Trust Me, I’m A (Block Chain) Computer

Noted polymath Nick Szabo published a new article yesterday, “The Dawn of Trustworthy Computing“.

Celebrated within the Bitcoin community, he’s the guy that came up with the concept of BitGold before Bitcoin and has written some of the most significant essays in the field over recent years (see ‘Shelling Out – The Origins of Money’ and his seminal paper on Smart Contracts, ‘Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks‘).

There are a few points from this new piece that really drive home the power of the technology that underpins the system. I recommend that you go and read it yourself (here) but given its importance, I thought that for today’s post, I’d try to give a high level summary of what is invariably, yet again, another excellent piece of work.

Szabo starts by pointing out that we currently rely on a system that is designed in such a way that the ‘other end’ of our computers (i.e. the web servers etc) has to be run by an individual or collection of people that we are required to trust. The system simply could not work unless you did. This has a significant downside as it means that no security measures will ever be able to prevent the data that you share in this way from being hacked or leaked if it is sufficiently valuable to someone else.

But think of how commerce operates. When you pay to see a film at the cinema, you simply hand across the money. We benefit from controls embedded within the system (the guy behind the desk checks you’ve paid the right money and gives you a ticket without asking your name). OK, so the process may be slow if there’s a queue but we receive a ticket and the cinema can control how many people get into the screening. However, compare that with an online transaction online. As we’ve established, the system of computers that we currently rely on is not very trustworthy, given that it is liable to hacks or leaks. However an online transaction will usually force you to fill out forms containing additional valuable personal data. We are forced to accept the risk of this data being lost because the time-saving from having computers involved (rather than requiring all customers to visit a shop to pay in cash, for example) is so significant.

But block chain computing changes all of this.

In this new system, a virtual computer that is protected by cryptography and consensus technology is now shared across many computers. It is a system in which each computer is required to check the work of the other computers in the network. The result? We can now explore interactions that were just too risky before this system was invented. We no longer need to place our trust in an individual or group on the other end of our computer.

The use of the word trust can often be confusing. For newcomers who are confused by people talking about ‘trustless’ systems, Szabo suggests ‘trust-minimised’ would be more accurate.  So instead of having to rely on (i.e. trust) unknown third parties to do what they’ve promised, each computer will reliably execute the instructions that we provide (subject to the 51% issue of course). Within this new network, we couldn’t trust the computers if we relied on them as individuals. But together, when all of the computers are constrained by mathematical rules, the end result is a reliable and secure network.

This is a powerful concept. Initially, we’ve seen block chain computers have been used primarily to develop a currency solution, namely Bitcoin. But now we are faced with an unforgeable record of transactional data being recorded in the block chain, we’ve can start to accelerate the development of further applications.

One area that fascinates me in particular is that of smart contracts. As Szabo writes:-

“The block chain can also make the search, negotiation, and verification phases of contracting more reliable and secure. With on-chain smart contracts we will be able to buy and sell many online services and financial instruments by button and slider instead of by laboriously filling out forms that disclose our private information.”

It’s worth noting that in order to achieve such powerful advantages of security and reliability, the decentralisation inevitably costs more (in terms of both money and time) when compared directly with the current system in which you rely on one web server alone. However, those advantages outweigh the negatives by an order of magnitude. Be careful however not to assuming that it is merely the fact that this improvement is simply because of the fact that the system has been decentralised:-

“It’s actually the protocol (Nakamoto consensus, which is highly distributed) combined with strong cryptography, rather than just decentralization per se, that is the source of the far higher reliability and and much lower vulnerability of block chains.”

It appears to be Szabo’s intention to follow up in the future by really digging into some of the applications are now possible on top of such a trust-minimised block chain. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. In the meantime, if you’re more interested in the computer science behind the block chain itself, check out this handy list of papers.

 

 

Size Does Matter: Microsoft Gets Some Coins

So there’s only really one story today for me – and no surprises for guessing what that might be…

I woke up to read that Microsoft were now accepting Bitcoin. That’s huge. And a bit out of the blue to say the least.

I couldn’t help but think back to May 2014 when a similar early morning glance at the headlines on my mobile told me that 50 miles away, CeX in Glasgow had suddenly not only unveiled a brand new Lamassu Bitcoin ATM in the store but had chosen not just to promote but to enforce a Bitcoin-only payment option for all customers for a three day period. OK, a *slightly* different scale but still.

