Digital Wire: Digital business, digital transformation, APIs, AI and payments

I have dabbled a fair amount with all sorts of crypto currencies and their respective permissionless networks. In fact, I have been dabbling since 2012 which is by my last count a whopping 12 years. While I have always maintained that I do believe the general concept for digitization and programmability of assets is on the right path, its implementation, the user experience, the accessibility, the fraudulent activities, and the overall inefficiencies permissionless DLTs have, never made me into a true believer. I have stated that opinion on several occasions, here , here and here . There are still barriers to entry when it comes to digitization of assets: sustainable- and interoperable infrastructure. To illustrate this, I recently asked a notary public here in Zurich, why they can’t store the notarized documents as PDFs, the answer surprised me: because they must keep records for at least 70 years. Now, think about what would have happened if we stored these documents on floppy disks

  Apple has given us a vision of what their VR and AR future might entail. But as have others pointed out numerous times, the whole point of the showcase at the WWDC 23 was to let people experiment, I’ve heard others say that it’s like the launch of the Apple Watch when Apple didn’t really know what would become of it. This is similar and yet different.  Just like the Apple Watch (and the iPad before it), Apple sought to porting its whole ecosystem onto a watch – granted, the Apple Watch can’t live on its own and a better comparison would probably be the iPad. The iPad can live without any other Apple device and unlike the iPhone, never really had a clearly defined function other than to watch movies and browse the web. It was not until it gained the ability to be used with a pencil that artists and designers started to explore the potential.  I’m trying to point out that Apple took 5 years from the first iPad in 2010 to the iPad Pro with pencil in 2015 to find its “killer-app”. But th

(Source: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/MarkoAliaksandr)

  If you believe Terushi Shimizu or rather, the way the press is formulating it , then camera phones will have better image quality in 2024 than your trusty DSLR or mirrorless digital camera. He backs this up with sensor technology advancements and computational photography. He has a point.     However, as a digital camera enthusiast myself, I must strongly disagree with this point of view. The message might be interpreted in such way that its meaning reflects a view that we are no longer bound by physics to get the best image quality.     The thing is this, the bigger your camera sensor, the more photons it can capture. However, this comes at the realization that big sensors require big lenses which in turn makes the camera big and heavy. I’m simplifying of course, but that’s physics. For camera makers it is therefore always a question of tradeoffs: do you want better image quality or do you want a smaller and lighter camera. Camera phones or cameras in smartphones, have changed this

I emphasise  the fact that we rent and not own - this is important because it’s always been the domain of home owners to do any sort of home automation - at least, it’s been perceived that way. I’m here to show how this doesn’t have to be the case and that you can do a lot of home automation even without the need of an electrician through the sheer magic of software.  However, I should note that you have to be handy with tools and in my example, you should understand your mains electricity. This is neither a guide or a how-to-manual, it’s simply to document what I had done over the last two years (coinciding with the appearance of a certain virus) to make my home smarter. Before I start this excursion, I’d like to highlight what some of my goals were. Clearly, my number one goal was to save electricity or rather, not waste electricity when we do not have to have the lights on or the TV or whatever else could have a power switch.   My second goal was to do it in such a way that I would

(source: Adobe) As it is with all technological change, every industry must understand, assess, and prepare to incorporate the “new” with the existing. The payment industry, which is undergoing almost constant change, is no exception to this rule. But to understand this change, we must start at the beginning – with Web 1.0 or the “static web”, so called because you would load all the data at once from a web server. This would start to change at around the turn of the millennia with Web 2.0. In 1999, Microsoft experimented with what later would be called “AJAX” (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) , which was an enhancement to its web browser so that it could asynchronously pull data from the web server without refreshing the whole page. This enabled websites to become more interactive and behave more and more like applications.  It was this underlying technology together with Javascript frameworks that enormously simplified content creation and self-publishing, and ultimately gave rise to