It costs a bloody fortune to produce a television series like Mad Men. All those cast members, the period costumes, the smart writers. Right now production companies make these efforts profitable by doing deals with networks like A&E that sell advertising spots. Many of us are recording our favorite shows and watching them later, […]

Does taking plastic get people to spend more money? The card networks certainly think so and have often touted increased sales as one of the reasons why merchants should accept plastic and be happy to pay for it. My skeptical economist colleagues question this. They argue that the main effect of accepting cards is to […]

Amazon and PayPal have both announced aggressive efforts to persuade developers to use their payment technologies. Each has opened up a gateway into their payment platforms. They are providing developers with tools for writing applications that use their payment technologies. And they are “evangelizing” their payment platforms to encourage lots of developers […]

The application wars in the mobile phone business are heating up. They will result in significant threats and opportunities for the payments biz.
Just recently the Apple iPhone topped more than 100,000 apps. It was just two years ago, on October 17th, that Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to allow third-party developers to build […]