Kudos to BitPay for delivering this. Coinbase were clearly pulling ahead in terms of integrations with billion-dollar business so it’s good to see the Atlanta team strike big. The result benefits everyone in the Bitcoin ecosystem – proving that when you’re in such a fast-growing marketplace, competition really is irrelevant. There’s plenty of pie to go around for everyone.

Now as you’ll see when you dig into the details, this isn’t a full integration – yet. They’re letting people use Bitcoin to add funds to Microsoft accounts that can then be spent on various Microsoft services  (such as software, Xbox games, apps for Windows phones). But the importance of this announcement cannot be understated for a number of reasons.

There’s a natural value in using Bitcoin to fund Skype credit and to potentially address the in-game microtransaction payment opportunity that exists via the Xbox. But fundamentally – and most importantly – this is acceptance by a company that the vast majority of people are aware of. Yes, Overstock and Dish are big business (in the US), Dell is well-known (but not to my mum) and Expedia has a strong brand (if you book your own online travel). But I’d hazard a guess that everyone who actively uses a computer today (in the West at least) has – at the very least – heard of Microsoft.

Of course, Microsoft were hardly attracting positive commentary about the pace of their innovation or general strategy under Steve Ballmer’s stewardship. From here, it’s hard to tell whether this move is simply a case of Ballmer’s replacement Satya Nadella being a Bitcoin fan (as has been claimed) or simply a change of direction approach within the business to become more receptive to innovation following a change in leadership.

But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Because of this:-

It’s been a big 2014. Roll on 2015.

AI and The Legal Profession

Working in the legal profession for well over a decade gave me a pretty good insight into the mindset of others in the industry – or, more specifically, their attitude towards change and innovation. What follows is necessarily a generalisation to some extent but I believe the observation remains no less valid because of that.

I vividly remember giving a talk as a trainee back in 1999 on why the invention of Napster’s file-sharing growth was so important. Most of my colleagues at the time looked on with barely-disguised expressions of confusion and boredom. It wasn’t the first time that I felt that my attitude towards adopting and experimenting with change made me feel very different to others within the industry over the course of 13+ years.

I was always a fan of Richard Susskind’s work over that time. For a man who predicted in his book “The Future of Law” in 1996 that email would become the predominant form of communication between lawyers and their clients (provoking a response from the Law Society of England and Wales along the lines that Susskind shouldn’t be allowed to speak in public because he clearly didn’t understand the way that the industry functioned and or the rules surrounding client confidentiality), he’s continued to push the industry kicking and screaming into the modern era throughout.

I just watched a talk that he gave over the summer in which he gave a 50 year view on the impact of AI and the law.

Susskind starts by setting out the four stages of resistance that he inevitably sees from members of the legal profession when faced with technological progress:-

  1. This is worthless nonsense
  2. This is an interesting but perverse point of view
  3. This is true but quite unimportant
  4. I have always said so.

And it was this first stage that reminded me of that Napster talk all those years ago. It’s reminiscent of Gandhi’s quote that gets bandied around frequently in Bitcoin circles when someone brings up the usual adoption hurdles:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”

Susskind’s history is interesting because he actually built a so-called Expert System with a leading expert lawyer back at the end of the 1980’s – basically transferring a human’s knowledge and expertise into a computer system for others to use. Not an easy call to take “a dense web of barely intelligible interrelated rules” and turn that into 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. But the end result was a system that would ask you a series of questions before giving you an answer.

Then on 6 August 1991, the web happened. But still the law firms didn’t cotton on to the fact that the world was changing. And of course, why would they? When your business is built on an hourly billing model, what possible use could you have for an Expert System that reduces a process that usually takes 10 hours down to 10 minutes?

But of course the signs are now undeniable and change is inevitable. As he points out, this key paper from 2011 points out that in terms of initial document reviews, intelligent search systems can now outperform junior lawyers and paralegals. And remember – that’s the worst that that technology is ever going to be in the future.

I’ve always been drawn to Susskind’s simple argument which goes along these lines: following Moore’s Law, the average desktop computer in 2020 will have more processing power than the human brain. And in 2050, the average desktop machine machine will have more processing power than the whole of humanity put together. So it might just be time for the legal profession to accept that change is coming. It just cannot be that the internet, computer science, natural language processing, speech recognition, big data, intelligent inference, machine learning, speech synthesis and so much more is transforming every single corner of society and yet somehow this effect will not extend into the legal profession – which after all is, of course, one of the most information- and document-intensive professions in the world!

