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 “kille...

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...

As many have during the summer, I have taken a break and did some reading. To my amazement, I have seen the term of “IT” or information technology in much of the literature that I read over the summer. And I started to wonder if we’re doing ourselves any favors by still insisting on using this term. I tried to answer that question for myself, and have come to the following realization:  The term information technology has its origin in a world where computers were largely absent – it was first mentioned in a 1958 Harvard Business Review  article . The article singled out three distinct elements: “technique of processing large amounts of information rapidly”, “statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making problems” and finally, “the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs”. The article further explained that information technology would have its greatest impact on middle- and top management. To be very clear, the article was not wrong and in fac...

I’m still following Apple and developments in hardware and software in general as it is still somewhat of a hobby of mine (having started my professional career developing on NeXT). Even after I have given Apple bad grades here and here , I think yesterday’s announcement that Apple is moving to their own Arm chips, is something that had long been coming and I think it will potentially alter the computing landscape. While I’m certainly no longer able to have insight knowledge or even be able to follow the last development in chip design, I do believe in phases or cycles of evolution and revolution in technology and I think that’s true for information technology as it is for cars or anything else for that matter. Apple just started to ramp up on a revolution cycle.   Reading the opinion of analysts regarding Apple’s risky move from Intel to their own Chips left me bewildered. After all, this is Apple’s third processor architecture change – from the Motorola 68K to the PowerPC a...

Yes, there’s so much speculation as to what our medium- and long-term future might look like in a post-COVID19 world. If you read the newspapers and magazines ( here , here , and here ) you will have noticed that most reports talk about a delay of 18 months until we have a working vaccine. You can probably add another six months to that number until the production and distribution have scaled up; and then of course there are still question marks around herd-immunity and how long one stays immune after having built-up antibodies. In summary: we’ll be wearing masks for at least another two years. But you might also have read about accelerating the digital transformation of our lives and that we have significantly advanced topics that have lingered for 20 years, within the span of a month. For example, online grocery shopping and remote health care. Given that we now have a good two years to ease into a new reality, I have tried to think about what all this means for us as a specie...

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 ...

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...