GOOG Acquisition of DCLK Approved

The Federal Trade Commission approved Google's acquisition of Doubleclick this morning the Associated Press reports. The $3.1 billion deal will substantially enhance Google's position within the online advertising space as Doublick serves a substantial portion of online advertising and the combination will make Google the #1 company in that space.

The decision comes over opposition lodged from a number of organizations including Microsoft, AT&T, Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups.

The FTC acted one day after an announcement between Microsoft and and Viacom that could total $500 million over the coming 5 years in which Microsoft will sell Viacom's remnant ad space on properties including MTV, Comedy Central, CBS and others. Microsoft will guarantee Viacom revenues by buying online ad space from Viacom, as well as licensng the company's content for use across the MSN sites.

Viacom's decision to go with a Google competitor is not terribly surprising in light of the company's on-going $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit lodged against Google over YouTube's display of copyrighted material, including the Daily Show, Colbert Report and others. Specifically, Viacom argued that Google was instructing its advertisers to optimize their content to appear on search results pages leading to the pages where Viacom's copyright videos can actually be viewed.

The agreement also provides some rationalization to Microsoft's acquisition of aQuantive, which owns Avenue A/Razorfish and Atlas. Avenue A is web marketing consultancy that recently helped AT&T with its re-branding. Atlas is a software company that is used to serve and track advertising on partner and affiliate sites. Viacom's properties and advertising provide Microsoft with a use for these large new assets.

This is just one of many arenas in which it will continue to be interesting to watch Google and Microsoft face-off.

Gartner - Financial Impact of Phishing Scams

Your friendly Mpayy blogger has just returned from a quick jaunt to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico (highly recommended), and is back to spread the gospel of Electronic & Mobile Payments...

Gartner Reports on Financial Impact of Phishing

Avivah Litan published "Phishing Attacks Escalate, Morph and Cause Considerable Damage" at Gartner (subscription required) on December 13, 2007. Litan points out that the number of users who think they received emails attempting to extract users' personal information rose by 14% in 2007, and "118% in three years from a total of 57 million in 2004 to 124 million in 2007." Litan's numbers are based on a survey of 5,000 adults.

"The average dollar lost per incident declined to $886 from $1,244 lost on average in 2006 (with a median loss of $200 in 2007), perhaps because of more-widespread fraud detection systems. But because there were more victims, a whopping $3.2 billion was lost to phishing in 2007, according to surveyed consumers." This is on top of an increase to 3.3% of those attacked ended up losing money.

Spoofing & Mpayy

Litan's survey demonstrates that PayPal and eBay are the number 1 and 2 brands on which phishers rely to attempt to extract user data. Further, the data they are attempting to extract is debit and check card because of the lax anti-fraud protections that exist for those payment instruments.



Mpayy fully expects that the first users (immediately following friends, family and members that learn of us by word of mouth) will be those attempting to use the service to launder or steal money. An interview I read recently with co-founder of PayPal, Max Levchin, indicates the financial institutions that company spoke to before they launched warned them of this phenomenon, but it was not until they were losing $10 million per month that they realized the magnitude of the problem.



Mpayy's relationship with its world-class US banking partner will help provide many of the anti-fraud measures necessary. Further, in our attempt to establish the most secure payment processing system, Mpayy will use 128-bit TDES encryption and PCI compliance standards should help address this. Other measures are being taken including the low-tech, but hopefully very effective step of creating a "Digital Signet" that will validate all communication - text and email - to users.

Debit Overtakes Credit - ACH Rapidly on the Rise

The Federal Reserve put out its 2007 Payments Study on December 10th that studied the composition of non-cash payments between the years of 2003 and 2006. In it, the primary bombshell was that the number of Debit Card transactions has, for the first time surpassed the number of Credit Card transactions in the United States.



Shifting Composition of Non-Cash Payments

The Fed reported that the number of checks paid decreased by -6.4% per year for a total decrease of 6.7 billion checks over the three year period. Lest the picture for checks be painted to bleakly, checks still comprised 55% of the value of non-cash payments in the United States.

