Changing the way people spend money and pay for things is hard. I’d argue that most people aren’t looking for new ways to pay unless the new payment method either a) enable a class of people who weren’t able to pay before to transact or b) it’s way less friction than competing alternatives. Otherwise, why not just use your current method of payment? I can think of a few payment innovations that succeeded (or are in the early stages of succeeding) and my guess as to why they’ve gotten traction:

• Bill Me Later – Allowed merchants to offer promotional financing and same-as-cash offers to e-commerce customers
• PayPal – Enabled relatively frictionless person-to-person transactions for auctions and other use cases
• Zong / Boku – Simple, fast, easy mobile payments using an existing billing system (the mobile phone)
• PlaySpan / Blackhawk / InComm / GMG – Pre-paid cards enabling teens and other people to pay for digital content (iTunes, free-to-play web games, etc)

I also worked on a payment product, Google Checkout, that is a good product but has not taken off. The reasons for that probably belong in another blog post. Suffice it to say that launching a new payment product, even with the imprimatur of a very strong brand like a Google or Faceboo, does not guarantee broad commercial adoption.

I’ve been reading about how the “Pay with Facebook” option that’s being rolled out to developers might actually be made available to 3rd parties in the same way that Facebook Connect is being rolled out. I’m still not getting the rationale for why off-Facebook payments are a big deal. I do think payment on Facebook could be really interesting because they have the ability to make buying things on Facebook just as simple as Amazon 1-click by storing credentials and integrating payments deeply into trusted applications. Now for my concerns…

Fraud has many faces – having a social graph (might) only address a few - Taking payments is a risky business. You’re always going to experience fraud, whether it’s friendly fraud or truly nefarious activity. Given that you can set up a fake Facebook profile, I’m not entirely convinced that the “verified” nature of Facebook identity is sufficient to reduce nefarious or friendly fraud. I need to be convinced of this argument before I’m willing to buy that merchants would view a “Paid with Facebook” transaction as being more trustworthy than a standard credit card transaction.

Merchants tend to be interested in offering payment options that convert well. Will enough Facebook users payment-enable their accounts to reach critical mass? How is Facebook going to get people to payment-enable their accounts? Sure, those who have purchased virtual goods or credits have a credit card on file with Facebook. But what about the other large percentage of users who don’t have a card or payment source on file? What will Facebook do to induce those users to register and how much will these inducements cost?

Beacon had some things right – the primary benefit of off-Facebook payments is likely to be a tight integration with the newsfeed or social graph – Say what you will about Beacon, the idea of publishing actual purchase or transaction data into a user’s social graph is a really powerful signal and a benefit that no other payment option can currently offer. For some categories that are inherently social (movie tickets, concert tickets, general entertainment and lifestyle purchases, life milestones, etc), the ability to broadcast a transaction could drive additional downstream revenue from people who see that activity and choose to transact. Is this a sufficiently powerful incentive for merchants to adopt off-Facebook payments? Depends on the complexity of integration, rate of adoption by consumers, and the number of downstream transactions they’d need to see to get a reasonable payback on the engineering effort.

My guess is that those e-commerce sites that have a positive experience with Facebook Connect will be first in line to trial a payments offer as a ride along.

What am I missing? Help me figure this out by leaving a comment.

Related Posts

• April 21, 2009 — Google Profiles – Not For Early Adopters, but Potentially Useful for Everyone Else (2)
• January 2, 2009 — Why Social Nets are Shying Away from Payments (6)
• April 20, 2008 — Social Networking Advertising – It Will Be Even Harder than we Think (30)
• February 3, 2008 — Thoughts on the Prospect of a Yahoo + Microsoft Merger (0)
• November 16, 2007 — Inbox 2.0 – I Think it’s Too Late to Matter for Social Networking (but fix them anyway) (0)

Overall, I like my MiFi a lot. It’s very small (about the size of 6 credit cards stacked on top of each other), it’s really easy to boot up, and it provides fairly reliable wireless coverage. I have a few gripes below, but I think this is a great first generation device.

One word of caution. If you are an existing Verizon Wireless Broadband customer and you have VZAccess Manager already installed on your computer, make sure you delete that program before trying to configure your MiFi. I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon before we diagnosed an existing VZAccess Manager installation as the root problem.

