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 […]

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 […]

Embattled handset manufacturer Motorola has recently announced its intention to develop a digital movie initiative that would offer full length motion pictures reformatted for their multimedia devices. Paramount Pictures has reportedly signed on as a content partner with others not far behind. Some say that the service could launch in May – although pricing options […]

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 […]

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 […]

The newest general purchase payment card scheme in the US–Discover, which was launched by Sears in 1986–has just bought the oldest general purchase payment card scheme in the U.S. (and elsewhere)–Diners Club, which launched the modern card in 1950 in Manhattan.
Diners Club is the poster child for why first-mover advantages sound good in […]

With Google’s stock down 40 percent since the beginning of the year you have to wonder whether some investors have misunderstood how Google makes money all along. Google’s stock too a big whack a few weeks ago when ComScore released stats showing that number of clicks the search-ad giant was getting were down. What the […]