This blog post appearing on TechCrunch over the weekend is a must read for everyone who has been panicked by reading the news (which is probably 100% of the population). It makes the point that we have been making to anyone who will listen now for several months: don’t look back, look ahead, this […]

Randall Stross wrote a great piece last week describing the rush to social networks like Facebook by brands who want to make friends with their members. The net net of what he wrote is that brands who treat Facebook as simply an extension of their marketing channel, expecting members to declare their loyalty by friending […]

With so many top executives and Wall Streeters having made fortunes while leading their investors and shareholders to the poor house there’s no wonder that everyone’s paying a lot of attention to corporate governance. But the recent effort by Congress to give themselves a pay raise makes me wonder whether we should use part of […]

Yahoo just agreed to store peoples’ search histories for only 90 days. Google had slashed its time to 9 months. And Microsoft says it will reduce theirs to 6 months if Google does too. If these search engines were using data retention as a way to compete for consumers concerned about their privacy I’d be […]

It’s finally happened! Mainstream journalists covering the payments space have woken up and smelt the coffee—contactless is sputtering along in the US. Rather than another rah rah article on how everyone’s swiping—when in fact hardly anyone is—John Stewart has an excellent balanced article in Digital Transactions.
Here’s a summary but you should read […]

Tired of sifting through the same old presentations, articles and online demos for nuggets of information? We are too, that’s why we’re launching our own webinar series entitled, MPD LIVE!: A Reality Webinar that features high level executives throughout various industries discussing topics as broad reaching as mobile, payments, banking, social media and the convergence […]

Irwin Steltzer has a great op ed in today’s Financial Times that cautions—as I did in my recent blog post—against throwing money at dying companies and industries. The dinosaurs like the American automobile companies aren’t going to create jobs and perk up the economy going forward. Innovation and with it jobs will come from new […]

A recent WSJ article, Google Gears Down for Tougher Times explains that their mantra has always been to put long term projects ahead of the short term interests of shareholders but not anymore.
Like many other companies, the focus needs to be on the here and now, (survival mode to be more dramatic) which has […]

Politicians and various other wags have been complaining about consumer debt for just about as long as there’ve been consumers and wags, Virginia Postrel reminds us in a very nice article in the November’s issue of of the Atlantic Monthly. Dick Schmalensee and I made a similar point in the 2nd edition of Paying […]