Income inequality gets a lot of press time. At this point in history, the majority of Americans are well aware that the gulf between the nation’s highest earners – 1 percenters, as they are colloquially known – and the nation’s bottom earners has been well...
There are two things that can be taken as certainly true coming out of the final days of April 2015. 1. It is a very good time to be Apple. 2. It is not such a good time to be the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX). Apple’s...
Beacons are about to be the next big thing – if the Internet is to be believed. Google “beacons are coming” and there are 11 articles from separate sources that use that phrase. Whose beacons? Which type? Using what tech? What use can merchants best...
Sometimes regulators’ efforts to protect consumers miss the mark. Case in point. In 1980, the State of Massachusetts actively intervened to prevent its citizens from investing in a flashy new tech startup for fear that the suggestible residents of the Bay State would be taken...
The Internet is good for many things – not the least of which is numbers. Want to know how many people are living Peoria right now? The Internet has your back (~116,000). Need to know Avogadro’s number? No need to find a chemist – Google...
When the Portland (Oregon) Seed Fund got its start four years ago, the concept of “going to City Hall for seed funding” was a bit of an eyebrow-raising idea. But it was one that started gaining traction in 2011 in Portland (and other U.S. cities),...
When people ask – “how hard is payments?” – there are a variety of ways to answer that question. There’s the simple and direct approach – “Insanely and unimaginably.” One could go into an intricate explanation of two-sided platform economics (and possibly win a Nobel...
When the history of the mobile revolution is written, the chapters on payments, media and small businesses will be among its richest reading. And while we anticipate that the complete history of the mobile wallet wars will be very interesting, for our part here at...