The Internet get started in Russia long ago, well before the Web.  When I first landed in Russia back in April of 1989, there was barely a functioning long-distance telephone system.  If you wanted to reach someone remote, you had to go through an operator, who would call you back once she found a line.Read more

Some 9,500 banks from around the world are currently meeting in Toronto to discuss the state of the industry at an annual industry gathering called Sibos.  Amongst the topics is “Where is the Growth in 2012 and Beyond.” Banks need to consider the answer carefully.  They risk becoming boring utilities, ceding the most interesting --and potentially most lucrative-- customer-facing parts of the business to nontraditional players.Read more

 It's fashionable these days to talk about personal attention as a commodity or even a currency. But in fact, it's a different kind of phenomenon, one that is becoming more interesting now that the Internet makes it easier for businessesto pay attention to individual customers on a grand scale...even as many companies sometimes confuse attention with intention (to buy).  While companies (and some people) seek attention because they expect to earn money through it, many individuals value attention as something intrinsically desirable in itself.Read more

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, I believe we need to rethink and rebuild many organizations and institutions that served us well in the past but are beginning to falter.  Fortunately, the Internet lets us do this.  It slashes collaboration costs and makes possible completely new models of combining people, skills, knowledge and capital for economic and social development.  Around the world, individuals and groups are working together, developing new businesses based on peer-to-peer (P2P) collaborative networks.Read more

It is lonely at the top, and all the more so if you are a woman. But that’s changing.

DLDWomen, a conference in Munich June 29-30 organized by Burda Media, featured three senior female politicians and some of the architects of the women's movement, along with top women in tech such as Google's Megan Smith, Candace Johnson, IBM's Marilyn Johnson and Facebook's Joanna Shields. The conference, which focuses on women’s influence on development in technology, media, markets and society, attracted some 600 women in business and the arts.Read more

As people in the U.S. and across the world cheer the death of Osama Bin Laden the talk is about justice for the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11.  But Bin Laden took the lives of many others years before two airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, a fact that many forget.Read more

One of the biggest opportunities in mobile money – a market estimated to reach 894 million users in 2015 – will be in Asia. So anyone with an interest in grabbing market share in the sector should not miss the first event in the region- Innotribe Mumbai June 1 and 2 - organized  by The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), a global organization that handles an average of 15 million standardized financial transactions a day for more than 8,000 banks.

Since 1973, Brussels-based SWIFT has provided a shared worldwide data processing and communication link for the world's banks, using a common language for international financial transactions.  Its main function is to be a carrier of messages. It does not hold funds, manage accounts on behalf of customers, or store financial information on an on-going basis.  That said, it is increasingly taking on the role of a catalyst to bring the financial community together to work collaboratively on market practice, standards and issues of mutual interest.  Its stated goal is to inject an innovation culture in the financial community as a whole, by collaborating on new e-banking solutions and working more closely with start-ups.

With that goal in mind, SWIFT has created an online marketplace called Innotribe which aims to leverage the collective creativity of the finance sector. The idea is to not only deliver on the traditional mission of lowering costs, reducing operational risk and eliminating inefficiencies, but get creative about taking the sector into entirely new directions. The first SWIFT Innotribe event in Asia will bring together a powerful combination of experts from banks, carriers and mobile device manufacturers, platform and service providers – as well as local and international entrepreneurs – to explore the ways in which mobile technologies are enabling greater financial inclusion. (Disclosure: I will be running a workshop at the event).

In the past two years many of the leading players in both the telecom industry and the financial sector have intensified their efforts to bring financial services to the world’s unbanked populations. Operators from Afghanistan to Zambia who either already have or want to launch mobile money services as have newer players such as PayPal and Western Union. .

India and China represent huge new opportunities. In the past year Western Union,, Nokia and a variety of local banks and carriers in India have all launched services there., The Union Bank of India, which has teamed with Nokia nad a U.S. start-up called Obopay, said their offers would help the Indian government address its social obligation of financial inclustion, especially in rural areas.

