Agile Development - A Product Owner's Story

Most of us bank on the Internet these days. It's so convenient when you want to check out your balance, transfer money or make payments. However, the banks continue to wrestle with the very real and very big threat from fraudsters obtaining their customers banking details and clearing out their accounts via the Internet. In the world of Mobile Marketing there is one quick, simple and relatively low cost way of combating such fraud. Of course it isn't fool-proof and Internet fraudsters will always find a way around security systems whilst there's a valuable reward for them to do so. However, anything that's done to make the criminals' lives harder and our money safer has to be a step in the right direction. So what's the solution? Well, by using SMS messaging and a secure random number generator the banks can build themselves what's called a two-factor authentication system. In single factor authentication systems you only need to provide one type of infor...

Buying products and services on line via the web is common practice for most of us these days. Online shopping for goods in all shapes and sizes and a large range of costs, is second nature. We buy holidays, insurance, computer games, music, cars even houses on line so what's stopping mobile commerce emulating the great online shopping craze? After all, we generally have our mobiles with us at all times, so why not take advantage of the convenience of snapping up a bargain from eBay whilst standing at the bus stop, pick next year's holiday whilst on your tea-break or buy that sports car you've always wanted whilst spinning the exercise bike pedals at the gym. One restriction that appears to be hindering growth of the mobile phone as a serious electronic shopping device is the screen size. Most of the current models' screens are too small to allow satisfactory product presentation. You can generally only have one browser window open at anytime, so comparing products and ...

I shall apologies in advance for a bit of a ramble in this week's post as it's based on an email conversation I've been having with a guy called Manju who got in touch via my Linkedin .com page. It's about contactless payments which utilises Near Field Communication (NFC) technologies. For those of you that aren't up to speed on NFC I'll explain what it is in a second (actually I've c&pd from Wikipedia). For those who know it inside and out you may want to skip a few paragraphs... Essentially, NFC, is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimetre (around 4 inches) distance (although my own tests suggests this is often more like 2 cms ). The technology is a simple extension of the ISO/ IEC 14443 proximity-card standard (as used in RFID ) that combines the interface of a smartcard and a reader into a single device. One of the real advantages of NFC is tha...

Is there an opportunity to make money from the International Remittances Market? Well, according to the World Bank in 2007, the overall global market for international remittances was estimated to be $340bn, so the simple answer is a rapturous “yes”. The tiger economies and the developing world continue to be the most attractive. According to analysts Yankee, the value of remittances made by foreign workers residing in Malaysia alone totalled $4.3bn annually as at 2008. With an estimated 2.3m foreign workers plying their trade in the country, this works out at an average annual remittance value of roughly $1,800 per worker per annum, or $150 per month. If one was to charge just 5% commission per transaction ($7.50) that’s a potential addressable market value of $17.25m per annum for just a single country. If only 10% of those transferring money between individuals in different countries switched to doing this using their mobile phone, then that gives us an addressable market for ...