Here are some slides and a video lecture (35 mins).  The example is from the case we did earlier on electric vehicles.

Here are some articles on Bitcoin and Blockchain/DLT

Goldman Sachs on Bitcoin

Goldman Sachs on Blockchain

A UC Berkeley (Engineering) report on Blockchain

UK Govt. Report on Blockchain

Some basic stats on India ....

“only about 15 percent of that population report ever having used a bank account in their entire lives.”

"there are 155,000 bank branches in that nation, but 600,000 towns and cities" CEO of MobileonMoney

"there are currently fewer than 20 cash machines for every 100,000 adults in India"
"there are about 57.7 million merchants in India but only 1.5 million digital payment acceptance locations" PYMNTS.com

Here is an article from The New Yorker on Sweden.

Look like SWIFT is feeling the heat from Blockchain.  Here is a description of their GPII upgrade for cross-border interbank transfers. Richer messages and end-to-end tracking.

It appears to be very difficult to a cost-benefit analysis of faster payments:

"Although we cannot provide monetary estimates of the benefits of the U.K. FPS, the total costs of the new system relative to the U.K. population (63 million in 2012) suggests that the value of benefits per individual per year need not be large to give FPS a positive net present value."  Green et.al. FRB Boston

More so because it is difficult to calculate possible external benefits to non-bank payment providers who can hook up to faster payments (at least in the UK there is a way for them to do so).

Here is an example from Transferwise which claims to be the first Fintech company to hook up to the UK Faster Payments Scheme.

Here is a recent speech by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney. Nice pictures of the value chain and potential risks.

What do Uber drivers and strippers have in common?

And Susan Fowler's blog on her year at Uber ... and the NYT story ... and then ... this guy

We talked about ClearXchange a bank-led payments initiative. Now 19 of them have decided to come up with a mobile app to compete with Venmo ... here on Bloomberg

Venmo is owned by PayPal and is a mobile wallet ... problem is cashing out takes days. As well there appear to be some security, fraud and consumer protection issues according to  Time.

Venmo is trying to counter this by speaking with card networks - problem is cards are costly due to interchange.

Many countries are using polymer currency. The Bank of England recently issued polymer 5 pound bills (with plans for 10s and 20s).

Doug Maw (a vegetarian) started a campaign on change.org regarding the small amount of tallow in the banknotes.

The inventor of the notes thought the campaign was "stupid" since the amount was trivial and similar amounts of tallow could also be found in soap and candles.

To it's credit, the Bank of England listened and met with Mr. Maw, and decided not to withdraw the 5 and 10 pound bills, but maybe the 20s will be vegetarian.

So the Bank of Canada recently released some interim results from Project Jasper.

Here is a set of slides explaining the experiment and here is an opinion piece written by Carolyn Wilkins who is a Senior Deputy Governor at the Bank.

Basically at this time the system does not meet all the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMIs).

In case you are wondering what 'T1 Cash' means. Canada has something called the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) - so it is a wholesale system. It has two payment streams Tranche 1 (T1) and Tranche 2 (T2). In the T1 system banks pledge collateral with the Bank of Canada. So I (being a bank) can send a T1 payment if my net owing position is less than or equal to the collateral I have pledged. So T1 payments are fully collateralized - I don't have access to any line of credit.

So step 1 (in the 6 steps) - Banks pledge T1 cash.

Step 2 - BOC converts cash to CAD-Coin - and this is used to fund participant accounts with the BOC.

So CAD-Coin is a settlement asset - for settlement between banks.  It is 'money' for them, not for us.

Central bank money is being exchanged on par - 1 CDN $ (cash) = 1 CAD-Coin - so the Money supply is constant.

Gordon has written a book ... in case you want to read a really long book ... The Rise and Fall of American Growth

But you could just read the papers the first piece and the sequel.

Basically he is suggesting that recent innovations 'tech' have not been as good for the U.S. as previous ones (electricity, internal combustion engines etc.). Good ... meaning in terms of productivity and economic growth. So the growth rate of output per hour was 2.36% p.a. over the period 1891-1972 and 1.59% from 1972-2013. Did computers etc. make no difference? They did, but looks like diminishing returns may have set in. The same statistic (rate of growth of labor productivity):

1972-1996: 1.38% p.a.

1996- 2004: 2.54%  <<<< here is the spike

2004- 2013: 1.33%

Hal Varian's consumer surplus argument does not cut it with Gordon (and rightfully so). Varian says many of the 'new' tech innovations give us more consumer surplus and consumer surplus is not part of GDP, so that's why things don't show up in growth statistics. Gordon says consumer surplus was never part of GDP.

Here is a recent HBS working paper by Christensen and others. He clarifies the concept:

Sustaining innovations - when technological change occurs along dimensions that main stream customers care about and that incumbents have provided in the past.