I have two primary use cases for my MiFi 2200. Unfortunately for me, one use case shines and one suffers:

Quick, bursty access to WiFi on my iPhone – One of the things I really like to do is download large podcasts on my iPhone 3G. I’ve also been known to enjoy a YouTube video or game on the go as well. Sadly, many of these activities are very taxing over AT&T’s 3G wireless network. Having the ability to quickly get a WiFi network for my iPhone and pull down this data (some of which, like video podcasts, currently require a WiFi connection to grab the data) is a huge help. The MiFi shines in this bursty, quick data grabbing use case. The device generally connects to the Verizon network in about a minute or so, so there’s no waiting around for a connection.

Long session use when traveling (hotels, airports, cafes, etc) – One of the things I liked about my old Verizon data card was that I could have long Internet sessions with minimal disruptions. I could work at an airport, cafe, or hotel room for 60-90 minute stretches before the card would start to flake out. A simple reconnect to the Verizon network would usually solve the problem. Sadly, the MiFi does not seem to work so well in cases where I want to use it for long stretches of time. Because there really isn’t a UI for the device, I have been noticing mystifying drops in coverage. I can’t tell whether it’s an issue with the Verizon 3G network, my computer’s AirPort, or the device itself. After about 30-45 minutes of continuous usage, the MiFi tends to crap out.

I have one modest feature request for the next version of this device. I wish there were a way to put it in “locked mode” where it wouldn’t turn on. I find the on/off switch to be very sensitive and there I have been a few instances where a slight jostling of the device turns it into broadcast mode and I’m unknowingly draining the battery along the way. I wish I could lock the device when it’s not in use so as to not accidentally activate it.

This is a really good device. If you travel frequently and have the need to share a connection across devices, this is a great solution.

Related Posts

• April 22, 2009 — I’m Finally Giving Up on MobileMe (5)
• March 30, 2008 — My Early Experiences with My Dash Express GPS Unit (2)
• February 8, 2008 — The iPod Touch as Training Wheels for the iPhone (6)

The Virtual Goods Summit will still continue to focus on the needs of those who are actively in market and pushing the boundaries of what’s doable with a virtual goods model. It seems to me that now’s the time for some segmentation but I’m totally open to feedback about whether or not this is a good idea.

I also wanted to float a list of topics that I think we should cover in the Virtual Goods Summit University – what’s missing? What would you like to hear about if you were to attend the Virtual Goods Summit University?

-Overview of virtual goods and why they work
-Overview of key concepts / terms / jargon
-Managing a virtual economy
-Launching and managing a virtual goods catalog
-Payments and monetization
-Community management and customer service
-Integrating brands and advertisers
-Measuring and tracking your success

As always, comments / feedback are welcome and encouraged.

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So far, I’ve found two really good use cases for Twitter and the real-time web based on the way I like to consume information:

-Following Events – Twitter hashtags are a great way to keep up with the pulse of what’s happening at tech conferences that I can’t attend. It’s way easier for me to follow than liveblogging as it gives me both shorter updates about what’s going on and allows me to easily hear from a wider variety of voices than a single blog can provide.
-Quick pulse of what’s on my friends’ minds – About once or twice a day I’ll see a link that gets retweeted by lots and lots of people I know. That tells me that they’re all reading or at least expressing interest in the content. That’s a good signal to me that I should probably check out whatever it is that they’re passing around.

Aside from those two use cases, I see a few key areas where the latest incarnation of the real-time web isn’t really making my life better, making me more productive, or where I’m having a hard time understanding all of the euphoria:

While the speed with which people can create and publish information continues to increase, I’m gated by my own ability to process information. I only have so many cycles to process new and existing information. While I’m always trying to get better at processing more information more quickly, there’s an upper bound on how fast I can get. Also, I am frequently connected to the Internet but I do log off from time to time. There are lots of real-time web tools that work great if you sit there and babysit them all day, but what about once you’re gone? Or what if something interesting or important happens while you’re away? I’m looking for the real-time web to help me make more sense of the vast streams of information floating around me – increasing the speed of the information coming out of the firehose is interesting but not nearly as useful as helping me prioritize what to read and evaluate first. I don’t necessarily need real-time filters to prioritize information – I’d trade a slower, stronger signal for a weak, fast signal at this point of my usage of the web.

Lots of information is delivered to me in real-time but isn’t really time-sensitive – This is particularly true of the real-time link sharing / re-tweeting use case. Seeing that all of my friends are re-tweeting or sharing a piece of content is a strong signal that it’s important. But that’s not the same as important right this very second. I find that most of the articles I see getting shared on Twitter either started up or end up on Techmeme or some other aggregation service. Seeing them a bit earlier than when they hit my Google Reader is cool but not critical in my information consumption patterns.