Some of that decline in check writing has shifted to Electronic checks in the form of ACH payments which demonstrated a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.6% between the years of 2003 and 2006. By 2006, 15.6% of non-cash payments were ACH payments, with an absolute increase of 5.8 billion payments. Further, ACH accounted of $31.0 trillion in 2006, or almost 91% of all electronic payments.

On the card front, debits have now overtaken credit cards. Debit card payments exhibited a CAGR of 17.5% per year over the three year period with growth in PIN debits topping 20.6%. Again, these users must beware of the fees charged for those transactions discussed in this blog here.

Credit cards grew at the slowest rate of all electronic transactions at 4.6%, which was the same rate of growth of all payments.



Implications for Mpayy

Mpayy will utilize ACH payments to facilitate Person-to-Person money transfers and shop online. NACHA reports that Web, Point of Purchases and telephone ACH payments are significantly on the rise with a 26.6% year over year growth in Web ACH payments on a year over year basis in the 3rd quarter. All of this points to the buying public's desire for efficient and secure payment solutions that are exactly what Mpayy will deliver.

Mpayy's payment processing application is nearing completion, and you can now see our account details described here.. Personal accounts that allow users to securely shop online from your checking account with Cash Back. Mobile Merchant accounts that allow salespeople to take their business on the road with a free Point of Sale solution are described here. Our Retailer Pro account will allow eCommerce businesses to streamline their online checkout process with 100% fraud protection.

Online Retail Market Grows Unimpeded

In a previous life at Zacks Investment Research, I would find some way into a commentary about the mortgage crisis, bailouts and foreign investors, a plunging dollar, etc. These days, I am significantly more focused, specifically on retail, and all signs point to significant growth in

Clicking Consumers


ComScore, the experts in monitoring and reporting eCommerce sales notes that consumers are clicking to buy at a pace never seen before. For the period from November 1 to December 9, online retail spending is up 18% to $18.79 billion.



The trend has been pronounced week over week since this shopping season began as ComScore's chart demonstrates.



ComScore's data is backed up by America's Research Group, which reports that 46.3% of holiday shoppers bought something online this holiday season vs. only 41.3%. This is compared to a forecast from the National Retail Federation of 4% increase in holiday shopping overall.

Black Friday 2007 was off to a quicker pace than the NRF prediction posting 8.3% growth out of the gate according to the Washington Post. Technology sales were up 11.8% on Black Friday according to CNET News, althought the pace of that growth slowed year over year as 2006 was more than 15% higher than 2005.

C. Britt Beemer, founder and Chairman of ARG notes that all is not rosy as consumers are so programmed to wait for deep discounts on goods before they purchase in the holiday season as "43.6% of shoppers are waiting for 50% off sales to finish their Christmas shopping. Of those consumers not yet finished, 60.7% expect to finish between Dec. 22 and Dec. 24."

It is likely that retailers will bring great deals more and more to the eCommerce world as this becomes their major source of growth. The rush to open new stores is slowing according to Fortune Magazine, partially due to saturation, worsening financing for new real estate, and flattening retail sales. Expect the retailers to look for sales growth online and improved margins on those sales will drive them to use Mpayy.

On the Future of Mobile Web

The New York Times reports today that Google's Android seeks to "turn cellphones into the principal portal to a mobile Web." The story goes on to explain that it is unclear whether or not this will be a boon or a threat to Nokia's business, which has seen its "market share, 28 percent five years ago" drop to "barely 10 percent".

Nokia is moving forward with its mobile web efforts through sealing content deals with Universal Music Group as reported by the Wall Street Journal (Subscription required). Nokia has Apple and the iPhone clearly in its sites through these efforts, and hopes that the Universal deal will improve its Ovi (Finnish for "door") web surfing service by providing users with simple one-touch access to videos and music through the mobile web. The Wall Street Journal notes that Nokia's estimates are that the "total market for Internet services to reach €100 billion ($147 billion) by 2010"

Verizon Wireless' recent announcement that it will make its network open to any device adds further texture to the evolving mobile web situation.


