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Posts By Karen Webster
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13.4KInnovationConsumer Convenience, Retail And Payments Disintermediation
Disintermediating the established intermediaries has become something of an art form in payments and retail these days. Physical retail is being disintermediated...
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10.4KFacebookWhat Everyone Missed About Facebook
There are any number of conclusions one might draw after watching the Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill last week. That most of...
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16.9KPayments InnovationCan Google’s Shopping Actions Take On Amazon?
In between stories last week about Jack Dorsey saying that bitcoin will be the world’s single digital currency in about 10 years...
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12.9KRegulationThe Curious Case For Breaking Up Tech Giants
There’s no question that the world’s weather patterns are undergoing a massive change. In the last few months alone, we’ve seen snow...
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18.1KConsumer InsightsThe Amazon Effect On Consumers And Grocery Shopping
If you’re like most Americans, you or someone in your household made a run to the grocery store on Saturday to get...
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11.5KeCommerceWho’ll Win When Facebook Advertisers Flee?
Procter & Gamble made headlines last week when its Chief Brand Officer, Marc Pritchard, confirmed that the world’s largest advertiser cut $200...
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21.2KPayments InnovationMobile Wallets: Where’s The S-Curve?
The classic product lifecycle that all of us had drilled into our heads in business school tells us that at the three-year...
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14.9KDataIn The Age Of Big Data, Why Are We Still Flying Blind?
In a world where we’re bombarded daily — even hourly — by data points on everything from stock prices and market cap to...
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23.7KDigital PaymentseBay/PayPal: What Everyone Missed
The year was 1999. eBay, then four years old, bought payments provider Billpoint to improve the payments experience on its site. When...
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30.3KMobile Commerce2018: The Year Of The Mobile Wallet Reset
It’s time to talk more about what we’re really trying to accomplish for consumers — and for our businesses — and less about the...
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17.2KRetailWhy Innovation Is Nothing Without Distribution
Charles Babbage is considered "the father of the computer." But it was Lord Byron’s daughter, the mathematician Ada Lovelace, who wrote the...
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15.0KPayments InnovationWhat Payments Innovators Can Learn From Monkeys
About 30 days from now, most of you reading this who made a New Year’s resolution will have broken it. Don’t feel...
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23.1KPayments InnovationPayments 2018: Think This — Not That
In 800 B.C., when people wanted to know the answer to “what’s next” about their personal futures, they flocked to Delphi and...
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15.0KKaren Webster52 Mondays, 52 Conversations, 52 Ways Of Looking At Payments
No year in payments is exactly alike – perhaps conversation is the only constant. 2017 was epic, from Amazon to bitcoin to...
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22.3KPayments InnovationWhy The Next Big Connected Commerce Play Is Television
No doubt you’ve heard the news: People aren’t watching television anymore. That may leave many of you who left for the office...
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13.3KRetailWhat Spontaneous Commerce Can Teach Online Retailers And Payment Providers
In January 1950, William Applebaum published a piece in the Journal of Marketing about the buying behaviors of consumers in retail stores. At...
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14.9KRetailWhat Walmart’s Resurgence Means For Retail And The “Pays”
Accomplished public intellectual and post-Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith was well-known for four things. He didn’t think much of math and science...
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13.9KSubscription CommerceWhat The Book Of The Month Club Can Teach Retailers About Taking On Amazon
Thousands of little brown boxes of books, delivered by the post office all over the U.S., are sent every day to book...
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12.9KFacebookFacebook: Too Big To Govern?
In December of 2008, Lindsay Ronson tried to log into her Facebook account with a new password — one she had recently created...
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25.2KBitcoinWhy It’s Time To Shut Down Cryptocurrencies
Two innovators approached a well-heeled investor asking for money. Their sales pitch was very convincing. They told this investor that their innovation...
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16.6KCommerceWho’ll Rule The Future Of Commerce?
Commerce intermediaries are nothing new. In fact, they are at least 557 years old. The first commerce intermediary to operate at scale...
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15.6KOmnicommerceDoes Amazon Plus Kohl’s Equal Retail’s Future?
Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Robert Frost was famous for using rural country metaphors when examining important philosophical issues of the modern world....
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18.2KRegulationWhy Regulation Won’t Fix Credit Reporting Agencies
Some of the most memorable television commercials of the 1970s and 1980s were those promoting E. F. Hutton’s brokerage services. When its...
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17.4KAmazonAmazon’s Whole Foods Whole Pay Play
Fanny Fern was the highest paid journalist in the country in 1855 because of her “witty and irreverent” tell-it-like-it-is style. Fern — a...
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11.8KFacebookShould Facebook Buy eBay?
People talk a lot about the tech giants that got their start in garages. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the GOOG...