It is no surprise then that SWIFT has chosen Mumbai as the spot for its first Innotribe event in Asia.

Speakers at the event will include:

*Ben Lyon, Co-founder and Vice President of Business Development, Kopo Kopo, Inc.  Lyon is founder of FrontlineSMS:Credit and co-founder of Kopo Kopo. Ben has extensive field experience in Sub-Saharan Africa and is a respected thought leader in mobile money. He is a 2010 Unreasonable Institute Fellow, 2010 Ashoka/Staples Youth Social Enterprise Award Winner and 2010 PopTech Fellow. He received a B.A. in Economics & International Studies from Rhodes College.

*Dan Marovitz, Head of Product Management for Global Transaction Banking Chief Operating Officer, Technology for Global Banking, Deutsche Bank 
Daniel Marovitz is the Head of Product Management for Deutsche Bank’s Global Transaction Banking business as well as COO for Technology for Deutsche Bank's Global Banking division. He also serves as a strategic advisor to the division’s technology banking practice. Marovitz joined Deutsche Bank in 2000 as Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of the eGCI group at Deutsche Bank, charged with developing and implementing online products for Deutsche Bank’s investment and commercial bank.Daniel joined Deutsche Bank from iVillage, the online Women’s Network and one of the 15 most trafficked sites on the Internet, where he was Vice President of Commerce from early 1999. Before iVillage, Mr. Marovitz worked for Gateway 2000 where he served as the head of Gateway.com- which sold the first PC over the Internet.  Prior to this, Mr. Marovitz was on the founding team of Gateway’s Japanese subsidiary.
A frequent speaker on the subjects of the Internet, IT management, and outsourcing. Marovitz has addressed audiences around the world. In 2001, he co-authored, Three Clicks Away: Advice from the Trenches of eCommerce, published by John Wiley. 

*Aditya Menon, Executive Vice President, Global Alliances, Obopay
Aditya Menon, is responsible for driving strategic alliances with financial services and telecommunication partners and other mobile money ecosystem players. Aditya is based out of Bangalore and has been with Obopay since Jan 2007 playing a lead role in starting Obopay’s operations outside of the US.
Prior to joining Obopay Aditya was CIO at Yes Bank where his responsibilities included driving innovation and developing strategic planning guidelines in accordance with the business strategy of the Bank. He drove the IT strategy to make YES Bank’s technology to be game changing in the Indian market with various initiatives such as Internet two factor authentication, mobile alerts, branch in a box, total outsourcing, wireless innovation in branches and Micro-Finance. Prior to joining Yes Bank, Aditya was Group CIO at MphasiS. Aditya has been a professional entrepreneur for 14 of his 25 working years in the field of banking software product development and organization building, specifically in the transaction banking space of payments and cash management. He has been a pioneer in the field of electronic payments and banking launching the first PC based high value payments systems in 1986 for global banks like ABN AMRO and subsequently for Standard Chartered Bank. Regional Banks such as OCBC Bank and DBS Bank in Singapore currently use corporate Internet banking and high volume cash management platforms architected by him when he was running his own company.


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At a Jan. 27 meeting of high-level information technology industry executives and government officials the World Economic Forum garnered preliminary industry support to create a prototype cloud computing platform for low income countries to access health, education and agriculture applications.Read more

I have been asked to help judge Nokia's Growth Economy Venture Challenge, a contest seeking the best idea for a new mobile product or solution designed to can dramatically improve the lives of people who live in developing countries where the average income is under $5 a day.  The winning start-up will receive a $1 million venture capital investment and support from Nokia to help turn the idea into reality.Read more

I was a teenager in the 1970s, the heady days of the women's movement when bra burning and slogans such as "A Woman Without A Man Is Like a Fish Without A Bicycle"  were in vogue.  We were promised we could have it all.

There has most certainly been progress in the last 30 years. But there are still too few women leading venture-backed companies. Too few in top management of bigger companies in Europe and not enough women on the boards of companies of any size. If we women want to change that then we have to frame it in economic terms.Read more