Mobile Payments Newest 5 Decisions

So maybe the mobile payments game isn't all over yet. A lot of news recently seems to indicate that a lot of the major card issuers are getting back into the game of mobile payments. That doesn't mean that the road ahead is clear though-- now they're wondering the nitty-gritty of the problems.

1. Visa wants to enable mobile payments and move them to the cloud. They're building on their existing PayWave technology, and are also extending the Visa Ready Program in order to support merchants to enable payment options in the cloud. The cloud offers a new turn in the mobile payments game-- for years people have worried about the balance of the security in the cloud vs. the flexibility and scalability of hosting things in the cloud. It seems like that tide is finally turning in favor of the flexibility and scalability of hosting in the cloud, and Visa is making strong strides in that direction. 
2. Partnerships have also begun to dominate. Visa and MasterCard are realizing that having a partner can help with the scaling needs to get them to the tipping point of adoption. Moreover, they're throwing their weight solely behind Android 4.4 and are firmly in support of their tap and pay technology
3. Partnerships do not have to be "like with like" either. Visa and MasterCard, two of the largest issuers in America have teamed up, sure, but we're also seeing more partnerships across specialties. Samsung, a hardware provider, has recently found a worthy partner in PayPal, whose origin comes from software. Partnerships like these allow both parties to leverage the strengths of the other to produce a stronger overall solution. Although rumors claim that these two are also in talks with Apple, nothing can be confirmed
4. Instant usability is a requirement. Loop Payments recently unveiled a key fob that leverages existing POS terminals to allow consumers to use mobile payments with a consolidated "wallet" of payment methods. The fob only works when connected to a user's iPhone, thereby inherently providing another layer of interconnectivity and potentially security into the process
5. The battle between Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and NFC (Near Field Communications) continues. Although they both have their pros and cons, choosing the wrong one could pen a potential player from adoption. This risk undoubtedly has a lot of potential players sitting on the sidelines to see what ultimately shakes out and what the industry decides to go with. In short, nothing much has changed in the last two years

Things I Learned Recently... Part Purple 2.7

• Apparently the new health care law is having a lot of unintended consequences considering some people are finding it as an opportunity to quit their jobs because they no longer need to be employed to get healthcare
• Don't know how I feel about this one. On one hand, good for you for being a little more empowered and taking charge of your life. On the other hand, you either could have done this earlier and I'm scared that lazy people will use this as an excuse to leave their jobs with limited penalty
• So Satya Nadella is Microsoft CEO now 
• He's a Booth alum. Big props. Apparently, some Indians are seeing this actually as a negative reflection on their culture as it highlights how so many people are moving away from India and becoming more successful abroad, which highlights the brain drain that is currently occurring in their country
•  Dartmouth has experienced low application rates this year. They guess its because of some of the bad publicity they've received regarding sexual assault/hazing on their campus
• They say they're working on it, and they're building new centers to combat any negative occurrences on campus, but I don't know if a new center is going to fix all of their problems
• So Ali Baba is killin' it. They were just valued at $153B after surging sales, and is probably what's really propping up Yahoo (a main shareholder)
• As a B2B sourcing portal between Asia and...everywhere else, this isn't surprising anyone. Expect their valuation to keep going up and their IPO price (supposedly later this year) to be ridiculous
• Apparently inequality is kind of unavoidable
• Some scientists set up an experiment awhile ago where everyone starts with equal talent and equal wealth. Setting up incentives to protect the non-wealthy actually resulted in an aggregated wealth disparity

• Sao Paulo, facing a drought, just figured out its largest water supply may run dry in 45 days
• So, I'm not a scientist, but I don't think that's good. It's compounded because much of the petrochemical refinery that happens requires a lot of water, which could result in extreme difficulties
• Technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that, contrary to the popular belief of nerds everywhere, technology will simply allow humans to be the best versions of themselves
• Not only will we have the benefits of gene selection, but we'll also be healthier thanks to tiny blood-cell-sized nanobots, better monitoring of our everyday health and be more productive

Why Everyone Should Love Short Films

I forgot how much I loved short films. I was recently out in Las Vegas for the MAGIC tradeshow (fashion-- apparel, accessories, sourcing, etc.) and I went with a friend to the Dam Boulder City short film festival (she was there with her parents and helping out and I tagged along), and we got to see the finalists of the shorts festival. Although a lot of them were good, my favorite was Fruitcake, which is about a man, although socially different than the majority, hits on a lot of the same things we all struggle with-- trying to fit in when he is still trying to define for himself what his life is and how to define his own self worth, etc.

