I have just completed a little under a week in Nairobi. It was a very enjoyable and enlightening experience — as well as being my first footsteps in East Africa. After a quick tour of the picturesque Karen Blixen Museum, I met with a couple of local VCs to discuss opportunities in the region. I… Continue reading Kenya: Investment Landscape
Tag: technology
Data Security
This week I had emails from two services I use notifying me that they each had suffered some sort of security intrusion, and suggesting I change my password etc etc. One was Slack — for a technology company currently raising assets at a reported $2.8bn valuation, discovering that hackers have been poking around in the… Continue reading Data Security
National Health Service: Not National At All!
Back in the mid-1980s when (as a freshly-minted science graduate) I joined Shell International Trading Company as a programmer, PCs were only just starting to appear on people’s desks: most of the ‘real’ work was done by big old mainframes located in Shell’s data centre at Wythenshawe, just outside Manchester. Oil traders, just like those… Continue reading National Health Service: Not National At All!
Putting the Gini Back in the Bottle
An article by The Economist on Twitter caught my eye a couple of days ago. It shows that the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans control around 22% of the nation’s wealth — almost exactly the same proportion as the bottom 90% of citizens. This hasn’t happened since the late 1930s and the article seems to be… Continue reading Putting the Gini Back in the Bottle
Mobile Telephony
I had an interesting and salutary experience recently when travelling in Germany. I was using my Blackberry to read my emails, careful (I thought) to be connecting to WiFi in the airport, hotel and so forth. When I got back to Jersey, I received a text message from my provider, Sure, alerting me that I had… Continue reading Mobile Telephony
Why Isn’t Software Regulated?
Great swathes of the economy are already subject to government oversight: finance is the most obvious, but of course there’s also healthcare, air travel, car safety, workplace-related legislation, food safety, building regulations, telecommunications and so forth. The list is pretty much endless. At a recent lecture I heard that something like five times as many… Continue reading Why Isn’t Software Regulated?