The Catalyst Code

Ignorance could delay contactless-payments adoption according to a heading in Cardline, which quotes some wags who suggest that contactless isn’t going as fast as it might because of “the technology’s unfamiliarity among merchants and consumers.” (CardLine, subscription required).Of course it is hard to tell whether potential customers don’t choose something because they are ignorant or […]

Card rewards are going to disappear and fees are going to return according to a recent research report Disruption in the Payments World. That’s a distinct possibility. Between the interchange fee lawsuits and Congressional pressure for the card associations to get rid of interchange fees it is possible that the US could go the way […]

In its latest stick ‘em in the eye approach to the mobile industry Google came out swinging at a recent forum sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission Google Pushes Open Mobile Platform at FTC Event.
According to Rich Miner, who’s heading their Android mobile software platform initiative, when someone controls a platform “it stifles innovation” and […]

With the abrupt stop of the mating dance between Microsoft and Yahoo we can talk about other questions about the future of the online ad business.
Here are some of mine.
For social networking: How much will eyeballs however measured sell for on social networking sites—will they be more or less valuable than the […]

Ok, all of you are probably sick of us writing on mobile. But I thought the recent article in the New York Times Mobile TV Spreading in Europe and to the US was pretty interesting.
The Swiss it appears are going crazy watching TV on their little screens—40,000 a day which might actually […]

As he said in an interview with American Banker (subscription required), Wachovia’s Steve Boehm is taking the sensible man’s approach to contactless: wait and see if it takes off and get on the bandwagon when it does. Contactless–like smart cards–is unfortunately a technology in search of a business model to support it.
Some banks and […]

Facebook developers did some whining at the Web 2.0 Expo, according to a report in TechCrunch titled “Facebook Platform Faces Rough Road Ahead, Despite Successes.”
The session started off with a disagreement over how much money developers are actually making through Facebook … Joyce Park of Renkoo and Matt Sanchez of VideoEgg predicted revenues as low […]

Mobile television hasn’t found a profitable business model just yet, mocoNews.net reports. The providers aren’t making much money even in Korea and Japan, where there are a lot of subscribers. Subscription-based services can’t generate enough revenue.
I agree with the article that we won’t ignite a catalyst reaction for mobile television until subscribers […]

The New York Times surprised analysts Thursday with a small loss instead of the anticipated roughly $24 million in quarterly profits. Today’s Wall St. Journal paints a miserable picture for the graying lady as well Media General and the Tribune on Page B1 (subscription only, see http://online.wsj.com for related news).
For anyone, including the billionaires […]

Google’s Q1 profits shot up 30 percent and beat the Street’s earnings estimates. This comes after all the hand-wringing about the reported dropoff in Google’s search-ad clicks reported by comScore. As I noted in What’s Down with Google? investors still seem to be figuring out what makes Google tick—lots of ingredients go into maximizing the […]