I’m not really sure that search is important for ephemeral information – A decent chunk (I’m not willing to hazard a guess) of the information I encounter on the real-time web is ephemeral. Status updates, thoughts, feelings, etc are all really interesting in the moment but can lose relevance over time. Even “breaking news” loses relevance once it’s broken – once a story is broken, I’m more interested in finding the source with the best coverage than I am sticking with the person who broke the story. This makes me wonder whether search is really a big deal for the real-time web. I must be in the minority here because both Google and Twitter seem convinced that search for real-time information is a big opportunity. But I’m having a hard time seeing it. For things that aren’t ephemeral, they can’t hide – they’ll make their way into other places on the web (blogs, websites, structured content that’s easily indexed by search engines, etc). For fluid real-time situations (natural disasters, crises, breaking news, sports, etc), I can see a ton of value in having a real-time window into what’s happening as a story is unfolding.

The one thing about the real-time web that does make sense to me is the disintermediation use case for brands and celebrities. If you’re a celebrity, brand (personal or corporate), or other public figure, there are a lot of people standing between you and the people you’re trying to reach – your own handlers, the media, technology platforms, etc. A lot of real-time web tools allow you to break this dependency in two ways. You don’t need to navigate the maze of people above to reach your constituents or fans (just get them to opt into hearing from you via a less noisy channel than email / print / radio – you know, something like Facebook or Twitter) and you’re not gated by communication caps. If you want to share everything you’re doing, there’s nothing stopping you. The time required to produce and distribute an update is very small. So it’s much easier for brands and celebrities to create a stronger bond with their fans / constituents by cutting out all of the people who stand between them and by sharing the kinds of details and information that has been difficult to surface until now. That’s not a use case that strikes me as being dependent on search. That’s a use case that’s about noiseless, frictionless distribution and communication.

Anyway, that’s a set of fairly disjoint thoughts I have about the real-time web and Twitter. Feel free to leave comments as I love them.

Related Posts

• April 21, 2009 — Google Profiles – Not For Early Adopters, but Potentially Useful for Everyone Else (2)
• February 16, 2009 — The Database of Intentions is More Valuable than the Database of Musings For Now (Google and Twitter) (10)
• April 20, 2008 — Social Networking Advertising – It Will Be Even Harder than we Think (30)
• February 3, 2008 — Thoughts on the Prospect of a Yahoo + Microsoft Merger (0)
• January 28, 2008 — Mining Facebook Status Updates – Search and Trends (1)

To date, I’ve been taking baby steps with this whole process. I’ve had my virtual assistant do some web research on cost-effective travel to New York, a fairly complicated personal vacation I have planned for this summer, and some regular hygeine on my Highrise CRM installation. So far, she’s done a great job on all of the tasks. Two key takeaways a week in:

1. There are lots of tasks in my life that need to be done quickly but not right away. One of the best learnings I’ve had from my first week using a virtual assistant is that not every time-sensitive personal task I have is critical. There are lots of things that need to be done quickly but not ASAP. Having someone else who can research the task, complete it, and report back within 24 hours is great. It’s really helped me focus my energy on the intersection of personal tasks that only I feel comfortable doing and are very time sensitive. Having trusted help allows me to complete some tasks in parallel with minimal time loss. If you’re like me and sometimes have a hard time de-prioritizing those tasks that are important but not critical, you’ll benefit from some help.

2. Writing down my own process for dealing with tasks exposes how broken some of my own processes are. Having a remote virtual assistant is great. Part of what makes it great is that it forces me to write down processes / algorithms for how I want certain tasks done (travel plans, meetings, etc). The process of writing things down has really exposed how poor a job I do of adhering to my own idea of best practices. Take meetings for example. A good meeting request should include both people’s mobile phone numbers, a concrete address for the meeting place, and some basic context on the “why” of the meeting. Left to my own devices, I usually drop the ball on at least one of these 3 key elements. A secondary benefit of writing these tasks down is that it forces me to examine whether or not I’m doing some of these things in the most efficient manner. In some cases, travel booking in particular, I’ve realized that my general approach is very time wasteful.

Thoughts? Questions? Feel free to leave me a comment.

**Update** If you decide to sign up for YourRemoteAssistant, you can list me as a referrer. I just realized they have a referral / affiliate program.

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-Straightforward web research tasks (market research, collecting data, etc)
-Address book hygeine (keeping my Highrise, Google Contacts, Mac OSX Address Book, etc neat and tidy)
-Marketing and promotions tasks for the conference business

I am open to any service recommendations you might have. I’ll let you know what I ultimately choose and anything I learn.