Disruptive innovation - the new innovation does not improve the attributes on which existing firms built their business (different trajectory/new 'unique' combination of product attributes - could in some ways be perceived to be inferior to existing product)

Technological change outstrips growth in demand for 'higher performance', So incumbents over-serve the market in terms of product features/attributes (consumers don't really want them) and this also leaves some room at the lower end of the quality scale for entrants (mini-mill story).

Incumbents don't see the attractiveness of investing in 'inferior' product with lower margins (and this is also why they are not a source of disruptive innovation). Or we could use Ghemawat's argument about commitment to explain why this does not happen.

All disruption does not have to be 'inferior' - new market disruptions "take hold in a new value network" and compete against 'non-consumption' - example: Godrej chotuKool portable refrigerator.

Here is a story from the NYT on opening up hardware design.

The internet of things in the home.  A story from the NYT.

And a search engine for the internet of things:

We talked about Kodak and its patents.  An article from the NYT on Kodak and a short NYT video.

Here are two reports on Bioinspiration that may be of interest - both commissioned by the San Diego Zoo. An Economic Progress Report and a Global report.

And here is a very cool video on Geckskin - (one of the examples in the case)

Here is a video on the reading by Micheal Porter for the last week of class.

A short video on the Harvard Business School Case Method.

Our speaker yesterday spoke of developments in data center efficiency.  Here is an article from Wired magazine on Google's data centers.  Although this is not the latest and greatest.  That is secret.

The next big thing:  Quantum Computing.  The Canadian company which makes these is D-Wave.  Google has bought one and so has Lockheed Martin.

In devices:  A material called Graphene. Can't wait to dump my iPhone!

As promised, here are some slides and a video accompaniment (about 25 mins.)

The article by Greenberger is quite interesting as it predicts other stuff like personalization and computerized stock trading ... you can get it here.

Here are some slides two-sided markets.  And if you are interested in a cross-country analysis of policy responses to regulating payments ... download this paper by Tirole.

Here are some documents on open gov / open public data

Australia:  Principles of Open Public Sector Information

OECD: Innovative and Open Government

Congressional Research Service: Assessment of President Obama's Initiative

And Socrata - which has built a business around Open data - many local governments in the U.S. seem to be very active.

Today (March 31st) is World Backup Day (2014).  Don't be an April Fool.

There are only two types of people - those who have lost data and those who are going to lose data.

Here are the slides for our last session.  The sources are in the slides ... Jocelyne Bourgon and Beth Simone Noveck.  Gordon Brown's argument is in his book (probably), but otherwise you could look at this Cisco white paper or the executive summary.  The New York Times coverage of Brazil (Mayara Vivian) is here and here or download here and here.  If you are interested in how to deal with the positive and negative effects of technology you should read this book by Kevin Kelly.

Here is a program produced by CNBC some years ago (total about 120 minutes).

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Here are three background papers on data brokers / information re-sellers:

U.S. Senate (2013)

U.S. Government Accountability Office (2013)

Congressional Research Service (2007)

Copyright: CNBC

There is too much stuff on MOOCs out there, so here is selection relating to some of the issues we discussed in class.

Sebastian Thrun blames students for the failure of the San Jose State University experiment - "It is a group for which this medium is not a good fit".  So nothing wrong with the medium or concept!

Coursera calamities - here are two.  The first was mentioned in the case - Fundamentals of Online Education, which supposedly flopped due to technical glitches and "lack of instruction for assignments and group activity".  The second was a Microeconomics course that I happened to have enrolled in.  I only just looked at the first few sessions so I did not know that the instructor essentially walked out on the students in the middle of the course.  His institution said he was not used to a "diverse audience including those who were not seriously committed ...".  Professor McKenzie from UC Irvine was apparently "dismayed" that students were not buying the textbook - guess who wrote the textbook?  He also did not like the quality of the Coursera videos and was unhappy about the fact that less than 2% of the students were actively engaged in the course.  In my few weeks of lurking in this course, I observed a few things.  Firstly, Professor McKenzie's examples were all from an 'American context' and would likely have made no sense to someone from Asia or Africa.  Secondly, he was very keen on selling his book and complaining that Amazon had increased the price since his online course started.  Lastly, I was quite impressed by the quality of the student discussion and the response to assignment questions.  Clearly many students were spending a lot of time responding to the assignments and in discussions.

The 'quality education' goal - I am sure some Professors spend a lot of time and energy in preparing the courses but there are others who do nothing.  Here is an example from UC Santa Cruz:

 “The film already existed,” Kenez said, “so we didn’t have to do anything. They hired our TA to put together the material at their website; we had nothing to do with that.” He said he had never looked at the Coursera video. As for the forums, the writing assignments, the student questions and student problems, “I have nothing to do with any of the online activity,” Kenez told me. “I haven’t even checked in. I have nothing to do with the evaluations.” 

This is the privacy reading I wanted you to look at.  It's a classic by Warren and Brandeis published in 1890 ... called the Right to Privacy.