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10.8KInnovationThe Great Online Innovation Pile On Of 2017
There seems to be an awful lot of piling on these days on the big online platforms. Startups are piling onto Facebook,...
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31.9KPayments InnovationWhat Walmart Pay Knows That Apple Pay Doesn’t
A lot of exciting things have happened in payments — and commerce, more broadly — over the last three years. PayPal became pals with...
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13.6KFacebookThe Missing ‘M’ In Facebook Messenger
Some of our most important innovations have happened by accident. In 1928, Sir Alexander Fleming left his lab for vacation without cleaning up....
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10.3KPayment MethodsWhat’s Fast And Slow And Read All Over?
Innovative ideas are inspired by smart people who see problems and have the conviction, capital and courage to come up with new...
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17.2KRetailSay Hello To The New Retail Intermediary
“There is also no question that doing business with [XXX] can give a supplier a fast, heady jolt of sales and market...
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13.1KGoogleConfused EU Regulators Slam Google
Does anyone else find it even mildly ironic that Google was just fined $2.7 billion in the EU for dominating an area...
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10.2KRidesharingThe End Of The Uber Experience?
Friction is something that I talk and write about a lot. Its abundance in payments and commerce is what inspires innovators to...
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14.8KAmazonAmazon And The Art of (The Grocery) War
Let me tell you a story about the art of the grocery store war, one that Amazon and supermarket Whole Foods just...
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11.9KApple“Siri — Will HomePod Be A Huge Hit?”
It’s hard to find a person who doesn’t like music. A 2014 Nielsen study reported that 93 percent of U.S. consumers listen...
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18.1KInternet of ThingsVisa Study Shows 83 Percent Of Consumers Want New, IoT Ways To Pay
Picture a car that’s smart enough to know it’s running low on gas and prompts the driver to stop at the nearest...
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10.9KNewsSnap And Innovation That Goes Old School
We’ve all heard the phrase “don’t reinvent the wheel” — a metaphor for not wasting time perfecting a perfectly good idea that’s stood...
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17.1KPayments InnovationWannacry? Why It’s Time To Come Down On Bitcoin
The massive "Wannacry" wave of crypto-ransomware cyberattacks now reported to have hit more than 200,000 computers in 150 countries shouldn’t be just...
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13.3KRetailAmazon’s Retail Swiss Army Knife
At the ripe old age of 120, the Swiss Army knife holds a unique place in retail. The same family who founded...
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12.3KPayments InnovationFacebook’s MySpace Problem
Could fake news and horrific videos in the Facebook news feed create Facebook’s MySpace moment? It’s the question that Karen Webster ponders...
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16.7KPayments InnovationAnt Financial’s Great Mobile Payments Race
The most memorable thing that came out of the 1959 movie, A Hole in the Head, was its 1960 Oscar-winning song, “High...
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9.8KFacebookWhy Facebook’s Payments Strategy Isn’t About Payments
If you want to know how and where a company will strategically spend its time, money and efforts, then look no further...
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32.8KPayment MethodsAn Inconvenient Apple Pay Truth
The WSJ article last week, finally, told the story of Apple Pay’s failure to meet the hype generated at its launch. Karen...
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16.4KQSR & MobileWhy Mobile Order Ahead Isn’t About Payments
Allow me to tell you a little story about mobile order ahead in the QSR space. Two aspiring entrepreneurs, between gigs, began...
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11.5KRetailThe Reality of Retail Darwinism
Twenty-seven years ago marked the end of a shopping era in Baltimore. That was the year — 1990 — that brick-and-mortar retailer Hutzler’s shut...
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15.5KAmazonThe Amazon Effect On … Payments
We spend a lot of time talking about the impact of the “Amazon Effect” on traditional retail’s current misfortunes. But there’s another...
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16.4KRetailSolving Retail’s Small Business Crisis
Small business once employed 50 percent of all workers in the U.S. and created 65 percent of net new jobs. No more....
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13.0KRetailChanneling Retail’s Inner Animal
Grab your cuppa Joe this morning and close your eyes. Now, imagine that you’re a chipmunk, just living the life all cozy...
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16.3KPayments InnovationWhat Do Hillbillies Have To Do With Payments Innovation?
J.D. Vance made “Hillbilly” and “Elegy” a part of our mainstream vocabulary last summer with the publication of his best-selling book, The...
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11.9KRetailWill Retail Brick-And-Mortar Go The Way Of ‘The Greatest Show On Earth?’
The Greatest Show is shutting down! No, don’t worry, NRF. We’re not talking about your show, which kicked off last night in...
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19.0KCESWhat I Learned At CES Last Week
The annual pilgrimage to Vegas that is CES is one for the history books. Karen Webster was one of those pilgrims this...
