While Google has gotten a lot of attention in the media around their wallet offering – there are other groups including VISA (including V.Me) and American Express who are developing their own wallet. Google has already launched pilots in Chicago and San Francisco. The first pilot to launch in Canada will be in early 2012. RIM and Telefonica has just launched a pilot of a version of the digital wallet in Spain.

Paypal’s unique entry combines NFC and non-NFC devices – they are selling the idea to retailers that to update their POSes requires a software upgrade rather than a hardware upgrade with NFC. In the instance of the non-NFC solution, one would use their mobile number and PIN for payment from their mobile wallet.

Owning the scope, budget, and timelines are the main responsibilities for the project manager — however most folks attempt to manage the project as “administrators” vs. “managers”.   A key differentiator between administrators and managers is leadership within the actual project. Often I see people who have been placed in project management roles fail because they could not lead people within the project — they are often pushed into a situation where they are bullied or too accommodating to the internal team or client needs.

At times, project managers require the need to lead people towards the overall deliverable — while each team member has a responsibility in ensuring their parts are completed, the project manager has to ensure that the project moves in the appropriate direction — within scope, budget, and timelines. This is not an easy thing to do — and appropriate controls are required. However, it is not enough to have things documented or even having a PMP certification. Strong leadership is required to ensure the project is moving forward in the right direction.

What are the best U.S. social media conferences in 2011?

Apple, lost in the PC war with Microsoft, focused their efforts in consumer electronics.  The lessons they learned from their experiences in the PC industry helped translate into their success in the iPod and iPhone products.   They were not first to market for both products — and the industries were highly competitive — but what they were able to offer was a simple and elegant user experience to digital music players and smartphones, leveraging their marketing, R&D, technology, and supply-chain prowess.   Microsoft, on the other hand, has unfortunately not figured this out yet (XBox is an exception) and because of their monopolistic practices in the PC industry, tried to apply a similar approach towards the media player (Zune) and smartphone product categories (Windows Mobile) but failed.  Microsoft’s arrogance towards product development and its failure to capture customers and Apple’s successes has resulted them to emulate similar practices… the challenge for Microsoft is that they were once agile and nimble but have become large and bureaucratic.    The product launch of Microsoft Windows Vista was a disaster — because they released a product which had too many bugs and it was slow and consumers looked for alternatives.

Keeping abreast of your competition, trends within the industry, understanding operations to reduce cost, getting to know your customer (feedback) are critical to challenge the status-quo, in order to create uneasiness and to combat complacency.  By doing so, companies have a greater chance in growing over the long-haul.

In 2007, Apple had responded to criticism by environmental groups such as Greenpeace who questioned their environmental commitment by taking a position on climate change, improving product energy efficiency, and recycling performance and to eliminate toxic chemicals from their products including: mercury and arsenic from displays and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from internal components. Apple introduced a policy on climate change, product energy efficiency, and overall recycling performance. A “Greener Apple” is an important part of their corporate business strategy. Also having Al Gore, former US Vice-President and active environmentalist — serves as a Director on the Apple board.

Although many companies are being socially responsible, they have found some challenges when taking their products/services to the global stage.  Google’s internal corporate motto “Don’t Be Evil” was said to recognize that large corporations often maximize short-term profits with actions that destroy long-term brand image and competitive position. By instilling a culture of trust and image would outweigh short-term gain. When they were entering China in 2006, they caved into China’s hard-line censorship by allowing the government to self-censor their search engine. CEO Eric Schmidt explained that the term “don’t be evil” was then later replaced with an “evil scale” balancing evils for a greater good — rather than taking a stand on censorship, the Chinese market was too large to ignore and caved into China’s demands.