The Catalyst Code

The wagons continue to circle around the payment card systems over interchange fees. The European Commission has found MasterCard’s fees for cross-country transactions unlawful and Visa is next on their radar screen. Meanwhile merchants seem to be hedging their bets with their mega antitrust case in the United States with MasterCard and Visa by getting […]

Industries like people sometimes do not live forever. The whaling industry was the major source of fuel for Americans in the 19th century. Great fortunes were made and Nantucket was once the whaling capital of the world. It died as people switched to gas and electricity. The typewriter industry had an almost century run […]

Some of eBay’s sellers have organized a strike of the giant auction site for having raised prices to them. Like any company, eBay has to abide by the law of demand (if customers don’t value your product enough they’ll go somewhere else) and the law of the jungle (competitors will eat you alive if […]

A recent announcement at the Mobile World Congress that Apple iPhones produced 50x more Google searches than any other handset got a ton of news coverage. Hello, can anyone really be that surprised? Apple’s killer app is really its browser – it was the first mobile handset to make web surfing humane. And more web […]

U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services — agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers — broke a record in November (769,000). Marketing consulting powered that growth. (Data from Advertising Age)
Now here’s an interesting trend. As […]

I picked up the New York Times two days ago and I could have told you that there were major cutbacks in its news department before ever reading the story that confirmed my suspicions. The paper isn’t as thick, the stories aren’t as rich and frankly, even the Style section seems a bit anemic of […]

1. Verizon’s New Rate Plans…Cruising for Bruising - GigaOm
2. Reasons to go contactless - Digital Money Forum
3. Slow penetration - Digital Money Forum

John Gapper responded today to Esther Dyson’s WSJ op-ed on the coming revolution in advertising.
I’m with John in being doubtful that friending is the future of online advertising. Someone will no doubt come up with a creative way to do some form of advertising for the millions of eyeballs on the social networking […]

Esther Dyson’s commentary on “The Coming Ad Revolution” manages to be both wrongly optimistic and wrongly pessimistic. Common ground is that there is a coming ad revolution. According to the article, online will become increasingly effective through the use of behavioral targeting, viral marketing on social networking sites, and sophisticated methods that are being dreamed […]

It has been quite a week for the search and online advertising industry. Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has dominated business news as it attempts to close the gap on industry behemoth Google. What these headlines have deflected though is the fact that Google’s market cap has fallen by $57 billion since the beginning […]