Night with a Futurist - MEMBERS ONLY: The Future of Micropayments May 9, 2011

In 2003 the DaVinci Institute produced an event called the “Future of Money Summit” and one of the areas we focused on was the future of micropayments.

Micropayments are small electronic transfers of money, usually only a few cents at a time, seamlessly transacted for digital information products like magazine articles, photos, and games.

At the time, several new micropayment companies had sprung to life and many felt the climate was ripe for this kind of enterprise.

But micropayments have a long history of falling flat, and 2003 was no exception. If you do a Google search for “Wired future of money”, there are over a dozen articles stretching back close to 20 years. So there have been a lot of attempts, and they have all run into the same issues.

There is one big problem they’ve all run into - it takes money to move money.

It’s not that the technology is expensive, or that costs scale up with volume: moving $1 between two banks costs about the same as moving $1 billion. The “problem” is that there are so many intermediaries who want a cut, albeit small ones.

Any successful micropayment scheme needs to deal effectively with three challenges:

Low Friction (Both in ease of use and low transfer costs)
Ubiquitous (Everyone needs to accept it)
Handle Fraud Effectively

Even though many past efforts have failed, a recent surge in micropayment activity by PayPal, Facebook, and others are breathing new life into this area of business. And new technologies have emerged that can potentially solve past problems.

Please join us as we take an in-depth look at micropayment and what we feel will become a huge marketplace in the future.

EVENT: Night with a Futurist - MEMBERS ONLY
DATE: May 9, 2011 - Monday
TIME: 6:30pm-9:00pm
WEBSITE: http://www.davinciinstitute.com/events/505/night-with-a-futurist--members-only-monday-march-14-2011

LOCATION: DaVinci Institute, 511 E. South Boulder Road Louisville, CO 80027

COST: $0, Members: Free, SuperMembers: Free

PHONE: 303-666-4133

TOPIC: The Future of Micropayments
SPEAKER: Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute

Official Website: http://www.davinciinstitute.com/events/531/night-with-a-futurist--members-only-monday-may--9-2011