So, I have to confess that I have yet to Tweet, but was intrigued by the recent announcement of a new payment system that allows tweeters to send money to each other in 140 characters or less.
This new payment method was conceived, launched and developed in 54 hours as part of the Atlanta Start […]

You have to give the GSM Association points for being optimistic. They recently released something that said soon, as in like mid-2009, you may be able to use your cell phone to pay for stuff at your local merchant right here in the US given their support of a standard that will make communication between […]

Last Friday morning, I had an informative conversation with new friends Paul May and Jeremy Bencken of BuzzStream. The topic was return on investment (ROI) in the world of social media/social marketing and whether companies will continue to spend money on social endeavors without a demonstrable return on their investment. What spurred the conversation […]

Complaints from marketers about the inability to monetize social networks are pretty mainstream at this point. AdAge recently featured an article that continued to beat on that drum, suggesting that marketers don’t belong on social networks. We take a different view.
Perhaps marketers don’t belong on social networks in the traditional sense of click-thru advertisements […]

Yahoo is looking for a new CEO as Jerry Yang takes his in-house guru job back (I’d like one of those jobs). Sure, he made a lot of missteps, but just how much of Yahoo’s plummeting fortunes are his fault rather than the market’s lower expectations for the growth of online advertising? I haven’t […]

One of the interesting discussions that we are having now with our clients is whether “being social” is using social networks as a distribution channel for existing products or creating new products that engage groups of consumers and in so doing create their own social networks.
Clearly, there is a lot of activity around the former. […]

I use a lot of smart things: the Chrome browser on my laptop that can predict with fairly remarkable precision what site I want to visit next based on what else I’ve been up to on the web; my roommate’s Wii which mimics my real-life movement and allows me to swing fearlessly at an oncoming […]

Macro conditions are beginning to affect day-to-day consumer spending. For years, American consumers took on growing debt loads disproportionate to their incomes and savings. Innovest’s October 2008 report, Credit Cards at a Tipping Point, describes the mortgage market collapse as only one symptom of a larger problem and that credit cards will be […]

Despite the trillions of dollars that are being tossed around like pennies to save businesses these days the United States taxpayer doesn’t have an unlimited amount of wealth to be bailing out everyone in the economy. The U.S. automobile industry is about the last part of the economy that ought to be seeking a […]

This is my first Catalyst Code blog entry. I first want to say how excited I am to be joining my friends and colleagues at Market Platform Dynamics at a time in financial services when the only thing we can depend on is change. Just looking back on the four weeks since I stepped off […]