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 […]

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This article is part of the February issue of the Lydian Journal.

Editor’s Note
A number of very large and significant platform industries are converging on a common opportunity – to create and grow consumer commerce. Payments capabilities certainly underpin this convergent trend. Yet increasingly, the power in the […]

Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg and his partners made it look easy. The social networking platform ignited almost immediately after it was introduced at Harvard College. It didn’t take many friends seeking friends and guys seeking girls and vice versa to create enough “fissionable material” as I discussed in the last entry. Within a week, more […]

Remember the kid’s story “The Little Engine That Could.” That describes what goes on with a lot of startups in two-sided markets. The train is trying to get up the mountain, but it needs to accelerate to offset the force of gravity that’s pushing it down. If it picks up enough momentum it can make […]

Earlier this week the Federal Trade Commission had an amazing two-day workshop on How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington and many others presented. I gave a talk on Advertising-Supported Media and the Future of Traditional Journalism how the role of advertising and two-sided markets would affect the evolution of the […]

It costs a bloody fortune to produce a television series like Mad Men. All those cast members, the period costumes, the smart writers. Right now production companies make these efforts profitable by doing deals with networks like A&E that sell advertising spots. Many of us are recording our favorite shows and watching them later, […]

Does taking plastic get people to spend more money? The card networks certainly think so and have often touted increased sales as one of the reasons why merchants should accept plastic and be happy to pay for it. My skeptical economist colleagues question this. They argue that the main effect of accepting cards is to […]

The application wars in the mobile phone business are heating up. They will result in significant threats and opportunities for the payments biz.
Just recently the Apple iPhone topped more than 100,000 apps. It was just two years ago, on October 17th, that Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to allow third-party developers to build […]

Unemployment will be over 10 percent soon, the economy remains fragile, and despite bursts of optimism the recovery looks like it is going to be long and slow. Weighing down on the economy is the fact that many consumers and small business owners are having trouble borrowing. Lots of people are finding that credit card […]

Last Thursday I testified before the House Committee on Financial Services on the “The Credit Card Interchange Fees Act of 2009” sponsored by Representative Welch. The Act would allow merchants to impose surcharges on cards, prevent card networks broadly defined from charging higher interchange fees for reward cards, require card networks to disclose publicly […]