Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published in VentureBeat. The Internet is about to hit its fourth major shift in server architecture. The early days were powered by simple Perl applications. As the dotcom hit, Java application servers running on highend UNIX machines powered the majority of the web and created a multibillion dollar per year industry. In the 2000s, scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby running on cloud based Linux infrastructure have spawned massive growth at companies like Rackspace and Amazon with its Amazon Web Services service. Each of these shifts in server architecture brought greater efficiencies and the ability to more cheaply deliver more sophisticated Internet services. We are now on the verge of hitting another inflection point with JavaScript running on the server. JavaScript came onto the scene in 1995 as the browser language in Netscape’s Navigator browser and was primarily used to implement simple user interface elements such as menus. With the wave of Web

This post was also published in VentureBeat. There has been a huge scrum amongst the smartphone players to capture the market for phone-based purchases. In a very surprising move, the major US-based carriers just folded their mobile payments hand, and folded it hard. Isis, the mobile payment system sponsored by Verizon, AT&T and TMobile, announced that it had signed deals with Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover to its touch and go payment systems. In the European and Asian markets, mobile carriers are payment providers, and people use their phones to pay for goods and services and then pay their carrier, and the carriers get a cut. So why are US carriers not going after this incredibly lucrative market? There’s actually a very simple reason. Payment providers require trust, and the US carriers decidedly do not have their customers’ trust. When your Verizon bill shows up and you see that it is $50 over what you expect, your first reaction is that they are scre