Digitalization – DISRUP|TEC

How far can BTC rise and why should it?

Peter S Onge has an interesting article here.

Without trying to quantify any future Bitcoin value, the underlying question is, under what circumstances Bitcoin would rise to extreme heights, a very interesting question indeed.

The author states that a collapse of the US Dollar would inevitably lead to such event and the question follows how this may happen.

In the article, excessive printing is one way to get it done, but the second point is the most obvious and most convincing:

“The dollar’s price could collapse … simply because nobody wants to use it anymore.”

Why would this happen, that nobody wants to use the US Dollar anymore?

Well, here are the reasons:

Increasingly global transactions are not conducted in USD anymore. This scenario is already on its way (China, Russia, Iran)
Excessive printing leads to inflation, as we can see and expect to get worse. More gov restrictions ahead like restriction of cash payments
Costs of money supply
Transaction difficulties and costs.

Introducing a FED-CBDC would solve the last point, none of the others, and opens the pandora box of even more manipulation.

Simply said, USD is the old-fashioned taxi business and BTC is UBER, autonomously driving and without sexual harassment.

So when people decide, step by step, that BTC is better to use for transactions, they will switch. This means that fewer people want to use paper money anymore and even demand a premium for such payments. Think of credit card fees.

Already today, many employees want to be paid in crypto, not in whatever fiat.

Already today, corporations keep crypto as an asset on their balance sheet. See www.microstrategy.com

San Salvador has made BTC legal tender and each business has to accept it. More countries are considering such a step, some as it means progress, others to solve their inflation problem.

But, you say, crypto is used for criminal transactions. Maybe, but in all the narco movies I have seen, the suitcases had been stuffed with dollar bills. So what?

But, you say, if BTC is such a great store of value, why would people spend instead of holding it? Well, they don’t have to. They can easily keep and use it as collateral for loans in stablecoins or even CBDC for transactions.

But, you say, If an EMP or CME is hitting earth and crashing the power supply, all is lost. Well, it is not, because as a decentralized system, there will always be network nodes alive somewhere and keeping it together.

If all the electricity in the world breaks down, as worst-case, then it’s all about survival, not money anymore.

So let us watch the USD going down and enjoy the increase in value of bitcoin.

Digitalization, Industry news, Society, Technology

Privacy – remember John Lennon?

His song title Power to the people is becoming popular again nowadays, when Internet giants have no shame to exploit our personal data for undisclosed purposes. Well, mostly for money and even more power.

Source: www.johnlennon.com

As always, when a movement goes to far, opposing powers rise up, slowly first, unstoppable soon. A good sign is when industry veterans initiate or join such action, feeling that the Web is not anymore what it was supposed to be.

Have a close look at those developments:

BRAVE browser, supported by Javascript creator Brendan Eich, is giving the user all the power needed to not get skimmed off, while surfing the Web. Included is the Basic Attention Token concept, enabling users to pay for content of their choice. First step into the right direction.

Brendan_Eich_Mozilla_Foundation_official_photo

Next worth to watch is SOLID and its POD concept, initiated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself, the famous WWW creator. POD stands for Personal Online Data Store, promising users to be and stay the masters of their data, enabling them to share through apps, but never losing control.

Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee

Last but not least, there is TUTANOTA, a newcomer out of Germany, offering “the world’s most secure email service, easy to use and private by design”. A fresh start, no veterans involved, as far as I know.

Another fresh approach, up to change advertisement and customer relations, is MYFAVORITO, where DISRUPTEC has been an early advisor.

Source of all pictures: http://www.wikipeda.org

Digitalization, Success stories, Technology

Finding your digitalization platform

To choose a platform for upcoming digitalization projects is a strategic decision. Large enterprises have basically 3 options:

established market leader – as used by their competitors
open source product – without influence on further development
owning a proprietary platform themselves

Obviously, the proprietary option makes a perfect solution:

differentiation from competitors – one does not become a market leader by doing what others do
control of ongoing development
IP creation and future paybacks

However, developing such a complex platform has two challenges: costs and time-to-market as the most important factor.

turned on white tablet computer at globe share graph — Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

How to overcome both issues?

There are companies out there, focused on technology, having built a product over years, permanently further developed, based on real customer requirements. Many of these companies have never had sales departments, hired more programmers instead.

They have always quickly identified, built-in and applied new developments in real-life projects. This way they have grown their customers successes significantly and made themselves enough money to independently decide what they want to develop next.

Here‘s one of them.

Sometimes they are called to save other’s failed projects, to match business-critical deadlines. Successfully.

So to get your own platform, find one of them in the marketplace and take control.

Blockchain, Digitalization, Technology

Blogging about blocking

We live in exciting times.

As the Internet from the beginning has made millionaires and billionaires, and still is, same thing is happening in a new domain right now: bitcoin.

bitcoin_com — Source: http://www.bitcoin.com

Coming from roughly $800 in January 2017, the famous cryptocurrency posterchild’s share price did exceed $5,800 on October 15.

coindesk-bpi-chart

And while there are very contrary opinions about the future share price development, there is no doubt about the underlying blockchain technology.

Start-ups, IT heavyweights, banks and other financial institutions, logistics companies, consulting firms, governments and regulators are eager to check the opportunities it may offer.

blockgeeks_com — Source: http://www.blockgeeks.com

New and disruptive business models, coming with reduced transaction costs and increased security are the promises.

A period of trial & error has begun. Concepts are developed, whitepapers written, pilots set up and tested … all that bringing progress, new ideas, corrections, contributing towards the next stage.

And as always, participating is the key to success. So the focus of this Website will be extended, covering blockchain concepts and project experiences.

Stay tuned.