The company plans to meet with device and software makers this summer to review its new open service according to the New York Times.

The Times notes:

"Consumers are already able to add software and make purchases online with many cellphones, but often the carriers do not make this easy, preferring instead to highlight their own offerings on phone screens.

The carriers have also been at odds with Silicon Valley companies like Google that want people to be able to use phones in much the same way that they can use any PC for access to the Internet. "

Open Access at Mpayy

These shifting trends in the wireless market only serve to benefit Mpayy and its mobile payment options. The best estimates are that up to 70% of cell phones sold in the US have mobile web usage enabled, even if the users do not take advantage of the service. As the device makers and networks work to make these services more usable and friendly, Mpayy will be there enabling ALL users on ALL networks with wireless web enabled cell phones to make purchases through their mobile phones. More to come...

Boarding Pass on your Cell Phone

Continental Airlines is launching a 3-month pilot program at Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport to allow customers to present a WAP-enabled boarding pass after checking in through the company's wireless site, which is here. According to Continental's Customer Service, users are then presented with the boarding pass image that is the airline's equivalent of a bar code. They present both their phones and photo id to TSA people at the security queue, and then again at the gate to get on the plane.

This is the one image that is being used with this story, but it's not clear who took it as it is at TSA.gov, USA Today, the Houston Chronicle and Endgadget without attribution.




The company providing the enabling technology is not listed in any of the stories or on the Continental website that we can find. As best we can tell, it MAY be a company called Mobiqa that has a product that is IATA approved and presents the image to security.



IATA has set a goal of 100% of airlines having the capability to do Bar Coded Boarding Passes by 2008 and 100% usage by 2010. Air Canada was actually the first to implement IATA's 2D barcode standard and usage grew quickly according to theStreet.com. According to Eric Leopold, Project Manager at IATA, the organization thinks it can facilitate more than $500 million in annual savings.


Mobile Ticket Purchase & Presentment

Mobiqa also caught our eye in a deal it did with PayPal and their mobile offering. The case study discusses that Scotland Rugby fans were left stranded without tickets due to strikes by the mail service. PayPal's WAP site enabled the payment processing and Mobiqa provided the ticket validation.

Mpayy will be the best solution for secure mobile payment processing and we hope to work our way into verticals like event ticketing with a partner like Mobiqa.

NYT gets Widgetized

I'm not certain that the description of this blog includes promises of covering unique online interfaces, but I will make sure it does. I discovered today that the New York Times forwarding a trend that has been around since the internet first took off - namely the concept that users want to take the time to customize their own interfaces, and find a one-etop shop for all of their news needs through the ordering and customization of specific modules or widgets.

Welcome to My Times



It seems that the Google and Facebook driven widgetization of the internet has extended to one of the most venerable media companies that's been around for 150 years. New York Times is an interesting place to provide users to set up their media consumption plus RSS feeds, weather, stock information, and movie information. New York Times adopted the correct approach, which is to allow content from other providers.

New York Times usage will never get as large as iGoogle or Facebook, however they do have the third largest daily readership in the United States according to Burrelle's Luce with 1,120,420 daily readers and 1,627,062 Sunday readers. See the circulation numbers for the top 100 newspapers here. According to the paper, they have 787,000 subscribers to the website, though only 227,000 pay. The site gets 13 million unique visitors per month, though.

New York Times stopped charging for access to its website in September because of concerns about growth in its subscriber base. The My Times page seems to be their attempt to make the free site stickier so users will make it their homepage driving advertising revenue. Certainly, New York Times is a company that knows how to make the ad model work.

Mpayyment Widget

Mpayy is planning on falling in line after launch with an Mpayyment widget that will allow folks to take payments from any site - facebook, myspace, igoogle, maybe even the New York Times. We are wondering about what services it should offer. Comments and thoughts on this matter are invited. Certainly, it will allow payment, but we wonder about enabling Activity and Payment Details on it. Please write back if you have thoughts.