Art2blog is going on holidays for 1 week to Bodrum. We’ll be back on October 4th. In mean time don’t stop reading our favourite colleagues. If you still have some holidays planned, check out Fasten Seatbelts where you can find the “Do’s and Don’ts” of the country you’re visiting.

We will certainly remember that:

• In Turkey, it is rude to show the sole of your shoe.
• In Turkey, the “OK” sign is very rude.
• In Turkey, in crowded busses (Dolmus), the way to pay for your ticket is to pass the money from passenger to passenger towards the bus driver.
• In various countries, you may be asked to remove your shoes before entering a home.

The last few days it has been quiet…well…now you know why. I moved our blog to my own hosting.http://www.art2blog.be is the place to be now…I’ll make some more changes the coming days on the design but all credits go to Design Disease which created this great 3 column wordpress theme. Furthermore you don’t have to change your rss feed address, that stayed the same (http://feeds.feedburner.com/art2blog)!

Hope you enjoy…

Are you a frequent traveler? You sure use WiFi network from time to time in the hotel not? Watch out for this!!
If this is for real…wow…I’ll never connect again :s

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScEaD-SikrM]

Source: TechEBlog

Received several mails from contacts to join their social network on the Quechup site. Ignore these! Don’t know what the final plan is, but once you register the engine behind the site proposes to import online contacts from your webmail account like Hotmail, Gmail, … once imported all these get a mail from you inviting to join Quechup again. Pure spam with hopefully no other harmful intentions (viruses?) behind.

Recent research by Citibank Belgium shows e-commerce in Belgium still has a long way to go in terms of gaining the the consumer’s trust. For almost 50% of Belgian surfers concerns about security is the main reason for not buying online. On the other hand, out of those who do buy online, hardly 1% ever experienced payment issues, proving e-commerce is actually pretty safe.

In my opinion there are 2 ways to change this e-commerce scepticism into e-commerce enthusiasm: the e-commerce sector has to clean up their image, the finance sector has to hand its customers solutions to shop safe.

In Belgium we have the e-commerce association Be Commerce. They have a label and hand-out annual awards, but could do more in terms of image campaigns to support the sector. SpamSquad is also a nice initiative by the Belgian government and IAB to sensitize surfers about online security.

Finance sector on the other hand just don’t get that e-commerce is global and goes cross-border. I keep on seeing solutions from Belgian banks where customer pay through an online money transfer linked in the e-commerce platform of the merchant. There are 2 huge disadvantages in this approach.
First of all, the merchants have to invest in their platform to be able to process these payments: an investment that eats their small margin and that they don’t like to do.
More importantly, what about cross-border shops? They only accept global methods like credit cards, Paypal, … and will never invest to accept transfer payments from Belgian consumers! I’m convinced that the credit card (and all methods linked to it like for example PayPal) will always be the overall accepted payment method, so banks should work on online fraud protection for credit cards.

Like Citibank’s Citi internet Number software: this free (!) software creates virtual card numbers for online purchases that differ from your real credit card number. The shopper never ever gives his real credit card number online and can limit the available amount on his credit card number, the merchant just processes an ordinary credit card transaction without extra platform investments. A concept already used a lot in the USA, UK, Scandinavian countries, France, … Recently PayPal also launched a similar service.

Read full Citibank press release here. (Dutch/French only)

Another great initiative from trendwatching.com: Springwise. Innovating business ideas from around the world on Springwise through a spotter network of over 8.000 people. You can subscribe to the general feed with a new daily item, or only items for your industry.

Live since Feb, but just discovered it now …

Earlier this year I was already convinced RSS might well be the next hot thing in the online advertising market. Google’s acquisition of Feedburner seems to confirm this is the case …

The Belgian online media agencies are on the move! A few weeks ago, Belgian independent agency These Days was acquired by Wunderman. Last week big announcements from 2 other big names in the Belgian online landscape: Emakina & I-Merge.

Emakina announced the acquisition of groupe Reflect: a French agency with strong background in 2.0. 4th acquisition of Emakina after B. On The Net, Design is Dead, SunTzu.

I-Merge on the other hand was buzzing the market already for some time something was about to happen. It turned out to be a name change: I-Merge becomes Boondoggle. Boon what!? What doggle?! What what?! Good thing we have Wikipedia: English for”scoubidou”! Together with the name change they also announced the expansion through an office in Amsterdam.

They all show healthy ambition to become big in Europe. They’ve all chosen their own way of accomplishing it. Art2blog wishes them all the best of luck in their new challenges!

As most of you know, Gottabet is giving away 1 million $. We would like to get at least 100$ of that, and you can help with just participating in our bet!

Our indoor football team (ZVC 1891 - Belgium) would like to buy some new shirts for next season. We are first in the league at the moment with 1 point difference on nr2 and I started a bet here >. We would like to get at least 100$, like that we have a good start to buy new shirts… More then 100 would be even better of course. Any sponsoring is welcome…any new participant gives us 1$.

It’s fairly simple and it’s FREE;

• just go to our bet
• click ‘Bet on it’
• Register
• And bet

That’s all…

Thanks!!!