His conclusion is that by the 2020’s, we’ll have legal IT systems that are not modelled on brains (i.e. we’ll move away from modelling AI based on human intelligence alone), fuelled by brute force computing, utilising speech recognition, with real-time machine language translation, natural language processing, an ability to discern otherwise hidden legal risks through the analysis of big data, perfect search and a mixture of deductive, inductive, analogical and lateral inference.

Face-to-face legal consultations will become the exception rather than the rule and “communities of legal experience” will develop – networks within which ordinary people who have consulted lawyers or solved problems themselves will share their experiences with others who want to access that knowledge.

And yet, the majority of lawyers are still in a state of denial. Most believe that the current state of the industry represents little more than a temporary blip in the standard state of affairs before things return to normal, with an economy similar to the one that existed before 2007. Yet whilst some more successful ‘firms’ are looking at the disaggregation of legal work (using paralegals, offshoring, on-shoring etc.), the real disruption will come over the next decade when technologies will be able to do the work that we originally thought could only be done by “intelligent human beings”.

Of course, it’s very easy to criticise from the outside. Which is why innovation often comes from elsewhere. And, with technology, hindsight is always 20/20. But disruption is a certainty. In a world in which Google’s stated aim has always been “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, the information that provides the foundation of value upon which the profession is built is gradually being made free. I can’t wait to see where we get to once AI really starts to kick in.

It’s not hard to imagine a demand for having IBM’s Watson as an app on your mobile dishing out legal advice whilst it also saves your life, is it?

 

Easy Access: Mail Order Keys

A late night tonight after returning from speaking at another Creative Currencies Chiasma warm-up event, this time in Glasgow but just time for a quick post.

More than a few folk have had issues with keys in the Bitcoin world. But such concerns are nothing new. I suspect that even Charles Chubb and Linus Yale, Sr. might have been somewhat concerned if a business such as KeyMe had been knocking around in their respective days.

KeyMe has an iPhone app that lets you upload a photograph of your keys and upload them to the company’s servers. After that, you can get a new set 3D printed and sent out to you immediately – or even have them cut in one of their vending machine in New York while you wait. Of course, it raises all manner of questions about security (how hard can it really be to simply steal someone’s keys briefly to photograph them for nefarious purposes)? For users there must surely also be an echo of that slightly uncomfortable feeling that anyone who uses a password manager synced via the cloud must also feel periodically.

Wired had a good article on the business a few months ago. The convenience of being able to immediately rescue yourself from a lock-out situation is obvious. But I couldn’t help but think of the parallel with handing someone your private keys to act as a custodian of your Bitcoin funds. The only difference is, in this case, you don’t just risk the money. Because of course, someone might just use the service to relocate other valuable items of yours to which you’re likely to have a far greater emotional attachment than boring old, fungible money.

This brings me perilously close to the 3D printed gun/Defense Distributed debate. But it’s already way too late so maybe another time.

I’ll leave you with this quote from the Wired article that sums up the power of the technology:-

“If you lose sight of your keys for the better part of 20 seconds, you should consider them lost,” says Jos Weyers, a Dutch lockpicking guru and security consultant. “If you find them later, consider them a souvenir.”

Create For The Fans, Not For The Mainstream

In many walks of life, for those engaged in traditionally ‘creative’ pursuits or more formulaic fare that continues to be served up during the course of a ‘standard’ working day (whatever ‘standard’ might mean), there’s usually a choice that has to be made. It’s one of focus. Should you aim to produce something that the masses will flock to? Or focus on pursuing the niche, a much smaller group yet one for whom your work has the potential to be viewed as truly significant?

Counterintuitively, there’s a strong argument that the greatest potential lies with the latter group if you’re looking to scale. Of course, no-one is saying you should be designing bespoke products that can only ever be used by ten men in, say, the Outer Hebrides alone. But in modern digital business, it’s almost impossible to somehow produce mainstream success unless you first build a small group of passionate and engaged customers, users or fans who like what you’ve done so  much that they’re desperate to go out and tell others on your behalf.

