Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #12

Best of the week

The Internet was supposed to kill middlemen, instead it made them even stronger.

I remember meeting with Borders and Barnes & Noble back in the 90s, urging them to come to grips with the existential th…

You can tell a 21st century leader because they don't talk about how their organization is structured, they focus on bringing their shared purpose to the world through their communities

We’re not creating the new businesses we should be, and these giants have to be broken up.

The increasingly conversational nature of your back-and-forth with your devices will make your relationship to technology even more intimate, more loyal, more personal.

Fintech

The launch of Apple Pay and Android Pay by Google will likely prompt another wave of forecasts that tech giants are muscling in to tread on the banks toes.

By Bernard Lunn I see the so called sharing economy services such as Uber and AirBnB as payment systems with a domain specific wrapper. They work for both parties because payment is so easy. At some stage this was always going to bring them into competition with payment specialists. One can always trust Uber to take the…

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Artificial Intelligence

The web's information filters are making assumptions about you based on details that you might not even notice yourself.

As the world recovers from yet another international stock-market roller-coaster — an outright crash probably only prevented by safety algorithms installed after the Singapore flash crash of 2013 — it might be helpful for us to remember a couple of lessons from history.

In a world first, an artificial intelligence machine plays chess by evaluating the board rather than using brute force to work out every possible move.

Other

Innovation is more than the next big idea. During the last 15 years, 47 fintech companies grew from startups to “unicorns” (valued at $1 billion or greater), with another 38 companies quickly approaching that level,

I saw this quote on Twitter this morning from Bob Rothman and it is a great encapsulation of what I had planned to write about. With so much talk of paradigm shifts, disruption, new patterns of organisation, so much of what I hear feels a little counterfeit. The reason is that the speakers are not…