In a final post about African transformation through technology, I’ve covered the key themes: mobile financial inclusion, smartphone innovation through apps, digital currencies and blockchain identities. One thing missed is a mention of the Water ATM. I hadn’t heard of automated machines for water being deployed before, although it started in India in 2013 and…
ValueWeb makes the contention that you cannot have an internet of things without a real-time and cheap internet of value. A core part of this is focused upon building a cheap shared ledger structure for digital identity and digital currencies and guess what? That cheap shared ledger is most likely going to be built in Africa. …
After writing about whether we are creating faster horses when we think of applying open sourced technologies to banking, some more thoughts occurred to me: Are we applying Blockchain to clearing and settlement, rather than reimagining the whole trade cycle from liquidity structures to collateral management using open source platform structures? Are we using data…
I’m often asked, as we move more and more to digital communications: what will happen to the people? What will happen to the people? As we move to robotics, automated agents, augmented and artificial intelligence, what will happen to the people. If we have no branches, no structures and no buildings that need humans, what…
I’m often talking about Victorian visions of the future to illustrate the issue we have today. The Victorian vision of the future was dealing with a number of problems, one of which was horse shit. Manure. Manure was a massive issue. Victorian Britain had too many horses and carriages on the streets, and the horses…
We had a fascinating chat about digital identities at the Innovate Finance Global Summit (#ifgs2016) today. It was a private roundtable with members of government, central banks, the banking and Fintech community and commentators/observers. Listening to the dialogue going to and fro, I realised that this is one nut that’s too tough to crack. Here’s…
I recently talked about the oncoming internet developments that follow the internet of things, from the internet on demand (3D and 4D printing) to the internet of robots. A colleague came up afterwards, and said I was daft to talk about robots. It’s science fiction he claimed. I disagreed as science fiction is rapidly becoming…
Having covered four ages of moneykind: Barter Coins Paper Chips What could possibly be the fifth? When we are just at the start of the Internet of Things (IoT), and are building an Internet of Value (ValueWeb), how can we imagine something beyond this next ten year cycle? Well we can and we must, as…
The Fourth Age of Man: the Network Age Part of the reason for talking about the history of money in depth this week is as a backdrop to what is happening today. Money originated as a control mechanism for governments of Ancient Sumer to control farmers, based upon shared beliefs. It was then structured during…