I'm particularly drawn to shorts not only because I have an incredibly short attention span, but also because there's nothing excessive. It's almost as though it's the skeleton of a film laid out in its rawest form. The characters are usually introduced in the first frame-- most of the information given to the audience is given through the implication of actions, objects in the background and the scene. The things that we take for granted in many of the longer movies becomes that much more important in a short because the director really only has 12-15 minutes to tell the story (hopefully) with a storyline arc and everything. I also find that, because the viewer is thrust into things midway through, that it elicits almost an instinctual bond between the viewer and the main protagonist. For some unexplainable reason, I notice that I feel much more for the characters in a short than in a full length feature film. Maybe it's because you have more time to realize the various facets of a character with more time and you don't feel so purely supportive when you realize that they love so freely (but love married men), maybe it's because deciphering the many implications of their life make you feel an unexplainable kinship, maybe it's because shorts are often more purely based on core problems/emotions-- loneliness, heartbreak, displacement, isolation, etc. that are simpler than some full-length films (think of Star Trek, for example). Whatever the reason, go watch one. Thank me later.

PS- Don't overlook animated shorts. They're awesome too. Mr. Hublot? Awesome.

Station to Station: A Cure for the Modern Age?

I'll be the first to admit that I'm kind of a jerk. Not to be a complete egomaniac, but I feel like after you've seen some things, traveled a little bit and tried to experience as much as you can, it's really hard after awhile to remember what awe felt like. Not like, "Oh man this frozen yogurt is the best thing I've ever eaten" but more like, "Wow. Humanity is awe inspiring" or "I can't believe that people really do this".

Particularly in an age where everyone is constantly hooked up to their cell phone, Googling what the average age of a great white shark is (it's older than you think) or looking up who the guest star was on SNL was last week (because let's be real, no one watches SNL anymore), it's easy to sometimes forget that you need to look up every now and then to see things. Much less be awed by things. (The two kind of go hand-in-hand.)

So I was intrigued when I read about Doug Aitken in my back issue of Wired Magazine (I'm really behind.) He was introduced to me as "This has been Aitken's subject for 20 years: the rootless geography of today's mobile life. When you check a text message and momentarily disconnect from the world around you, when you wander down an urban street that's alive with LED advertisements, when business travelers forget which city they're in because the hotel rooms all look the same-- that's Aitken territory. As technology has swallowed more and more of our lives, his art has grown in lockstep-- harnessing cutting0edge techniques, fiber optics and servers to turn practically anything into a screen. It's digital art for the digital age. And we need it. We're so surrounded by media it seems banal; Aitken makes it weird again, showing us how beautiful and disquieting our networked world has become."

 Even more so when I read what he decided to do: "With "Station to Station", he'll spend three weeks traveling from New York to California aboard a nine-car train filled with visual and musical artists. At each stop they'll have a stage for live performances, bringing out local talent too. His production team will shoot and edit video of each stop, as well as of spontaneous performances on the moving train, and post it all online while they're traveling. Huge displays will show footage Aitken has already shot-- some 200 hours-- of artists across the country talking about their work, the nature of creativity, and how their surroundings influence their work. LED screens affixed to the sides of the tain will broadcast footage out to the landscape-- a moving image that also, well, moves."

I finally caved when I read: "His goal? To make art that's simultaneously physical and virtual, local and global, broadcast using a mashup of the Internet and one of the oldest networks in the US, the steel rails. If "Song1" [another one of his pieces] was liquid architecture, this is practically a plasma. "We're living in a new topography," Aitken says. "Is it possible to be everywhere and nowhere?"

Okay, I got to be honest he lost me a little bit with the weird, "I'm going to talk in paradoxes because I think it makes me more mysterious" thing, but I was still intrigued enough to take a look at his final site with the movies. It's worth checking out if you want to be inspired by the type of artistic, creative souls that are just out there minding their own business-- existing outside your realm of consciousness but steadfastly on the periphery. 

I'm An Adult, I Swear.

Ahhhh.... admit weekend is finally behind us. After three exhausting days of way-too-early mornings and far-too-late-for-me-because-I'm-a-grandma nights, the admits have gotten to sneak a peak at what makes Booth, Booth, and I've gotten a small reminder about why I love going to this school.

