MasterCard Names Antonio Ferri to Newly Created Position of Group Executive of Enterprise Architecture (MasterCard nomeia Antonio Ferri para a recentemente criada posição de Executivo de Arquitetura Empresarial do Grupo)

O post abaixo, do http://news.prnewswire.com, é interessante por duas razões.  Em primeiro lugar pelo fato de uma grande organização, como é a MasterCard, estar criando uma nova posição, que é a de Arquiteto Empresarial, o que, por si só já é um indicativo da importância deste novo conceito na nova empresa contemporânea. Há algum tempo venho argumentando em favor da questão da Arquitetura Empresarial como um dado novo a ser incorporado pelas empresas.

O segundo fato é o tamanho da operação de TI da MasterCard (ver abaixo no post), e o que representa esta corporação em termos de sua importância financeira.  Ou seja, não dá mais para gerir uma empresa deste porte sem uma robusta TI, e isto significa complexidade, e complexidade se enfrenta com Arquitetura Empresarial!

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MasterCard Names Antonio Ferri to Newly Created Position of Group Executive of Enterprise Architecture

MasterCard Worldwide today announced the appointment of Antonio “Tony” Ferri to the newly created position of group executive of Enterprise Architecture. Based at the company’s Global Technology and Operations headquarters in St. Louis, Ferri takes on responsibility for information technology effectiveness and efficiency, as well as ensuring technology structure is in line with overall business strategy. (PRNewsFoto/MasterCard Worldwide, Tim Parker)

ST. LOUIS, MO UNITED STATES

ST. LOUIS, April 9 /PRNewswire/ — MasterCard Worldwide today announced the appointment of Antonio “Tony” Ferri to the newly created position of group executive of Enterprise Architecture. Based at the company’s Global Technology and Operations (GTO) headquarters in St. Louis, Ferri takes on responsibility for information technology effectiveness and efficiency, as well as ensuring technology structure is in line with overall business strategy.

Ferri will direct the MasterCard IT roadmap, ensuring that the company’s technology and operations capabilities are aligned with its business strategies. He also will oversee components of the software development lifecycle and continue the implementation of advanced processes to improve business and IT operations. He will manage and work with IT business partners, suppliers and vendors critical to the success of the MasterCard computing infrastructure.

“Tony Ferri is an industry veteran. He has extensive knowledge of IT and operations as well as deep understanding of the critical importance of technology in driving our business. His experience will be invaluable in helping to ensure that MasterCard stays at the forefront of leadership and innovation in the growing market of electronic payment processing,” said Rob Reeg, president of MasterCard GTO.

Ferri comes to MasterCard GTO with nearly 30 years of experience leading information technology and other corporate organizations in solving high-impact business problems, achieving operational excellence and setting strategic direction.

“I am extremely pleased to be joining the award-winning team of MasterCard IT professionals. Unlike most companies, where information technology is a support function, at MasterCard innovative IT is fundamental to the business – from network operations, to payment processing, to differentiated software solutions for its financial institution customers and on to the company’s tremendous data warehouse,” Ferri said.

Ferri joins MasterCard from Dante Consulting, where he was a senior consultant. Ferri earlier served as chief development officer and chief enterprise architect at PriceWaterhouseCoopers with responsibility both for U.S. and European territories. He also held senior IT positions at several leading companies including Verizon, AT&T Telecommunications and Sprint Telecommunications. Ferri received a bachelor’s of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles.

About MasterCard Global Technology and Operations

From its headquarters in O’Fallon, Mo., MasterCard Global Technology and Operations manages its operations in 210 countries and territories. For approximately 24,000 financial institutions, the MasterCard Worldwide Network in 2008 processed 21 billion transactions with a gross dollar volume of $2.5 trillion. The MasterCard network has the capacity to handle 140 million transactions per hour with an average network response time of 140 milliseconds and 99.999 percent network availability.

About MasterCard Worldwide

MasterCard Worldwide advances global commerce by providing a critical economic link among financial institutions, businesses, cardholders and merchants worldwide. As a franchisor, processor and advisor, MasterCard develops and markets payment solutions, processes approximately 21 billion transactions each year, and provides industry-leading analysis and consulting services to financial-institution customers and merchants. Powered by the MasterCard Worldwide Network and through its family of brands, including MasterCard(R), Maestro(R) and Cirrus(R), MasterCard serves consumers and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. For more information go to www.mastercard.com.

Freemium model for newspapers and other survival ideas (Modelo Freemium para jornais e outras idéias de sobrevivência)

Post de hoje de Don Dodge, da Microsoft!