I’ve always been a fan of Kevin Kelly’s classic ‘1,000 True Fans’ which remains, for me, one of the most important articles for anyone looking to build success across a digital platform. And Seth Godin has today written something with very similar sentiments which is well worth a read.

Godin points out that mainstream success only occurs when those people who are infrequent purchasers of your type of product – the majority – finally pluck up the courage to buy what you’re selling. For such people, making this type of purchase is rare and they therefore have far fewer spaces to buy what you’re offering. So they rely (consciously or not) on the noise of the informed super-fans to guide their decisions. And this is precisely why mainstream success is so difficult. If you usually only buy one book a year, which one will you choose – do you opt for an unknown niche literary work or simply plump for the next Harry Potter?

Critical mass and the concept of a tipping point remain the source of plenty of debate. But Godin warns us away from blindly trusting those any business that is focused on seeking out mainstream, blockbuster hits alone. Look closely and you can see examples from across all forms of culture – just think about the glut of movie reboots, formulaic music productions and even suspiciously similar novel artwork that floods the market following the success of an outlier.

As an artist – and Godin has long argued that anyone who does their best work is an artist, no matter the field – your goal must be to delight those who you can inspire to spread your work. Because you can’t do it alone. And in today’s world,  it’s even more clear that copying a blockbuster success rarely leads to something as valuable.

Look for the niche and own it.

Bitcoin Recap: Five On A Sunday

Another packed week in Bitcoin land. When isn’t it? So this week I thought I’d recap on five big stories that caught my interest over the last week. Maybe that’ll be of interest to some people who read this blog but don’t spend every waking hour perusing the crypto-press and forums like, ahem, “others I know”…

Mastercard. Oh dear.

Last week, we watched the Western Union v Bitcoin meme spread online. This week, we watched a rather spirited attempt by Matthew Driver, President (South East Asia) of Mastercard to dismiss the value of crypto-currencies provoke a similar kind of response.

With Mastercard actively petitioning the legislators in Australia for increased regulation (whilst Australia’s largest Bitcoin startup CoinJar was already announced the relocation of its headquarters to the UK due to the onerous nature of the existing regime), it was unlikely that Mastercard were ever going to be treated kindly by the Bitcoin faithful.

However, cut through some of the more simplistic criticisms of the multinational financial services organisation and read through Samual Patterson’s line by line response to Mastercard. It’s a valuable exercise in pointing out the areas in which Mastercard appear to have fundamentally (wilfully?) misunderstood the technology.

And, of course, the cynical out there might see why a company that has come under fire for tracking its US customers’ purchases and selling the data to advertisers  might see (perceived) anonymity to be something of a problem.

HSBC. Oh dear.

Back in August, I asked Daniel Masters from Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Fund to come up to Edinburgh to speak at the inaugural Scottish Bitcoin Conference that I was organising. A good account he gave of himself too. GABI were just going live on the world’s first regulated Bitcoin hedge fund. Since then, it’s been interesting to watch Jersey really make a play to become a world-leading Bitcoin location.

And then last week, HSBC pulled the plug on its banking relationship with Global Advisors, the Jersey-based hedge fund that runs GABI. The indications are that the risk profile of being associated with a Bitcoin business were perceived to be too problematic for the bank. As Danny writes on LinkedIn, it appears that “innovation is indeed well supported so long as it doesn’t impinge on the prospects of HSBC collecting fees”.

Now, whether this just represents one turkey that doesn’t want to vote for Christmas or not, it’s particularly galling for many within the Bitcoin community. Few are unaware that HSBC paid out $1.9 billion to settle a case in 2012 in which they’d been shown to be “lax in money laundering” (to put it extremely charitably – the US Senate investigation stated that they’d been a “conduit for drug kingpins and rogue nations”, with criminals depositing money in boxes specifically designed to fit through the tellers’ windows of Mexican HSBC branches).

HM Treasury Consultations Closes

The deadline passed for HM Treasury’s Digital Currencies Call For Information on Wednesday. A number of submissions were made and you can check out the UK Digital Currency Association’s submission here. From my involvement, it’s clear that the two key areas are a call for light-touch regulation under existing laws and a plea for the Treasury to ease one of the biggest problems that UK Bitcoin startups face today – securing banking relationships with existing financial institutions that don’t suddenly get closed with no notice being given.

