Community

New stats from Apple: One million 3G phones sold and ten million applications downloaded from the App Store since its launch late last week.

Barclaycard paid £35 million for Goldfish, after Discover wrote down the value of the business by $422 million. Citi paid £500m+ for Egg. Like Discover before it, I suspect Citi would have to write off a large part of that valuation before it could offload the business.

We've been here before. See this Finextra story and associated blog comments from April last year:  E-Gold operators accused of money laundering

Wouldn't a country with low card penetration but increasing adoption of mobile phones be better advised to skip the plastic all-together and explore alternative payment options instead?

Stop press: Within five minutes of posting this blog the shiny new swift.com appeared triumphantly in Firefox. Now, that's what I call rapid response.

The National Association of Convenience Stores has quickly weighed in with a massive grassroots campaign in support of the Credit Card Fair Fee Act. Nacs  has developed a series of pumptoppers, or glossy advertising signage, that can be posted at the pump to alert consumers to the effect of credit card interchange. The ads have two messages: “Tell Congress you want to know how much this fill-up cost you in credit card fees” and “That pain you are experiencing in part is caused by secret credit card fees.” Both ads encourage motorists to go to the Web site www.unfaircreditcardfees.com to send a message to their elected leaders.

For the full crime-sheet, check out this story in New York Magazine: Only the men survive, about the rise and fall of Zoe Cruz at Morgan Stanley. Nicknamed the Cruz Missile because of her combative management style, she eventually crashed and burned during the sub-prime crisis in November.

'If women across Wall Street viewed Cruz’s firing as a blow, there were men at Morgan Stanley who seemed almost gleeful about it. The woman they had nicknamed the “Czarina,” the “Wicked Witch,” and, most famously, “Cruz Missile” was out of the picture. They joked that it was worth the $9 billion loss to have her gone. In her rise through the company, Cruz had become not just one of the most powerful women on Wall Street but also the most loathed. It’s a matter of opinion whether those two things are inextricably linked, but for Cruz the same qualities that propelled her almost to the top also prevented her from reaching it.'

A favoured scenario of the sci-fi genre when I was growing up was that of the human race enslaved by intelligent machines. Now, ask yourself: how much time do you spend in front of your computer screen each day? It strikes me that the scenario has already come to pass - we just haven't noticed yet.

Hi Shripad

Yes, we've got some big plans to boost interactivity among Community members. It's a phased roll-out beginning with the public newswire. But rest asured - the Community experience is uppermost in our thoughts and plans. There are some exciting changes afoot - stay tuned.

I seem to remember Barclays performing a similar experiement some years back...with exactly the same result. Moneysupermarket's reading of the situation is totally fatuous (not to mention a waste of money - literally).