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Pitch Night 2009
May 7th, 2009, 6 pm to 9 pm
MICROSOFT 835 Market St (Westfield Center) #700
Limited seating: http://pitch2009.eventbrite.com/
This is an open event for all entrepreneurs, investors and innocent bystanders.
********************************************
Join Women 2.0 and watch the Pitch 2009 finalists pitch live, American Idol-style, to live panel of investors and executives, vote for your favorite startup, and meet the entrepreneurial community at Women 2.0’s Pitch Night.

At Pitch Night, YOU, the audience, participates by voting for the People’s Choice Award using your mobile phone. We’ll award 4 awards on Pitch Night.

Meet the finalists here: http://www.women2.org/pitch-night-2009/

Seating is limited. This is an OPEN event for all. This is the biggest night of the year for Women 2.0, do join us!
http://www.women2.org/pitch-night-2009/

Pitch 2009 is a unique Women 2.0 startup competition open to early-stage ventures, globally. Over ninety submissions have been reviewed, and the finalists for Pitch 2009 are pitching LIVE at Pitch Night for a Grand Prize of a meeting with iconic investor Michael Moritz of Sequoia along with a suite of additional entrepreneur
resources.

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My Setup
I have a fairly atypical setup. I have several thousand contacts, 8ish calendars, and a lot of other information that I like to have available across all of my computers and mobile devices. I have 4 Macs (1 Mac Mini, 1 Macbook Air, 1 Macbook, 1 Macbook Pro – yes, that’s ridiculous and I accept that), 1 iPhone 3G, and 1 iPod Touch. I have two core requirements:

1. Support for OTA sync for my 8 Google Calendars and 1 Gmail account
2. Ability to differentiate between what information I’d like on my PC and what information I’d like on my iPhone

Overall, I found the revised MobileMe to be very unsatisfying for me edge case needs. A few things that didn’t work well for me:

No support for contact group syncing – I try to keep up with a lot of people. One of the key ways I make sense of all of my contacts is by putting them into groups. I don’t necessarily want to sync all groups to all devices at all times. For example, there’s a relatively small set of contacts that I like to keep on my phone and a fairly large group I like to keep in my address book. As far as I can tell, MobileMe does not support this use case. It’s an important one for me, even if I am an edge case.

No support for my primary email address(es) – While I’m sure I could figure out a way to make forwarding work, I don’t want to jump through hoops to support my primary email addresses (my personal domain and my gmail account). An OTA push email system that doesn’t support my primary email addresses is a non-starter. I can’t believe I’m alone here.

No need for the Gallery or iDisk products – I don’t have much of a need for the Gallery product and I already have a preferred web-based storage product (Dropbox). Neither of those features are of particular value to me and I don’t see a need to pay for them.

No substantive value above and beyond existing OTA calendar sync products – I’ve used Nuevasync and Google Sync to keep my Google Calendar in sync with my various computers and devices. Both products work well – I prefer Nuevasync over GCS because it allows me to sync more calendars and that’s the one I used first. MobileMe’s calendar product works well, but not meaningfully better than the Google or Nuevasync product. I don’t see any reason to pay when the free alternative is solid.

I have been pretty happy with NuevaSync but am tempted to try out the Google product when and if they release OTA mail sync and support for more than 5 calendars.

Related Posts

• June 16, 2009 — What’s the Use Case for Facebook Payments Off Facebook? (6)
• June 4, 2009 — My Early Impressions of my Verizon MiFi 2200 – Good for Some Use Cases, Not So Good for Others (0)
• June 3, 2009 — Thoughts on the Real-Time Web (5)
• April 21, 2009 — Google Profiles – Not For Early Adopters, but Potentially Useful for Everyone Else (2)
• March 14, 2009 — Is Google Voice a Threat to SpinVox and Phonetag? (3)

Unless Google promotes these Profile Pages with a Onebox or some other type of above-the-fold navigation callout, it doesn’t change the status quo for those who have reasonably well-developed web presences.
As I read it, Google does not plan to give prominent placement (at the moment) to user-generated profile pages. Below is a screen shot of a Google vanity search for my name – as you can see, my blog is at the top of the list, followed by my FriendFeed, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles (respectively):

Those are all links that have been on the web for quite some time and there are a number of high-quality referrers who point to those links. Unless Google gives my Google Profile link more prominence or I engage in some aggressive link-building or promotion for my Google Profile link, I’m not sure how it will bump any of the top sources of information about me on the web. I imagine that’s true for most people who live web lives and publish / share information about themselves online.