BitLicense Comments Published

Within the next couple of weeks, all manner of hell will break loose online when the final draft of New York’s BitLicense gets published. To recap, in January, the New York Department of Financial Services held a hearing into Virtual Currencies. Initially positive, New York listened to entrepreneurs, investors and other knowledgeable individuals from within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Benjamin Lawsky, Superintendent of Financial Services for New York then came out with the idea for a BitLicense for digital currency businesses. Draft regulations were published and comments were requested – to an almost unanimous wave of criticism.

Lawsky tweeted this week that all 3,746 comments received had been published with the final regulations coming out later this month. If you want to read through some of the commentary, here are some highlights: the Bitcoin Foundation (and here), the Chamber of Digital Commerce, BTC China, Coinbase, BoostVC, Circle, UK Digital Currency Association, Amazon, BitPay, Ripple Labs, Walmart, Western Union – not to mention Chris Odom’s response.

It’s hard to say which way this will go. However, the impact of getting this regulation wrong for New York at this stage (and I have no idea how someone can regulate something correctly – in the sense of being comprehensive and flexible enough to cover the technology as it continues to evolve), could be severely damaging. I suspect UK regulators are watching with as much interest as the rest of us.

ChangeTip Raises Funding

Finally, let’s end on some really positive news. ChangeTip, a business that has gone from niche to mainstream in the last couple of weeks announced $3.5 million in seed funding led by Bitcoin investment pioneers Pantera Capital. I’m a big fan of the Pantera team, I think they’re doing a great job (their daily BitFlash update service is both free and valuable – sign up here) and I thoroughly recommend you take a read through their most recent Bitcoin Letter to really learn more about the importance of tipping within the overall Bitcoin ecosystem. Well done to the ChangeTip team.

That’s it for this week. As ever, there’s plenty of other stories – a week sometimes feels like a month in Bitcoin Land – but these are the ones that stood out for me.

Now. Let’s see what this week brings.

 

The Future Of Digital 2014

If you’ve got time, it’s worth clicking through the 120-odd slides on the Future of Digital 2014 put together by Business Insider. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary but a good high-level overview of the trends.

Here’s a few highlights:-

  • 3 out of 7 billion worldwide are now online
  • Consumption of media is collapsing across TV, online, radio and print – and rising rapidly in mobile
  • Money follows eyeballs – so it’s going mobile
  • Wearables continue to grow – albeit not at a level that was previously hyped
  • Cars are increasingly connected to the internet
  • The average owner spends an hour a day on their smartphone (is that all?!)
  • More than 25% of all internet traffic is mobile
  • Global sales of tablets have hit a wall
  • Apple are losing the war: Android run 85% of the smartphones and 65% of the tablets in the world
  • Android is now more popular with developers than iOS
  • Android will soon overtake iOS in app revenue
  • The key digital media trends are: Mobile, Social, Video, Programmatic, Native
  • PayPal powers $30 billion in mobile payments
  • Google’s Chrome browser remains the most popular by far
  • The Internet of Things will see 20 billion connected devices by 2020

Out of Context in Evernote

I’m a huge fan of Evernote. After Google, I probably rely on the company more than any other throughout the course of my daily digital life. And like increasing numbers around the world, I trust them heavily to back up my brain. But I’m just not a huge fan of their Context product.

If you don’t use Evernote, let me explain. I usually write directly into Evernote – meeting notes, blog posts, whatever – in addition to saving articles that I need to return to at a later date. Using the service is a no-brainer when you can rely on it to sync perfectly across platforms (well, usually; it has had the usual challenges that face any tech company growing at rapid speed). However the company recently decided to ‘reward’ premium users by surfacing a number of (hopefully) relevant articles in the space below your writing space.

Now, I’m not entirely sure but I *think* that previously they’d surface other notes that you’d made and saved yourself. Presumably they used some form of fairly simple word recognition algorithm that just scanned your collected content. And of course that could be useful – on occasion. It was rare that I actually click to open the suggestions but occasionally it was interesting to realise that I’d written/saved an article months earlier on a similar topic. No big deal. Little benefit for me in practice but, with minimal interruption, no complaints from me.

However, at the start of October, Evernote introduced Context. The company now surfaces relevant ‘high quality’ content from selected media partners, such as LinkedIn and The Wall Street Journal, within that space.

