blog@Yantrajaal

Journalists could be an endangered species as more and more newspapers and magazines lose readers to free websites on the internet. While the reach offered by a website is immense, what is disturbing is that the author / journalist is hardly ever compensated for his effort in putting together an interesting article. Many business models have been tried, including paywalls, where readers have to pay to access content and free-mium where a part of the content is free and the premium content has to be paid for, but the lure of the completely free competitor is irresistible. Once readers are accustomed to free content, it is almost impossible to wean them away towards making payments. So is the case with other intellectual property like computer software and college textbooks. Even if we ignore direct criminal acts like piracy and photocopying of books, the existence of free and open source software and websites that offer educational content have curtailed demand for paid products. Some...

Rise of the digital autonomous corporation Think of a company that offers a service that helps people track their assets and transfer the same to others on the basis of validated instructions -- similar to a current account with cheque facility. Think of the same company as hiring people to do this and paying them for their effort with shares in the company -- sweat equity. Think of this company as being in operation since 2009 and the value of its shares spiking to US$ 1200 before stabilising at around US$ 200 over the past two years. Think of this company having a current market capitalisation of around US$ 5.5 billion. Now what if this company were to have to no human managers and but only programs on multiple computers interacting with each other!  Is such an unmanaged company possible? Strangely enough, it is possible, it does exist today and it is called Bitcoin. The only twist in the the tale is that the only asset being tracked by the company also happens to be the sh...

If 2013 was the year of Bitcoin, the enigmatic crypto-currency created by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, then 2016 is going to be year of the BlockChain -- the shared public ledger technology that provides the platform on which Bitcoin works. In fact, Bitcoin is just ONE of the many applications that can be built on the blockchain and this fact is gradually dawning on the world of technology as different groups are racing to create new products. While many strange and wonderful products like an automatic Uber-like car service have been proposed, the most powerful applications seem to be coming out of Wall Street. This is because of two reasons The fundamental premise behind the blockchain is control and transfer of assets and this is what Wall Street does for a living Wall Street has realised that rather than resisting the arrival of a disruptive technology it is better adopt it first. Resistance is futile. Just as retailers who ignored the eCommerce revolution got wiped out by ...