Month: November 2021

Getting Ready for Metaverse

Shabbir Chunawalla

Meta means beyond, and universe has been added to it. It is a complex digital environment. It consists of several elements and is evolving.

The most common characteristic that has led to the possibility of such a world is data explosion. Data traffic too is, therefore, explosive — 1G was about analogue voice calls, 2G about digital voice communication, 3G about web browsing and 4G about mobile broadband. 5G services are soon arriving. It deals with not only explosion of data but the speed of data transmission too.

IoT represents an interconnected world of billions of devices. Clouds are being adopted. Data is analysed on clouds.

There is AR/VR and robotics. There is AI and NLP. There is speech-to-text and computer vision. There is ML. There is live streaming. There are cryptos. There are expressways in the sky.

The world is getting ready for a metaverse.

Professional Journals and Research Workers

Shabbir Chunawalla

These days research workers fall prey to fake or cloned journals available online. They accept research papers and articles against payment from the research workers. Some articles do get published in such fraud journals. It is also called predatory publishing which charges fees from authors without vetting the articles for quality and legitimacy. These journals are of poor quality or fraudulent. At times, even the authors are aware of their true nature. Some-times, they accept money and vanish.

Cloned journals are counterfeit. They are mirror copies of the authentic journals. They exploit the tittle and ISSN of the authentic journals. Sometimes, these cloned journals chase the authors luring them with an open-access publication fee.

There are citation databases which identify such journals. Scopus and Web of Science are such databases. UGC too publishes a list (VGC-CARE) of authentic journals. It is updated quarterly.

Digitisation has accelerated the pace of fraudulent journalism. There is lack of understanding of open-access (paid access) research and predatory publishing. Some open access journals are sponsored by institutes.

India’s research output is good but its citation is poor, say barely above 3 per cent. A large output is lost in predatory publishing.

It is necessary to give importance to peer reviews. It is a better approach than the publication in the journals.

Why to miss out on Metaverse?

Shabbir Chunawalla

Facebook has been rebranded Meta. Many have suddenly become interested in the concept, though they do not know its exact contours. What matters is that some breakthrough innovation is arriving. And we must not miss out on it. People call it a successor to the mobile internet. It converges several emerging technologies. Zuckerberg calls it the next chapter for internet. Since the arrival of smart phone, a computer in our pocket, a decade ago, the arrival of metaverse would change far too many things. It may sound linear, and so be it. Millions of people around the world will hang out in metaverse.

A metaverse as a label conjures up an interactive game-like world with its own culture and economy. It could have its own currency and it could govern itself. It is a placeless, stateless system. It is a slippery concept.

Facebook too does not want to miss out such a world. It is staking a claim on it. Already Facebook has attained centrality in our lives, and would like to remain so in the next internet era.

Online Gaming

Shabbir Chunawalla

Gaming attracts multiple regulations in different Indian states. Still, gaming also attracts investment driven by its popularity. Investors are more interested in innovative products. It is mostly a self-regulating industry. It is just 12 year old industry. It has seen phenomenal growth in the last four years.

There are two types of gaming — casual and skill-based. In casual gaming, there are in-app purchases. In skill-based gaming, the regulations are unclear, and the rule of thumb is that there is skill involved. However, if it is a game of chance, it is a grey area.

In real money games like Poker, the judicial precedent is not clear. It ocillates between a game of skill and game of chance.

Casino games are divided into games of skill and games of chance. In a game of skill, you play against other players, and there is scope to apply strategy. In a game of chance, you play against the ‘house’, and the strategy does not help. It is not easy to classify games into games of skill and games of chance.

Games like on line Rummy, poker, fantasy sports and e-sports have been classified as games of skill by different HCs and SC.

Edge Computing

Shabbir Chunawalla

IoT is called edge computing. Here sensors (which are tiny) are used along with computing devices at or near the point where data is generated. The idea is to take instant action.

A driverless car cannot afford the luxury of sending data to a cloud for analysis which sends instruction to the car in return. The time involved is just a few milliseconds, but these can cause an accident.

A wrist watch measuring heart rate collects reflections from blood vessels and skin, and perceives the difference to decide whether pulse occurred or not.

An edge device takes the decision on the spot. Whether a robot can create vacuum or not to move the objects to make it reliable is decided by the edge device. Volcanic eruption possibilities and tsunami predictions, can be made. Here 5G is critical to ensure alerts from sensors.

Edge computing is also important as it is too expensive to transport everything to the cloud. It also puts a heavy burden on the bandwidth. A lot of unnecessary data is generated by a camera, and only 1 TB may be valuable. The rest is waste. AI at the edge filters out the waste, and sends only what is necessary to the cloud. In home automation, large scale transfer of data to the cloud would also affect the privacy.

Edge requires diverse talents — in software, semiconductors, applications.

Ludo on Mobiles

Shabbir Chunawalla

In India board games have been played since long. Ludo is the modern version of the Parchisi, a board game in India. This game is powered by technology and is popular not only in the sub-continent but also across the Mediterranean countries.

Games on mobile have received a boost on account of the number of game engines available now. A game engine is a software tool that allows one to build video games. Developers are facilitated in the game play aspect, how it will work on the phone. Rest is art, animation and design. All put together must work seamlessly in the multiplayer format.

Game design merits attention. It keeps people glued to the game. A player must have games design for the start, the middle, and the month end. The new content has to be introduced throughout the year.

Backend engineering must be paid attention. Engineers work to leverage tech. They strive to build tech modules and efficiencies. It is difficult to build multi-player functions which are not buggy.

Ludo King, Ludo Club, Gameberry’s Ludo, Ludo of Jetsynthesys are popular Ludo game versions. Ludo Zenith has introduced betting on a game. ShapChat and Square Enix, foreign companies, have made entry into this space.

India is a very challenging market to generate revenue and find the right manpower for AAA games.

Metaverse Pioneers and Facebook

Shabbir Chunawalla

Though metaverse has become the buzz word in 2021 and has attracted investor interest, there have been users of internet who have spent time in the virtual world for years. In fact, what is sought to be built today, the users of virtual world have been building over a period of time. The current claims seem to be usurping what already exists as their own. Many meet-ups have been hosted in different metaverses.

Facebook’s rebranding seems to be an attempt to insert it into metaverse narrative. Metaverse environment is expected be decentralised, whereas that of Facebook is likely to be centralised.

Existing metaverse platforms, many of them, are based on blockchain technology ruling out central control. It is distributed ledger architecture.

All metaverse adopters are. however, not adverse to the entry of Facebook. Its entry could raise interest in the concept of virtual worlds and attract more users. It will support development of multiple virtual worlds.

Facebook has several reasons to enter this space. It wants to ward off adverse criticism from law makers and regulators over its monopolistic policies, algorithmic decisions and monitoring of its content. Facebook also wants an early name change to secure a new trademark legally.

Multi-cloud Strategy

Shabbir Chunawalla

In the digital economy, organisations move to clouds as a necessity. Cloud offers a viable business model to consume IT as a pay-per-use service.

It is not prudent for organisations to depend on one single cloud for all apps and workloads. Each cloud is not best-suited for every workload. It is necessary to choose multiple clouds. The focus is on what data and applications should move to each cloud. Thus there is a set of cloud-smart organisations.

Large organisations consider a multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud strategy. It is superior to investing in a single cloud. In multi-cloud strategy, some key areas are integration, visibility, security, resilience and the right set of tools.

However, multi-cloud strategy make the system complex. It should be done taking a holistic view. It should be a cohesive strategy.

Crypto Investments of Indians

Shabbir Chunawalla

HAPPY DEEPAVALI, 2021

As many as 10.5 crore Indians constituting about 8 per cent population, currently own cryptocurrency. Crypto investments have jumped over to $10 billion. The key driver to investments in cryptos is greater awareness. Retail investors have not to worry much, as long as their investments are below the limit of $250000 per person per financial year under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS). High networth individuals (HNIs) and institutional investors who cross LRS limit are exposed to risks.

India must introduce regulation to protect the investors. The trading volume on Indian exchanges have crossed $1 billion everyday. Traffic on international exchanges through Indian IPs indicates a massive surge. Indian investors not only invest in Bitcoins but also in other cryptos such as Ethereum, Solana and Ripple.

What is Crypto?

Shabbir Chunawalla

Crypto is a digital asset secured by cryptography. It is difficult to counterfeit it or double-spend it. It is decentralised and distributed. It facililates peer-to-peer transaction of digital assets, with no intermediary.

It is an alternative asset class. It runs on blockchains. It can run smart contracts, e.g. Bitcoin and Ether. It is essentially a virtual currency, the transactions of which are recorded on blockchain, making it irrefutable and immutable. A blockchain is akin to a public ledger.

Bitcoins halving occurs once in four years. The most recent occurred in 2020. In every bitcoin halving, the mining reward is curtailed by half and at the same time rate at which new coins are released in circulation.

Social media and Internet celebrities endorse cryptos. It therefore spreads across the world.