Admit weekend is a funny thing, because it takes a ton of planning so you'd think that it would come across as very forced and contrived, but because of the sheer amount of people who help out to make it happen (over 200) it really takes on a life of its own. On Sunday night though, as I scrambled to finish my cases in financial management midterm that I'd put off all weekend due to the festivities, I realized just how strange it was that people came to the school and saw the second years and first years as people that were somehow "more knowledgeable" than them. The first years because they had gone through a whole year of business school already, the second years because not only had they gone through a year and a half (holy crap, does that year make a ton of difference *sarcasm*) of business school, but they also had finished recruiting and *hopefully* have figured out what they're going to do with their lives.

Well let me destroy some myths. You think I'm an adult but:

• Instead of working on my take-home midterm on the impact of hedge funds and the technology bubble in the winter garden, I'm actually looking up the best ramen places in Chicago. Why? Because. #2ndyear #ramenisyums that's why. And there's a lot of new contenders this year! Check it out: Best Ramen in Chicago Revisited
• Instead of fretting over who's going to take over co-chair positions next year, I'm really just looking at the million "top X lists" on Buzzfeed. These usually have deep, meaningful impact on my psyche like "Top 10 Ways You Can Tell Your Cat Hates You" or "What Game of Thrones Character Are You?" or, my personal favorite today, "17 Things Only a Hyperactive Person Would Understand"
• As a side note, all co-chairs are really in it so they can hang out with their friends and pass it off as work. We work hard organizing conferences and things, but most of the time, we just genuinely like each other and want to hang out. Therefore, all co-chair meetings are really just meetings to eat food, laugh at each other and catch up on life
• When you argue about stupid things in public places, I laugh at you. When I was a real adult and I worked for a living, I would stifle my laughter behind a coffee, newspaper or my computer screen. Now I give zero. So if you're sitting in the middle of the Winter Garden arguing about how the reading room shouldn't be called "the reading room" and instead should be called "the studying room", or how you don't like it when your group members won't brainstorm with you during study group meetings, I'm just going to laugh at you. And maybe point
• When I'm typing furiously in class and you think I'm taking very meticulous class notes. I'm really just writing on my blog. No seriously. Or I could be chatting with my friends through Facebook. Depends how ambitious I feel

#2ndyear #concentratingishard

How Do You Know Your Start Up Is Going To Make It?

 

So, in my spare time that I don't really have I work at a startup. My favorite thing about this startup is that it's a startup of startups. We are, in fact, a startup incubator. I've learned a crazy amount of things about myself during my time here, particularly around how I'm motivated, how I react and how I affect others.

I've also learned a lot about business. Sure, as a consultant I also learned a lot about business, but this is a different type of business. A startup is truly a different type of animal. It's the rawest, truest, most genuine sense of company-- of a business. In many ways, it's very personal and can cause people to act and react irrationally-- the term "entrepreneur complex" is a real thing. They get too attached, too defensive, too emotional. But how can we possibly blame them? These small businesses are essentially their children. Their way of expressing themselves to the world.

Here are some things I've noticed though on start-ups that have not done so well:

1. Start with the leader: Ask why they want to start their own business. You'll get a variety of answers. Sometimes, they're deeply personal ("My dad always wanted to do this and I feel like I've always been driven the same direction"), sometimes they're optomistic ("I really think I can change X about the world") those I think are okay answers. You want to stay away from "because I've always wanted to own something of my own". These types of answers-- answers that insinuate ownership and the desire to be THE anything (The Leader, The Owner, The Most Important Person) usually mean that they want to own something more than create something. And those are two very different things.
2. Start with the team: Stay away from start-ups who are overly dependent on personal relationships within their company. If the founder has his sister as his legal counsel, that's fine, but if his mother's his brand manager and his father his accountant? Be careful. Be extra careful if they're love interests. If someone decides to have their boyfriend/girlfriend as Chief Strategic Officer, run.
3. Start with work division: Do they want to know what goes into their website? Normal. Do they want to know what language they should use in their marketing? Normal. Do they not care at all? That's scary. If the entrepreneur seems overly focused on delegating, get out! They should at least be willing to learn what it takes to get their business off the ground. It usually implies the lack of desire to actually work for their goals, and they'll most likely delegate to whomever is closest-- you.
4. Start with integrity: For everyone involved, try to suss out some motives. If the founder has multiple arrests on his record and most of them are for fraud or embezzlement, that is probably not going to bode well. This is where the importance of due diligence comes in-- I'll admit that I've had a client that carefully hid his indiscretions for a long time. Let's just say that it always comes out eventually in their personality. Don't associate with crooks.
5. Start with connections: Relationships with people in the industry, general passion and ties to the content of what they're working on. These are great things to have. Not as critical as maybe some of the ones above, but still important to have. Have an entrepreneur who makes hats for cats but has never owned a cat and is deathly allergic? Probably not going to end well.

