Future

The Third Age: The Industrial Revolution The use of money as a means of value exchange, alongside barter, lasted for hundreds of years or, to be more exact, about 4,700 years.  During this time, beads, tokens, silver, gold and other commodities were used as money, as well as melted iron and other materials. Perhaps the…

The Second Age of Man: The Invention of Money I’ve blogged about money being invented for sex many times before but hey, it’s a good story, so I’m going to again. So man became civilized and dominant by being able to work in groups of hundreds.  This was unique to homo sapiens form of communication, as…

As you all know now, this week sees the release of my new book ValueWeb.  Yes, you can buy it from today on Amazon or any of the other services you use.  It’s released in UK from March 15, and USA from April 7 (this is due to publisher getting hard copies to distributors before it…

As David Cameron negotiates a new EU contract in Brussels today, the UK referendum on a Brexit takes place during the summer, with some saying as early as June 23rd.  There’s a YES campaign to stay in the Union and a NO campaign to get out., with the question being: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a…

Few of us can forget the terrible attack on Paris in November.  When the Paris attacks took place at the end of last year, I was lucky enough to visit Paris a couple of days later for the annual CARTES conference event. Some firms had pulled out last minute for fear of further attacks, but…

So I just got back from Hong Kong having keynoted at the NextBank FF16 Fintech Finals conference which ran Monday and Tuesday, in partnership with StartmeupHK. A highlight of the week was a fireside chat with Elon Musk, who appeared before a sold out invitation-only audience which I felt lucky to be invited along to,…

I’ve been wondering how this year would start and so far the answer seems badly.  What with David Bowie’s death on the same day as I catch man-flu, could it get any worse?  Well yes.  I wake up to the headline: Sell everything ahead of stock market crash, say RBS economists.  NNNNOOOOOOO!!!!! Royal Bank of…

I’ve been asked the same question twice this week in two separate conferences (one in Vienna, the other in San Francisco): “how will we deal with the corruptive forces when we are all on the net?” The second questioner clarified what she meant by referencing the film Enemy of the State, where Will Smith gets…

We think we’ve come a long way with technology, but we haven’t really.  Sure we can now ping a message between a router in Hong Kong and London at the rate of 0.239 seconds speed; we can wear a watch that not only tells the time but takes photos, keeps our diary and tells us…