Future Banking Blog

How many times have you heard “a reduction in consumer spending” with a negative connotation over the last 12 months? How many times have you heard “an increase in consumer spending” portrayed as positive news? In John Tamny’s recent article “Saving as a Stimulus“, he references the headline “Hard-Hit Families Finally Start Saving, Aggravating Nation’s [...]

A prediction for the near future: One of the great disruptions of Web 3.0 technologies will be to unleash unprecedented powers of collective action. Information asymmetries between enterprises and their customers, between governments and their citizens, and between the credentialed and the uncredentialed will be dramatically realigned. Not just asymmetries in access to information, but [...]

Whenever a group starts out with the ambition of transforming any aspect of the economic and social eco-system, (e.g. banking), they are met with skepticism. This has been true from trans-Atlantic shipping in the days of Columbus, to the first personal computer in the 70’s and the more recent Tata Nano car concept.
The rationale for [...]

From Bangladesh via the Wall Street Journal comes an interesting story on bringing the networked economy to everyone with a cell phone.  CellBazaar provides what we’d call Craigslist or the classifieds via a cell phone. CellBazaar supports various specific methodologies for SMS, voice, and web access.  The system lets users post items for sale, look for [...]

A mental installment in things that make me go “HMMMM…”
I had the luxury of sitting on the couch, recovering from a month of exceptional travel. Couch = TV = commercials. Glued to the ”set,” I began to wonder: “Is Viral Commerce a good thing?”

Commerce: Merriam-Webster “the exchange or buying and selling of commodities on a large [...]

Occasionally there’s good news out there.  The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (part of Harvard Law) yesterday released a report on Child Safety and Online Technologies.  The report runs counter to many people’s perceptions of the Internet and its use by minors.  The Internet is safer than our collective perception, and there remains a need for more research [...]

“Daddy…why do you go work?”  That was the question posed by my 4 year old daughter Deirdre as I was leaving for work one morning.  Like many questions from young children, they catch you off-guard, and force you into deeper thought than you expected.  I started to respond with answers like, “Well because everyone has [...]