Some activities such as money laundering, fraud and tax evasion persist. These risks in the financial system, whether real or virtual, will not go away on their own. They cannot just fix themselves. The costs to the society of unregulated digital assets is high and require some action. Cryptos troubles should not leak into the financial system. Legislative attempts to design crypto rules will have to be both an international and national effort. This will help us prevent another ‘Lehman Brothers Moment!’

ASCI had issued disclaimer guidelines in 2016. Disclaimers are used to support, limit or explain claims made in advertisements. A disclaimer can expand, clarify a claim, make qualifications. However it should not contradict or modify the material claim made. It should not try to suppress material information with respect to the claim, the omission or absence of which is likely to make the ad deceptive. A disclaimer should not attempt to correct a misleading claim made in the an ad.

ASCI has now come with new guidelines. It says that the use of disclaimers should be kept to a minimum. It further says in video ads, disclaimers should be clearly readable to consumers. It also says in a single frame, there should not be more than one disclaimer.

ASCI wants that when a disclaimer exceeds two lines, additional hold duration should be accounted for. Hold duration is the time for the ad to remain in the frame. Hold duration requirement is in favour of broadcasters, but may prove costly for the advertisers as hold duration for more than four seconds would be heavy on their pockets.

As far as possible, advertisements must be so designed that minimises the need for qualifying disclaimers.

On an intimate platform such as WhatsApp, we get many brand and business messages. It has increased so much that it is feared that WhatsApp is going the SMS and e-mail way. It all started with WhatsApp Business in India in 2018 allowing business to connect directly with consumers on WhatsApp. WhatsApp has about 500 million users, and India is its biggest market. WhatsApp messages have an open rate of over 90 per cent within the first hour of receiving the message. WhatsApp Business has 50 million users globally, of which 15 million are in India. Facebook took over the messaging platform in 2014 for a sum of $16 billion. Facebook is interested in monetising this investment by pushing WhatsUp Business. The advertising revenue of Facebook has shown decline and its core business is plateuing. It has to make investments in metaverse. It, therefore, is innovating in Facebook. JioMart has been allowed as an end-to-end shopping experience platform. It is morphing into e-commerce.

WhatsApp spamming is of serious concern. People receive so many messages and links. Such links or messages should not be opened at an individual level. They could be blocked if necessary.

Data happens to be an underused intangible asset. Data has the potential to improve revenues, customer experience and operational efficiencies.

India has no dearth of data. Since all companies generate data, all companies are tech companies. Technology is not merely an IT preserve. Business goals require technology enablement.

Storage-as-a-service business has been shaped by using data analytics. It is a multi-cloud data problem.

Companies employ self-encrypting drives and always-on data protection technology. Seagate offers Lyve Cloud control of their data.

Storage-as-a-service must have security and privacy. It can get ISO certification. Data remains encrypted at rest and in transit. There is ransomware protection.

Corporates are adopting multi-cloud storage-as-a-service (StaaS). It has become a key plank of the data management strategy which enables innovation. It can achieve long-term business and technology goals.

There should be strict cost control while doing this. Data then can be used to get insights. Insights lead to innovation.

As part of New Data Bill , the Government is likely to propose the concept of ‘data embassies’ on the lines of diplomatic embassy enjoying immunity from the host country’s jurisdiction. The concerns of foreign data centres about the application of domestic law thus will be mostly addressed. India could become an attractive destination for such data centres.

The data embassy concept is a reciprocal concept. There would be investment from tech infra firms and cloud storage companies. Some countries could shift their entire data processing to India. Data embassies could be set up in GIFT IFSC. Data embassies, would create ‘bubbles of trust’. In future, these corridors of trust could store Indian users data in foreign cloud, as long as they are subject to Indian laws.

Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have launched Artifact, a text-based version of TikTok which deploys ML to assess the interest of the users. It is a customised newsfeed app and as its name indicates provides a combination of articles, facts and AI. It was opened up to the public on waiting list by the end of January, 2023 for both Android and iOS devices.

