I’m always fascinated when people either merchants or web designers assume e-commerce should be “easy” or they’ll just write a quick shopping cart themselves because it’s a “simple” task only to find them stuck on the side of the e-commerce road later on either never launched or painted into a corner they hadn’t thought through.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe that vendors of e-commerce applications need to focus on usability and making the product a joy to use, however that’s a very different thing than e-commerce being “easy and simple”.

Most e-commerce sites are going to be up there in complexity with the largest projects of a person’s life, even the simple ones. If someone only has say 1 product and uses a digital means of delivery (therefore they don’t care about shipping, inventory or sales tax) then use you can make a simple site, connect to it via PayPal and that’s about as simple as it gets for e-commerce.

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Internet governing body ICANN is on the verge of announcing the new president and CEO, and many industry insiders point to Rod Beckstrom, the former US cybersecurity chief for the US Department of Homeland Security.

Citing two anonymous sources close to the ICANN discussions, both the Associated Press and The Australian published separate reports on Wednesday that Beckstrom would replace current ICANN head Paul Twomey.

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Among other major data center builders, Google and Microsoft , that have been known to maintain secrecy over their data center efficiency, the most secretive of them all, Yahoo, has revealed a number of innovations in cooling design and energy efficiency ratings, and they fall in the same ball park as its rivals, according to a Data Center Knowledge report.

Yahoo chief architect, Adam Bechtel, who is responsible for network, storage, and systems at Yahoo, presented “Machines or MegaWatts” to a San Jose, California audience at the O’Reilly Velocity 2009 conference (en.oreilly.com/velocity2009/), in which he discussed how naming conventions did not fit many aspects of Yahoo!’s infrastructure as it grew.

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Full-service content delivery network provider CDNetworks has expanded a strategic relationship with Nexway , a European online distributor of software and video games, extending the scope of its content delivery beyond Europe to the entire world.

According to CDNetwork’s Wednesday announcement, Nexway has also added CDNetworks’ “Web Acceleration” services, and is also participating in a mutual customer-referral program. Nexway provides turnkey e-commerce solutions for software providers and video-game publishers in more than 50 countries across the globe, including front-office, back-office, secure-payment functions, and an e-commerce distribution platform for content delivery.

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Fiber optic connectivity solution provider AboveNet announced on Thursday it has expanded its service into Baltimore Technology Park’s data center.

This capability is part of AboveNet’s continuing investment in connectivity to premier in-market data center providers.

“As the premier data center in Baltimore we are extremely pleased to have AboveNet as an on-net fiber provider at our facility,” says Jim Weller, president of BTP. “This helps us offer customers key data center capabilities, along with best of breed network partners, which combine to provide regional customers an unrivaled IT infrastructure platform.

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Web hosting provider Navisite revealed on Tuesday that it is selling its colocation business, despite meeting compliance with the NASDAQ Stock Market guidelines on minimum market valuations.

The company was looking for potential buyers for its colocation division in an effort to meet NASDAQ compliance challenges.

When Navisite’s stock price increased, helping the company meet the exchange’s minimum market cap of $35 million for 10 consecutive sessions, the company decided it would still sell of its colocation business.

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Invacare, which manufactures wheelchairs and home medical equipment, has chosen Verizon Business to provide its European operations a secure, cost-effective way to provide its employees with immediately available applications and the flexibility to accommodate fluctuations in bandwidth demand.

According to Verizon’s Thursday announcement, Invacare’s new European communications network is fully managed by Verizon’s Private IP solution, which effectively quadruples the bandwidth available to employees at the company’s 20 sales and production locations in Europe. Its business-critical applications will be colocated at Verizon Business’ data center in France.

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Data center operator Digital Realty Trust announced on Thursday it has signed a turn-key data center lease agreement with consulting, technology and outsourcing services provider Capgemini.

Under the agreement, Capgemini will establish data center space in a Digital Realty Trust property in France this summer to support the growth of its data center infrastructure.

“We are delighted to be working with Capgemini on this important data center project for its global IT strategy,” says Bernard Geoghegan, senior vice president of international operations at Digital Realty Trust. “Our turn-key data center is an ideal solution for corporate customers such as Capgemini, allowing them to focus on deploying their IT systems in a timely, cost effective manner with a data center infrastructure partner they can rely on for the long term.

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Web host Lunarpages has selected tier 3 colocation and disaster recovery solutions provider CoreLink Data Centers for its data center provider in Las Vegas, offering Lunarpages high-density power and cooling facilities to support its mission-critical web hosting applications.

Providing web hosting for personal websites, small business, e-commerce shops, Fortune 100 corporations and dedicated customers, Lunarpages selected CoreLink data centers because of their high level of expertise in the area of high density data center and disaster recovery solutions, Lunarpages chief operating officer George Natzic said regarding the Thursday announcement.

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Canadian web hosting provider PEER 1 Network Enterprises announced on Thursday it has launched its CloudXcelerator program (www.peer1.com/cloud), which lets PEER 1 partners to develop, test and run their cloud applications on the company’s IT hosting infrastructure.

The launch follows PEER’s announcement last month that it has begun constructing a 41,000 square foot “green” data center in the Toronto area.

The CloudXcelerator program is designed to help any company that is developing cloud technology that requires hosting, to achieve early success.

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