Barnaby Jack showed a live demonstration of how he hacked two different Windows CE-based ATMs on stage during a talk this afternoon at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. Jack was scheduled to give the talk a year ago, but it was canceled after an ATM vendor objected to his then-employer, Juniper Networks. This year, Jack switched jobs to IOActive. The ease with which he hacked the machines should be a wake-up call for banks.

Jack showed how you could walk up to an ATM, break into it using a common universal key, and then use a universal serial bus (USB) stick to load a rootkit, or hacking software, that could compromise the machine’s security. On stage, he showed how he could run a program that could talk over the machines and get them to display “jackpot!” on the ATM screen and then spit out bills.

Mobile commerce, or m-commerce, is simply the ability to conduct business transactions through a mobile device. With smartphone sales rising 49% in the first quarter of 2010, never before has it been so easy to shop, anywhere, anytime from the palm of your hand. There is an enormous amount of ongoing market research, and though there has been a variety of numbers estimated and reported, they all conclude that mobile commerce is a profitable and rapidly growing market.

By 2015, it’s estimated that shoppers from around the world will spend about $119 billion on goods and services bought via their mobile phones, according to a study by ABI Research released this past February. In the United States alone, mobile shopping rose from $396 million in 2008 to $1.2 billion in 2009, and mobile campaign spending also increased by 25 to 30% over the past year, with companies shelling out just under $313 million according to the same study. Senior Analyst Mark Beccue, said that he’s forecasting U.S. sales to reach about $2.2 billion in 2010.

Here are five mobile commerce trends to keep an eye on for the remainder of 2010.

1. Bargain Hunting
2. Mobile Ticketing
3. Banking
4. Tangible Goods
5. Marketing

Akbank ilginç bir atak yaparak daha evvel iPhone için çıkarttığı Yatırımcı uygulamasının bu sefer iPad versiyonunu yayınladı. Bu sayede de iPad için uygulama geliştiren ilk finans şirketi oldu. (Diğer sektörlerden de iPad için uygulama geliştirenlerin sayısı çok çok az.)

A consistent theme keeps popping up as I discuss social media innovations with bankers these days. It is increasingly frustrating for innovators who want to use mobile, social media, the web and other such tools to get these past hyper-risk-adverse compliance specialists. It seems as if many of the banker’s I’m meeting are saying that the favorite word of the compliance officer of today is simply “No”.

That needs to change…

Wesabe is closing its doors. In an announcement on its site today, Marc Hedlund, the company's CEO said the personal finance site can't take care of its obligations to assistance and security.

Almost two years ago, we wrote a survey of the 10 leading personal finance sites. In the intervening months, three have shut down, one has been folded into another and a fifth, Mint, has been acquired. That's quite a grisly faceplant for a sector in which we could find 10 companies to profile.

Global forces: An introduction | McKinsey

For much of the past year, a team at McKinsey has revisited and retested our assumptions about the key global trends that will define the coming era. We have identified five forces, or crucibles, where the stresses and tensions will be greatest and thus offer the richest opportunities for companies to innovate and change:

• The great rebalancing. The coming decade will be the first in 200 years when emerging-market countries contribute more growth than the developed ones. This growth will not only create a wave of new middle-class consumers but also drive profound innovations in product design, market infrastructure, and value chains.
• The productivity imperative. Developed-world economies will need to generate pronounced gains in productivity to power continued economic growth. The most dramatic innovations in the Western world are likely to be those that accelerate economic productivity.
• The global grid. The global economy is growing ever more connected. Complex flows of capital, goods, information, and people are creating an interlinked network that spans geographies, social groups, and economies in ways that permit large-scale interactions at any moment. This expanding grid is seeding new business models and accelerating the pace of innovation. It also makes destabilizing cycles of volatility more likely.
• Pricing the planet. A collision is shaping up among the rising demand for resources, constrained supplies, and changing social attitudes toward environmental protection. The next decade will see an increased focus on resource productivity, the emergence of substantial clean-tech industries, and regulatory initiatives.
• The market state. The often contradictory demands of driving economic growth and providing the necessary safety nets to maintain social stability have put governments under extraordinary pressure. Globalization applies additional heat: how will distinctly national entities govern in an increasingly globalized world?

Global Forces website

very similar to PayPal..

Innovation jobs aren't supposed to be safe. If you sign up to do one, your duty to your organisation is to change things, to rock the boat.  If there was no desire to change the old way, why on earth would an innovation job have been created in the first place? Innovation jobs are permission to rock the boat.

The skill is in rocking the boat enough that things happen, but not rocking so much you capsize. 

Here's another observation I have about people in innovation jobs. They need to have alternative employment opportunities available to them at all times, or else the financial freedom to be without work for a bit while they find a new role. 

There are dozens of great demos. But four you don't want to miss are from the companies named Best of Show by the live audience on May 11: 

• Bobber Interactive: Launched a youth-oriented online banking/savings program with gaming and social features.  
• Expensify: Demoed new tools for managers to track and monitor employee spending via "expense reports that don't suck."
• oFlows: Showed its new end-to-end paperless loan-application system.
• Wikinvest: Launched its new Hurricane stock information system to deliver real-time info faster than other outlets.