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

I’ve been looking at distributed ledger technology since 2012; I’ve tried to mine bitcoins and ethereum; I’ve made several bets, participated in ICOs and tried to comprehend some of the underlying mechanisms. After seven years, I figured I would summarize what I see most investors, innovators and entrepreneurs get wrong about this technology. 1.            Comparing it to the Internet (as the next big thing) The Internet was not something “new” in every sense of the word. But It linked the underlying computer base and in fact existing LAN networks together into one super wide area network. The origins are from the 60s (DARPA funded as a means for communications to survive a nuclear attack) and while crypto enthusiasts rightfully point out that it took 20 years until we saw some meaningful applications in the late 80s and finally commercialization in the mid-90s, blockchain projects are nothing like the Internet. A whole lot ...

Something exciting happened in the personal computing domain of the early 90's: the GO corporation launched their PenPoint OS. The computer industry had just adopted the graphical user interface - inspired by Xerox, brought to market by Apple and copied by Microsoft - this was the way how we would use computers from now on. Fueled by this magic, visionaries (among them Robert Carr) already saw the next logical evolution in the user input interfaces: the pen! The promise of using a pen to interact with the computer was tempting to the point where Microsoft saw its nascent monopoly challenged and decided to copy once more an idea, so it went after the PenPoint OS with a special version of Windows 3.1 for pens. Similarly, Apple - not wanting to miss the boat - under the leadership of ex-Pepsi Cola CEO John Sculley, saw it's pen future in a device called the Newton. The pen computing idea was simple: why not use the handwriting that we have all known since we've ent...

I read the Wallstreet Journal story about the unveiling of Huawei’s “new” HarmonyOs and felt that a couple of points were “conveniently” left out of the reporting. So, yes HarmonyOs is a new microkernel design that aims to supersede the current Linux kernel in Android OS, however, that doesn’t mean it can’t run Android apps. In fact, porting existing Android apps over is in the best case a simple recompile. In the worst case it’s probably stripping out any Google dependencies. But even that can be helped if Huawei is smart enough to provide its own “Google Mobile Service” layer with the same APIs. So in short, I’m not sure a new operating system would be such a big deal as long as all the APIs and libraries are present. In an ironic twist, the Trump administration gave Huawei “permission” to run its own operating system and Google doesn’t like it at all. But not for the reason they are saying, the so called “security threats” are a smokescreen - Google is really scared of a ...

Every time I watch a car review that includes a Tesla somewhere, it is always fascinating how the reviewers react. They try hard to compartmentalize the Tesla into their existing matrix and scorecards of what makes a good car. I sometimes roll my eyes when the subject of materials, build quality and range come up. Obviously, these things matter for car people - but what should also be discussed and what reviewers generally do not grasp is that Tesla changed forever the way we look at cars. Tesla cars are really computers with wheels whereas all the other electric cars, from the incumbent car makers, are just cars. Why is this important?   It changes everything - it’s the same comparison between a feature phone and the iPhone. The feature phone was primarily used to make phone calls and send the occasional text. The iPhone became a platform business where a whole new economy was created through the power of software. Just like Apple, Tesla pursues a single-soft...

The title is in fact a redundant expression. When I say the first electric Porsche, I’m not talking about the new Porsche Taycan . No, I’m talking about the first Porsche car that just happens to be electric. Yes, you read that correctly: It’s been a 120 years since Porsche launched its first electric car. Let that sink in for a moment. What happened in those 120 years? Why have we become a petrol/combustible engine type world? Well, Ford and Edison could have had something to do with it. Apparently, Edison simply could not make the battery that would have been required to power an inexpensive electric car with Ford at the time producing more cars than anyone else combined. If Ford had adopted the technology, it would have had a much better chance of success. But that was not the only reason, the oil boom coupled with a new road system that extended beyond cities also gave rise to the combustion engine since electricity was still a rare commodity outside of large ...

The PBS documentary “Apollo’s daring mission” explains how the Apollo 8 mission was changed because the US and NASA feared that the USSR would beat them on a mission to the moon. So they changed the mission objective of Apollo 8 with the aim to fly to the moon, do 10 orbits and return to earth. What the documentary rightly makes clear is that this was in fact the first time ever in human history that humans left the earth. In the documentary, Michael Collins (who would later become the moon orbiting crew-member of Apollo 11) lamants the mundane mission milestone names that NASA created. In this case, the significant maneuver to go to the moon had been called TLI (which stands for Trans Lunar Injection) and his regret was that instead of confirming TLI he would have rather cited the beginning of a poem by a 2nd world war fighter pilot John Gillespie Magee- which starts like this: “ Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies ...” You might think what...

I have some history with this – no, not directly but I’ve been researching the various attempts that Facebook made in order to enable their user base to make person to person as well commercial payments. I could be wrong but none of these efforts seemed to have panned out for Facebook. Case in point, Facebook has had an  e-money license  for their Irish and Spanish subsidiaries for nearly three years – this licenses are in theory “passportable” throughout Europe which would have given Facebook the opportunity to offer some form of payment service throughout the EU. I’ve known of some implementations in France and the UK but never anything that would have enabled them to go cross-border. In other words, Facebook has had to deal with the same payment fragmentation landscape in Europe and elsewhere than the rest of us. When Facebook officially threw in the towel by  shutting down  the P2P payment service on its messenger platform, I knew this was ominous. On the o...

It finally happened, I made an online reservation and saw a payment option for my barber. So I paid my barber before getting service. Of course you can ask yourself would I have done that had I not known the barber in question. But afterwards, I realized that we are doing this already. For example, sometimes we pay for our trips in advance without knowing the hotel. So we are used to buying service in advance under certain circumstances. Of course paying the hotel upfront guarantees a room this is not as crucial with the barber. However, paying upfront also limits your exposure to problems later, so you have a certain assurance that the payment will not be a challenge at the location of the service delivery. In other words, convenience outweighs trust. But to me this has also revealed something else, namely the fact that even small and medium businesses are now cloud based and accessible through commercial platforms. If we take a step back here, I’ve made the argument...