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Freemium model for newspapers and other survival ideas

Newspapers do a poor job of monetizing their web sites. Google is not the problem, in fact, search engines are their best friends. The AP news service told Miguel Helft at the NYT “It’s a balancing act,” he said. “We’d like to have a pay wall but we like the traffic we get from search engines.”. The newspapers should follow the example of many web based companies and implement the Freemium business model where basic content is free and premium content and services are paid by subscription. Most freemium based companies convert between 2% and 10% of their users to paid subscriptions. The average is about 4% but it depends on the premium services and price points.

Check out this quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in the New York Times “Mr.. Schmidt encouraged publishers to create more personalized news products that could be delivered effectively on the Web, cellphones and other devices. “We think we can build a business — again, with you guys — with significant advertising resources, where the advertising is targeted to the content,” he said. He acknowledged that many publishers were increasingly thinking about charging for their content, and said he expected the newspaper industry to eventually resemble television, where some content was free, some was purchased by subscription and some was paid for every time it was viewed. But he said he expected that advertising would remain the leading revenue model in online media.”

The New York Times says “They Pay For Cable, Music, and Extra Bags. How About News?” The story points out where consumers pay for content and services, but fails to explain why. Understanding what consumers will pay for, and why, is critical to any business. The successful freemium guys have figured this out. Some fascinating examples in the NYT story;

In 1995, Encyclopedia Britannica began selling online subscriptions and attracted 70,000 paying customers. But in 1999 it opened its doors, hoping to take advantage of the Internet advertising boom. Two years later, it reversed course again, and now charges $70 a year for access to most of its site. When it resumed charging in 2001, it got back to 70,000 subscribers within 10 months, and now has about 200,000.

The Web site of The Financial Times, FT.com, had more than one million registered users in 2001, when it began charging for access to much of its content though many articles remain open to anyone.“After a year, we had 50,000 subscribers,” said Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com. Eight years later, the figure is up to 109,000, he said, a small portion of the number of readers who visit the site.

Personally, I am amazed that the Encyclopedia Britannica can pull in $14M a year in subscriptions when Wikipedia and lots of other web sources are free. But that just illustrates my main point that businesses today need to employ multiple business models and pricing plans. In the old days you could make all customers fit into one model. Not anymore. Every business needs to understand what customers want and how they are willing to consume the product/service and pay for it. There are many examples of very successful free web services and free newspapers that are totally ad supported. There are many examples of freemium companies that provide a free base service and charge premiums for enhanced services or features. Subscriptions and one time fees work too. Newspapers need to employ all of these models, and come up with interesting bundled services, to get back to profitability.

Production costs kill newspapers. My home town newspaper prints Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. The printing and distribution costs are just too high to support a 7 day model. Some newspapers update their web sites daily but only print a Sunday newspaper. The Boston Globe might want to consider a bundled service where you get the Sunday newspaper home delivered and daily access to premium content on their web site for one subscription price. National news, business news, and sports news is freely available on many Internet web sites. Local news, hyper-local content, is what people are willing to pay for…and where the advertising rates are FAR higher. Newspapers need to figure out how segment the market and optimize their revenue opportunities. Resistance is futile…and time is short.

Post from Don Dodge

Predicting the Present with Google Trends (Prevendo o Presente com Google Trends)

 Aí está meu guru Prof. Hal Varian com mais uma a partir de sua posição de Chief Economist Officer do Google!

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Predicting the Present with Google Trends

Thursday, April 02, 2009 at 4/02/2009 02:10:00 PM

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist and Hyunyoung Choi, Decision Support Engineering AnalystCan Google queries help predict economic activity?

 

The answer depends on what you mean by “predict.” Google Trends and Google Insights for Search provide a real time report on query volume, while economic data is typically released several days after the close of the month. Given this time lag, it is not implausible that Google queries in a category like “Automotive/Vehicle Shopping” during the first few weeks of March may help predict what actual March automotive sales will be like when the official data is released halfway through April.

That famous economist Yogi Berra once said “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” This inspired our approach: let us lower the bar and just try to predict the present.

Our work to date is summarized in a paper called Predicting the Present with Google Trends. We find that Google Trends data can help improve forecasts of the current level of activity for a number of different economic time series, including automobile sales, home sales, retail sales, and travel behavior.

Even predicting the present is useful, since it may help identify “turning points” in economic time series. If people start doing significantly more searches for “Real Estate Agents” in a certain location, it is tempting to think that house sales might increase in that area in the near future.

Our paper outlines one approach to short-term economic prediction, but we expect that there are several other interesting ideas out there. So we suggest that forecasting wannabes download some Google Trends data and try to relate it to other economic time series. If you find an interesting pattern, post your findings on a website and send a link to econ-forecast@google.com. We’ll report on the most interesting results in a later blog post.

It has been said that if you put a million monkeys in front of a million computers, you would eventually produce an accurate economic forecast. Let’s see how well that theory works …