It will offer select popular curated articles from different publications, e.g. news outlets, blogs about niche topics. Users show interest in the articles by tapping them. The app then shows them similar posts and stories in future.

Coursera is a US based massive open online course, founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Coursera has signed a number of top academic institutions. They have about 110 million registered learners. There are 20 million in the US, 17 million in India, 5.5 million in Mexico. Indian students grow at 34% a year. US students grow at 20% a year. India is going to be number one country for Coursera soon. US provides much revenue to Coursera, whereas India mostly takes free courses. However, India provides a big opportunity in future.

It is estimated that India’s e-commerce market consists of 190 million shoppers ( 2021). The market will expand to another 200 million shoppers. Of this additional shoppers, 150 million are expected to be value shoppers.

What is value commerce? It is the purchase of affordable products by consumers. Value commerce had an estimated market of $4 billion in 2019, and is likely to expand to $40 billion by 2030.

Snapdeal caters to the needs of value-conscious shoppers. Stellaro sells affordable brands in fashion and life style. Very few sites sell the affordable quality sarees in the price range of Rs.400-Rs.500.

Most of the value market, as on today, is unorganised. The growth of value market will come from tier-II markets and beyond. This is where majority of our population resides. Meesho gets its 80 per cent business from tier-II plus regions and 60 per cent from tier-IV plus regions. It is the real democratisation of e-commerce.

The bulk of value commerce market has connectivity problems. The app should be light, e.g. Meesho’s app is 13.6 GB. It should be integrated for both sellers and consumers. Such an app goes well with low-end smart phones, and provides a seamless experience. The apps should be alive to audio and language since vernacular should be a preferred version to the English version.

India has a strong eco-system of online content creations. This industry commands a total global revenue of $105 billion. India has about 60-80 million content creators. Out of this, about 2 million content creators work full-time to create live streams, vlogs, podcasts, online courses and various formats of video. These creators may reach a number of 10 million by 2025.

One major issue for these content creators is the addition of music to their content. Music is protected by copyrights and any unauthorised use by the creators may lead to unpleasant consequences such as legal suits and/or fines, both under civil and criminal laws.

To address this issue, Hoopr has been set up. It facilitates the addition of licensed music to the videos. Thus the creators steer clear of copyright laws. Hoopr provides a multi-purpose license to use songs and music in the web-shows, movies, influencer videos and advertisements. Hoopr thus gives an additional opportunity to music producers to monetise their music.

Hoopr intends to use tools and technology to leverage data and consumer insights to make informed recommendations.

Hoopr has been funded by well-known investors, and has a catalogue of 25000 tracks and special effects. It is taking steps to scale up its music library and intends to onboard 1 lac users.

As we have observed in previous articles, generative AI has already been incorporated by Microsoft to its Bing search engine, and Google too is likely to follow suit by deploying the technology for its Google search engine.

We have also observed that in traditional searches, the web crawlers scanned the internet to compile an idex of information.

On the other hand, ChatGPT type AI search uses huge computing power — there are chips worth of billions of dollars, which are deployed over their long useful life of several years, and have a long payback period. Another cost is that of electricity. The companies have to meet their carbon footprint goals AI-powered search queries are handled by a process leading to inference and consists of a neural network resembling how the CNS infers answer to a query. Googles in-house chips called Tensor Processing Units or TPUs along with other optimisers handle this.

Thus all said and done, AI-model accounts for high expense. ChatGPT computing costs a couple or more cents per conversation. The language model is likely to cost 10 times more than the standard key search. Of course, there could be additional revenue from chat-based advertising but still it may not be enough to prevent erosion of the bottomline of the current search engines. There is several billions worth of additional costs — there could be a $6 billion dollar increase in costs for Google by 2024, even if it handles 50 per cent queries it receives with short answers.

Microsoft expects to gain additional users and more advertising revenue after empowering Bing with generative AI.

AI-chat involves charts, videos and other generative tech. It raises the expenses between 30-50 per cent.

However, as we know, when technology is scaled up, it becomes economical and that could happen over a period of time.