I just listened to George W. Bush being interviewed by AT&T CEO and Chairman, Randall Stephenson, and it was an interesting experience. For example, I’ve heard Bill Clinton speaking and Mikhail Gorbachev (twice), but this event was clearly far more security conscious than those. I mean we’re at an event with lots of corporate bozos…
And continuing my shameless self-interest, a little more on the new book … I’ve been musing for a while about inclusivity, and find that the world is truly being transformed as everyone joins the network. It is the theme I present all the time right now, and discussions around M-Pesa, Saldazo, Paytm and Ant Financial…
Following on from the discussions of The Wizard of Oz being a political allegory and rally cry against Wall Street and capitalism, did you realise that the boardgame Monopoly is the same, as in a game meant to illustrate the evils of capitalism? If not, then this article by Kate Raworth, sums it up well: Monopoly…
I was surprised to make a chance discovery about The Wizard of Oz. The film with Judy Garland is firmly embedded in modern culture as a classic, but did you know that it was a rally call against the financial system when the book was originally written? It as a political, economic and monetary allegory…
Last week marked ten years since the financial crisis hit. On August 9 2007, BNP Paribas froze three of its American funds, the first in a chain of events which would lead to the biggest recession since the Great Depression. These funds were tied to American subprime mortgages and the freeze was the first public…
It’s a decade since the iPhone launched. Steve Jobs unveiled the new phone on January 9th, 2007. The first iPhones were made available to the grubby hands of the public on June 29th, 2007, exactly ten years ago today. This was originally just for American consumers with the UK, France, and Germany following in November…
I have no academic papers or historical research view on what I’m about to post, although I will find some, but I was reflecting on my discussions of revolutions in humanity. In particular, the second age of humankind, when we invented money as a control mechanism. Before this seismic change, money didn’t matter. We shared beliefs…
From the origins of the internet in 1990, the end of the 1990s saw the emergence of e-commerce and a plethora of payments services and commercial websites. Then not a great deal happened until the internet became social. Blog platforms like WordPress and Typepad emerged in 2003; Facebook launched in 2004; and YouTube a year…
Web 1.0 – the network begins As mentioned yesterday, almost half a century of developments in technology led to the launch of the web as we know it today, following Tim Berners-Lee’s paper detailing HTML and URLs. This was in 1990 and, consequently, the internet morphs almost every decade. This makes our decade – the…
