The use of cellular phones for mobile payments takes two main forms: using the cellular phone as an electronic wallet and as a credit card reader terminal.

With the first option, the phone simply replaces the traditional credit card.

The second option enables the phone owner to accept payments from traditional credit cards or electronic wallets. Earlier versions achieved limited popularity, as they required connecting the phone to an external card reader, or entering the information manually. A more recent development integrated a credit card reader directly into the Smartphone by either using image processing   or an RFID / NFC  Reader, permitting it to read Credit cards with RFID tags.

The vision is that Smartphones transactions will replace transactions that until now were typically done using cash. For example, Bob and Alice go to a restaurant, Bob pays for dinner with his credit card. Alice wants to share the cheque, but is not carrying cash… and so Alice gives to Bob her  credit card; Bob scans the card using his Smartphone and charges Alice for half of the dinner cost.

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) hope to benefit from these financial transactions by establishing a presence at this new market. For example according to Bloomberg AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile USA are planning a venture to displace credit and debit cards with Smartphone’s.  However, they are not alone. many companies from different backgrounds, from Apple, through  PayPal to Visa, are entering into the mobile payment market.

So what we have is a big market with huge potential, where CSPs, device manufactures, and Credit/Payments companies are all jostling to get a lead position, because as the song says the winner (segment) takes it all.

Can you imagine a world in which all the payments are made using phones and Credit card companies  or the CSPs don’t see a penny of it?

All this excitement opens up new “opportunities” for revenue leakage and fraud. However this time the leakage will not be in minutes, but hard cash. The question is how much money will companies lose before they realize the need to adopt and adapt RA and fraud prevention standards from the telecommunication industry in addition with existing anti fraud best practices from the financial world.

Only time will tell…

Ok, so I wasn’t as accurate as Paul the octopus in predicting the Football world cup matches results, but I believe I have good reasons:
1.       I predicted all the results in advance, while Paul predicted each game at a time knowing the previous results. Certainly an unfair advantage!
2.       Paul has domain expertise, he started his prediction career two years ago predicting the UEFA Euro 2008 results, and he clearly improved since then. I just started now, with this world cup, so I can still improve!
3.      Scientist claims that octopuses are quite intelligent animals that can even use tools, So  Paul’s intelligence is clearly an scientific fact  , while  no ,   scientist ever claimed that I am intelligent (I know a few that claimed quite the opposite)!Now being more serious, my predictions (see below) were quite good (my correct predictions are marked in red)
·         Reach the quarter finals: Spain, England, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Holland, Germany, and France – 50% success
·         Reach the semi finals: Spain, England, Argentina, and Brazil – 25% success
·         Reach the finals: Spain and Brazil – 50% - success
·         Champion: Spain – 100% - success
·         Top Goal Scorer: Villa of Spain – 100% - success

Disclaimer – despite my good predictions, please do not attempt this at home, I do not recommend betting, the chances of losing, even if you use a highly sophisticated method, are higher than wining (otherwise gambling wouldn’t be such a great industry).

Until the next world cup, viva España !
Gadi

By now you are certainly asking yourselves: Who will win the World Cup? Who will be the finalist? Who will be the top goal scorer? Here at cVidya we decided to make a friendly internal bet. I must admit that I enjoy football as the next person, but I don’t know a lot about it. So what should I do? How do I ensure that I get the upper hand?

Data mining is often used to identify or predict a phenomenon; e.g., identify fraud or predict high risk of churn. However, given the same data, different data-mining models will predict different outcomes, even when each of the models was built by an expert. One of the approaches is to try to select your prediction by consensus; basically, you predict that those clients that were identified as being at high risk of churn by the majority of the models are indeed a risk. The beauty of this is that you do not have to understand why and how each of the models made its prediction in order to reach the consensus. (OK, it is not so simple; you should take care not to have bias by duplication of identical or similar models – but experts in data mining also deserve to make a living!)

So what does all this have to do with football? Instead of data-mining models, I took the bet ratios from several e-gambling sites, combined them, and here is my bet. Next month I’ll let you know whether it was enough to win cVidya’s internal contest.

Disclaimer: The following predictions were made simply using some math and in no way show my personal preferences. And of course, I cannot guarantee that they are correct; quite the opposite, there is a high probability that they are incorrect.

Reach the quarter finals: Spain, England, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Holland, Germany, and France

Reach the semi finals: Spain, England, Argentina, and Brazil

Reach the finals: Spain and Brazil

Champion: Spain

Top Goal Scorer: Villa of Spain

Last week, when I was in China, I saw in Shenzhen airport a cartoon in a 3D TV without glasses set up by a Chinese company called TCL .
Amazing! The quality of the 3D was affected by my exact distance from and position relative to the TV. While the quality was still not HD, it was a marvelous preview into the future. Think of the opportunities, think of watching a ‘clásico’ between Real and Barça (Spanish football, of course) in 3D. Wow! Now think of having cameras installed on the players and watchng the game in 3D from Messi’s perspective.Does it have anything to do with RA? Well, yes! New technologies lead to new services that eventually lead to new billing schemes, which bring new challenges in terms of RA. For example, you pay for watching the game from the perspective of player A but the player is replaced in the middle of the game.
What happens now? How do you verify correct charging? What about the correct revenue share with the player, the team, etc? Now think of all this with real-time charging…After enjoying the match from Messi’s perspective and as he saw it, we RA practitioners need to develop RA techniques that will cope with these new realities.

Since I work for an RA vendor and yet wish to avoid turning my blog into a marketing tool, I have decided long ago to refrain from writing in my blogs about any RA vendor. Instead, I try to put my ideas and thoughts, which anybody is welcome to contradict, in writing. In fact, I enjoy very much a healthy discussion.
However, I do wish for the discussions to remain at the thematic level and not descend into what this company is doing or why this person said this or that. Therefore, I abstain from publishing comments that try to use this blog as a platform to fight or praise RA vendors based on personal or business interests.

I am sorry if this policy frustrates some people, yet I do not plan to change itGadi

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
“Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2) 

Juliet claims that a name is just a name, but clearly all marketing people will tell you that a name is an important part of the essence. Just think that starting tomorrow we would call Coca-Cola  Pepsi and vice versa.

I believe that RA is an evolving profession and not a random occupation. We have an established name for our profession, Revenue assurance. It may not be such a great name, because it also covers costs assurance. However, it is a well known and widely used name and so I am happy with it. My problem is with the way we call ourselves; are we RA experts, RA practitioners? Read the rest of this entry »