The Catalyst Code

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 […]

My post last week Blah, Blah Mobile… Blah, Blah Mobile really prompted a lot of discussion about the topic of mobile payments – and maybe even touched a few raw nerves in the process. I thought I would follow up with a few observations given the discussions that took place last week on and off […]

How many of you are growing weary of the same old proclamations from analysts on mobile payments? Citing “the need to work together so that everyone can win” Javelin remains bullish on NFC technology and cites contactless as the enabler for e-wallets that contain everything from cards to photos to medical records.
A recent […]

EBay reported 22% growth Wednesday, exceeding Wall Street expectations. While a number of factors are involved in its strong showing, eBay’s new CEO has recently implemented a number of changes to the site to make it more competitive with sites such as Amazon.com.

Two recent articles on mobile bar codes illustrate the importance of a key catalyst principle—you have to get the pricing balance right for your stakeholders. A trial of mobile bar codes among students at Case Western University flopped in part because of price—students were unsure how much downloading the barcodes was going to cost […]

Amazon’s latest foray into the mobile shopping world has to be giving the bricks and mortar merchant a major headache. TextBuyIt allows a consumer to be in a store (or anywhere for that matter), text an item’s description or UPC code to Amazon and receive a free text message back with two product options, if […]

eMarketer recently reported the results of a University of Iowa study that suggests that consumers who have only a little information about a product are much happier with that product than people who have more information. It’s kind of an interesting commentary in a world increasingly dominated by information from a variety of sources […]

A few readers responded to my post on the European Commission’s efforts to regulate interchange fees in Europe. One commentator pointed out the lack of evidence in Australia that merchants passed on lower interchange fees to consumers in the form of lower prices. Another one responded that the amount of money was so small that […]

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 160 million years before a huge impact rendered them all but extinct. They never saw it coming – one day they were the dominant species; the next, they were all but gone. Ad agencies might just end up being the dinosaurs of modern business. The impact that has created […]

The latest WeMedia/Zogby poll citing that most people use the internet for their primary source of news and information is hardly a newsflash. We’ve been reading about the newspaper industry’s demise now for a couple of years as a result of fewer people reading the paper and therefore fewer advertisers using it to reach the […]