Here’s my points of extrapolation:

1. Facebook has garnered a significant share of people’s online time.  It’s become a default daily activity for 500M people globally.  That’s one helluva marketplace.
2. Social Media works better on mobile devices.  Said another way, more people are accessing (read: addicted) to Facebook via their mobile phone.
3. Mobile phones make a great way to pay for things.  I’ve discussed this before.

It’s a relatively straight line to draw from those three points to having Facebook offer up a PayPal-type functionality where friends exchange credits with each other, and then Facebook then offers up some sort of payment gateway with retailers.  I realize that the “credits” being sold in the stores are going the other way– from physical retail to virtual credits, but it’s easy to see that river flowing the other way once people start to see Facebook as another wallet to store value and trade/give/sell/swap with their friends.

Online gift cards have been a perennial also-ran.  Gift cards are cheesy enough for a store, but coupled with the inhuman touch of an online shopping experience, gift cards have never really worked that well.  However, Facebook is inherently a friend-connection system.  Might that humanization be enough to overcome the inhibitions around gift cards?  Let me ask the question this way: if you could simply run through your facebook friend list, and click “$5″ next to each name, then put the sum total on a credit card, would you do it?

Christmas shopping done in 10 minutes… oh yeah.

Just search in Katakana

UPDATE 4JUL2010: The ICANN board has now approved Chinese character URLs. I doubt this will change the marketing strategies for Japanese companies, however.  I think we’ll just get a bunch of redirects.

Americans invented the Internet, and it’s going to stay nice and readable to Americans as long as they have anything to say about it (daggumit). Most people in the Americas, Western Europe, and Australia are blithely unaware that a battle has been raging for several years among the internationalists over the format of the URL (the web address you type to go somewhere on the web). Why? Because these countries all use the roman alphabet. Our slavic friends would love to use cyrillic URLs; Chinese want Chinese characters, Koreans want hangul, etc. The ICANN (the international standards cops) are still only testing and allowing non-roman alphabets in limited trials.

Last month in Tokyo, I noticed something about all the adverts on the trains: the Japanese companies have found a way around the common restriction: they simply tell you (the customer) what to search for, using Japanese kanji and gana, nevermind what the actual proper URL may be. I’ve highlighted two examples here (forgive the low photo quality– lighting on subways isn’t so bright).

On the good side, by asking the commuter to search for a specific keyword, they’ve immediately screened out all the content from the English-language Internet (which can be overbearing in volume). Every mobile phone has this rudimentary web search capability, so the call-to-action is immediate.

Solar backpacks-- just search for

On the bad side, however, this strategy assumes some risk: if I ask for my customers to find me by searching for “スマート外国人” (smart gaijin), what happens when someone else comes along with a better SEO value for that term? All my advertising now goes to benefit someone else.

Mitigating this risk are three factors: 1) campaigns on the trains cycle pretty quickly, so keyword hints can be updated often; 2) the keywords are pretty specific, and the campaigns only bring more traffic, which then reinforces the lead position; 3) Rakuten has an almost monopoly-level stranglehold on web publishing in Japan. If two companies conflict over a desired keyword, Rakuten can probably work it out between them (ah, the Japanese sense of controlharmony). It’s kinda like when AOL or Yahoo could get away with this back in the day.

This thing is metal, the size of a credit card, and uses contactless RFID to talk with whatever cash register is nearby.  Japan Rail started using Suica on the train wickets 10 years ago (traditionally, the choke point of inefficiency in any station) in order to speed people through before they get packed in like sardines (you’ve seen the pics before, and yes– it’s true).  From there, it soon spread to the convenience kiosks on the platform, the convenience stores next door, and now looks pretty ubiquitous anywhere within a kilometer of the station (which means everywhere except your grandma’s house).

Visa and Mastercard never got very far in Japan (compared to marketshare in the US).  JCP (a Japan-specific credit card) had a good run, but looks to be shrinking to second-class status like Discover Card.  Cash was always king: I used to walk around with the equivalent of $500 in my back pocket; most Japanese had $1000 on them at any given time.  Big cash + crowded trains = pickpocket’s dreamland.  I couldn’t ever figure out why crime was so low.

But enter the Suica– it’s got both Cash and Credit Cards beat:

• can be loaded up with credit via monthly automatic deposit, cash in an ATM, or even cash-back from some POS
• personally stamped with your daily commute route
• same size as a credit card
• no numbers or identity to be stolen
• MUCH MUCH faster than a credit card transaction

That last point is the killer.  To buy anything, all we had to do was tap this thing inside a circle on the glass counter, as if we were beknighting the transaction,  done.  Meanwhile, a credit card requires a swipe, a printout, the hostess signing the receipt, and we (the buyer) countersigning.  I know that some US places are just accepting the one swipe under a given amount (no signing required under $25 or so), but it’s still slower.

My prediction: Suica or other RFID cards are coming to the US soon (some are already here).  They’ll take a good chunk away from Visa corporation, especially in mass-transit towns like Boston, NYC, DC, and/or San Francisco.  My money is on Boston or San Francisco, especially if they can figure out a way to build community-centric bullshit around the card.

If I were Yelp, I would be teaming up with JR on bringing a branded card to SFO right away.