sentaire partners

This is a great data visualization of the growth of US newspapers The Growth of US Newspapers, 1690-2011 – YouTube.

Another testimonial for Apple. Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit | The Great Debate. But Apple’s “core” capability, beside innovation, is/was Steve Job’s ability to throw out the junk and focus on designing and making a few great products.

Here is a PDF of the famous, reedmemo , Memo From the Beach that caused Citicorp to focus and grow the Consumer Banking business.

Follow on to the John Reed,  Memo from the Beach: Business Plans and Consumer 2.0 John Reed Memo: Follow on to the “Memo from the Beach”

Interesting analysis highlighting the leaders and laggards who are leveraging Web 2.0 technologies, positioning themselves for the next iteration of the internet.  The Rise of the “Second Internet” and What It Means: Tech News and Analysis «.

The emergence of the digital wallet is going to cause a tectonic shift in the electronic payments industry.  For a briefing on the emerging trends, see the article recently published by sentaire Partners in Monecy Market.

.: Money Market: The Consumer Newspaper:..

Malicious software is rapidly expanding into the “new frontier” of smartphones  FT.com / Telecoms – Threat of mobile cybercrime on the increase.  This is one of the main reasons why we believe that Apple’s App Store model is superior Android’s Market.  Apple has a review process in place prior to placing Apps in the Apps store.  At minimum, it will thwart lazy criminals who don’t want to put in the extra effort required to disguise Malware to conceal its malignant intentions.

The alternative payments arena is becoming quite interesting.  It’s rumored that Apple will be embedding an NCF chip in the next generation iPhone; Apple’s magic touch could tip NFC | FT.com.  The “killer app” leveraging this technology will be Apple’s iTunes Store.  With over 100 million registered customers, Apple already possesses the customer relationship, know-how, technology and processes to instantly become a major force in the alternative payments industry —  Apple will be as disruptive to payments, as they have been to the distribution of music and software. NFC technology has many applications, it has been widely deployed in Japan and Korea.

An immediate alternative to NFC technology is the use of QR codes. According to Andy Rubin, Google Executive responsible for Android, there are over 300,000 Android phones being activated daily.  Almost all have a camera and are preloaded with a barcode scanner that can be used to initiate all the same types of interactions being supported by the NFC technology.

On the merchant side, anyone with a smartphone, is capable of accepting credit and debit card payments, using Square’s technology and process.  Square was established by Jack Dorsey, creator of  Twitter.  Square is an amazingly simple method for a small businesses to instantly become a merchant — literally in a matter of minutes, an individual or company can register to become a merchant and begin accepting payments on Square’s network.

The smartphone enables all customer interactions to be “location stamped” using its geo capability to determine, real time, the exact location of the device.  As the technology evolves, smartphones will be used to capture biometric information, uniquely identifying the holder of the phone, making the verification process very simple.  These two additional aspects make mobile payments an increasingly attractive business proposition for customer centric companies.

This is an interesting concept for a blog, Edge — its the equivalent of sitting at a dinner table listening to great conversation. Don Tapscott, recent post, Designing your Mind, guided me to the blog.  The concept is simple, every year a question is posted to which a number of academics, intellectuals and practitioners reply.  The questions can be found in the Question Center section of the site.