You don’t need Google Profiles to have a “home” online
You don’t need Google Profiles to have a curated home online. You can achieve roughly the same thing by making your LinkedIn profile or Facebook profile public. Sure, the Google Profile allows you to include many links to lots of other services or places you hang out on the web, but it’s basically a static profile that you can share and have other people find easily through the magic of Google. Again, this is more of an expert-level concern – if you have a well-developed, well-linked LinkedIn or Facebook profile on the web, I’m not sure that you’ll get all excited about the Google Profiles product.

So why do this? Well, it’s useful for the many web users who don’t have an investment in a centralized web presence and/or aren’t actively promoting said web presence. I am of the mind that the audience of folks who have not aggressively built and promoted a centralized web presence is much larger than the audience of those who have. Properly marketed and promoted, Google Profiles could become the home profile for many of those who haven’t committed to another service yet.

I have two other thoughts I wanted to share:

Google Profiles is not likely to become a social network but could become a social network traffic firehose
In playing with this product, it doesn’t feel like the green shoot bud of a social network. It feels like a directory page. If I were betting, I would guess that this will not turn into a social network but will tend to look much more like the world’s largest white pages service. Even for Google, I think it would be hard to use these Google Profiles as a seed / starting point for a new social network. That being said, I can see Google Profiles being a good traffic firehose for the services that users add to their profiles. I can imagine a use case where someone searches for a friend, finds said friends, realizes that he / she is on Facebook, Twitter, etc and decides to connect with him / her there as well. If profiles become popular, I can see them driving lots of traffic away from Google Profiles and to the underlying services that people link to on their profiles.

Will Google actively promote this or will it fade away?
Even with its culled product portfolio, will Google actively promote Google Profiles? They have so many priorities – I’m not sure where this one ranks relative to existing services and products (Android, AdSense, AdWords, Checkout, etc) and new products (Latitude, for starters). As interesting as this product might be, it certainly won’t get adopted without some active promotion from Google.

Thoughts? Leave me a comment and I’ll respond.

Related Posts

• April 20, 2008 — Social Networking Advertising – It Will Be Even Harder than we Think (30)
• November 16, 2007 — Inbox 2.0 – I Think it’s Too Late to Matter for Social Networking (but fix them anyway) (0)
• April 6, 2009 — The New FriendFeed UI – More About Content, Less About Sources (0)
• November 24, 2008 — Twitter and Facebook? (0)
• September 29, 2008 — Why a LinkedIn Connection is Worth More than a Facebook Friend (3)

-Put 700 business cards in a large plastic bag
-Put said plastic bag in a FedEx or USPS envelope and mail it off to them
-Pay $181.20 for the privilege of having my business cards digitized and make available for easy import into many systems. That broke down to about 25 cents per card scanned.
-Wait a few days until you get an email telling you the digitized file with your cards is available

CloudContacts was a fair deal – not cheap, but a good value
I could have bought a new card scanner for about $200. Instead, I chose to use CloudContacts. I’ve used card scanners in the past and I found that about 80% of the cards I scanned came in 100% correct. For data purity reasons, I often had to manually review all of the cards I scanned. I’m not sure whether paying $0.25 per card was the right price, but it struck me as relatively fair and conformed to my own Kinko’s principle (the Charles Hudson Kinko’s principle states that I’m willing to pay a premium for stuff I don’t want to own but do want to use from time to time; I expect to pay a premium for scanning, printing, faxing, etc but don’t expect to get gouged).

The results CloudContacts produced were MUCH better than what I was able to create by manually scanning cards by hand. I’ve been flipping through the results I got back from CloudContacts and so far I have yet to find a meaningful data error in the 700 cards they sent my way. They also gave me a wide variety of file formats to choose as well – I opted for Highrise and the import was flawless.

Good customer service along the way – As an aside, I had a bunch of questions during the process and Allen from CloudContacts provided timely updates and answers to my questions. I found it very reassuring.

I am pretty pleased with my first experience with CloudContacts. It strikes me as a good business that charges a fair price for a good product.

Related Posts

• April 2, 2009 — Can Large Companies Help Small Companies Find Business Models (An Open M&A Question) (6)
• February 14, 2009 — Why Didn’t the New York Times or the WSJ Sell Me My Kindle 2? (4)
• February 9, 2009 — Would You Spend the Next 20-30 Years of Your Career in Silicon Valley? (9)
• September 28, 2008 — What’s the Right Business Model for a User-Generated Review Site? (0)
• June 3, 2008 — Three Blog Posts In Progress – Advice for Generalists, Why Marketplaces Rule, and Why Video is Tough (1)