The ZTIC (rhymes with stick) is IBM’s latest payment schtick (haha) designed to protect online card transactions from fraud. Without going into a lot of the detail which you can read here, this USB gizmo, when inserted into a PC, enables transactions to go thru it rather than the traditional online channels. It was designed […]

Yes, this is the great ambition of marketers today who hope to make hay via social networking. The making friends part is easy, the making money part, by and large, remains elusive although there is no shortage of experiments going on today to test various monetization strategies which by and large have missed the mark. […]

The NYTimes uses Twitter and Yammer as standins for its story about two business models duking it out in the aftermath of the market collapse: “build first and figure it out later” and “figure it now, then build.” Like most morality tales this one is exaggerated. Twitter hasn’t been particularly stupid. Between the […]

A couple of years ago I posted a paper on the credit card’s midlife crisis. At the time the problems were that the credit card had become commoditized (the desperate attempts by banks to appear different, shows just how same old all the offers are), the market was close to saturated, and the days […]

The FCC appears to be headed in the direction of auctioning off airwaves to bidders who agree to offer “free” national wireless services. Imagine that—companies are going to pay for airwaves and then make them free. Well, of course they aren’t. They are going to subsidize the “free” services with something else—maybe it will […]

Michael Arrington has a good review of MySpace’s MyAd’s platform. It looks pretty smart: display ads sold on a cost-per-click basis that can be targeted based on 1200 categories of users MySpace has developed based on user behavior on the site. As Arrington mentions, if you are looking for California women between 25-30 who like […]

In celebration of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we’ve teamed up with Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Citi to raise awareness for a cause that affects countless Americans every year. We’ve re-launched a new and improved Pink Ribbon on MySpace and Facebook that gives users tons of easy ways to show their […]

No – 1929 was simpler because financial markets were simpler then. We must quickly enact some version of the “bailout” the House rejected on Monday. Without a restoration of confidence, we can’t have working credit and capital markets, and without them our economy will simply stop, as it almost did in the 1930s. Some may […]