Saturday, December 31, 2011

Looking back on 10 years of blogging.....

These days it's about ten years ago that I started blogging: I set up the blog Retail Betaalgedachten to voice my views on the retail payments issues in the Netherlands. At that point in time a friend of mine had a personal blog, but I started to use blogs for my consultancy work, thus being one of the very early business bloggers in the Netherlands. So here's the bottle to celebrate...:



Blogging has been with me ever since those first days. The Retail-betaalgedachten became: Linkdump on Retailpayments that you are now reading. And of course, when setting up 11a2.nl, a representative organisation for e-money issuers in the Netherlands, I chose the blog as the main landing/reading platform of the website. And in addition I set up a personal blog on jazz in the Netherlands.

And now, last year marks the beginning of yet another blog, this time on the financial history of amsterdam/netherlands. It's a spin off of my passion to always take a historical approach towards analyzing todays issues in society and industry. So as of this year, every now and then you can read my views on euro-crisis, financial sector and payments on that blog.

And on that note I wish all the readers a very good new year !!

Monday, December 05, 2011

Six Pack becomes fivepack: T-mobile leaves NFC-consortium of Dutch banks and telcos

Tweakers net today reports that T-mobile is leaving the consortium of banks and telco's in the Netherlands. The sixpack consortium is also delayed in its plans (from mid 2012 to beginning of 2013) given the considerable market share that both the banks and telco's have. So they will go to Brussels to aks for exemption of competition rules.