Snippings

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Nearly one in three preteens lists influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers. The so-called creator economy surpasses $250 billion worldwide, according to Goldman Sachs, with U.S. brands spending more than $5 billion a year on influencers.

From: A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men – The New York Times.

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Speaking as he collected the “popular prize” at the European Inventor Award 2014 for his work, Hara said that the QR code is likely to be replaced by something more sophisticated.
He suggests that future software can accurately recognise objects by their size and shape, rather than relying on a special code, such as the new Amazon Fire.
“I think there may be further development in the area of image processing, so they will be able to see directly,” he said. “It would be great if we can get away with this code that’s printed on paper and recognise the thing itself. That’s an idea I’ve been having in my mind for years.”
A secure QR code which is capable of distinguishing between what you want to share and what you don’t is being looked into in Japan, Hara said.

From: QR codes only have about 10 years until extinction, inventor believes | The Drum.

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For now, it’s strictly early adopters who are handing over seemingly every aspect of their lives to these AIs. But if adoption by users follows investment, then the billions being poured into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Jeff Bezos-backed AI search startup Perplexity, Google’s new Gemini AI, and Microsoft’s Copilot (which featured in the first every Super Bowl ad for an AI) set us on a path for a very different future for online commerce.

Credit cards are commodities. I don’t care whether my favourite co-brand credit card (in my case, John Lewis) is a Mastercard or a Visa card and I don’t care whether it comes from Citi or HSBC. Any of these combinations achieves the same purpose: I can pay for things in shops and I get cashback vouchers.

The vouchers are important. Javelin says that in across their history of consumer research, “reward programs remain a top driver” when it comes to choosing a card. But what if that changes? Whole the current U.S. card model means that a substantial portion of payment revenues are paid out as cardholder rewards, but that is the result of the interaction of regulatory and business arrangements, it is not a law of nature.

What if the rewards model changes? Organisations with a strategic perpsective are, I imagine, already taking a long-term view and preparing for a time when interchange revenue may be reduced. 

 

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Visa and Mastercard set interchange rates but only get a small slice of the charges. It is credit card-issuing banks that collect the bulk of swipe fees. They often use the money to fund perks for cardholders, including cash back, points or airline miles.

From Mastercard/Visa: new bill will do little to challenge duopoly | Financial Times:

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There’s an interesting 2022 paper about this from Valdimir Mukharlyamov and Natasha Sarin at the UPenn Law School. The paper, “Price Regulation in Two-Sided Markets: Empirical Evidence from Debit Cards”,  concludes that regulation to limit that amount banks can charge for debit transactions (ie, the Durbin Amendment of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act) led to higher checking account fees  for consumers (previously subsidized) and accelerated the adoption of credit cards with higher interchange fees (cutting down on potential savings for merchants). In summar, the regulation’s stated objective of enhancing consumers’ welfare through lower retail prices was not met. Having looked at this issue across different markets and over many years, I have to say that I am not surprised and remain convinced that regulators should focus on more competion (from instant payments, for example) than trying to fix prices.

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Activity on coding answer site Stack Overflow has dropped in the face of competition from these AI agents. The company disclosed in August that its traffic dropped 14% in April, the month after the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can be used to write code that developers otherwise would look up on sites like Stack Overflow. In October, the company announced it was laying off 28% of its workforce.

From: It’s the End of the Web as We Know It – WSJ.

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The implications of this shift could be big. Seeking information using a search engine could be almost completely replaced by this new generation of large language model-powered systems, says Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who has lately made a name for himself as an analyst of these AIs.

This could be good for consumers, but it could also completely upend the delicate balance of publishers, tech giants and advertisers on which the internet as we know it has long depended.

AI agents help cut through the clutter, but research is already suggesting they also eliminate any need for people to click through to the websites they rely on to produce their answers, says Mollick. Without traffic, the business model for many publishers—of providing useful, human-generated information on the web—could collapse.

From: It’s the End of the Web as We Know It – WSJ.

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This humorous panel kicked off with talk about the possibility of protecting ones private key for accessing encrypted data by converting it to a QR and and tattooing it on a very private body part.
The moderator, David Birch of Consult Hyperion, was presumably being hyperbolic (though he provided no proof), but his point was well taken: protecting one’s identity can result in some extreme precautions.

From: Consensus 2016 Panelists Debate Blockchain’s Business Impact – CoinDesk.

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According to Kim Bates, Chief Futurist at Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve, “The customer journey of the future will begin to emerge as Business to Robot to Consumer (B2R2C).” This will all begin within the comfort of our homes.

From: Marketing To Robots: Why CMOs Need To Start Thinking About Business To Robot To Consumer (B2R2C).

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Marketing in the future is an entire paradigm shift where it’s no longer the brand owning the relationship with the customer but rather the personal digital assistant, (and the platform it is run on), owning the relationship.”

From: Marketing To Robots: Why CMOs Need To Start Thinking About Business To Robot To Consumer (B2R2C).

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Capital One, the ninth-largest bank in the country and a major credit-card issuer, uses Visa and Mastercard for most of its cards. The bank plans to switch at least some of its cards to the Discover network, while continuing to use Visa and Mastercard on others

From: Capital One Is Buying Discover Financial for $35 Billion – WSJ.

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To enable generic functionality for EU citizens, the EDIW must contain three elements: personal identification data (PID), a qualified signature, and various electronic attestations of qualified and non-qualified attributes. These three elements enable EU citizens to use the EDIW as a way of identification or to confirm certain personal attributes for the purpose of access to public and private digital services across the EU.

From: Demystifying the payment scope related to the European Digital Identity Wallet | INNOPAY.

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