There’s a couple of immediate problems here. Suddenly noticing external content pop up within your own personal safety deposit box immediately creates dissonance. Whether it’s relevant is neither here nor there. And in the same way as there was uproar when Google finally admitted that it was scanning all your emails to serve you advertising within Gmail, there are inevitable questions about privacy. How much of your data are they sharing with third parties to provide this content?

For customers with sensitive personal information (despite the warnings, people still use cloud services like Evernote and Dropbox to store this sort of data), the real concern is that this information is being shared without permission. Evernote have now clarified that this is not the case but there’s no doubt that the public are becoming both more wary and more vocal about such issues.

Evernote position is that they are providing additional content because it is valuable context that will help you work more efficiently. But to a premium customer who is already supporting the service by paying a subscription, these suggestions at first glance look, to all intents and purposes, to be advertising. And don’t we usually pay to remove adverts?

It’s not all bad though. If you can get over the privacy concerns and get comfortable with the use of data, they’re bringing something that could be hugely valuable to workforces using the Evernote Business service. If you start working on something that a co-worker has already tackled and the product surfaces the relevant notes, you can see how many wheels will avoid being reinvented. Get it right – and Evernote have a real chance here given the quality of the search technology that they’ve built within their platform – and they could be onto a big winner.

But first, they need to allay those concerns. I don’t go to Evernote to find new knowledge. I go to Evernote to find the things that I’ve already filtered out as being valuable for me to store. Third party curation is something that necessarily should be happening outside my personal ecosystem.

I’ll not be going anywhere. Evernote remains a truly valuable resource and immensely powerful if used correctly. But whether it’s down to an issue of design, communication or a young algorithm, Context still has a long way to go.

 

Never Out Of Signal: The Rise Of Mesh Networks

As we become increasingly dependent on internet access, there’s still a big problem that needs to be solved with the advance of the internet of things. We’re going to need this internet connectivity for all these great ideas to take root and advance.

Within existing infrastructure, WiFi is now pretty much commonplace. But as soon as you head out onto the streets, even if you’re wealthy or desperate enough to have agreed to pay for half-solutions to the problem, you can never have full confidence that an existing WiFi signal will be good enough to guarantee you the flexibility that’s needed to carry out all of the things that you want to do whilst you’re on the go.

The world of mesh networking however presents us with one solution. Instead of relying on the traditional network in which access is for the most part controlled by large mobile telcos, each individual’s mobile phone (for example) now acts as a router that talks to all of the others around it. This creates a network that can support internet connectivity even when there is no public internet connection.

Another way to think about it is that the standard internet connectivity model uses a star topology. If you want to send a file from your laptop to another computer, you have to send it via a central router. But with a mesh topology, every node can create to every other node around it.

The potential of a system of decentralised connectivity that can deal with the many problems of poor connectivity – perhaps in a location that lacks the necessary infrastructure as a result of a remote location, an oppressive government or the aftermath of natural disaster or war – could prove to be transformative. Even down to the simple usefulness found in helping festival-goers get past an overwhelmed phone network that prevents them texting their lost friends, the value is clear.

This technology (Apple called this ‘Multipeer Connectivity‘) was included with iOS7. You probably heard about the rapid ascent of Open Garden’s Firechat app which exploded in popularity upon being used by pro-democracy campaigners in Hong Kong. Of course, it comes with the usual caveat in that circumstance. It is not secure from surveillance in any way a pretty significant weakness when you’re a protester that’s challenging an oppressive regime I think you’d agree (although this is currently being worked on by the company, I believe).

However, the point here is that the system doesn’t require centralised infrastructure. Allowing people to communicate without requiring internet access is a leap forward on many fronts. And of course the Firechat app still has value for those who are railing against centralised censorship – you can still get the message distributed, provided you’re willing to adopt the “I’m Spartacus” defence. And of course, you could always look at integrating mesh networks with Maidsafe.

There’s an interesting company called Veniam that have come out with a hugely ambitious vision.  Given the fact that people move around yet still need to effortlessly maintain connectivity in the course of their travels, they plan to connect the ‘internet of moving things’ by turning vehicles into WiFi hotspots  And it’s more than simply a big idea – they’ve already managed to equip more than 600 vehicles in Porto (including commuter buses) to show the potential of a smart city in action.

