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How Marty McFly’s sneakers help your credit card company prevent fraud
Maybe not those sneakers per se, but my latest column for Fox Business explores five of the most ridiculous credit card charges of all time, including Tinie Tempah’s recent purchase of a $37,500 pair of Nike Mags. (Don’t worry, it was for charity.) Your credit card company watches for purchases that fall outside your normal…
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Happy Independence Day.
Happy Fourth of July! Before I head out to enjoy some red velvet pancakes, parades, and fireworks, I’m going to explain what’s happening here. For more than a decade, I’ve been ghost writing blogs, articles, and even books for clients all over the United States. I’ve done it under the cover of various “day jobs,”…
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The Making of Barclaycard Ring
In an era of big bank consolidation, I’m excited that the folks from Barclaycard have chosen to leverage their “clean brand” to shake up the credit card business here in the United States. I interviewed Barclaycard’s Paul Wilmore for this credit card profile on the Fox Business website.
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Five Weird Food Combos
I don’t always just write about personal finance and music. My first food blog post landed at The Daily Meal this week. I catalog five of the weirdest plates I saw or heard about during my recent trip to New York. Highlights include a pickle marinated in Kool-Aid and a specialty pizza that costs $1,000.…
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Credit Cards of the Future
Fox Business, NASDAQ, and many other outlets in our CardRatings syndicate picked up my feature on four technology trends that could change the way we use credit cards over the next twenty years. I’m not sure if we’ll figure out how to eliminate cash in our lifetime. After all, there’s still something very primal and…
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MSN Feature: Demystifying Your Credit Score
The folks at MSN highlighted a feature I originally wrote for CardRatings.com about the ingredients that make up your credit score. Each one of the four major credit bureaus uses their own recipe: FICO TransUnion Equifax Experian Some bureaus give more weight to what you’ve done with your credit history over the past two years,…
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Multiple Audiences, Multiple Networks
When I helped relaunch XPN‘s online presence over 10 years ago, our biggest concern was unifying the experience across multiple platforms. At the time, it still felt strange to shepherd your audience from your on-air stream to your online content. Moving somebody from an FM signal to a blog page felt wrong, and I know…
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Best of spinme.com: Cultural significance, microfunding, finding collaborators
I’m through the hardest part of the “remastering” process on the spinme.com books series, so I’ve been able to spend more time posting new essays to the site: “What’s culturally significant?“ I remember being part of a team that asked this question at WXPN in the late 1990s, and it crops up again today. When…
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Why we never cut the cord.
I declared victory over the need to get a cable box in the new apartment in this post from a few months back. You might be among the dozens of folks who’ve been asking me about what happened since then. Turns out, it’s not as easy as you might think to totally cut the cord.…
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I’m starting my New Year’s Resolutions a few weeks early.
Attending Barcamp Philly inspired me to solidify a lot of these ideas. There’s a JFDI attitude in this town that I find myself connecting with more and more. Now that I’m settled in from our move to Center City, I’m no longer content to wait until 2011 to make some changes. 1. Add more white…
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Best of CardRatings.com: PayPal, Kardashians, APIs
Some of my favorite recent stories from our CardRatings.com Credit Card News blog: PayPal’s mobile app enables person-to-person transactions. It sounds like they want to take on the folks from Square, but Intuit’s rolling up with a serious contender for mobile credit card acceptance. Kim Kardashian launches a prepaid debit card. Brilliant and scary at…
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Busting Your Performance Bottlenecks at Work
As a boss, I sometimes have to listen to a member of my team explain why something went horribly wrong. As as a business owner, I also have to ease the concerns of clients who have been burned by vendors in the past. And as a human being, I hate being on the hot seat…