Despite the challenges faced by previous payments consortia (think Spectrum, Pariter and ISIS), many continue to believe that partnership and “co-opetition” are the best ways to compete in emerging payments markets, like online and mobile payments. On Wednesday, May 25, 2011, another formidable group – Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo – […]

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, […]

On the 11th Day of Christmas my true love gave to me … 100 Facebook credits and told me I could go crazy buying virtual stuff for my farm on Farmville. Frankly, it was not what I expected to receive from my true love. I’m really not the kind of girl who is into farming, […]

2011 will be the year that social commerce begins to take root on Facebook with solutions that are both merchant and customer friendly.
To be fair, pundits have been talking about “shopping on Facebook” since about 2006 when it first opened its platform to developers and concurrently introduced two new products (to an overwhelmingly negative […]

“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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

Lots of people have been talking about social sites cannibalizing search. I’ve addressed this in a prior post since it comes up a lot. eMarketer published a report today that has two interesting findings. First, Google, Bing and Yahoo have little to worry about. They still represent nearly all (like 97.8%) of the search traffic […]

Perhaps not much of a surprise to those in the know, but Bloomberg announced this morning that it is buying the beleaguered Business Week property for somewhere between $2 and $5 million dollars, or the price of a nice apartment on the Upper East Side. Business Week is a media asset owned by McGraw Hill […]