Online payment methods for the un-banked

 

According to some industry forecasts, over 10 million low-income U.S. households will be brought online via municipal programs by 2010. In fact, the main impetus behind municipal networks is the economic and social development of under-served communities. Yet., most low-income families will not be able to take full advantage of the Internet: nearly 80 million people (about 36 million households) are “underserved” in terms of financial services, and most inner-city users of free or low-cost wireless broadband fall in this category.

 This mostly means no credit card, debit card or even bank account. What is the benefit of being online if onecannot purchase goods and services, including books, music, clothes, participate in auctions or send money overseas at bargain rates? Municipal governments will soon find out that providing free broadband access to households that don't have means of paying electronically will significantly hinder adoption and effective use of the service. The answer? Prepaid, reloadable cards that do not require credit or even a bank account.

 

10:05:17 PM    

Investors Put $16M in Ruckus. Motorola Ventures and T-Online see investment paying off with wireless home entertainment. [Wi-Fi Planet Wireless News]
7:15:51 AM    

French may have to buy compulsory biometric ID cards. PARIS -- French citizens will have to pay for new identity cards that hold their biometric information in electronic format -- and carrying the cards will become compulsory, if the minister of the interior gets his way. [InfoWorld: Top News]
10:15:37 AM    

Fraud prevention takes a different approach overseas, experts say

More on the subject on international online fraud.

"Address verification procedures common in the U.S., for instance, are not always as effective in other countries, says Ashwini Narayanan, director of product management for CyberSource Corp., a provider of payment processing and fraud prevent services. In the UK, she notes, the password-based Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode systems for entering credit card information are more effective than address verification, because the postal system grants individual residents the flexibility to change their address numbers. "

7:01:42 PM    

In Europe and Asia, publishers weigh their Web options

Very educational article on how different countries experiment with various ways of charging for content. The most interesting example is Apple Daily, which  differenciates pricing policies based the reader's location. Simply let price elasticity determine your pricing policies: charge for news where news (in this case in Chinese) are harder to come by (.e. Chinese emigrant workers),  but keep it free in the home country, where competition is stronger.

"Apple Daily, one of the largest-circulation Chinese-language newspapers in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, offers free online access to Web visitors from within those territories, but charges overseas visitors about $40 a year.

"We found a profitable model by building advertising domestically and charging subscriptions for overseas readers," said Mark Simon, group advertising director of Apple Daily Newspapers. "We just don't like giving away content that we worked hard to create." Since the newspaper started charging about three years ago, the number of overseas online subscriptions has reached 30,000. Meanwhile, online advertising revenue has reached $2 million annually, with rates charged by the Web site increasing at 5 percent a month." "

6:59:37 PM    

Net tightens gray-market retail vise (or how multinationals are scrambling to justify international pricing differentials )

Another example of how the Internet is affecting global trade. Companies used to be able to exploit inefficiencies in the international distribution system by adapting local prices to local market conditions, such as supply-demand, presence of local competitors etc. No more. Thanks to search engines and comparative shopping, consumers in price-premium countries will often bypass local distributors in favor of lower prices. This has multinationals scrambling:

"The Internet is where the gray-market problem really exploded," said Marla Briscoe, a member of HP's brand protection team and vice president of AGMA. "With the Internet, we virtually created a borderless distribution system that makes it a lot easier for unauthorized dealers to advertise products, to buy and resell, and makes it more difficult for manufacturers to track down who exactly is selling these products. This is a worldwide issue."

A "borderless distribution system": that's precisely what the Internet is about.  Granted, gray market can indeed be a serious threat to brands and consumers alike, as many unscrupulous exporters or importers can profit at the expenses of unaware consumers by shipping products with no warranty, no local support, or even no compliance to local standards. However, the trend toward price equality is definitely a positive one for consumers around the globe, and a great opportunity for companies able to deal with the new rules of the market. Eventually, price differentials across countries should only reflect the different costs of supplying and supporting products in that country.

6:52:47 PM    

British Telecom: Who needs HDTV?

I have othen wondered what all the fuzz on HDTV is about: with DSL2 scheduled to bring tens of Mbits/sec to the home, HDTV can be accomplished with a regular media player and content encoded for high definition. My take is that DSL2 will be common long before all the goverments, industry players etc. have fianlly agreed on HDTV standards.

"It also sees delivering TV over broadband as a way of getting high-definition (HD) content to people sooner than they will be able to get it through conventional, regular broadcasts."

6:44:29 PM    

Intel, T-Online, push digital home in Europe

T-Online seems to embrace the IPTV philosophy. The only concern is how to protect content providers' digital rights while allowing consumers the flexibility to share content within the household. Hence the partnership with Intel in Europe.

"However, much work still remains to be done to assure movie studios and music companies that their content will be protected while also encouraging consumers with the knowledge that they will still have the ability to use their content on a wide variety of devices in their homes. To that end, Intel is working with a number of industry partners in the Digital Living Network Alliance to make its DTCP/IP (Digital Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) technology an industry standard around the world, Chandrasekher said. "

5:59:56 PM    

 

Success is all a matter of where you are on the "hype curve". Interesting stuff from Ken Novak's Weblog:

frontline: high stakes in cyberspace: Paul Saffo in 1995 on PBS:  Fun to read the old stuff.  Paul Saffo is remarkably on-target, 10 years later.  This article mentions "macro-myopia: A pattern where our hopes and our expectations or our fears about the threatened impact of some new technology causes us to overestimate its short term impacts and reality always fails to meet those inflated expectations. And as a result our disappointment then leads us to turn around and underestimate the long term implications and I can guarantee you this time will be no different. The short term impact of this stuff will be less than the hype would suggest but the long term implications will be vastly larger than we can possibly imagine today."  I've since encoutered Gartner's Hype Cycle, which they say they started to use also in 1995, with a graphic version of this insight. 

I found this when looking for a reference to an aphorism that I think comes from Saffo.   The aphorism:  Over two years, things change much less than we think they will; but over ten years, they change more than we imagine. 

It makes me wonder about the timeframe in between, say 5 to 7 years in the future, when major impacts will be felt from things we know are changing now, despite hype (digital sensors and surveillance) and disillusion (wind and solar power).

[Ken Novak's Weblog]
5:25:01 PM    

Visualize M-Commerce:

Amazon A9 has photo yellow pages:  Very cool: search for a service near a zip code, get a map that shows where things are, then see photos of the storefront and neighboring strees.  "A9's so-called block view allows users to see storefronts and virtually stroll the streets of 10 cities, including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the company has collected more than 20 million photographs. It took a few days in each city to gather the images using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system receivers and proprietary software. "You can virtually go to an area, see the business and walk around the block," A9.com Chief Executive Udi Manber said of the service in an interview. "You get a feel for the neighborhood."  ..

(Ken Novak's weblog)

 

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