Technology

It’s thirteen years since I had the idea of using social media for insider trading. TBH, any media can be used to buck the system. These days we talk about Telegram and Signal, but a few years ago it was Blackberry Messenger and Facebook. Whenever technology develops anonymity, crime will follow. We might look for…

I just had an interesting and lengthy dialogue. After booking flights a while ago, the flight operator cancelled one leg of my flight. Instead of flying to Las Vegas for five nights via Frankfurt, I was now flying to Las Vegas for two nights and then back to my layover city Frankfurt for three nights….

I shared a post the other day: It inspired FinTech friend and colleague Efi Pylarinou to write a post about it. Efi has kindly allowed me to share the post with you here … Beware of powerful and ambitious Tigers amongst Big VCs We are in the 6th month of the Water Tiger Year and…

There’s a regular debate about whether BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) is a good or bad thing. There’s a big call for it to be regulated and comparisons with payday loans are made often. Nevertheless, it makes sense as many companies are now grabbing a slice of this space. The latest one is Apple. It amused…

I was in the theatres again recently, watching shows. I love theatre, especially musicals (Ed: is it okay for Chris to say this?). I wondered why theatre is so special and then realised it’s that shared experience. A bunch of people on stage doing stuff, and a crowd of people sharing what they’re doing. It…

After yesterday’s blog How can you oversee a system you don’t see?, Ricardo replied on twitter: So, I investigated how our social media platforms’ algorithms fail, and there are lots of examples. Let’s start with Facebook. Facebook’s algorithm is blamed for the spread of misinformation and divisive content, radicalising users and failing to protect them from some of the most…

For years now there has been a discussion of having chips inside humans. I was presenting this idea twenty years ago, and often used the example of the Baja Beach Club. The idea made sense: get a club chip inserted under the skin and you need no wallet or phone … just dance. It particularly…

I was reminded the other day of a quote by Ronald Reagan: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” He said this in the 1980s about the government’s view of the economy, but let’s apply it to cryptocurrencies. Initially irrelevant but now mainstream, many…

I haven’t written much about Facebook’s digital currency Diem, as there’s not much to write about. A dead duck from day one, it would never succeed. I said so back when it launched in 2019: The bottom-line is that Facebook may have developed a stablecoin using blockchain to enable global payments within Messenger, Instagram and…