online shops.

  • PiRX (unregistered) in reply to Gnudiff

    Errr, you from Latvia?

     

    btw. BankServiss now is called First Data

  • deets (unregistered) in reply to Brady Kelly

    I'm the submitter, and Alex did some editing on my posting. I'm not unsatisfied with the result, but to me he altered one critical part that makes it a WTF: there was only one meeting, in which we discussed the whole system. And it went like this:

    while(1) { boss: "we must map their workflow to our workflow"; IT: "That can't be done. We don't get credit card numbers from them, so we can't reserve a hotel room" boss: "We can give them our credit card number. We do have the money, so it doesn't matter" IT: "But they won't charge the amount we charged when booking. The customer might want a payback, or we have to get after him for additional expenses, rendering the whole system useless" }

    This took about three hours. With only minor rephrasing. It was "kafkaesk". And then, we were left to implement it anyway - but the bubble burst faster than we were coding, so the company failed to ruin itself.

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    [image]One of the more popular ideas from the dot-com days was creating a payment service provider company. It's hard to say why; perhaps their founders believed that we really needed yet another "layer of abstraction" in commerce? Perhaps they thought that merchants would sign up in droves when they heard about the opportunity to give away yet another percentage of each sale to a middleman? Whatever the reason, no one signed up and most providers collapsed as soon as their funding dried up. Well, I shouldn't say "no one;" there were a few businesses that took the bait.

    Yeah, "a few", like virtually 100% of porn sites, which funnel billions of dollars a year through third-party payment processing companies.

     

  • Mike Edenfield (unregistered) in reply to flatline

    Companies like PayPal are exactly what he's talking about.  Even more in line with this "payment service provider" are companies like CCBill and iBill, both of which are still around and apparently doing rather well for themselves.



    The difference is that those companies quickly realized that selling themselves to businesses large enough to have their own credit card processing system was stupid.  CCBill and iBill began marketing themselves to smaller websites and other online (and offline -- the took payments by phone) business that couldn't afford to implement their own payment processing system.  Of course, being the Internets, this meant porn sites :)  But also many of the smaller web stores and subscription sites, who let the billing company deal with getting money from the customers and all the hassle that went with it.  PayPal, of course, took this one step further and went directly to the end user, letting them give each other money -- you could now pay the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn with a credit card.



     

  • Corporate Cog (unregistered)

    No friggin way. Urban Legend.

  • jayh (unregistered) in reply to PiRX
    Anonymous:

    Errr, you from Latvia?

     

    btw. BankServiss now is called First Data

     Until the next data leak, then time to fire up the Random Name Generator (tm)

  • Secret Traveller (unregistered)

    Could anyone imagine what would happen if I'd travel to the USA and the "homeland security" guys find out that a wanted terrorist had once used the same credit card (number) to book a hotel room..?

    Well, I'd expect a free vacation at one of Cubas most scenic and exclusive holiday spots. "Special interrogation" (read: 'torture') inclusive.
     

  • James (unregistered) in reply to Gnudiff

    Totally agree with the other Anonymous Coward above.  My wife is trying to set up a small online store for some baby gear she sews.  Almost certainly less than $200/month, at least for the first year or two.  She'd never turn a cent of profit going directly through a CC company since they charge 3-figure setup fees.

    Paypal (and now Google Checkout) are the best way we have right now of sending money to somebody quickly.  Cheaper than Western Union and vastly more reliable than any paper transactions -- unwise to send cash, and if checks (cashiers or personal) turn out to be forged/bounced, the onus is on you, the payee, to come up with the bounced amount plus probably a bounced-check fee.  Ick.  Small web stores need a payment processor that will side with you, the seller, at least some of the time, and banks are not going to do that.  Would it be nice if the payment processor didn't take a meaty chunk of your profit?  Sure.  But until there's a system to let that happen, we're stuck with Paypal et al.

     

    Bonus: CAPTCHA is "jiggles".  Heh. 

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