On a particularly pleasant afternoon in Penang, I was about to pay for one of the Malaysian island’s most famous delicacies, char koay teow. The rice noodle-based dish is a rare treat, but on this unfortunate occasion, I had absent-mindedly left my wallet back at the hotel and with no physical currency to part with (I was not about to trade my mobile phone for some sustenance) had to take the walk of shame back to my hotel room, unsatisfied. Malaysia continues to remain a very strongly cash-based country.
No doubt, digital assistants add comfort to our lives. But, incidents around privacy breaches force us to rethink whether our decision of trusting a digital assistant is right or wrong.
A friend of mine casually remarked the other day in the midst of the highly destructive Bitcoin Cash hash war — “but surely Bitcoin is now trading below the cost of mining? Isn’t there a minimum floor price?” Unfortunately, there is no floor when it comes to cryptocurrencies — the same way that there is no ceiling. To try to postulate what drives cryptocurrency prices one way or the other is akin to telling the future in tea leaves — whatever you’re looking for is there. The cost of mining Bitcoin differs from country to country and the figures that we do have for the cost of Bitcoin mining is an estimation at best.
Despite the recent emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), several businesses have already developed numerous applications that can replicate human thoughts, performing superior cognitive and creative tasks.
The next time someone remarks casually that cryptocurrencies are not “real money” because nobody would use real money to buy digital goods, ask them if they’ve ever played the highly addictive mobile game Clash of Clans or any one of the other hugely popular mobile gaming titles available. In Clash of Clans, prices start as low as US$2.60 for 500 gemsbut can go much crazier from there. Yet not only are players happy to fork out real cash for virtual goods, at least in the case of Clash of Clans, they’re forking it out to the tune of a cool US$1.5 million a day, making the Helsinki-based company enormously rich. What are the developers going to spend all that real gold on anyway? A better ice house? Nowhere is the addictive nature of gaming more apparent than in China — the world’s largest biggest video game market. But just as the Chinese have been plonking down some hard-earned yuan for some virtual armor, the Chinese government has been coming down hard to limit what it has determined to be a highly malicious influence on Chinese society.
As the minister in charge of France’s economic policy in 2008, Christine Lagarde is no stranger to financial crises. During the 2008 Financial Crises, she described her encounter with her then U.S. counterpart, Treasury Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson when news of the likely insolvency of Lehman Brothers, one of the world’s largest investment banks at the time, as, “It’s like a tsunami was coming and we were discussing what bathing suit to wear.”
I’ve spent the last 6 years of my life heavily involved in A/B testing, and other testing methodologies. Whether it was the performance of an email campaign to drive health outcomes, product changes, Website changes, the example list goes on. A few of these tests have been full factorial MVT tests (my favorite).