Author: mikedudas

  • How I Discover Great Content

    A number of folks have asked me over the years what system I use for discovering great content. Here is my setup as of the beginning of 2015… Twitter — My #1 source for the past few years. I try to follow ~300 or so folks at any given time. I learn a tremendous amount from these…

  • The On-Demand Economy By The Numbers

    Re-published from www.theondemandeconomy.org. Do you need food for the evening, but you’re too busy to prepare dinner? Or perhaps it’s raining, and you can’t find a taxi. Thanks to on-demand economy services, you can have restaurant-quality food in under an hour or a car service at your door in an instant. GrubHub/Seamless and Uber are now…

  • The Technology “Sales” Person

    As technology impacts every process, operation and function of every industry known to humans, the set of potential buyers of technology products has increased to “any human employed in any industry”. And within any given organization, the range of potential people who will ultimately make the buying decision for a specific technology product can be broad.…

  • Rapid Fire Thoughts On Apple Pay

    As you may have heard, Apple launched an evolutionary mobile payments product called Apple Pay this week. Here are a few quick thoughts on the product, launch and mobile payments market in general. Functionality today: Apple Pay is a payments product today, pure and simple. No loyalty, no coupons, no fancy features. Just an easier and…

  • Silicon Valley, consumer dollars and regulated industries

    Anthony Weiner started a new career this past week, writing an opinion piece in Business Insider in which he chastises Tesla, Uber and Airbnb for not knowing how to play politics (eg, effect change to advance their business interests in regulated industries). Weiner takes Tesla and others to task for their brash tactics in highlighting disagreements with regulators…

  • Mobile shopping apps and the consumer’s time budget

    A study of the free shopping apps in the Android Play store shows that the most popular apps fall into the broad categories that one would reasonably expect without pushing the limits of imagination: pure play e-commerce, brick-and-mortar retailer apps, coupons & deals, utilities (shopping lists, product scans, loyalty storage) and rewards for shopping behavior…

  • Simple and smart

    I was perusing MasterCard’s merchant support site, located here: MasterCard Merchant Rules. There are a number of documents linked from that site, including “MasterCard Rules”, which is 326 pages long. That document opens with “MasterCard Standards” which reads: MasterCard is dedicated to making payments safe, simple and smart. We have a set of standards (“the Standards”) in support…

  • New technology products and “promise-driven” sales

    USA Today recently published a far-ranging interview with Silicon Valley legend Bill Campbell in which he had an excellent take on what makes great sales people and a great sales process. Bill’s quote: You’re going to get me at fistfight with everybody in the Valley talking about this. I am a big bully about that…

  • Employee Data Portability in the Marketplace Economy

    I was reading a few related articles yesterday about the challenging employment environment for low and middle-income workers in the United States. The gist is that in the economic recovery since 2008, a disproportionate share of the economic gains are going to the richest folks. Paul Krugman cited a study showing that “95 percent of the gains…

  • Saturday Payments Thoughts: ISIS & Coin

    Some thoughts on two bits of interesting consumer payments news from this week… ISIS: The carrier-led mobile payments joint venture ISIS launched nationally this week, approximately 3 years after the venture’s initial announcement. Three years is an awfully long time to get a mobile app to market. Obviously, there is a ton of work that…