In the spirit of Paul Saffo’s comments:
“In particular, to get a short-term success, look for something that’s been failing for twenty years”
Micropayments seem to be a hot topic once again.
Amazing. See Spare Change.
Category: Payments
I got a kick out of Chris Skinner’s posting on the Financial Services Club Blog about the party to celebrate PayPal’s tenth birthday in the UK.
The photos are great – lots of folks in suit and tie.
How so very London – and how not so Silicon Valley!
Forrester’s Navi Radjou has written a report titled “Cisco 3.0 – A New Tech Star Rises in the East” that describes how Cisco is “systematically globalizing its US-centric corporate culture.”
Radjou writes that “Forrester expects Cisco to be the first tech multinational corporation (MNC) to have evolved into a globally adaptive organization (GAO) — a socially responsible and culturally sensitive enterprise with globally integrated assets, talent, processes, and partnerships.”
Categories
Which Browser Would You PIck?
Earlier today, VeriFone announced a deal with Opera – “to develop a secure payment-enabled version of the Opera Web browser.”
Is that the best choice? Did VeriFone make the best choice?
Before you answer that question, see this post about Webkit – the core component of Apple’s Safari browser.
Microfinance for the rest of us!
As I mentioned here a few weeks back, last Thursday and Friday we held the first Glenbrook public “boot camp” on payments at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
Carol and I had a great time hosting it and thoroughly enjoyed our interaction with all of the participants — including my old friend and venture capitalist Tim Oren! We’re looking forward to hosting v2 sometime soon!
In the meantime, our colleagues Jay DeWitt and Allen Weinberg are preparing for their one day Glenbrook merchants’ boot camp — coming up this Thursday.
I’m in Philadelphia for a couple of days and happened across an ING Direct Cafe while out for my morning walk this morning.
This was the first I’d heard about ING Direct having cafes! I’ve been a big fan of the big Orange’s marketing efforts — so, naturally, I had to check it out. “Sip, Surf, Save” is the motto — Peet’s coffee, free Internet, and help (if you want it) in opening an ING Direct Orange Savings or Mortgage account.
Very cool…with yuppies hanging out — while 1/2 block away the local McDonald’s “quick service restaurant” had the morning downtown homeless crowd counting their coins.
This afternoon I took the Phlash trolley bus around downtown — a nice way to see the city center in an hour, the Phlash runs between Penn’s Landing (awfully quiet at the Landing this afternoon) to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where the Dali special exhibition was sold out for the day).
For the first time ever, my colleagues and I at Glenbrook will be holding a couple of payments “boot camps” during May.
We’ve done many of these as private sessions for clients — but this is the first time we’ve ever opened them up for anyone to attend. If you’re interested in learning more about the world of electronic payments and how to get paid as a merchant, these boot camps should be perfect for you.
For details, see this page on the Glenbrook site. For fun, we’re hosting the sessions at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
At Glenbrook, we’re currently ramping up a new project focusing on the emerging payments infrastructure in China.
I’ll be in Shanghai (and potentially Beijing) the week of February 28th. If you’re in Shanghai that week, let me know and we’ll try to get together.
Should be fun!
Over on our sister site Payments News, we’re assessing the interest in a San Francisco Bay Area centric group of payments professionals that we’ve named BayPay.
If you qualify and would like to get involved, please send us an email and we’ll tell you how you can participate.