innovation course

Here is the reading by Jack and Suri on the Economics of M-Pesa.  This is their 2011 paper.

They also have a 2010 paper with the same title which you probably should not bother with ...

In the 2010 paper they had a random sample of 3000 households (survey was in April 2008).

In the 2011 paper they also report results from a follow up survey conducted in 2009.  However, the follow up-survey has only 2016 of the original 3000 households.  So when you compare the tables in the 2010 paper with Round 1 survey results in the 2011 paper, the numbers may not be identical due to the difference in the sample size.  Some other details/pieces of information/observations made by the authors in the 2010 piece are omitted from the 2011 piece ... I don't think they are critical.

Here are some example of visualizations:

Meterorites

A wind map

Human Development Indicators

And here is a some free software and a public gallery

And if you want to get fancy ... try to get a robotic turtle do draw a tree for you ...

If you are on a Mac platform use Firefox or Safari because some of the sites use Java/Flash (Chrome for Mac is 32 bit)

Please do visit the Paydiant website to see what they are up to.  Looks like they have solutions for merchants (targeted mobile advertising), processors (differentiated service offering) and banks (attach to existing mobile solution).

We can discuss the point about regulation (of telcos) raised by Fenny next week since we have to talk about a telco model of mobile payments.  Also Fenny needs a new phone (quit Android - Google is evil!) or a new QR code scanning software because  the QR code appears on the screen of the POS equipment - so not necessarily printed on paper. Paydiant also appears to have a got a patent for ATM withdrawals using their technology.  So lots of stuff we did not think about!

Here is a video from Paydiant's website

And the interview with one of the founders  ...  He says " we think of payments as the kernel and its all the neat stuff you wrap around it".  So the monetization for Paydiant is not really 'payments' but the "neat stuff". Also the consumer data belongs to the merchant.

Read the article by Kentaro Toyama (posted earlier) and the following response by Christine Qiang and answer the assignment question.

Here are some slides on Chakravorti's approach.

Here are some slides on payments - basically about how cards work.

Here are some slides with some simple coordination games.

Here are the links to the various articles by W. Brian Arthur:

Increasing Returns and the New World of Business (in HBR)

Positive Feedbacks in the Economy (in Scientific American)

And his more recent article on Complexity Economics

This is his website at the Santa Fe Institute

If you like you can also read Chapter 7 of Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian