Month: September 2021

Cryptos : Definition

Shabbir Chunawalla

Cryptocurrencies may not be treated as currency by the government as the central bank alone has the authority to issue currency. Cryptos, therefore, in the proposed regulation will not be used as a medium of exchange for buying-selling.

Cryptos can be defined in terms of their use. They could be treated as assets or commodities. In fact, these are digital assets.

Crypto exchanges have made regulatory policy recommendations. They have suggested registration of crypto exchanges. According to them, crypto tokens should be treated as digital assets. There should be exchange ownership parameters, KYC, accounting and reporting parameters.

Crypto currencies covered under government definition may be allowed to be traded in India. The government will spell out its taxation treatment, say security transaction tax or revenues earned as business income and capital gains treatment.

DeFi

Shabbir Chunawalla

The simplest example of DeFi is peer-to-peer finance. Finance is based on owning assets, getting returns on these assets, borrowing and lending. All those four could be covered by DeFi products. The protocol used is programmable blockchains such as Ethereum. There are contractual aspects of finance. They will be catered to by the maths of crypto or blockchain. These are early days. Many assurances of central financial institutions are yet not available on DeFi. Of course, you get the ability to lend and borrow, with no paperwork as in the real world in a jiffy. In fiat currency, this takes a lot of time. Suppose a person has to borrow $1 billion for a few seconds. Let there be a million DeFi users, each contributing $1000 by parking their crypto assets into yield farms. It is a cool solution.

NFTs

Shabbir Chunawalla

NFTS have the potential to securitise a variety of digital and physical goods and create a marketplace around their sale-purchase using crypto as the currency.

Cryptokitties (2017) were funded quickly. These were digitally owned and bred. They were digital kittens.

NFTS digitise art, pop-culture, sports moments and even life experiences.

There could be intersection of gaming, NFTs and communities. New age retail investors are excited about gamitication of finance.

ToneTag : Voice-based Transactions

Shabbir Chunawalla

ToneTag is a Bangalore-based company founded in 2013. Basically it is a technology company that uses encrypted sound waves to make offline, proximity-based, contactless digital transactions.

Basically, here there is interaction of two devices through the medium of sound. Sound transfers the data.

ToneTag proprietary Software Development Kit (SDK) must be installed either on existing device or infrastructure. There is an algorithm in the kit built on soundwaves. The device interaction happens through irreversible set of codes. The transfer is fast and secure.

The technology could be used for payments which are person-to-person, through feature phones, through POS, from web to mobile payments, for cardless ATM transactions and through RetailPods. The payments can be made even when there is no internet/bluetooth connectivity.

A customer can open ToneTag app and select pay the merchant option. The phone is tapped on the RetaiPod, where it plays a tone. Recognising the tone, there comes a pop-up on the phone. The amount is entered and payment is confirmed. The RetailPod displays an acknowledgement message.

ToneTag has been given approval by the RBI after completing the first cohort under the RBI sandbox for retail payments. The regulated entities can now easily adopt this technology. It will be a boon for people who are not digitally savvy.

MBA Curriculum

Shabbir Chunawalla

There is great demand for MBA courses being offered by Indian business schools. MBA has shown flexibility in its orientation, and that makes it easier for the candidates to switch careers. MBA , to begin with, was structured on the teaching of foundation courses and some electives at the final year or the last semester. This was so in the 1960s and 1970s. The usual electives were HR, production and operations, finance and marketing. Marketing has become an elective of choice by a large number students. One reason was that marketing executives were on company’s expense account on the job, and the company met their lodging, boarding, travelling and entertainment expenses. The world was experiencing a chemistry revolution. Many breakthrough products such as detergents, polyester and paints had appeared on the market. These products were easy to produce and many producers joined the race to make them. What was needed was a marketing team to differentiate these similar products. There emerged a concept of brand and its image. Advertising agencies assisted the companies in this . Business schools introduced subjects such as marketing research, product management, brand management and sales management.

Later in the 80s and 90s and post-2000, business schools shifted the orientation from marketing to finance. Financial services were growing at a rapid pace. They offered most of the lucrative jobs. There was financialisation of economies. Financial services contribute substantially to national income. The types of financial products available increased in number and complexity. There are consultants working in this field globally. Candidates started opting for finance courses.

Another era has began. It is an era of AI and Machine Learning. AI brings a new approach to age-old business issues. We can do marketing research (MR), market segmentation and targeting, and sales forecasting using AI. Business is considered as a network of entities. We have to map our network of which our business is a part. There are bridging opportunities, geographic clusters and hubs. We have to avoid algorathmic bias. Thus the new orientation is AI and innovation, business analytics and prediction.

Business schools have to adapt to each new era. The challenge is to find competent teachers to impart these new skills. There is constant reshuffling of the curricula — old and outdated is cast off, and new topics and courses are added.

El Salvador and Bitcoin

Shabbir Chunawalla

EL salvador has legalised the use of bitcoin for day-to-day transactions through a state-sponsored wallet. Initially there were some issues, but then the transactions have proceeded fine later. EL Salvador has adopted the US dollar in 2001 as currency. Bitcoin is the supplementary currency. It is an experiment. The problem is the high volatility. It makes it a high-risk investment rather than a store of value.

EL Salvador receives foreign remittances to the extent of 16 per cent of its GDP. Bitcoin is good for cross-border transactions as it operates on blockchain technology which cuts time and cost.

Cross-border transactions is a cogent argument for central bank digital currency (CBDC). Even India’s RBI is thinking about a CBDC.

Cryptocurrencies like Stablecoins are less volatile as they are pegged to the dominant currencies of the world. These have a bright future.

AI Writing Computer Code

Shabbir Chunawalla

Codex, a new AI technology, writes its own computer programmes. It was feared that such a technology could threaten the jobs of the programmers. However, the fear is unfounded. It is a tool to improve human productivity. It facilitates a coder’s job. Codex is built by OpenAI. OpenAI is prestigious research lab dedicated to AI.

Of late. the neural network has attracted attention. Machines, as we know, learn certain skills, by analysing huge amount of data. OpenAI researchers design neural networks that analyse vast amount of prose and recognise patterns in text. The network learned to predict the next word in the sequence. They could complete the thought with entire paragraphs. OpenAI has created GPT-3 which writes its own Twitter posts, speeches, poetry and news articles.

AI recognises voice commands, translates languages, identifies street signs and identifies pedestrians.

Novel by Artificial Intelligence (AI )

Shabbir Chunawalla

A real full-fledged Korean novel written by AI has been published. Its AI author has been called Birampurg. The name of the novel is The World From Now On.

In the past, there were crude attempts to produce a novel powered by AI. There was one such attempt in Russia in 2008, and one in Japan in 2016.

The present Korean novel is woven around five professionals trying to understand the meaning of human existence. It is a 560-page work.

A Korean novelist Kim has acted as a director for this project. He used to instruct AI after checking results.

AI Writer was fed with 1000 books to make it learn writing style. It was not necessary to check grammar and edit the book. The writing guide was fed with well-defined techniques in codes. Its acquired knowledge was used to draw details from thousands of books the engine had been made to read.

Of course, AI too experiences the Writer’s Block and becomes quiet for certain periods. At times, the expressions go overboard, or it uses slang or outdated language. Here Kim as the director of the project intervened and corrected the course. The whole project took 7 years to complete.

AI has also been used in solving cross words and in copywriting for advertising.

Can AI replace human writers? Is it possible to get Shakespeares and Byrons through AI?

AI now uses Artificial Neural Network. It uses 175 billion parameters. It has developed GPT-3, almost like an artificial brain. It is a Natural Language Processor (NLP). It can complete a prompt given. Its training material is the entire Internet. If it is given some parts of the texts, it can predict the further parts. It writes in all sorts of styles. GPT-3 can be as convincing as a human author.

Apple’s Search Engine

Shabbir Chunawalla

There is an understanding between Apple and Google whereby Apple uses Google’s Search Engine on its iOs devices by default, and receives several billion dollars as distribution payments. Google’s Search Engine, according to industry estimates, has a 92 per cent share. Thus it gives Google a commanding position and is anti-competitive. Though Google pays Apple, Google receives far more revenue from its iOs customers. Apple has a robust user base of 1 billion plus.

It makes sense for Apple to launch its own search engine. It will protect the privacy of its customers too. Investment in search capabilities would enhance the utility of Apple’s products. The skills required are similar to making mobile software and cloud services which Apple possesses already.

Apple can make strides into areas such as AI and voice recognition using the expertise it acquires in search engines.

Cloud Adoption in India

Shabbir Chunawalla

India is one of the fastest cloud computing market. Google Cloud is used by customers to grow their infrastructure and operations. There is increasing adoption of cloud in automation, manufacturing and education.

There are several cloud regions of Google. It has launched a second cloud region in India. In Asia Pacific, Delhi NCR is the tenth cloud region. Google cloud customers will now see low latency and high performance of cloud-based apps and data.

Till a few years age, cloud computing was used for storage, servers, and running of data centres. Today it is used to transform organisations — making them digital. Google cloud is used in diverse sectors — telecom, broadcasting, e-commerce, finetech. There are multi-cloud architectures to prioritise robustness, agility. They configure cloud capability by identifying and employing customised elements from multiple service providers.

Google Cloud will provide cloud services to Reliance Jio for their 5G services. Viacom 18 and Eros Now are using cloud services.

Google Cloud focuses on financial services, telecoms, M&E, gaming, retail and CPG, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing and public sector.