Forrester's Bruce Temkin reviews 40 consumer financial web sites -- and flunks 85% of them with the top problems being the lack of contextual help, illegible text, and inconsistent interface elements..

Anita Weier reports for The Capital Times (Madison, WI) about Wal-Mart's efforts to own a bank.

"Financial services is important, but it is a very small portion of our overall business. We don't break it out. We do see it as an emerging opportunity. Our strategy on banks is we invite third parties into our stores. Anything we may or may not do in the future, we do not comment on."

The Standard reports from Hong Kong on the launch of PayPal China.

The long-awaited mainland launch of eBay's online payment subsidiary comes as the company prepares to hold a press conference in Shanghai Monday, with global chief executive Meg Whitman rumored to be attending.

InformIT has published an in-depth article from Knowledge@Wharton on China's Alibaba.com.

Faculty members at Wharton and other researchers and analysts around the world who follow Alibaba say the company has done an exemplary job at using its knowledge of China to grow its businesses there.

The question is whether Ma, in the months and years to come, can expand his business in other countries while at the same time increasing his share of the intra-China B2B market being fueled by exploding domestic economic growth.

Ma and his management team also are engaged in a showdown with global online auction leader eBay for preeminence in the large and growing C2C space in China, where there are an estimated 100 million Internet users.

Craig Offman writes for FT.com about Verichip, a RFID-identification chip for human identification.

Joe Nocera writes for the New York Times about data theft-- looking back at the actions twenty years ago led by Sen. William Proxmire that changed the way credit card issuers had to deal with consumers and why Bruce Schneier is recommending similar changes today to deal with data theft or data loss.

What we need right now is someone in power who can put the burden for this problem right where it belongs: on the financial and other institutions who collect this data. Let's face it: by the time even the most vigilant consumer discovers his information has been used fraudulently, it's already too late.

"When people ask me what can the average person do to stop identity theft, I say, 'nothing,' " said Bruce Schneier, the chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security. "This data is held by third parties and they have no impetus to fix it."