Blogs

I had the pleasure to work from home today.  I don’t know about you, but working from home is such a treat, particularly after a long week of work and travel.  While working away today, the doorbell rang and there was a delivery from a courier.

Up until now, the question has been "How can a mobile operator help me accept payments from mobile subscribers"? Collecting payments for applications & services via operator billing systems has always been an attractive proposition for application & service providers since it leverages the operator's existing relationship with the customer, and simplifies the process for all parties involved.   However, the thought of attempting to integrate with even one operator can be overwhelming in itself, let alone looking at integrating with the multiple operators required in order to truly enable this form of payment within a given region.  
Some businesses such as Zong have managed to perform the integration to several different operators over a long period of time, and use this as the basis of their product offering.

After having a chance to review all the marketing brochures I
collected at the GSMA conference last week I found one from a company focused
on Proximity Marketing.  
Proximity marketing is not the same concept as mobile marketing,

The good people at CGAP have shared a great report on the emerging and needed field of Government-to-Person (Payments).  The report is extensive and shares much light on the benefit that up to 170 million people worldwide would receive from governments employing electronic channels, including mobile solutions, to distribute social transfers and payments to current and retired workers.This report a must read for all those working in the mobile and value transfer field as its comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and best of all, it's free.

Today I had the opportunity to listen in on the Webinar Happy
Holidays or Not: Mobile Lessons Learned, and Best Practice for 2010.
The webinar was interesting and provided some good facts
about how the mobile phone assisted the 2009 holiday shopping season.  It was truly a global trend according

In an article from Mobile
Banker (American Banker) several industry experts are listing 2009 as the
year mobile banking officially became commonplace and customers consider it a
standard service to be offered by their financial institutions.

In an article from USA Today, eBay’s CEO John Donahoe said
his company expects to generate over $500 million in mobile-based application revenue
in 2009.   Most of this revenue
will come from the iPhone application, which has been downloaded more than 5

I was researching the product suite offered by Talend at the request of a client.  It seems to be a very rich and robust solution and is based on open source which makes it that much more interesting. 
Talend offers many products and services but at a high level the solution is comprised of Data Integration, Data Migration, Data Synchronization and ETL for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing.

November has been an interesting month for iPhone users with an initial harmless virus appearing near the beginning of the month which morphed into a more malicious one by month's end. The initial 'ikee' virus simply replaced the phone's wallpaper with a photo of the 80's pop singer Rick Astley. Fortunately this virus only affected jailbroken iPhones, who's users did not change the default SSH passwords.

Hello MobileMoney Canada. Hope all is well. In case you have not heard the news as yet, I thought that you may be interested in announcement just released by Scotiabank.