Mobile. Everywhere. Opportunity. Everywhere. This was the theme of the GigaOm Mobilize 2011 conference held one week ago in San Francisco. Over two days during 50 sessions, participants debated the impact of the mash-up of cloud computing and the mobile Web for driving new opportunities for everyone in mobile - certainly a familiar theme for […]

Over last two days, I handicapped PayPal and Google in their race with each other and potential players to grab a big share of the emerging mobile transaction platform ecosystem. Today, I’m going to share some final thoughts.
One thing that I think that the Starbucks mobile experience has shown us is how willing consumers are […]

OK, having just written a little analysis on the deal space, I was feeling pretty prescient about the Groupon IPO delay story that popped up literally hours after my story was published on PYMNTS.com. No, it had nothing to do with Andrew Mason reading my piece and deciding they needed a strategic about face, but, […]

The resignation of Steve Jobs as Apple’s CEO has prompted a zillion articles on its impact on everything from Apple’s ability to continue to innovate to the future of the mobile industry. I don’t have much to add to that score. News of his resignation brought to mind two things, though, that might be new […]

To integrate, or not to integrate: that is the question. Or at least the one that has hung over Steve Jobs’ career that, sadly, seems to have come to an end.
By the late 1980s, Jobs was considered a fool outdone by the wily Bill Gates. Jobs – obsessed with the beauty of the Mac, with […]

There was a lot of great stuff that came out of the Payments Innovation Institute at Harvard last week but two anecdotes that have absolutely nothing to do with payments specifically, I think, provide some of the more thought provoking insights around the pitfalls and promise of innovation. See if you agree.
The story of the […]

I have always been up for a challenge. I read just last week a quote from someone from Forrester who basically said that anyone who believes Facebook is the commerce frontier is basically smoking something. (Well, what he said was that they had about as much credibility as the guy who bought billboards predicting the […]

Google’s announcement today of its NFC-mobile payments scheme is, with a few exceptions, a real textbook case study in what you need to do if you want to ignite a new payments method. It’s also a real study in contrast of the struggles that others, namely ISIS, have had in trying to pull something similar […]

Finovate hosted their spring event this week at the San Francisco Design Center, bringing together the latest and greatest innovators for payments and financial service technologies in a massive exhibition hall in the city by the bay. The San Francisco Bay Area has been a global leader in business model and technology innovation, giving birth […]

Getting a new product off the ground is one of the great challenges in business. That’s well documented for entrepreneurs. VCs don’t get any return from more than 40 percent of their first-round investments and get back less than they put in for two-thirds. I haven’t come across any stats for major companies that launch […]