Last week’s announcement of Visa’s strategic investment in Square set off a wave of news reports and blog posts about its implications for Visa, Square and the rest of the ecosystem. Most of the discussion was focused on the how much Visa invested (they say it was in the “single millions of dollars”) and speculation […]

Google and Apple made news last week when they announced their respective plans to help publishers monetize their content. Less than 24 hours after Cupid worked his magic on Valentine’s Day, Apple began a subscription payment service that lets customers pay for content that magazine publishers make available via the Apple app store. There are […]

Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but the weeklong “Loves Me” or “Loves Me Not” series on PYMNTS.com is just beginning. The final stop for the Market Platform Dynamics team is ‘Open Platforms’: loves me or loves me not?
David Evans: Loves Me
Wouldn’t you love to have a business where everyone else does all the work, […]

Point of Sale (POS) payment acceptance was once a relatively sleepy, almost commodity-like extension of the merchant acquiring business, with a handful of standard terminals manufactured by Verifone, Hypercom and Ingenico that were sold and deployed via merchant acquirers and ISOs.  These POS systems were joined by the large, integrated software solutions provided by IBM, […]

“Network effect” strategy – once you tip the scale, growth is (hopefully) soon to follow. At least that’s what long time platform master Microsoft has experienced and what

David Evans’ paper, Markets with Two-Sided Platforms, discusses how these two-sided platform businesses serve distinct groups of customers and need each other in some way. They provide these customers a real or virtual meeting place, and they facilitate the interactions between members of these customer groups. They essentially act as intermediaries between the two groups […]

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 […]

Two Gartner analysts have laid out a doomsday scenario in which Microsoft’s Windows operating system is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. They point to Microsoft’s smaller and nimble rivals such as Apple and Linux as more innovative.
They have a point—up to a point. Microsoft has taken on the huge task […]

The lastest issue of Wired Magazine has an interesting article on. How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong. It provides some useful insights into why companies can sometimes do better by keeping tight control over their product rather than operating as a catalyst that encourages other businesses to join the ecosystem. Any […]

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 […]