TED

My Entrepreneurship course in my MBA borrowed heavily on videos from TED and Rob Findlay has pointed out the list of the first 150 TED videos

Morgan Stanley Report

Morgan Stanley has a report on Internet/Technology Trends that proves interesting. Obvious trends include:

• "Rest of World" PC Sales increasing faster than the traditional heavyweights.


• BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) gain ground in TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications).


• Asia/Pacific Internet Users growing faster than other markets

MS$

Rob Findlay over at the Bank channel points to a story on Microsoft's Zune points which have their own conversion rates to different currencies, effectively making it a currency of its own. So what? I'm very interested in what banking fundamentally is, what currencies are and are not and here is an example of how a firm can instigate a "value transfer system", which is really all a currency is, without fanfare. Now lets make a silly prediction: in five years time there will be three new virtual currencies: the Amazon Dollar, the Google Credit and the Microsoft Dollar. Each will be used across a number of service providers and linked into various banking and payment systems and will threaten the ability of central banks to control the supply of funds in their economy.

An idea who's time has come

Dave Birch does a great job illustrating how the M-Pesa meme (Person to Person money tranfer via cell phone) is a) growing and b) wide spread. This is an exciting time with the base technology becoming widely available and affordable, and the concepts resonating across cultures and nations. The most interesting part of it all for me is how something cross-cultural (need for p2p payments on mobiles) is constrained by operational difficulties that firms operating in this area face by virtue of the country (ie culture) in which they operate

Mobile Banking, Old School

Brandon McGee does a great job covering the movements of the big players in the Mobile Payments/Mobile Banking world, covering the Firethorn/Verizon hookup and the BBT, mFoundry & ClearMail threesome, but in his latest post, a comment points to a different example of "mobile banking".

Perceptions...

Staying with Hannes at Fundamo, he has a post bemoaning the attitudes towards Mobile Banking in the developing world. Obviously Hannes is encountering resistance in the "developed" world to solutions produced from Africa. He does have one point that I find particularly interesting: that without legacy systems getting in the way, products are able to be innovative and flexible.

Mobile Banking Fraud!

Hannes (Hannes runs Fundamo which is one of the mobile payments/mobile banking companies that I follow) over at Mobile Banking raises some issues on fraud in mobile payments in his latest post. Of particular interest to me is the case of identity theft in one of his linked stories, which identifies the consequences of lax security around opening mobile banking accounts. The sad part is that lax security in any banking environment can lead to fraud, so mobile banking is not specifically to blame.

Innovation vs Optimisation

Apologies for the delay in posting... James at Banker Vision has a discussion on Innovation vs Optimisation that I think has echoes outside of the banking industry, in particular with the Recorded Music Industry. For a long time, the music industry has operated with a view to "doing what they do better". So contracts get bigger because they accomodate scenarios that didn't exist at the time of first drafting, and the power accumulates in the hands of a few as success breeds success. All this engrains the culture of optimisation. The divergence between the tools available and the tools the major labels use has become so vast that every man and his dog is trying to discover the best ways of using the tools, and the major label system is in tatters. And yet no clear winner, no clearly successful use of all the tools neglected by the majors has become apparent. I'd say that the tools for innovation for the music industry exist, but nobody has actually been able to put them all together successfully yet. So the major label system is not necessarily dead yet.

[apologies to the American readers: I'm in New Zealand and we use British English spelling: optimisation vs optimization]

Mobile Banking Market Research

Brandon McGee has a look at market research involving mobile banking and comes up with some interesting angles