Techdirt

I'm out the money and went three days without the product. I purchased Dragon Dictate 4 for Mac through deals.techdirt.com (order number *******). Fortunately, I checked out through PayPal and have a good relationship with my bank. The redemption link to obtain my software cycles me back into the shopping cart with the same product at full price. Digital River cannot locate the order by any standard method. Nuance (Dragon NaturallySpeaking and related products) can't help. And the actual charge went through StackCommerce which uses a GoogleVoice account to try and track its (apparently very few) people but ultimately gives one an email address and hangs up.

Eventually I learned the confirmation code is intended to be used as a coupon code on the second round through the shopping cart. You heard me right. You check out and get a web page confirmation. The confirmation code is your coupon code for the second time you check out! Then, and only then, do you get a real order number Digital River can recognize and, subsequently, a real serial number. This has to be the worst, most confusing, poorly documented scheme I have seen. There are four parties to the transaction - techdirt, DigitalRiver, the software company (Nuance in my case), and StackSocial (although they process the payment under yet another name). There are five if you include your payment company (PayPal in my case). For $20 more I could have ordered the same product on Amazon with only one company collecting my information and gotten a noise-cancelling microphone.

Techdirt is a different type of site more looking into laws and background info in the tech world. I don't always agree with the views but that's not a bad thing because if you always agree it means your a sheep with no thinking ability. They can become political at times which is kind of hand in hand when discussing law but can become too much at times. I land on the site around 2-3 times a week.

This site having technology information but the news are not up to date. They are having delay for posting the news.

This is a very interesting site. It has articles about what is happening in the tech online world.