A couple of weeks ago a fake UK web site called Zavvi Direct garnered thousands of orders for the elusive Wii Fit. Its success was based on several factors:

• Ads on eBay and Google made it easy for potential customers to find
• The Wii Fit shortage meant that customers were looking beyond their usual suppliers – hence eBay and Google – and perhaps taking less care than usual
• Anyone selling Wii Fit at normal retail price is guaranteed a ready market, since it sells on eBay and Amazon marketplace at a premium of around 80%
• Crucially, customers thought the site was run by Zavvi, formerly Virgin Megastores.

In fact it was nothing to do with Zavvi; as far as I’m aware nobody has received their goods and it is under investigation by police.

I wrote this up for today’s Guardian. It was interesting to me because of the number of customers – known to be in the thousands – and as an example of Internet insecurity. As far as I know, none of the phishing filters built into browsers like IE7 or Firefox picked this one up – it’s not exactly a phishing site of course, but nevertheless was not what it appeared to be.

Now put this together with ICANN’s decision to expand the number of top-level domains – the bit after the last dot or couple of dots. It is already near-impossible to register all the possible, plausible variations of a domain name. In the Zavvi Direct case, the fakers got zavvidirect.co.uk, zavvidirect.com and zavvisports.co.uk. They could have used hyphens; they could have used .net or .org; they could have combined zavvi with other words such as games, gadgets, electronics, fast, quick, online, web. Now companies like Zavvi face the possibility of zavvi.gadgets, zavvi.direct, zavvi.electronics, zavvi.directsales, zavvi.shop or even shop.zavvi.

I am not sure that ICANN’s decision is wise. Currently its possible at least to pre-register the most obvious names; now even that will be harder to achieve.

Still, it’s arguably not that much worse than the current situation. Further, the key players in this are not the domain registrars but the search engines. Nobody would have typed zavvidirect.co.uk into their address bar; they all went to Google or eBay. If these companies made more stringent checks, fewer people would be caught out. Note that all the customers I spoke clicked on paid ads, not pure search results.

In mitigation, while the Internet has caused this kind of problem, it also helps to solve it. Zavvi Direct customers soon found help on online forums – again through Google – such as Rpoints and MoneySavingExpert. These communities quickly waved red flags, their users received good advice about the best way to attempt to recover their money, and banks will be under pressure to act consistently.

In this particular case, it looks likely that most or all customers will get their money returned. Too late for the Guardian article, a spokesperson for Royal Bank of Scotland, which also owns NatWest, told me this:

In this specific case we can confirm that all RBS group card holders who are affected will be receiving refunds and that’s going to show on their accounts in a matter of days from now.

I was told that this will be automatic; so if you were a would-be Zavvi Direct customer and paid with an RBS card, sit tight for a week or so before complaining further.

Update: there’s more background on Zavvi Direct in this ComputerActive article.

Yesterday I viewed Apple’s presentation for MobileMe. Here’s my quick take. Live Mesh is a true platform, whose scope extends well beyond MobileMe. Yet Apple’s marketing message is so close to Microsoft’s that most users will not see that difference. Here’s Apple:

Wherever you are, your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC are always current and always in sync. And with a suite of elegant new web applications, you can access your data from anywhere.

and here’s Microsoft:

No more e-mailing attachments to yourself. Instead, synchronize the information you need across all your devices. The most up-to-date versions will be at hand when you need them—at home, at the office, and on the go.

Apple calls MobileMe “Exchange for the rest of us”. This is spot on. I got onto the Internet in the early nineties. I opened a CIX account in 1991. I remember copying CIX scratchpads – all the downloaded messages – from one PC to another in an effort to keep them in synch. I moved on to POP3 email and still had problems. POP3 usually means deleting messages from the server when you download them; there is an option to leave messages on the server but it tends to be inefficient – I remember having clients that would simply create more and more duplicate messages if you did this. I tried Microsoft Outlook when it came out as part of Office 97, and copied the .PST file from PC to laptop to keep up to date. It was all horrible. Then I realised that Outlook only works properly as an Exchange client. I installed Exchange and loved it; it solved all my email synch problems.

