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

We have been toying with VR for like the last two years. And we got some interesting experiences out of VR, for example, BeatSaber has become my exercise routine. However, so far, I have not seen anything that would have given me this “wow” experience that VR had always promised. BeatSaber is great, I absolutely love it, but it is a one-dimensional experience that is akin to something you would play at Arcades. In short, not unlike Space Invaders, just a lot more physically demanding. So here comes Alyx – Alyx is a prequel or sequel (I am not sure) to the Half-life game series that have been popular in the early 2000s. Now for full disclosure: I have always been a fan of half-live and I could have written the same article 17 or so years ago by pointing out how half-live has changed the game industry (literally). So, it is with some excitement that I can proclaim that another title of the half-life series is changing the game industry – the virtual reality game industry that...

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 ...

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 ...