I was asked to moderate a panel on Innovation in Payments Saturday (November 13, 2010) as part of Harvard Business School’s 16th annual Cyberposium. This year’s theme was Battle of the Platforms (a subject near and dear to our hearts here at MPD). http://www.cyberposium.com/ The conference usually draws about 600 people and this year was […]

MPD Payments Innovation Institute
Cambridge: November 4, 2010
Every new business needs a startup strategy: every new payments business and, more broadly, every new platform business needs its startup strategy to be an ignition strategy. I want to focus today on what sets ignition strategies apart from ordinary startup strategies and why they are so important for […]

Hard data are not available but based on my experience billions of dollars each year go poof in the payments industry from investments in products that crash and burn soon after launch. These products didn’t have a sound ignition strategy which should be the foundation of all payments innovation. This series describes what […]

Have I got a deal for you. I have a new killer app for the Internet. Now it happens to be in a space in which each of the last several inventors of a killer app was leapfrogged by someone just like me. Now I’m not making any money at all and I’m not really […]

New ventures in the tech space are going to have to start looking elsewhere for the startup funds they used to get from angel investors according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times. Part of the story and the one highlighted by the Times is that angels, like just about everyone these days […]

Irwin Steltzer has a great op ed in today’s Financial Times that cautions—as I did in my recent blog post—against throwing money at dying companies and industries. The dinosaurs like the American automobile companies aren’t going to create jobs and perk up the economy going forward. Innovation and with it jobs will come from new […]

Politicians and various other wags have been complaining about consumer debt for just about as long as there’ve been consumers and wags, Virginia Postrel reminds us in a very nice article in the November’s issue of of the Atlantic Monthly. Dick Schmalensee and I made a similar point in the 2nd edition of Paying […]

I recently read an article that compared Entrepreneurs to Artists. Potentially a bit self serving as an Entrepreneur, I immediately gravitated to the message of the comparison. Although I always felt like a creator and knew my business creations had the potential to touch lives, it was the first time I had seen such a […]

In May 2008, Facebook, MySpace and Google each announced the release of their own platform that will allow users to take their on-line social network data and make it available to other websites, such as blogs, shopping portals, or hobby sites. Once adopted, these platforms will fundamentally change the way individuals and companies use the […]

Lee Gomes manages to pan bloggers, the “tech elite”, Wired and Chris Anderson for all the hype and hoopla around The Long-Tail—the theory laid out in Anderson’s 2006 book of that name that explained “Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.” My favorite line was “The Long Tail seems […]