Thirsty Rock

In 2008 Jerome Kerviel, a French national, was formally charged with the trading incident in which Société De Générale lost close to € 5 billion. Jerome held pole position as the greatest rogue trader to tread the earth. Until Bernard Madoff turned up. Last week Fabrice Tourre, believed to be the architect of the sub-prime mortgage mess, took leave to wait out an SEC probe into privileged hedging aided (and some say abetted) by Goldman Sachs . Mr Tourre is a French national. France has a history of producing some of the best brains in mathematics: Siméon-Denis Poisson (1781-1840), Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) and, of course, Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827). Concocting complex derivatives demands a high aptitude for numbers, a trait shared by Monsieur Kerviel and Tourre. We haven't seen the last of French mathematicians brewing complex algorithms.

Microsoft on Monday (12 April 2010) unveiled two new smart phones aimed at teenagers. The low cost phones target the bottom of the smart phone pyramid where Research In Motion's Blackberry rules supreme. Both phones (Kin One and Kin Two) have a touch screen and are wired for social networking (Facebook, Tweeter and MySpace) where teenagers like to hang out. The following Tuesday saw Nokia showcase the C3, E5 and C6 phones, aimed at the world's bottom billion - the low tier CIA markets (China, India and Africa). Nokia's arsenal in the battle for mobile commerce is almost complete. Expect to see an upswing in M&A involving OEMs, MNOs and financial institutions later in the year.

Software developers are flocking to the mobile platform en masse lured by exponential growth in subscriptions that are fast approaching one billion. However, mobile phones present different challenges to PC software development. The most significant hurdle is size – both physical and virtual. Mass market handset typically sport 512 KB on-board memory, with 2 MB or more available on smart phones. Another challenge is security. Since data is transmitted over the air (using well known frequencies), rogue intrusions and interceptions are a real threat. Advanced encryption techniques only add to the another limitation of mobile phones – power. Network traffic places a huge demand on processors and therefore power consumption. Inelegant designs place limitations on application usage (hours). One final hurdle is choice of development environment. Developers are faced with a plethora of tools: Java ME, EclipseME, C++, Adobe Flash, QT and many others. Then add to that cocktail a slew of di...

Researchers (Ngai and Gunasekan (2007); Clarke (1992)) locate the discipline of Information Systems (IS) between computer science and social sciences. A study by Li et al (2009) which found that theories drawn from Psychology and Sociology inform 49% of research papers supports the hybrid nature of IS. A dearth of home grown theory in the IS discipline has sparked debate in major journals including MISQ, Information Systems Research and Communications of the AIM. Novice researchers are confounded by a lack of indigenous theory within IS depending instead on theories lifted from various reference disciplines. One of the main reasons for conducting any research is to increase the body of knowledge (Clarke, 2000). On this score alone IS has not fared well. Benbast (2008) argues that the propensity for cohorts to use dominant theories such as the Technology Acceptance Model (Davies, 1989) and Innovation Diffusion Theory (Rodger, 1990) has meant that resources that could have been applie...

In most developing countries there are possibly many more mobile phone users than there are bank account holders. This ubiquitous nature of mobile terminals will position them as the preferred access point for ‘anytime, anywhere’ services (Cyr et al 2006). Yet, in spite of advancements in cellular technology such as increased bandwidth and packet switching (Lee et al 2003), researchers acknowledge that mobile communication technologies present new challenges for diffusion to both banks and users (Harker and Van Akken 2002; Sugai 2005). High penetration rates of mobile devices have not been matched by a high uptake in mobile commerce (Khalifa and Ning Shen 2008). That may change. At the recent GSMA Mobile World Conference held in Barcelona key industry heavyweights including Vodafone and Nokia signalled their intention to provide platforms for mobile banking. Many are motivated by the resounding success of M-PESA in Kenya. Researchers are keen to establish antecedents to the behavio...