I have some exciting news.

On Saturday, October 30, SmartSwipe won the TIA New Saskatchewan Product Award at the 26th annual ABEX awards. To those of you unfamiliar with the ABEX awards, the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce introduced the Achievement for Business Excellence Awards in 1984. The awards are meant to celebrate all of the business success stories that take place in our province.

Now that our Firefox version has been released, I am going to get back to blogging regularly. Since our Firefox version is so new, I am going to start a series of usability tips and tricks that will help you get started with SmartSwipe in Firefox.

For my first article in this series, I am going to cover installing SmartSwipe all the way from downloading the installation package to running it and making sure that the toolbar appears where you want it to appear in Firefox. In doing so, I will also (hopefully) show you some interesting tricks to make your overall Firefox experience more pleasant.

In one of the most perfect moments of my career, yesterday, at just after 4pm Saskatchewan time, I got to upload a brand new installation package to our web site. The moment the upload finished marked a wonderful milestone in our company's history - for the first time, we had a version of SmartSwipe that would run on Mozilla Firefox. If you would like to download this new version, please visit our downloads page

However, that is not the only change in this new version. Our development team made some architectural changes so SmartSwipe is faster than ever before.

Phonebusters published some interesting information on their web site and I thought that I should share it with all of you. They released their statistics for December 2009 and those stats include a snapshot of the year in identity theft. Those statistics seem to indicate that fewer people fell victim to identity theft, but the average loss was much greater.

In 2008, 11,511 reported being the victims of identity theft. These people were victimized out of a total of $9,697,199.05. In 2009, only 11,135 people reported being the victims of identity theft but they lost a total of $10,993, 348.72. If you do the math, this means that in 2009, the average identity theft victim lost $987.28.

I have some great news from world swipe quarters - SmartSwipe version 1.7.3 is now available for download! This version is a major step forward in the history of SmartSwipe and we encourage all of our users to upgrade. To upgrade, you can either use the pop-up that appears in your version of Internet Explorer, or you can go to our downloads page to download the full version.

Happy holidays!

Between a bad case of writers' block and an extremely busy work schedule, I have not updated this blog in a very long time. However, I was digging around in Google Analytics, noticed an interesting trend and thought I would write about it on this blog.

It seems that a number of people reach our site when they are trying to figure out whether they have a 32-bit operating system or a 64-bit operating system. When I dig around online, I find a series of often confusing instructions. So, I wanted to draw attention to a simple web-based tool that one of my co-workers came up with. If you are trying to figure out whether you have a 32-bit or 64-bit browser, please open up Internet Explorer and click on this link. Please note - depending on what version of Internet Explorer you use, you may have to hold down the CTRL key while you click that link!

When you click on that link, a popup window will appear that will tell you whether you use a 32-bit operating system or a 64-bit operating system. Based on our testing, this popup is incredibly accurate, but if you have another experience, please let us know.

While I have been following online scams for quite awhile, every once in a while, I read about one that makes my blood boil. Yesterday, I heard about a phishing scam that made me pretty angry and today, I got enough confirmation to write an article about it.

There is a phishing email going around right now that says that people who were vaccinated against H1N1 have to go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) web site to create a "Personal H1N1 Vaccination Profile". And, when people click on the link to create their profile, they are directed to a site which will steal their personal health information and (in some cases) try to infect their computers with malicious software.

Coremetrics, the web site sales tracking firm, announced some exciting numbers from Cyber Monday 2009. According to their numbers, consumers bought 30% more items on Cyber Monday 2009 than on Cyber Monday 2008! Moreover, total sales were up 13.7% when compared to 2008.

These are some incredibly encouraging numbers from the world of online retailing. However, not all of Coremetrics numbers were quite so good. One particularly important metric (shopping cart conversions) was 3.11% lower than in 2008. And both sports retailers and department stores saw their average order volume drop when compared to Cyber Monday 2008.