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

  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 smartph...

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...

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 social medi...

Quo Vadis, Metaverse? If you read popular Science Fiction, then you probably already have an idea of what the Metaverse is or at least how it is portrayed. Basically, we would be immersed in a virtual reality world with the idea of meeting, playing and working together in a fantastic setting while remaining physically separated. If you look at the difference in vision between Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (who thinks we could all have meetings virtually or at least augmented) and Epic’s Tim Sweeny (Who believes the Metaverse should be a world for games and interaction), then you will see these visions are somewhat different. My ideal Metaverse is a global, immersive, digitally created computer environment that is accessible via the Internet, is open to everyone (and is governed by both commercial and non-commercial interests), may require devices that can translate between the virtual world and human senses, and allows for interoperability with other generated digital worlds.   But regar...