Amazon Drone – Delivery Revolution Or PR Stunt?

On the weekend preceding 2 December 2013, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced plans to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – aka drones – to deliver packages, thereby cutting delivery times to 30 minutes. Like many people, I thought this was a great idea. Amazon’s plan to use drones is self-admittedly futuristic. Retail Systems Research, Reuters and … Read more

To Personalize Or Not To Personalize Is The Question

Personalization has always been a hot topic since the dawn of the Internet. It has been garnering greater interest lately as recent advances in HTML5, Big Data and Mobility technologies have raised the ability of brands to improve timeliness and relevance of their customer engagement efforts to the next level. News, social updates, color scheme, … Read more

From Multichannel To Omnichannel & Beyond

Over the years, my background in IT marketing and product management has brought me close to the subject of how a software should be extended to new channels. I can recall at least five occasions on which I’ve been involved with spec’cing channel support in the past 15-odd years: ERP in Branch Office in the … Read more

Doubling Mobile Wallet Adoption By Halving Its Scope

In Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments, we saw why consumers were more likely to try out mobile wallets for store loyalty cards than debit or credit cards. In this post, we’ll go beyond initial adoption and see where these two mobile wallet use cases – “mobile loyalty” and “mobile payment” … Read more

Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments

My leather wallet wore out recently. With so much buzz around mobile wallets, I was wondering if I should even bother with another leather wallet. Before switching to a mobile wallet, I inventoried the contents of my wallet and arranged them into two piles. LHS: This pile contained payment related items such as cash, two … Read more

Why People Overestimate Change In Two Years

Bill Gates had once famously remarked, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten”. Having witnessed the first part of this statement coming true with so many technologies – biometrics, e-grocery and mobile payments to name a few – … Read more

Open Letter To My ePayment Gateway Company

The proverbial ink has hardly dried on my blog post titled Mobile OTP: Cyanide Or Caffeine For Online Payments? than I saw the following “payment failure” screen on my laptop: This ‘kiss-of-death’ message appeared when I tried to pay for my broadband connection. Incidentally, it was the very first online bill payment I attempted after the … Read more

Mobile OTP: Cyanide Or Caffeine For Online Payments?

I recently received an SMS from one of my credit card issuing banks informing me about the following change in procedure for using its credit cards online: With immediate effect, for each online transaction on your BANK1 Credit Card, an OTP (One Time Password) will be sent via SMS to your registered mobile number. In … Read more

Five Ways to Stimulate Electronic Payments (Hint: Discouraging Cheques Is Not One Of Them)

The number of times the words “should” and “charge” appear in this article titled “RBI WANTS TO DISCOURAGE USE OF CHEQUES” got me wondering if “negative reinforcement” is seen as the only way to wean people away from their time-worn habit of using cheques and move them to electronic payments. For the uninitiated, RBI, or … Read more

QR Codes Are 110X More Effective Than Banner Ads – When Done Right

In our past articles (click here and here), we took QR codes for granted wherever we found them and focused on their underlying technology, shared tips on how to get them right and suggested a few goals for after they scanned correctly. For a quick recap, QR codes enable smartphone users to visit websites and landing pages, download … Read more