Obviously this doesn't hold true as a rule across the board, but I think this is a good way to start. In choosing companies I work for or colleagues I work with, I've noticed that these rules always hold. 

The Top 5 Things That Suck About Business School

So, Admit Weekend is upon us again. For those of us who are not part of the bschool cult, Admit Weekends are actually a pretty big deal in our world and they take months of relentless planning (at least at my school) to make sure that everything is properly laid out and ready for our bright-eyed prospective students. Here's how it works: a prospective student somewhere in the world gets a call in the early winter time (usually around December, depending on the school) telling them that they are awesome, probably one of the smartest people in the world because they got into one of the biggest-deal bschools on the planet and congratulations. A few weeks later they get invited to an admit weekend, where they can come to visit the school and learn more about the culture.

They come for a weekend and current 1st and 2nd years (usually) are brought in to show them around campus, answer questions, talk to them about what it's like to go that school and participate in "late night events" to show them how fun that particular school is. Usually, it seems like all the big schools have their weekends the same weekend, so we are quite literally competing against each other for the minds and hearts of prospective students.

I participate in this now since I felt like it helped me make my decision when I was a prospective student, and I went to training last night which covered all the basics I would expect: don't trash talk other schools, please don't have sex with the prospectives, please don't assume it's always the male in a couple that has been accepted (nowadays its almost more likely it will be the female), etc. Basically, don't mess this up. I started thinking about all the reasons I love bschool (they're not ground-breaking: the people, the experiences, the opportunities, the alumni network, etc.), but then I realized that there were a couple of things that I didn't like about it. Bschool really skews your perception of what is real-life, and I think sometimes it pushes you toward some kind of irrational thinking. Some examples:

1. You hear conversations that are ridiculous (and that may make you a crazy person). Particularly around recruiting time. Walking around the halls, you'll hear the inevitable, "He only got an interview invite from McKinsey and Bain? What about BCG? He must have really messed up". Dude. You got invites from two of the top consulting companies in the world, calm it down. Or, another of my favorites once signing time comes around is, "Can you believe I got a signing bonus of only $15k? That means this year, my salary will only be like, $120k. You may think that's a lot, but it's not. I'm living in San Francisco!". Okay, true that. San Francisco is expensive. I get it. But there's lots of people who live there that live on a lot less than that. And are less of a jerk-off than you are.
2. You live in a constant state of Fear-Of-Missing-Out (FOMO). Damn right we made it into an acronym. And we use it freely, because it's just so damn common on campus. "Man, I'm FOMO-ing like whoa right now", "Come to the party this weekend! FOMO!". Yup, these things happen. So you live in a constant state of "Yay! I didn't miss out on all of these things" instead of a "Proud of myself I did all of these things". I feel like that just can't be healthy.
3. You do more than any sane person should do. Especially as a second year, you would hope that your life issues are pretty much condensed into whether or not you watch an entire season of Revenge or an entire season of Breaking Bad on weeknights, but in reality, you still have a lot to do. There are clubs to run, first years to help, big school events (like admit weekend) to participate in, and, oh yeah, don't forget to hang out with your friends/significant other when you have time (aka when you're sleeping). If you decide to be one of the crazy ones that works part time, good luck and god speed to ya.
4. You are constantly hyper-aware that you are probably behind in something. You want to be a high performer-- do all of your homework, analyze all the readings, prepare all of your cases thoroughly. But sometimes life doesn't work out that way (see 3 above). For example, (at least at my school), it is more likely that you're in a silent competition with your group mates to be the first person to put their first draft into the Dropbox. You don't want to be the last one, lest your group thinks that you're a complete slacker, so start accepting that for every first draft you turned in there's at least three others you missed the boat on. It all balances out in the end, but for those super-prudent folks who organize and plan everything, we just need to let go a little bit and accept that, hey, sometimes you'll be the late one.
5. You pretty much disappear from your non-bschool friends lives. There are a lot of workarounds to this one, but I feel like I'm never budgeting my time appropriately between bschool and non-bschool acquaintances. And that makes me feel bad. I feel better that I try my hardest to make sure I carve out at least a little bit of time, but....FOMO.