Revolutionary new IoT chip communicates miles without using any energy
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF IoT devices only “work” if they have connectivity, but up until now trying to get data from a sensor in a field, or a toaster at home, has meant fitting them all with battery powered communications gear, new backscatter devices solve that issue. A...
Ditch your telco provider, Blockchain based Mesh networks are coming to town
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Connectivity is ubiquitous, so we’re told, but today all these different communications channels are siloed and isolated, over the next decade, or two, devices will be able to hop between them all at will. Mesh networks, which ironically are the very same sorts of...
Passive Wi-Fi breakthrough could revolutionise the Internet of Things
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Wi-Fi is ubiquitous, sensors are ubiquitous, but putting batteries in small sensors is impractical, now passive Wi-Fi that doesn’t need an energy source will change all that For those that live in developed countries it has to be said that wireless internet, and Wi-Fi,...
Ethereum founder thinks crypto can disrupt Mastercard and Visa in “next few years”
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The processing networks that the major credit card companies have built up over the years means that they’re difficult to disrupt, but as we learn so often difficult doesn’t mean impossible… The brain behind the runaway train that is Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is matter of...
Chinese Government orders the “immediate shutdown” of all Bitcoin exchanges, BTC balks
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Bitcoin shows no sign of stopping or slowing down so regulators and governments are now starting to take the regulation and “management” of the “stateless crypto economy” more seriously A little while ago I gave a talk on the Future of Money, which is...
Blockchain, EU GDPR privacy law could finally give users back control of their privacy
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF None of us have any control whatsoever over our personal privacy and the information that companies store on us, but Europe’s new GDPR law is about to change all that and as companies struggle to meet the deadline a paradigm shift in the way we...
3 Ways the 5G Revolution Will Transform the Internet of Things
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The arrival of 5G networks will revolutionise existing industries and help create new ones and its impact should not be under estimated The 5G revolution is around the corner, and one of its biggest impacts will be the transformation of the Internet of Things....
Estonia announces plans to create its own national cryptocurrency
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The future of money is digital, and more countries around the world are drawing up plans to develop and deploy their own national cryptocurrencies, signalling the demise of the cash society and ushering in a new era of government led transparency and control. Estonia...
UK passes payment milestone as cards overtake cash as king
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Cash has been with us for Millenia, however, slowly but surely its reign is coming to an end but the road to phase it out completely will be a long one. Over the past five years there has been a dramatic rise in the...
Stanford just built the world’s first Flash Organisation
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF With fully automated, and crowdsourced organisations already here the only type of organisation that noone seems to have been able to create yet is a Flash Organisation, but that could soon change We’ve all heard about the rise of Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAO), that don’t...
Australian researchers claim a blockchain record of 440,000 transactions per second
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Blockchains relatively low transaction speeds could stop it from reaching its full potential, but now a research group from USYD claim to have smashed the performance barrier that could have held it back. Researchers at Australia’s University of Sydney (USYD) announced this week that...
China’s cashless future, PBoC gets ready to launch world’s first national cryptocurrency
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The use of cash in society is falling and some of the world’s largest central banks are creating new cryptocurrencies and planning for a future without cash. China’s central bank has announced that it’s going digital, but while that shouldn’t be a surprise to...
A secret trader just made over $200 million in a month trading Ethereum
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many speculate that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are riding bubbles that are about to pop, but as the adoption of cryptocurrencies, by individuals, organisations and governments increases it’s likely they’re wrong An unknown cryptocurrency trader turned $55 million of paper wealth into $283...
World first as Chinese scientists teleport particles 300km into space
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Teleportation is the ultimate sci-fi dream, and scientists are getting better at teleporting quantum particles further than ever before but teleporting real objects is still a long way away. Earlier this week Chinese scientists managed to teleport an object from Earth and into space,...
The United Nations taps blockchain to solve world hunger
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Hundreds of millions of people go hungry every night, and after a succesful pilot the UN thinks that blockchain could help them solve world hunger. Earlier this week United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) announced that 10,000 individuals had taken advantage of its trial to deliver food to Syrian...
Apple’s becoming a bank by the back door
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Increasingly Apple wants to be your wallet, your payment provider, and maybe one day your bank of choice, but if they do “become a bank” then it’s unlikely it’ll be like anything like we’ve ever seen before It’s been rumoured for nearly five years,...
Toyota ties up with blockchain startups to connect its world
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Blockchain is one of the world’s most promising emerging technologies and it’s now finding its way into the automotive and transportation sectors Just a few weeks after Ford officially ousted its CEO in order to make way for a new, more future focused CEO,...
LTE meets WiFi as Intel, Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm fire up MulteFire
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Licensed spectrum is expensive and it gets crowded quickly, now some of the world’s largest companies are banding together to create a new communications standard that combines the best of Wifi and LTE to create ultra fast, flexible networks A consortium of wireless industry...
DTCC wants to put hundreds of trillions of dollars of securities transactions on the blockchain
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The Vice Chairman of the DTCC argues that a lack of standards is holding back blockchains adoption in the financial services industry, and he wants to change that. Last week Larry Thompson, the Vice Chairman of the US Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC),...
Facebook launches itself into developing brain reading tech
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Mark Zuckerberg wants to create the world’s largest, and maybe only, telepathic network and he’s slowly pulling all the pieces together. As if Facebook wasn’t already pervasive enough in everyday life, with the total number of users reaching two billion people, the company’s newly...
