A rather long post, but it covers many aspects.
Beginning of an article from Netbanker cited on SmartyPig homepage.
Take a basic FDIC-insured savings account, spice it up with automated electronic transfers and email communications, mix in gift/debit cards, wrap the whole thing up in a social network, and top it with a memorable name. What do you have? SmartyPig, the most innovative financial service we’ve seen since Prosper launched two years ago.
A bank book, a system of automatic eletronic transfers, debit cards and gift cards, asocila network, all of it together. This is SmartyPig.
Meanwhile in Canda, the system of peer to peer loans IOUCentral was to a large extent blocked by BDRVM (pdf), a kind of Canadian Banca d'Italia.
The media, air and telephonic industries, are coming back heavily redefined in digitalization, standardization and interoperabilty (internet laws).
A lot has been written on the impact on medias. A new demonstartion on the impact on telephony arrives from the east; it seems that Skype is a cause of the 21% drop on the volume of phone calls between China and Taiwan, according to Digitimes.
There were 282.2 million voice communication calls from China to Taiwan with a total use time of 784.8 million minutes in 2007, dropping by 21.37% and 10.41%, respectively, from 2006, according to statistics by Taiwan's National Communications Commission (NCC).
Regarding low cost airlines, point to point existed but they became a real problem when the differential cost increased as a consequence of disintermediation brought by Internet (it's a transfer ofCirca le linee aeree low cost point to point esistevano ma sono diventate u vero problema quando il differenziale di costo è aumentato a causa della disintermedazione portata da Internet (It's a transfer of a considerable portion of operating processes managed by the costumer). (pdf)
The impact of the Internet on how tickets are sold and consumers search for fares and the growth of low cost airlines as a market force accessible to almost every consumer has hurt legacy airline revenues by placing downward pressure on airfares
Digitalization, standardization and interoperability, combined with afavourable normative picture of international commerce (lets think about outsourcing) are contributing to contain inflation, by lowering the costs of durable and semidurable goods; meanwhile I believe that the relative incidence of raw materials and commodities will gardually increase.
It seems that banks will follow, even though I believe that it will take longer. There is an optimism (which I don't share on timing) regarding the use of NFC (especially in Italy), according to the Financial Times
But he insists that the wait for mobile payments is almost over: “For most users, NFC-enabled mobile phones will appear suddenly, seemingly overnight – just as camera phones did. All the handset manufacturers we partner with are working on one or two NFC models for release this year.”
Next in line, I believe, will be insurance agencies.
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