Digitalization

Business disruption gone wrong

2 weeks ago I have transferred administration of one of my business domains to DOMAIN.COM, in order to have all my domains under one roof, simplifying life.

Was I wrong. Just the opposite happened.

First it took 2 days until my Website was up and running again. Could be normal or not. Then I found that my Webmail wasn’t working. Could be fixed by changed settings myself, with help of my home admin.

Then I had gotten one or 2 emails with a subject “Confirm your domain”. There was no more explaining text and not even a signature, which was strange, so I checked the domain it came from: domain-inc.net.

Here’s the Website:

Bildschirmfoto vom 2017-07-03 11-23-03

Didn’t look like something official, so it was ignored as spam. Not a good idea.

Few days later my domain was suspended and since then I am spending lots of time in the domain.com support chat.

After having sent more verification documents on saturday, we’ve been told that over the weekend the verification department does not work.

This monday morning we’ve been told that the verification department is understaffed today because of tomorrow’s national holiday and we now don’t expect them to be back to work before wednesday.

Reminds me of some stories in the past with a similar background: Almost all serious businesses have streamlined their everyday processes to efficiency and it works very well. Most of the time. But when something goes wrong, it gets really complicated. As here and now.

Some time ago we’ve sent an overnight package by UPS or Fedex or DHL. Didn’t arrive in time and not at all. So we’ve had to resend it, using the same carrier. At pick-up, the employee seriously insisted to get paid for this order as well, not accepting the fact that we’ve paid already, weren’t served as contracted and even had experienced real damage.

So before a business gets disrupted in a constructive, forward-moving way, more attention has to be spent on avoiding unintentional disruptions.

Digitalization, Industry news, Success stories, Technology

On historic ground

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA was the place for a 500startups DemoDay this week. As advisor to Myfavorito Inc., one of the batch 19 companies, I have thankfully been invited to join.

What a place: Here are the Fairchild Semiconductor patent and laboratory notebooks preserved and exhibited, dating back to the late 1950s, and being the fundament for the tremendous technological progress we experience and enjoy nowadays. Rightfully, Fairchild is described there as the “Trillion Dollar Startup”.

One of the founders was Gordon Moore, who defined Moore’s law. Based on their work and progress in early integrated circuits it projected exponential growth in number of active elements per chip and thus performance, decrease in costs. Still valid today and we are already experiencing the steeper slope of this exponential curve.

The 500DemoDay was an all-day event where 40 companies presented to potential investors , in a 2-minutes pitch on-stage and later in a more casual one-to-one environment. The event has been extremely well prepared and professionally run, fully booked by interested parties.

Our company had more than 25 serious conversations to be followed up in the next weeks.

All the best to Myfavorito.

Digitalization, Technology

Autonomous cars? Think bolder.

Just stuck in a 1-hour traffic jam few days ago because of some wires fallen across the Interamerican highway. And as this is the backbone of Panama, there is no way to go around. Time to go over it, literally.

Bad news: all the upcoming autonomous driving cars will not change this. Not at all. But the solution is above our heads: kind-of-autonomous flying objects. (AFO)

Here is what imho is the best concept and first real prototype ready to fly this year:

liliumflying

Fast as a jet
vertical take-off and landing
light-sport category
36 engines (electric fans)
6 battery packs
3 computers
2 seats
1 airframe parachute.

It is Lilium’s electric jet, developed by a Munich-based start-up that lately got a €10mio capital infusion.

liliumhelipad

This aircraft can take-off and land on a helipad or elsewhere. No runway, no emissions. Once in the air it travels as fast as 180 mph and goes for 300 miles.

Consider it as disruption in personal travel and keep watching here

All pictures (C) Lilium Aviation

Digitalization, Industry news, Success stories, Technology

Mission accomplished, finally

When the new economy crisis hit in 2001, our Germany-based family software business had just missed to get established in the U.S.

Fifteen years later, our sons have been successful.

500myfa

Experience collected during these years and marketplace knowledge diligently aquired, has led to a brandnew product with some potential.

Now participating in 500 startups’ program. Congratulations!

Want more details? Here.

Digitalization, Society, Technology

Tearing down walls, but …

Peter Diamandis’ TechBlog starts like this today:

With all the talk of building walls, it seems to me that technology has actually been rapidly tearing down walls.

Besides your passport, what really defines your nationality these days?

Is it where you were live? Where you work? The language you speak? The currency you use?

If it is, then despite an increase in “nationalism” (i.e. BREXIT), we may see the idea of “nationality” quickly dissolve in the decades ahead… Or at least become an option you choose versus assume as a default.

Residency, currency and language are rapidly being disrupted and dematerialized by technology.

Peter is describing the world from a tech-pro perspective and I understand. Even more, as my life has been massively influenced by the teared-down Berlin wall.

There is, however, more to consider:

In Europe, countries have and are being flooded with strangers unchecked, who do not subscribe to our culture and belief system, even fight our lifestyle. Just the opposite of the e.g. Indian entrepreneur who is doing business in or with the Silicon Valley.

In Europe, an unelected bureaucratic monster is more and more influencing the citizenry’s everyday life, changing the world in a way a “Kommissar” thinks it should be.

This kind of experiences has caused a situation when boarders are built again as defense, mentally and physically.

And don’t forget that people have roots. Just recently I have been able to track my ancestors as far back as 1600. It is a very personal and exciting lesson in history. Kind of proud of what battles they had to fight and survive. However, these roots have not held me back in considering another part of the world home today.

The catch is that technology is developing exponentially, at high speed, increasing. Human beings can barely keep pace and societies just don’t.

What to do about it? Debug politics, teach people, develop societies?

All of it.