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ARC Thoughts

This is a blog on architecture. Focus of this blog is to help technical decision makers with upcoming technologies so they can make informed decisions. Since I'm passionate about retail industry and payments industry, there will some bias towards those areas.

December 2006 - Posts

Season's Greetings
Holiday season is here. My warm seasons greetings for the holiday season. Talk to you next year! Read More...
What a storm!
I live in the Seattle area and this past weekend we experienced a major wind storm. We had winds ranging from 60 MPH to 90 MPH. As you can imagine major power outage in the area and even after 5 days there are still 200,000 homes without power. I personally Read More...
PCI, PCI, PCI, PCI, .. .... .... ..... ....
Everywhere I turn these days the talk is about PCI. May be I'm hanging out with the wrong folks:), but seriously I feel there is more talk about PCI than actual work. I would like to think of this whole thing as "risk to business" and how you take care Read More...
PCI Compliance (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard)
PCI compliance has been in the news for last few years. It was originally started by Visa as CISP , then followed by SDP from MasterCard and all the four major card associations have come together to form the PCI DSS compliance. Its goal is to protect Read More...
Free Office Live - You can't beat that
I'm just coming back from a information session on OfficeLive . It is very interesting product offering. The basic product offering starts with FREE domain name, web site, email, web site stats, etc. I don't think anyone can beat that!! There other paid Read More...
Evolution of payment industry
Christopher Thom from MasterCard has a very nice perspective on the evolution of the credit card. He really nicely walked through the history briefly yet thoroughly. I agree that we have come a long way. Starting with the imprinted credit cards, where Read More...
Windows Live Writer
I just downloaded the advanced beta of Windows Live Writer . It is an awesome tool! I love it and I'm impressed with how easy it makes the job of blogging. My biggest pain point has been the process of logging in, forgetting password and inserting images. Read More...
Next generation payments solution
During the recently concluded conference I was talking to architects, CIOs, CTOs and technical decision makers from variety of global banks and retail organizations. We were discussing what the next generation payments will look like. I think that NFC Read More...
Death of Password
I was doing a roundtable session yesterday at Strategic Architecture Forum (SAF ) and the discussion moved into what is Windows CardSpace (WCS) and how it helps the identity and payments industry. Many of the participants had never heard about WCS and Read More...
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