It made me laugh today. I was chairing a panel where Romana Kumar, Head of Global Transaction Banking for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), was discussing their trial of Ripple. The background to this was announced in a press release on 1st February 2017: Ripple’s Distributed Financial Technology fits within NBAD’s existing infrastructure…
I heard a rumour the other day. The rumour goes something like: are you not surprised that banks grow into big beasts, as it’s government supported? Governments want banks to be big and regulated, because governments can then access the data the bank is keeping about their clients. IT’s access to data for tracking financial…
The first job Tom Blomfield (left in photo) ever had was delivering leaflets for estate agent Wilson Heal. He lasted one day in the cold December rain before convincing the guys that leaflets were old school and they really needed a website, which Tom then built and still exists today. That opened up the world…
There’s a line in the 2013 film Her, it’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness. The film is about Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Theodore is a lonely writer who gets to trial a new operating system OS1, the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system. The OS1 tailors itself to your habits and…
We are already entering the fourth-generation internet, the internet of things, but it won’t really take off until the next decade, the 2020s. Sure, we have self-driving Teslas and Nest home appliances, along with Samsung’s Smart Things, but it’s not mainstream yet. For example, none of my friends has a self-driving car yet. This will…
Now we move onto the third-generation internet, web 3.0. What is web 3.0? It’s not been well defined or described. Many would say it’s the internet of things, but I disagree. The internet of things is emerging, but it cannot exist until a bridge between the mobile social network and the internet of things has…
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…
The last chapter of ValueWeb talks about what comes after the third generation internet: the internet of value. This is the internet being built today, based upon shared ledgers, cloud, apps, APIs and analytics. Of course, the next generation is the internet of things. But what comes after that? There is an answer, but you…
