Money 3.0 – The Exformation of Tender

In my short time here at my new company I’ve become even more bullish on what I’m calling Money3.0.  Why Money 3.0?  Well, Money’s been around a long time, and I think Money 2.0 was really pioneered in the 50’s with the brith of payment cards.  I think we have amassed significant intellectual property and world-wide acceptance and availability of technologies that we helped bring to market that lay the groundwork for what I’m calling Money3.0.

I use 3.0 specifically in relation to the 2.0 so often used in the media, in the techdailies, bizrags, blogosphere and the like.  Web2.0 is a lot of things to a lot of people and I don’t want to go into detail about the topic that is covered so completely in so many other places.  Suffice it to say that there are many undercurrents and social memes and technology driving those phenomena, and I want to make one distinction clear.

I think it is important and it is truly at the root of this coming transformation, or what I call the exformation of our industry. Don’t worry, I’ll explain exformation in detail in this blog.  Meanwhile, you can google it to start to get up to speed on it.

Web1.0, early CERN, WWW and HTML.

We all know web1.0 was the static web. The world wide web of one-way information, pictures, cheesy music and flaming spinning logos.  In other words, a lot of hype that helped an entire new generation get acquainted and familiar with concepts like market bubbles, paper millionaires and implosives corrections.  Who would have guessed what good training that would be?

Web1.0 is where many of the currently “cool” tech titans cut their teeth on making what would eventually become marketplaces or economies in their own right.  The emergence of ecommerce sites and disruptive innovators like Amazon, eBay and Rhapsody began to prove out that business could be made on the web while companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle watched for the business model to emerge. Companies that took it upon themselves to making this burgeoning ecosystem more user-friendly and useful like Google and Yahoo! Carved out nice niches for themselves by providing entirely new services that the traditional companies didn’t understand. Many a picture of a furry mammal (the upstarts) running around tapping dinosaur eggs (the tech incumbents) was rampant on the net.

Web2.0, O’Reilly’s Participatory Contribution Revolution

Web2.0 is the read-write web, or the participatory web.  O’Reilly (and no, not the Factor, but Tim, the Geek) is most lauded as the coiner of the term, though he was more like its biggest promoter.  Web2.0 is wikis, blogs, RSS, XML and podcasts.  Everybody wants to be in on 2.0, right? Put 2.0 on the end of something and there is an implied inflection point in whatever product, good, service or experience you’re providing. 2.0 inspires many a vision of grandeur about the democratization of the tools of content production and participatory nirvana the likes of which wikinomics or freakonomics or whatever your favorite economic buzzword du jour could sell you.  And these were not necessarily bad things.  2.0 innovations brought us sites like flickr, youtube, delicious, digg, upcoming, evite, and of course, social networking favorites, myspace, LinkedIn and facebook, oh my!

Many electronic payment upstarts that are now long gone tried to do for the web what the payment card industry had done for banking, but it was hard, especially as the banking and financial sites began to dip their toes in the web2.0 waters after PayPal’s meteoric rise and acceptance.

Money3.0 = web2.0 + money + mobile + context + wallets + reputations + trust

Mobile Payments

The Future is Mobile, and it is already here. We just need to look east… Far East.

Imagine a world in which you had a magic device, say a magic wand of sorts, lightweight and svelte, easy on the eye and reflective of your personal style and superior prosumer choice-making. Imagine a device that one could carry that knows where one is, knows what time it is and actually helps one keep track of time. Imagine this wand also carried with it the power to inform, translate, locate, compare, contrast, capture and review your fondest memories, stories, places, events, things and places and loved ones. It even has your favorite music, your favorite books, movies, games, pictures, and maps of every place you have ever been, and everywhere you want to be. Naturally, you can chat with friends, actually talk to people, video conference with a group of your colleagues, tweet, wiki or blog about what’s new, read the news, get the latest scores, check the market, find out what’s playing next and where you should go for that next bite to eat. Hey, I’m low on cash (as in have none) so where’s the nearest ATM?

Who carries that anyways these days, you ask? Well, apparently a lot of people still, since not everyone’s gone digitally native, yet… Anyway, I digress. You quickly find the nearest ATM and impress me with your amazing grasp of geospatiotemporal localizability.  After all, that’s what your magic wand gives you -- Incredible fidelity and awareness of one’s surroundings.

Your mobile phone is finally powerful and secure enough to free you from the tyranny of multiple swatches of plastic, fiber or card-like magnetically encoded strips and embedded radio-frequency emitters and other techno-wizardry and performs its job as any sufficiently advanced technology should…

“poof”

…like magic.

Look East! Far East for what the western future of mobile commerce looks like.

Geospatiotemporal What?

• Geospatio refers to “where” in space.
• Temporal refers to “when” in time.
• Localizability refers to the translation of that when and where into a meaningful context like:

In my cube, at the office on the 3^rd floor of our main campus, at 3:57pm in the afternoon (Eastern Daylight Savings Time) of October 14, 2008.

In fact, so much INformation, it borders on what the Nordic scientist Joergen called EXformation.  That is, all of that other data that is usually discarded or not INcluded in the record of what’s happening because it has been historically too expensive, too cumbersome or otherwise impractical to capture.  As Chris Anderson explained in The Long Tail, encoding information as bits effectively moves their storage and transmission costs so low as to almost be incalcualably “free” (or as Products become “digitized” the storage and transmission costs trend towards Zero).