When Should Mobile Apps Ask Their Users To Register?

Just like some people will never pay for a mobile app – or any digital content for that matter – I’ll never use a mobile app that forces me to register before I’ve had a chance to try it out. Of course, this rule doesn’t apply to mobile banking, Twitter, HootSuite, and other mobile apps … Read more

Thank God Google Acquired FeedBurner Along With Its CAPTCHA

When we separated our company blog from my personal blog Talk of Many Things, I had to migrate our business email subscribers from the latter to the former. Since I couldn’t find a way to automate this, I resigned myself to doing it manually. Because I’d chosen Feedburner to manage the feed and subscriptions of … Read more

How To Make Co-Creation Work?

It’s over a decade since the late C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy wrote their seminal book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers. During this period, users have written millions of articles on Wikipedia and posted zillions of updates and photographs on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks. Judging by the explosive … Read more

How The Obama Credit Card Decline Shapes The Future Of Analytics

President Barack Obama’s credit card got declined in a New York restaurant. Because, to quote Obama himself, “…I guess I don’t use it enough, so they thought there was some fraud going on.” While this is the most high profile example of predictive analytics going awry, it’s not the first, and it certainly won’t be … Read more

Apple Pay Puts Banks Squarely At The Center Of Mobile Payments

Like many, I’ve long held that nothing is broken with plastic cards for instore payments and made the case for mobile wallets to stick to gift, loyalty, ID and other forms of non-payment cards (see Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments). Until I read this line about Apple Pay: “Every … Read more

Will Publishers Survive The Mobile Onslaught?

Looks like mobile has started impoverishing publishers, too, since I wrote Will Mobile Impoverish Bloggers? two years ago. Smartphones and tablets are causing trouble for publishers for more reasons than one:   Their smaller displays support fewer ads  People have a lower propensity to click ads on mobile (unless they’re like the nicely obfuscated Google Ads but … Read more

How Security Can Actually Increase Vulnerability

Security increases friction. That’s not news. I’ve myself written many blog posts – click here, here and here – on this perennial tradeoff involved in payments. However, I recently found a new security measure that actually creates new sources of vulnerability. Ironic but true. Since December 2013, India’s central bank RBI has made it mandatory … Read more

Shopper’s Stop – Loyalty Or Disloyalty Program?

Since I wrote Loyalty Or Disloyalty Programs? and Beware Of Losing Sales With Bad Loyalty Programs, a couple of companies have used mobile technologies in very innovative ways to design loyalty programs that truly foster loyalty. But Shopper’s Stop is not one among them. The pioneer of India’s organized retail industry recently introduced a mobile app variant of its … Read more

Omnichannel Fiasco #1: Standard Chartered Credit Card

I recently went through two omnichannel experiences, one that started well but went downhill thereafter, and another that was a disaster right from the beginning. Before I deep dive into my experiences, here’s a quick working definition of omnichannel: Omnichannel is where a single business process is deliberately split across multiple channels so that each … Read more