Future

I was reflecting on a friend of mine who runs a FinTech start-up.  Their company was on a funding round, and struggling.  They struggled so much that they ended up having to lay off a load of staff, cut budgets and defer income.  In fact, they reached the point where they would only survive another…

There are basic human needs: food, drink, sleep … wifi.  Once those are covered, everything else is supplemental.  It’s not needed.  It’s just stuff you want.  If you can eat, drink and sleep comfortably, what else is there? I only ask this question because I was thinking about what we value, and realised that we…

There’s a line in the 2013 film Her, it’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.  The film is about Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix.  Theodore is a lonely writer who gets to trial a new operating system OS1, the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system.  The OS1 tailors itself to your habits and…

We are already entering the fourth-generation internet, the internet of things, but it won’t really take off until the next decade, the 2020s.  Sure, we have self-driving Teslas and Nest home appliances, along with Samsung’s Smart Things, but it’s not mainstream yet.  For example, none of my friends has a self-driving car yet. This will…

Now we move onto the third-generation internet, web 3.0.  What is web 3.0?  It’s not been well defined or described.  Many would say it’s the internet of things, but I disagree.  The internet of things is emerging, but it cannot exist until a bridge between the mobile social network and the internet of things has…

The last chapter of ValueWeb talks about what comes after the third generation internet: the internet of value.  This is the internet being built today, based upon shared ledgers, cloud, apps, APIs and analytics.  Of course, the next generation is the internet of things.  But what comes after that? There is an answer, but you…

Building on yesterday’s blog, there was another interesting debate about the risks of humans in the network.  Humans screw up.  Humans cause problems.  Humans have emotions.  Humans are not welcome here. A good example of why humans are not welcome is that it is typically human error that causes issue.  A self-driving car is likely…

I was in a long conversation about machine learning yesterday that will probably inspire a lot of blogging.  One of the key parts of the conversation was the integration of robotics and artificial intelligence.  When you can make love with a human being that doesn’t talk back, why would you want a real one?  Let’s…

For ten years, my friends cover at Z/Yen have been producing the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), on behalf of the City of London.  It’s a research program where people can answer the survey questionnaire and, from those participating, the different cities of the world vying to be financial hubs are ranked.  Around 2,500 people respond…

Banks are scared.  They’ve seen the rise of the new world of open APIs, apps and analytics and know that their organisations are not yet ready or fit to change to that world.  What to do? Well, the easiest thing to do is to block access to the bank’s data.  If third party FinTech firms…