Exchange is fine for corporates and the occasional geek, but Microsoft has done little to help individuals with their mail and contact synch problems. It acquired Hotmail in 1997, and came up with a series of half-baked connectors that synchronize Hotmail with Outlook or Outlook Express. After years of trying, these still do not work well; and I guess that IzyMail does good business enabling standard mail clients to work properly with Live.com accounts.

With MobileMe Apple is promising seamless Outlook integration, push email on the iPhone, synch across all devices, and an alternative web interface like Gmail combined with Google Calendar combined with online file storage up to 20GB. If it works well, it will be attractive even to PC users – though unlike Google’s services, you will have to pay a subscription. It will be $99.00 per annum for an individual, or $149.00 for a family pack.

Now, Live Mesh is great for file synch, but how do I synch email with it? Where is the Live Mesh calendar? Ah no, for that you need Live Mail. So does this work with Windows Mobile? A thread like this is all too familiar:

Using my T-Mobile Shadow with Windows Mobile 6.0, I tried to log on to my Windows Live Calendar. I receive the following message:
JavaScript required to sign in. Windows Live ID requires JavaScript to sign in. This web browser either does not support JavaScript or scripts are being blocked.

Maybe you are meant to use ActiveSync; but that won’t deliver push synchronization. And and how about integrating your Windows Live Calendar with Outlook? There’s a connector but it’s for paid subscribers only. In fairness, Apple’s service costs as well. But Microsoft’s solutions to these problems are fragmented, inconsistent and frustrating. An it-just-works solution to PIM synchronization across all devices and on the web will be a winner. Exchange is nearly there already for corporate users (though if it were fully there, there would be no market for Blackberry); but for individuals, MobileMe may come as a huge relief.

I still like Live Mesh, especially its promise as an application platform in conjunction with Silverlight. MobileMe is a lesser thing in concept, but if it works as promised, it will deliver more value sooner for individuals. The main thing against it is that it will work best with the expensive, locked-in iPhone; plus you have to suffer the embarrassment of a me.com email address, or continue to advertise Apple with .mac. Now, how about MobileMe for domains?

I was surprised to read that Stuart McKee, Microsoft’s US National Technology Officer, declared that “ODF has clearly won” at a Red Hat summit in Boston.

Open Document Format is an XML standard for office documents. Microsoft has its own XML format, called [Office] Open XML, and fought a bitter fight to get it standardised through ISO.

What’s a National Technology Officer? The role seems to involve promoting Microsoft products to government organizations. It is in the public sector that pressure towards standards adoption has been most intense. Presumably McKee is constantly having to defend Microsoft’s position. In May Microsoft announced that it will support ODF natively in Office, and will join OASIS to work on the standard.

Can Microsoft successfully promote its own OOXML standard, while simultaneously playing nicely with OASIS and ODF? The messaging, as PR people say, is tricky. Microsoft has told us that ODF cannot capture all Office documents with true fidelity, and that OOXML is more complete and better tuned for high performance. Can it now say convincingly that Office will be a great ODF editor? And if it can, surely Microsoft is undermining its own arguments for why OOXML was necessary in the first place.

Although Microsoft is fighting to maintain market share in the public sector by introducing ODF support, it still has a problem. ODF is closely associated with Open Office, and Microsoft Office is likely to lag its rival in this respect.

The real value of XML documents comes when you start manipulating them programmatically and on the server; I would have thought it would be difficult for Microsoft to make products like future versions of SharePoint work equally well with both formats. IBM’s server products will use ODF, which I presume is why the company fought brutally to oppose the standardization of OOXML.

In other words, a lot of future business hangs on this ODF vs OOXML argument. It is remarkable that a senior Microsoft person has said publicly, albeit in a small session at an open source conference, that “ODF has clearly won.”

Businesses and developers planning their future document management strategy can reasonably ask: is Microsoft still committed to OOXML? Does the format have a future?

I asked the company for comment and clarification, but as yet none has been forthcoming.