Category: International - Trade

To those who are concerned about a “global big brother” resulting from all our digital and global village connectedness, I say humbug and let the global standards roll forth.

I say this partly in jest as I believe there is already a Universal All-knowing being, one who is loving and graceful but really really smart and ever expanding who already knows everything there is to know about each one of us, and on a more serious grounded earthly level, I was reminded recently of the glory of universal standards that come from collective agreements among men.

This reminder came by way of processing international credit cards for Tele-Vision DVDs. Up to now, most of my e.commerce exposure has been with processing Canadian and US credit cards.

As running start fyi, early on most of CoolTea’s credit card sales were for event tickets, thus we didn’t care too much about what your billing or shipping address was as you had to come to the event to get the deliverable.

But along the way, Mastercard and Visa started charging bill backs for merchants who failed to run AVS (address verification system). One day, six months after a big event where we had charged $5,000 worth of tickets, I was aghast to see an additional charge to our bank account in the way of several hundred dollars.

I called my Merchant bank and said, “What gives - where are these charges coming from?” and as politely and professionally clean as any large institution can do, they did their best to explain that these were billback charges from Mastercard and Visa because CoolTea did not pass the billing address information to the banks during the real-time credit card transactions.

I tried to explain that CoolTea was in the event business, and the likelihood of some hacker buying tickets with a fraudulent card and then showing up at the event was very unlikely, but they just laughed at me and said, “Sorry - take it or leave it. If you want to accept Mastercard and Visa, gotta play by their rules.”

CoolTea had been capturing your address info just-in-case we needed to call you or send mail but had not been passing this info along during the transaction.

Okay, ouch to bill back lesson, and when we started passing the address info to banks, double ouch. Our customer service calls started to climb.

“Hey Chuck, why was my card declined?”

It turned out that most of the cards were valid but did not pass the AVS code verification - e.g., most of the time it was a simple faux pax by a customer in that they were at work using their personal cards but entered their work address; or it was the reverse - people working at home using their corporate cards but entering their home address. Most of this got cleared up when we changed our online forms and improved the language about billing address entered needing to match 100% with what is on file with banks.

I should also mention we were always getting your card’s three digit security code but Mastercard and Visa didn’t give us a break - they still wanted to see matching billing addresses, otherwise they would charge us more points.

There is nothing more frustrating than looking at accounting statements and thinking it was all settled and done, only to find a couple of months later that Mastercard and Visa decided to penalize us.

So fast forward and CoolTea has a wonderful e.commerce system, no more charge backs, almost no customer services calls, and all is good, until we ventured into the international scene.

First it was funny stuff like different characters for other languages - e.g., Norwegians have some funny characters, and no, I’m not talking about people, but literal text characters that are considered “high level ASCII” - you know, the E’s with the funny slants on top, the O’s with double dots, etc.

So these funny characters wrecked some havoc with our banking transactions. We got around this with some data scrubbing before passing the variables to the banks, but then AVS bit us again.

In particular, our German customers started complaining, “Hey I know my card is valid, my address is valid, my 3-digit code is valid, so why are you bouncing my card and transaction?”

This triggered my auto neurosis of “Now what have I done and missed” but alas, I came to find out after much technical digging with gateways and banks that there is no AVS with most of the international banks.

It’s not my fault that most international banking systems cannot confirm their customers billing address in real-time, so now what? Don’t do AVS and pay more points, don’t accept international customers, or ..??..

Suffice it to say we found a solution - some logic under the hood that says, “if US/Canada customer go this way, otherwise process it this way”, and now the international cards from around the world are going through the system without hiccups - at least for now until somebody changes the systems or rules, etc. - a reminder of the golden rule, “those with the gold rule” and since CoolTea is not on par with Mastercard/Visa’s gold, so be it and let’s learn to flow.

Which brings me full circle to standards.

The 1980s IBM PC is a great example of the explosion of growth that can occur when we collectively agree to open standards.

MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) is perhaps the most profound example of benefits from standards, but unless you are musically inclined and want to gig and share your music with other like-minded creative folks, it is perhaps a tad esoteric for the average person who is not musically inclined, so let me jump to open standards we all can relate to.

Without the alphabet (e.g., here are 26 symbols that mean this) and grammar (e.g., here is how we arrange the alphabetic symbols) and other open source frameworks like musical chords, notes and scales, what kind of a planet would we have, and how enriching would our lives be?

Thus I say, standards, especially open source, collectively agreed upon ones, are a good thing - even a beneficial thing and necessary for free, open democracies that win with growing markets.

After all, and looping back to credit card processing, I am grateful for the service that Mastercard and Visa provide. I am mindful of the thieves, scoundrels, and risks that the likes of Mastercard and Visa endure. And yet I am committed to providing our customers with the most efficient shopping experience possible that balances et al.

In summary - viva the open standards enthusiasts - and back to my opening point about already being known by some other intelligence - double bravo to accountability and transparency!

Is this a great planet or what!

This audio interview is approximately 35 minutes in length and an 8.6 meg mp3 file
If you don’t have flash player click here to download mp3 file

Some of the Themes Discussed in This Interview with Howard Include:

• Why capitalism should be re-invented …
• The ethical imperative of saving neighbors …
• Institutional growth in the record industry ala Warner Brothers vs CBS …
• How to feel great about your work no matter where you are or who you are working for …
• The cost of ripping people off and Enron reflections …
• Selling commodities versus selling novelties …
• Getting to the heart of art, science, and everyday things …
• Saving Western Civilization and the miracle fabric of kings …
• The protest industry …
• And, the truths behind Vision Quest Live that will change your work life forever plus more …

About Howard Bloom
Howard Bloom, a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception.

Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. He started out normally enough, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department of The State University of New York, Buffalo, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world’s largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls “society’s myth-making machinery”–the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into “the dark underbelly of mass emotion” he edited a magazine which won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled the publication’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre–the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, Bloom formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he’d invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members achieve their goals…a skill which gave him an inside role in the rise of rap, disco, and punk rock.

This audio interview is approximately 40 minutes in length and the file is a 8.9 meg mp3 file
If you don’t have flash player click here to download mp3 file

Some of the Themes Discussed in this Interview with David Include:

• David’s upcoming book about Herbert Feiss - an economic advisor to the State Dept during the early years of the Cold War who was a first hand witness to policies implemented that explain many of today’s middle east issues and problems we are now dealing with …
• David’s book which has been in continuous print since 1972 and biography of Frank Zappa …
• What it takes to be a visionary …
• Aspects of Teanage Nervous Breakdown, another book authored by David …
• Experiences teaching at Williams College and going for grants …
• Delivering on the 1960s and how today’s yuppie is the same as the dooper of the 70s …
• What it is was like to go to school with guys like W and how their arrogance compels them to surround themselves with medicore yes people …
• How the CIA could change the world if they only employed comic gag writers who know how to cut …
• And many other tibits re: culture, politics, society and much much more …

About David Walley
WalleysWitzEnd.com - David Walley has been a critic, cultural historian and freelance editor for more than 30 years. A graduate of Rutgers University in the late Sixties he began his career as a columnist for Jazz and Pop Magazine which lead to a full-time position at one of the alternative press’s most influential papers, New York City’s East Village Other. During the late Sixties into the early Eighties, his essays, reviews and columns appeared in such magazines as Zygote, Fusion, and Changes. During a two and a half sojourn in Los Angeles, he distinguished himself as the Arts editor of the LA Free Press. His interviews with Iggy Pop and Detroit’s legendary band, the MC5 are considered classics of their type and for their time. During that period he also ghosted books on Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Bobby Darin, a classic despite itself.

In 1972, Walley published the first (and only) American biography of the avant garde musician and social critic Frank Zappa called “No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa” . After numerous reprints and three revisions, it is still in print thirty years later available through DeCapo books. David is known as the father of the contemporary rock and roll biography, and his book was characterized by the Village Voice’s Milo Miles as “one of the earliest rock books and unjustly forgotten”. Obviously it no longer is. Continuing his fascination with American originals, in 1975 he released, “Nothing in Moderation: The Ernie Kovacs Story” a seminal and unique biography of television’s first surrealist comedian who became an iconic and inspirational figure to the original crew from Saturday Night Live, as well as comedians like Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, George Carlin and others. Though subsequently published by two other imprints as “The Ernie Kovacs Phile”, and, much to the author’s dismay because he won’t realize one thin dime, this classic can still be purchased at more discriminating on-line used bookstores. He encourages you to seek it out anyway, it won’t hurt and you’ll laugh. Is that so bad?

Pursuing his various interests American cultural history, in 1998 Walley brought out “Teenage Nervous Breakdown: Music and Politics in the Post-Elvis Age” which, having survived hardcover hell is currently available in paperback through Perseus Publishing.

In a series of interconnected essays Walley examines how and why America has become hostage to the corrosive effects of an increasingly celebrity-driven consumerism, itself the result of the cumulative effects of the commercial exploitation of high school peer group dynamics. Animated by a throbbing rock and roll and hip-hop beat, this virulent form of consumerism has given rise to a multinational, adolescent-driven corporate consciousness in which MTV has become the virtual Voice of America wherein all manner of goods from tranquilizers to tanks, from insurance to politics are sold to an unconscious public. It is a book for thinkers on American culture.

One Amazon.com reader described it this way: “If you ever had the sneaking suspicion that you never escaped high school, this book explains why…This is a fascinating, fast-moving series of think pieces without boring the reader to death: Thorsten Veblen meets Camille Paglia, the most subversive book on American culture to be published since Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class.” Recently the book was used as the basis for a Winter Studies course at Williams College called, “Decadent Memories: The Sixties in Theory and Practice”. It took a little while but the students finally got it. He has been a guest lecturer in Sociology at Williams as well.

During the Nineties, Walley’s words and ideas have appeared in Cosmik Debris, an on-line music magazine, and more recently in New Partisan, some of which are archived in columns.

Walley is working on another biography about another American original named Herbert Feis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning economist and diplomatic historian of the Cold War. This story of epic proportions details how a Jewish emigrant from New York’s Lower Eastside against all odds and by dint of incredible drive plus some amazing coincidences rose to be Economic Advisor in the State Department from 1931-1943, a crucial period in American history, to become an observer/participant in some of the most momentous happenings of 20th Century American history. At one time Feis was a familiar voice on foreign policy and a frequent anti-Vietnam war speaker on college campuses. His life touched many of the important intellectual figures of the 20th century, from Lewis Mumford social historian and philosopher to Felix Frankfurter, Franklin Roosevelt, and Louis Brandeis. Sample chapters for the book called for the moment” The Shackled Historian: The Life and Times of Herbert Feis can be found in Works in Progress.

David Walley is currently living in Maine and is hard at work on this project and in the future is planning afterwards to be working on a movie about Ernie Kovacs with Bob Cecsa who runs CampChaos, god help the both of them.