Monday, November 25, 2002

States Try to Tackle Online Sales Tax. Thirty-one states have settled on a framework that legislatures can use to streamline tax codes, a step toward trying to collect sales tax from goods sold online. By Matt Richtel. [New York Times: Business] 6:06:13 AM

Recently someone mentioned a Wired article - The Long Boom: A History of the Future. And I finally read it over the weekend. A disconcerting read - not by how right they turned out to be or by how wrong they turned out to be - but by how it is mostly neither, how in so many places they are right and wrong at the same time. In some places, you glimpse the naive. Research by a few economists, like Stanford University's Paul Romer, suggests that fundamentally new technologies generally don't become productive until a generation after their introduction, the time it takes for people to really learn how to use them in new ways. Sure enough, about a generation after the introduction of personal computers in the workplace, work processes begin mutating enough to take full advantage of the tool. Soon after, economists figure out how to accurately measure the true gains in productivity - and take into account the nebulous concept of improvement in quality rather than just quantity. And, I must confess, I likely read it at the time and thought it brilliant (it was). Its over optimism helps give balance, caution, to any current over pessimism. The quote is right, new technologies generally don't become productive until a generation after their introduction. And for that generation there are new technologies to wrestle with. At once we triumph and we tremble before the next challenge. The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020 By Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, Wired, July, 1997 We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that? And then this current article on the ongoing evolution of the banking industry, one of the first hit by the forces of digital adapt or die. Helps place it all into perspective. Evolution continues - be it business process change or social change. Banking behind the scenes From the McKinsey Quarterly, Special to CNET News.com, November 24, 2002, 4:00 AM PT Banks constantly battle to streamline their back-office "factories," with good cause--these facilities can be responsible for up to half of their operating costs, excluding interest. 5:58:26 AM

Dan Gillmor: Cash cards rule in Hong Kong. San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor reports from Hong Kong on the Octopus card. Octopus is easily the world's most successful experiment to date in stored-value, electronic cash cards. Instead of pulling out bills and coins in subways, buses, fast-food restaurants and convenience stores, customers wave purses and wallets past devices that deduct dollars from their cards inside. These are not debit cards, the widely used system in the United States. With debit cards, money gets deducted from bank accounts during transactions. Octopus cards are the real thing when it comes to cash cards. They are equivalent to cash. You put value into them, spend it down and then replenish the money if you want to keep using it. They're like cash in another crucial way. If the user prefers, they are entirely anonymous -- that is, not linked to any bank account or other personal information. An earlier report in ComputerWeekly mentions both Octopus and Sony's EDY e-purse as likely to succeed in their respective markets. Operating in Japan through a separate company named BitWallet, Sony's EDY electronic money system is being adopted by Japanese finance companies. [Scott Loftesness] 4:17:01 AM

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