Someone asked me to provide feedback on an article regarding The Future of NFC Payments (yes, capitalized, like in “Big Future”). I do not cherish the idea of giving up my contact details for a brochure download, so I did not read the actual paper. I cannot imagine why people would not want their ideas to be widespread. I think it is silly to force people to register when you want them to read your articles, for they will simply read it elsewhere.
Anyhow, back to the subject of mobile payments with NFC – that’s what the paper claims to be about. I do not really know what they said inside but seeing “NFC was hailed as one of the biggest trends for mobile operators for 2011″ in the blurb is enough to get an idea of what might be on the inside.
Now, let’s be clear that mobile payments are a fighting ground for two large forces: the banking industry and the mobile service industry. Both of them deal with a lot of customers and a lot of cash. And none of them would willingly give up the payment transactions stream to another. One, the banking industry, owns the terminals and the networks, the payment infrastructure. The other, the mobile industry, owns the handset and the SIM card, the means of payment.
So, until I hear that those two – mobile operators and banking associations – came into some sort of an agreement between themselves on some terms regarding the mobile payments, I am not going to lose my sleep over any imagined mobile payments trends, with or without NFC, this year.
Mind you, there is always a chance for a small handset manufacturer like Apple to come up with a painfully obvious scheme that Nokia simply cannot afford…. But that is another story.
Reuters is amazing me today. Another short article gives a quick update on the Chinese affairs in Africa. Chinese were copying small stuff from everywhere until now: products, technologies, machines, tools. Now they are copying the big politics and economic strategies. US has used this strategy successfully for a long time in South America, Europe, Asia and Middle East, enslaving multiple countries with horrendous amounts of debt. Now China is copying their approach in Africa. There is a lot of agricultural land in Africa and securing access to this land in the long term is a very wise decision. Not that it is going to do any good for the others but for China it is definitely a very good move.
A very interesting thing has caught my eye in the photographs from the recent riots in Athens, Greece.
If you look at the pictures, it very definitely says “I.M.F. GET OUT“. Why would demonstrators talk of IMF in Greece? Would it be possible that Greece bought into one of those IMF backed plans? If so, it would be interesting to learn a bit more about what economic development “plan” was sold to Greece. It is also quite interesting to see that Reuters does not mention IMF in their articles on Greece for some reason. Did they not see their own pictures?
Eurozone troubles drove U.S. treasury debt prices higher as investors fled to havens including gold and the dollar.
Seek the one who benefits, right?
Did you see how much Euro went down recently? Do you think it is normal? Do you think if Greece went bankrupt it would really mean something apocalyptic for the Euro-zone? No, really? How much of the all-European economy is in Greece? Come on, be realistic, Greece is too small for the kind of impact pictured in those articles. But panic! yes, panic can hurt Euro-zone, oh, yes… I have seen panic used many times in the recent years… and always by the same powers… rings a bell, yes, it does.
The data for the economic growth in EU is here: Eurostat Report. It is in German but you understand the numbers. It seems that Northern Europe and Eastern Europe are pretty much all right and at least until the second wave of the “financial crisis” comes should be well on their way to the new boom. It is interesting to see the comparisons between various countries and how the growth is distributed in Europe. Begs the question of “who supplies who with what?”
