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 […]

Card rewards are going to disappear and fees are going to return according to a recent research report Disruption in the Payments World. That’s a distinct possibility. Between the interchange fee lawsuits and Congressional pressure for the card associations to get rid of interchange fees it is possible that the US could go the way […]

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 […]

Last Wednesday, in a statement lost on many of us in the clamor of the Visa IPO the day before, the biometrics company Pay By Touch regretfully announced that it would be shuttering its doors following nearly six years since its first biometric transaction in 2002.
Several factors were responsible for bringing the company to […]

Media companies are engaging in a bit of co-opetition as they form ad networks for selling advertising across member properties. (See the recent AP article Media Groups Share Content in Ad Deals.)
Sometimes competitors are getting in bed together because they figure, I guess, that they don’t want to lose the money for selling […]

Visa, a bank card association that was formed in 1970, and which endured numerous attacks from class action lawyers, rivals, and government prosecutors, passed away on Wednesday, March 19, 2008, after a long illness. Her death was announced by her investment banker, Goldman Sachs. Survivors include its thousands of issuers, and millions of cardholders. […]

1. Deal Yenta: Should Verizon Buy Sprint? - WSJ Blogs
2. Is Amazon Rethinking Its Movie Download Service? - TechCrunch
3. News Via Old Fashioned Means Put on Dead Pool Watch - TechCrunch
4. Google Backs Harvard Scientist’s 100,000-Genome Quest - Bloomberg
5. Debit Cards in Use to Reach 5.2 Billion in 2012 - Global Industry Analysts
6. Widgets: The […]

This week’s Carnival of Mobilists is up at WAP Review. The Carnival features the best blog posts on all things mobile-related from the past week.
Included is our Nokia as Mobile Catalyst post on what the term “open” means for all players in the mobile ecosystem.

You’d think that America’s days were numbered from all the doom and gloom talk coming out of Davos this year. Some of the complaints about the States have merit. At least with the benefit of hindsight there seems to have been an incredible amount of bad judgment in the massive amount of subprime […]

Randall Stross’s comments on the Kindle in today’s New York Times reminded me that I’ve been meaning to review the Kindle which I bought myself as a pre-Christmas present in early December. Unlike Randall, I kept my wife’s paws off of mine and I’ve been happily using it for about six weeks. It is a […]