Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

For those of you who may be near Philadelphia next week, I’ll be delivering the Keynote Address at a PCI Summit in the city of brotherly contempt on Thursday.

For the moment, let’s set aside the very legitimate question of why they asked me to keynote, given that it’s hard to imagine scraping the bottom of the speaker barrel any more pathetically than to ask an ink-stained journalist to talk.

That’s actually literal. A few weeks ago, I didn’t check my pockets carefully and did the clothes washing with a blue pen still embedded. Voila! The perfect shirts to wear in full ink-stained wretch mode. Wretch Wear! I was delighted by the discovery. My wife much less so. Then again, I’ve been relieved of clothes washing for awhile so this might be seen as a win-win.

But, yet again, I digress. I’ll be talking about the retail struggles with PCI, including the conflicts of interest and auditor interpretation issues, as well as cost and other factors. Much more importantly, the event actually has several top-notch speakers, including the incomparable Dave Taylor, president of the PCI Security Vendor Alliance. Dave has a wonderful habit of telling the truth regardless of the forum, so he’s both fun and dangerous.

So if any of you are in the Cracked Liberty Bell environs and want to get into the particulars of credit card security, would love for you to drop by. I personally think I’m up there to make the other speakers look smart by comparison. It’s one of the few things I can do naturally.