From: cman@communities.com (Douglas Barnes)
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 95 09:15:29 PDT
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
Subject: Re: Mark Twain Bank
Message-ID: <v02120d02acb2c5bc4466@[199.2.22.120]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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>Well just another bit of information. On their FAQ they say to mail to
>shops@marktwain.com for more information on merchant accounts. Well the
>address does not exist. Not a very good start. I hope the get their act
>together.
>

They STILL haven't fixed that? I complained about it to Trotter
on Sunday night. It looks a lot like the marktwain.com doman is run
by SPS Productions, and that MTB doesn't have direct control over
something as simple as adding a mail alias.

FWIW, I have heard some nice things about MTB _as a bank_, but they
not only seem technically clueless, they seem to have made a very
poor choice in outsourcing the technical aspects of this job. They
also appear to have _no clue whatsoever_ about how to market this
service. When three reasonably intelligent people can obtain three
_completely different_ ideas of how the MTB e-cash accounts are set
up, they're in a world of hurt, 'cause most people aren't even going
to take the time.  Aaaargh!

Also, http://marktwain.com is the home page for this SPS Productions
outfit...  these are apparently the ones responsible for the
look of their web page (at first I thought that MTB had interpreted
the request to "fix their web page" as a request to "tart it up",
but it turned out to be the page for these other folks.) They appear
to be located in Wisconsin, of all places.

Also, an outfit called "MIDS.com" (M&I Data Services) seem to be
involved in this. Another outfit from Wisconsin. Weird. (Time to
look at a map and see where Wisconsin is wrt MO. I think they're
both in the middle. :-) I may be guilty of a bit of crass regionalism,
but Wisconsin is not a place I associate strongly with either
outstanding graphical design or with Internet savvy. Mostly I think
of cheese...  and certainly these folks turn out some cheezy web pages.

Also, I think any organization that thinks "WorldWide Wizdom (tm)"
is an appropriate name for a financial advice column needs to have a
marketing department transplant. And they should really lose that
ghastly black background. It makes the page look like a velvet
painting.

(heavy sigh)