The really fascinating time will come I suspect when these systems are also collecting vast amounts of data about the current status of urban settings as they become continually denser. The rubbish bin that notifies a passing rubbish truck when it’s nearly full provides one example. In many ways this starts to bring the reality of the Trade Net closer, where self-driving cars (using Bitcoin microtransactions, of course) are negotiating in milliseconds to gain right of way on the roads, clearing traffic jams instantly. Or drones are delivering your requirements on demand.

There are significant issues to consider once we overlay our towns and cities with such coverage  (personal data, security and surveillance immediately jump to mind) which is why it’s so important I belive that we start to think about these issues very seriously now. But provided we find a way to tackle such issues (which we face in any event), the potential benefits from mesh networks could be hugely valuable. After all, anything that facilitates communication in a disaster zone must have a very significant contribution to make in the future.

 

 

Global Trends in 2015

Like many, I’m a sucker for those “look take a look at what’s on the horizon” type of posts. December’s always the month that these things start to really appear with a vengeance and the presentation from Global Trends is as good a place to start as any.

Here’s a few areas that stood out to me. I’ve partly picked these out of general interest but mainly it’s because I think that they reinforce a few of my own thoughts about key themes that every entrepreneur who’s looking to build a business in a growth area should at least be aware of.

1. Images hold more power than text

Not news in itself but it does reinforce this renewed interest in visual communications technologies (Oculus Rift, anyone?). In some cases, the technologies are developing to help us interact with the real world but in others, virtual reality will continue to gain traction.

2. The data security risk will worsen

Breaches will continue to happen more regularly and with increasingly serious repercussions. The problem will worsen significantly as the rapid advance of the Internet of Things eats up all manner of additional personal data. The battles for privacy, freedom and security will continue online, with the defence being strengthened I have no doubt by the hard work being carried out by my friends at MaidSafe.

At the same time, efforts made to access and index the Deep Web will continue apace. Those parts of the world wide web that are not indexed by conventional search engines contain a vast quantity of data that is several orders of magnitude larger than the surface web and remains untapped. A potential treasure trove of information appeals to many around the world for different reasons. But the potential to use such ‘big data’ to develop new solutions to existing problems is likely to attract people looking for new opportunities.

3. The battle for increasingly scarce resources heats up

As we collectively leave our own individual trails digital exhaust to be exploited by marketers and identity thieves, the demand (and, on the flip side, reward) for reducing waste by combining recycling, green energy and new business models will drive new ideas within what is being called the Circular Economy.

4. The rise of impact capitalism

More people will seek to invest their money in a way that delivers a measurable environmental and social impact, and not simply just a financial return. Crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending models will continuing to grow apace in order to tackle significant challenges that the market has previously ignored when left to its own devices.

My favourite example here has to be Watsi, the Y Combinator company that’s created a healthcare crowdfunding platform that lets you directly fund medical care for individuals in developing countries.

5. Working life continues to evolve

More people are responding to high unemployment levels with an entrepreneurial mindset, increasingly out of necessity. Self-employment and ‘on-demand’ working patterns will become commonplace with larger businesses becoming more open in general to collaboration with individuals.

6. Healthcare changes

More progress will be made this year in the field of personalised medicine designed for individual use, the tracking of health indicators using data captured by wearable devices that will increase diagnostic efficiency and the continued integration of robots (albeit without the AI of science fiction novels at this stage) into care and treatment cycles. Out of many fascinating areas, early-stage experiments into bioprinting will continue – using 3D printing technology to print body parts.

7. The rise of the city state

With the continued growth in population putting ever-increasing pressure on food and electricity supplies, cities are facing rapidly expanding populations – and therefore growing in importance as they seek to protect and provide for the demands of their residents. With more than 50% of the world’s population living in cities (there are currently 28 megacities with over 10 million people), the mayors who rule these cities will find their roles increase in significance. At the very least, they’ll have a significant role to play in tackling global issues, as cities currently produce 70% of all global harmful CO2 emissions in a world that needs such levels reduced drastically within the next 20 years.

8. Intelligence

And of course the debate will continue over whether robots are going to continue to close the gap on humans – and the existential threat to humanity that this development in AI may cause. Many of the predictions in the deck are likely to come to fruition well beyond 2015 but the meshing of machine intelligence with neuroscience, genomics and biotechnology provide no end of ideas for researchers and computer scientists to continue their collaborations.