Her integrity and dedication has encouraged and inspired me and she has advised us in our  understanding of the inner workings of the UK political system.

Myself, Anna and the @CubateMobile team are proud to share the first stage of our “Mobile for Development” Research Paper.

I am currently in Johannesburg about to speak at MobileWebAfrica.com and will be asking them the same question I am you now…..

If you have an understanding of developing economies please read the paper and feedback to me on era (at) me.com before we reconviene to draw our conclusions from the research.

I hope you enjoy it

Mobiles for Development – Research

This blew me away!

It is like no-one told this guy the rules of playing the guitar.

He has just looked at it and in a caveman type way just thought ‘how can I get sound (value) out of this thing.’

Looking holistically at the instrument he has created something beautiful that others confined by the convention or prior art would not have seen or been able to create.

He would have looked like an IDIOT when experimenting and practising! HAHA, but now he is an inspiring badass!

The world is changing FAST. Mobile, Social and Local are the dominant change agents and so many brands I work with are struggling to engage and monetise new and existing customers even though they still have strong brands.

I believe the key to change management is looking more holistically and objectively at the business assets and unlearning the platforms and tools and strategies that have been implemented until now.

This means getting back to basics, putting the relationship of the consumer and the brand in the centre and then TOTALLY rethinking the touch points used to engage and then monetise that customer.

If your brand doesn’t manage to decouple itself from the platform it is used to being delivered on then I fear for its survival over the next 5 years.

Some clean chirpy startup will probably come in and eat your lunch!

Thanks @DHS for showing me the music.

It was really fun and we designed GetGiving

I learnt about PayPal’s Adaptive Payments system in its Alpha release and realised that a Mobile Payments revolution was on the way that would change EVERYTHING.

With so many companies trying to become your mobile wallet it can be hard to know which basket to put your eggs in.

I decided 2 years ago that PayPal would probably win due these factors………

- They have Appox 100 Million users unlike finance startups.

- Their brand is built on primarily on commerce unlike Google.

- They are still young enough as a business to innovate. unlike the Banks.

- They are platform agnostic unlike Apple.

- They are approachable and have committed to empower developers to create the future through X.com

- There is no barrier to signing up for small businesses unlike PDQ services.

So I threw my eggs in their basket and have never looked back.

After Apple blocked our donation app. We went back to the drawing board and designed Givey which is a FAR deeper reaching product so I am pretty happy they forced us think harder to solve the Mobile Social Giving problem.

We also designed Mosho and TouchCart from the lessons we learnt hoping that our bet would pay off……

Thankfully PayPal  are beginning to make big strides into the real world.

With a REAL  pop up store in Manhattan to showcase their new innovations like the one John Lunn showed us the other day at the PayPal offices in London that brings a whole new meaning to the term window shopping

And then the icing on the cake was this morning when my good friend @LukeAndrews sent me a picture of his bill from Pizza Express from the other day, which no doubt he cashed in on the Taste London card

So PayPal is getting out of the building and out of eBay and this is only just the beginning.

My guess is to get on board or get out of the way.

I have made many terrible guesses about the future but I still back this one.  :-)

]]> http://www.daviderasmus.com/here-comes-paypal/feed/ 0 http://www.daviderasmus.com/social-payments/ http://www.daviderasmus.com/social-payments/#comments Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:21:51 +0000 David Erasmus http://www.daviderasmus.com/?p=522  

It has been a really interesting couple of weeks @ Cubate.

I started my first meetings with VCs and began to put our embryonic business into the furnace to see if it got incinerated.

I actually really enjoyed it, the VCs I met like Alliot from Octopus Ventures are just quick, smart people who need to understand within 10 minutes what you are doing, why you need help and how they will get their money back quickly.

VC meetings are not suitable for complicated visions or weird company structures.

The Power of getting out of the building and refining your business ideas through conversations with smart people is absolutely invaluable.

In our case nearly ALL the smart investors I have met have really latched on to the Social payments we have been exploring with Givey and soon to be Mosho. They believe this is where our niche value lies.

Through these conversations I have increased the visibility of Social Payment innovation within our model.

Here is another cool example of some guys doing a great job of extracting REAL WORLD VALUE out of Social media.

Pay with a Tweet – Case Study – OMG version from Leif on Vimeo.

In short once you have a good idea and have got it to a place of “Tangibility” so others can see it go and chat to AS MANY smart and some not so smart people to find out what they think and then……….

Reiterate, Reiterate, Reiterate both your product and your communications.

Don’t believe your Product girl or your Marketing guys, they are both as vital as each other.

I love asking the big questions and being OK with having very few answers and often being misunderstood.

Its rare these days that I question what is right and wrong as In an interconnected world some people probably spend their lives asking this and never doing anything. Instead my big questions tend to look a little bit like this when I am trying to make decisions……….

What do I want written on my grave stone?

What story do I want to be a part of?

Is what I am about to do the easy option?

Am I being honouring and loving to those around me?

Am I thinking long term or looking for immediate gratification?

It does become tricky when as I have found recently massive opportunities can come along that only maybe meet 30% of the good answers to those questions and then the rubber hits the road!

They are not black and white situations that are opposite to my beliefs but hang in the big grey abyss.  If I took the work on I would be misunderstood and run the almost certain risk of making a good number of peoples life much worse.

If you take the Sex scene for a clear example…….

I almost certainly would be happy to support and take on a mobile project for a party shop that mainly sold helium balloons and poppers but also sold fluffy toy handcuffs or a few sex toys

At the other end of the spectrum I  am actively involved with an Anti Slavery Charity who help bonded sex workers get free from their torture.

At some point along that line I change from being helpful to actually campaigning against.

Choosing at what point you are pro, which point you abstain and at what point you are actively against is a tricky one.

All I know is that the questions I have mentioned are vital, the answers may change from time to time but I am not worried about that, I am only worried if I or anyone else stops asking the important questions altogether.

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