| Zimbabweans shun banks after cash shortages
Kennedy Tsambo's faith in Zimbabwe's banking system finally hit breaking point over Christmas when he spent an ultimately fruitless three days queuing to withdraw cash in order to buy a bus fare home. "This was not a donation that I was queuing for, it's my own money which I should be able to withdraw as and when I like," said the 37-year-old, who works as a mechanic in Harare but whose family lives in eastern Nyanyadzi district. "Now I am thinking of taking out all my money. I won't deposit any more in the bank until this chaos is over." Tsambo is among tens of thousands of casualties of a cash crisis in inflation-ravaged Zimbabwe which has seen banks regularly run out of notes since mid-October. Central back chief Gideon Gono blames the crisis on cash barons he says have been hoarding Zimbabwe dollars and exchanging them for scarce foreign currency.
The Intel switch pays off
Maybe Jobs' time there has run its course… Does the Intel news make anyone else sick to their stomachs? Obviously, there was a fair amount of knee-jerk negativity going on, which any amateur psychiatrist can tell you is typical whenever people are faced with change. And I think at the root of that ambivalence toward the Intel transition was a single underlying concern: Just how does this move benefit me? A little more than a year later, Apple provided the definitive answer to that question with the unveiling of the Mac Pro, the desktop that completes the company's migration to Intel processors. The processing specs of the Mac Pro are impressive enough—two dual-core Xeon processors that run at clock speeds ranging from 2GHz to 3GHz for reported performance gains of anywhere from 1.4 to 1.8 times that of a PowerPC G5, depending on what application you're talking about.
Cards: Opportunities Abound In Crowded Payments Field
In the course of a decade, card-based payments have doubled in volume to account for 28 percent of all consumer payments. It's nearly half of the payments pie when excluding the amount spent on auto loans, mortgages and other debt vehicles unsuitable for cards. Credit or debit card use at the point of sale represents 56 percent of all purchases, interchange now accounts for 19 percent of issuers' revenues, and the number of card-accepting merchants now tops 6.1 million. It's obvious that consumers are comfortable swiping cards for groceries, utility bills, morning coffee and hamburgers. But as Celent notes in a new report on payment trends, cards are not close to conquering cash and checks: cards' growth market is $4.5 trillion. Much of that growth is going to be fueled by evolving trends in consumer behavior, added merchant choices and technology, as bank issuers seek innovative ways of building and retaining card customers whose average cost of acquisition is between $50 and $300.
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