Overview: Digital Transformation

could pose a devastating threat to large tranches of the financial industry, and profoundly change the management of monetary policy... RSCoin would be a tool of state control, allowing the central bank to keep a tight grip on the money supply and respond to crises. It would erode the exorbitant privilege of commercial banks of creating money out …

AI still can’t ... deal with natural language well enough, but it’s getting much better. And the way translation’s currently done will change because Google now has what promises to be a much better way to do machine translation.

the rise of Trump using language of how we talk about startups that become black swans.

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

To understand what makes BuzzFeed tick, you need to know how Dao Nguyen thinks about data... As the value of content approaches zero, "Having technology, data science, and being able to know how to manage, optimize and coordinate your publishing is the thing that gives you a competitive advantage"... One myth is data scientists are telling report…

To get a better grip on the questions that bots raise... organized a workshop that brought together a diverse group of bot experts. This article is the output of the event, a tour of the bot and its semi-autonomy from three perspectives: that of the designer, the implementer, and the regulator... The last several years have seen a rise in bots …

BotOrNot checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.

[leaders are] usually busy furiously making believe that there is no decline. Instead of leading societies out of decline (which is what they should be doing), they’re working night and day manufacturing (or luxuriously reclining in) what I’ll call Unreality Bubbles... intelligentsias manufacture unrealities in eras of decline because their positi…

the fear is that the platform will change without warning, and teams will have ended up wasting precious time and effort before they get a chance to get it right or reap the benefits if they do.

What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization.... All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time... Frazzled, exhausted, and …

data enrichment platforms have become a valuable resource for data scientists looking to automate and scale the cleaning, labeling and enrichment of data using human intelligence for machine learning — i.e. training data creation.

the future of work will rely on self-organization, enabled by collaborative software like Slack and Ethereum... Even in a self-organized, decentralized, collaborative, and high-trust future ... people will need to navigate their organization... Roles and projects will need to be created, filled, and disbanded with increasing frequency... we need …

in the new news business that old saw is getting flipped: messaging is the new medium... Readers are fatigued by apps... overwhelmed by the torrents pushed out on social networks. What newsrooms ... are realizing is that the place to reach readers these days are messaging apps... already reach more than 2 billion people worldwide

To help developers quickly begin exploring the use of blockchain in the enterprise, IBM this week made several announcements to rapidly advance the use of distributed ledger technology across multiple industries. New blockchain services on IBM’s cloud platform, as well as plans to offer blockchain engagement centers (called Garages) in London, New…

This is a completely new way to launch a media startup,... Most startups start with VC funding or a foundation grant or corporate support and then go chasing after an audience. But our crowdfunding approach means that #EmergingUS will be built on an audience of thousands... treated as real stakeholders. They'll play a big role in shaping the cont…

“We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task... Physicist Stephen Hawking and the tech billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk issued a similar warning last year... Vardi, a professor at Rice University and Guggenheim fellow... suggested AI could drive global unemployment to 50%, wiping out middle-…

Betts ... became the first data head to join the publisher’s board, recognizing data’s importance in growing its subscriptions and audience. Today, he heads up a 30-person team focused on customer analytics and research. Here are lessons from Betts on data maturity and driving audience engagement... While subscriptions are critical ... it’s not t…

Bots are to modern messaging apps what APIs were to Web 2.0; a way to build on top of other services, experiment, and create a new way of interacting with existing services... what inspiration can we draw from the past that might help us to think about designing Conversational UIs?

Artificial intelligence is the future of Google Search, and if it’s the future of Google Search, it’s the future of so much more... with its head of AI taking over search, the company seems to believe this is the way forward.

“Innovation is not just a cool thing. It’s not just a process. It’s a culture. We research. We design. We build.” Innovation should not compete with the daily grind of the company, it must emerge from it

an edge is not just a term for advantage itself; it can also be the place where you can find that advantage... the outer rim that frames what you do and separates it, quite conveniently, from what you don’t... When you proceed beyond this border in business, the main thing that changes is risk. they are the places where the inside and the outside…

Free group messagingIt's like a private chat room for your small group. Have as many as you want, and it's always free. Now, you can coordinate with coworkers, organize a game night, and keep in touch with family all in the same place.

there’s no shortage of startups, projects, and developers trying to apply the blockchain concept to everything... because it gives the tech industry another bite at a long-coveted apple: decentralization. Is there a decentralization event-horizon beyond which platforms simply dissolve... Here are two instances of that dream... Ujo imagines an au…

the collapse of the digital interface of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) IT system... supposed to be one of its key exemplars for GDS in showcasing its "agile" approach to delivering digital technology... the system will be 40 per cent over budget at £215m and has led to disallowance penalties to the EU of up to £180m per year due to mis-paym…

the government’s chief scientific adviser, published ... Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Block Chain... official study that explores how the aforementioned technology “can revolutionise services, both in government and the private sector... the potential to help governments to collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land reg…

Every insurance company’s core computer system is, at heart, a big, fat centralised transaction ledger and if the insurance industry does not begin to learn about, evaluate, build with and eventually embrace Blockchain technology, they will leave themselves naked and open to the next Uber, Netflix,  AirBnB orwanna’ be Unicorn that comes along and …

a new role that I believe will become more and more important: the Minister of Culture.WARNING: REAL CONTENT AHEAD! This essay links to most of the best research on culture. ... I’ll also show how to generate a culture score for your company and improve it. ... a full 3-6 month course on culture ... Don’t think of this as a long post — think of it…

... high levels of skills obsolescence. We must anticipate massive quantitative and qualitative educational needs. Technological literacy will be key, obviously, but I also believe we will need to cultivate our “core human competencies”. Collaboration, empathy, active listening and caring, creativity ... anticipate the social effects of a “winner-…

About 7 million jobs will be lost and 2 million gained as a result of technological change in 15 major developed and emerging economies... "It is simply not possible to weather the current technological revolution by waiting for the next generation’s workforce to become better prepared."... "routine white-collar office functions at risk of being…

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.