Earlier this week the Federal Trade Commission had an amazing two-day workshop on How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington and many others presented. I gave a talk on Advertising-Supported Media and the Future of Traditional Journalism how the role of advertising and two-sided markets would affect the evolution of the […]

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 […]

Lots of people have been talking about social sites cannibalizing search. I’ve addressed this in a prior post since it comes up a lot. eMarketer published a report today that has two interesting findings. First, Google, Bing and Yahoo have little to worry about. They still represent nearly all (like 97.8%) of the search traffic […]

I was part of an interesting panel discussion on Saturday on what social networking means for business and what the future holds. This panel was part of the Harvard Business School’s African American Alumni Associations Annual Leadership Summit and included Kevin Colleran from Facebook, Laela Sturdy from YouTube/Google, Juliette Powell, entrepreneur and author of 33 […]

Unemployment will be over 10 percent soon, the economy remains fragile, and despite bursts of optimism the recovery looks like it is going to be long and slow. Weighing down on the economy is the fact that many consumers and small business owners are having trouble borrowing. Lots of people are finding that credit card […]

Last Thursday I testified before the House Committee on Financial Services on the “The Credit Card Interchange Fees Act of 2009” sponsored by Representative Welch. The Act would allow merchants to impose surcharges on cards, prevent card networks broadly defined from charging higher interchange fees for reward cards, require card networks to disclose publicly […]

Just when there seemed to be landslide support for charging for content among struggling publishers Yahoo has thrown some cold water on the faces of the eager mob. Of course talk is cheap and online publishers have been approaching subscription models with great trepidation.
So what’s the cold water? The Financial Times today has a […]