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The Washington Post 05/7/2023
While Twitter announced unpopular new rules that set daily limits on the number of tweets users can read in a day, Instagram teased an alternative app, Threads, due to be released Thursday.
The new Meta-owned platform, which is billing itself as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app,” appeared on Apple’s App Store with no accompanying details other than a simple countdown website in its name.
Threads appears to share many functional similarities to Twitter. According to its App Store profile, it promises users the ability to “share your point of view” through text or imagebased posts known as “threads,” which people can react and reply to, and share. Many of the app’s features appear to be closely integrated with Instagram, according to preview screenshots, providing users with the option to log in through their Instagram handle, keep their username and follow the same accounts.
“Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things,” Threads’s App Store listing said. It also promised users the ability to “build a loyal following” and “share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.”
In an email Tuesday, Meta declined to provide further information about the app. But earlier this year, Meta said it was exploring the creation of a stand-alone, text-based social media network where “creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.”
The launch of Threads follows announcements over the weekend by Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October, limiting the app’s functionality for many users. Last week, he announced that the platform would temporarily limit the number of tweets that users could read per day, and unveiled a “temporary emergency measure” that prevented non-logged-in users from viewing tweets on the platform’s web browser. He said they were to prevent third-party computer programs from combing the platform for data, saying: “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
On Monday, Twitter announced a further change: Access to its Tweetdeck platform — which provides users with an enhanced interface for viewing multiple tweets at once — would be limited to paying users starting soon.
Meta has also been grappling with issues of its own in recent months. Threads’s scheduled launch on Thursday comes as the company embarks on a largescale downsizing effort, eliminating 21,000 roles, including teams that handle content moderation, policy and regulatory issues. Like other tech giants, Meta is facing an industry-wide downturn — and increased competition from Tiktok.
On Monday night, Musk responded to a tweet about Meta’s release of Threads by quipping: “Thank goodness they’re so sanely run.” He also responded to posts that highlighted the lengthy list of personal data that users will be required to grant Instagram access to use the app, according to its App Store profile.
Meta and Twitter’s commercial battle for users has been echoed by an increasingly public personal rivalry between the two men at their helms. Last month, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg accepted a challenge from Musk to take part in a cage match at a Las Vegas arena after news reports on Meta’s Twitter competitor. It’s unclear whether the fight — announced as Zuckerberg increasingly tries to make himself look more relevant to the tech elite — will actually take place.
Meta’s decision to launch Threads pits it against other companies also trying to lure users away from Twitter with alternative social networks.
Mastodon’s open-source decentralized model, which was founded seven years ago, saw a large influx of new users in the immediate aftermath of Musk’s
Twitter takeover. Bluesky, which also runs on a decentralized system, was launched by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and is in the beta stage. Unlike Twitter, the platform says it intends to give users more control over their feed by allowing them to select from a variety of recommendation algorithms to curate their experience.
Meta is no stranger to launching its own versions of innovations pioneered by rival apps — often with success. In 2016, Instagram copied Snapchat’s disappearing-photo feature, launching Stories, an offering that has since become integral to its user experience. Four years later, Instagram unveiled Reels, allowing users to create and share short-form vertical videos, just like Tiktok.
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24/6/2023
THE LATEST, grim, inflation figures in Britain were not—truly—a shock. For each of the past few months a routine has emerged: the numbers come in worse than had been forecast, traders adjust expectations upwards for how fast, and far, the Bank of England will raise interest rates, and thus the cost of borrowing jumps. After that, mortgage holders fret and the government makes sympathetic noises. The figures for May, published on June 21st, followed that sorry script to the letter. The headline figure remained steady from the previous month, at 8.7%. That was above economists’ expectations of a fall to 8.4%. More ominous was that core inflation, without food and energy, jumped to 7.1% from 6.8% in the previous month.
Britain is an outlier, and not in a good way. Core inflation both in America and the euro zone, though still high, has been ticking down gently—it reached 5.3% in May, in both places—and headline numbers in those economies, including food and energy, have tumbled faster. Among the G7 countries, none has higher inflation than Britain. Only Italy comes close, with a headline rate of 7.6%. Even its trend, unlike in Britain, is firmly downwards. You have to look to smaller places, such as Austria, Iceland or Sweden, or to eastern European economies still battered by war in Ukraine, to find examples of economies in the same—miserable—inflationary boat.
What has gone so wrong? Britain is exposed to higher prices for natural gas. Put that aside, however, and it is clear inflationary pressures are overwhelmingly the result of decisions taken at home. Inflation, unlike much else, is made in Britain. Old excuses that it is imported, because of war, snarled-up supply chains or high global food prices, no longer wash. The rate of services inflation, overwhelmingly a domestic factor, rose in May to an annual rate of 7.4% from 6.9% previously. The rate of goods inflation did drop slightly, from 10.0% to 9.7%, in part because food-price increases are not quite so rapid as before.
The culprits behind Britain’s problems are many. Don’t take seriously claims about Prince Harry, who recently published an overpriced but popular memoir. It’s true that inflation measured by the culture sub-index is soaring, in particular non-fiction books are up by 29.4% over the last year. But the real question is why sellers in that sector can get away with high prices. The answer: they operate where demand for goods and services has grown faster than supply.
Demand is strong, in turn, because policymakers have long been trying to rev it up. Consider fiscal efforts. Britain stands out for the stimulus it gave to the economy in the pandemic and then, last year, during the energy crisis. One measure of this is to combine an estimate from the International Monetary Fund of covid-era support with one from Bruegel, an EU think-tank, of help for households and firms hit by painful energy bills. Only America doled out a bigger stimulus. Britain heavily outspent other peers: around 23.1% of national income, vastly more, for example, than the 13.3% in France.
Those setting monetary policy are also to blame. In hindsight, they were too cautious. A so-called Taylor Rule for monetary
policy sets a simple guide for the right level of interest rates given the rate of unemployment and core inflation. Even a version calibrated to avoid big changes in rates says the bank should have been preparing to lift them to around 5.7% at a meeting on June 22nd. The day before, however, markets were forecasting only a 25-basis-point increase in the main policy rate, to 4.75%. It is becoming apparent that—because fewer Britons have a mortgage than in previous tightening cycles and, in any case, many have fixed rates for longer—the effects of rate rises have, so far, been limited. The result: the bank will probably have to tighten more to achieve the same, dampening, effect.
Come on down, the price is wrong
Easy policy combines with a weaker supply side. Again, Britain stands aside from its peers (again, in a bad way). Labour-force participation remains below its pre-pandemic level. One portion of missing workers are those—perhaps half a million more than before—too sick or tired to seek work. EU workers are also missing. And whereas, post Brexit, non-EU migrants have poured in, many are refugees or students, not fulltime workers. Dario Perkins, of TS Lombard, a research outfit, calculates that total labour supply is down by about 3% from pre-covid trends. Pre-pandemic, the labour force was growing thanks to migration and a rising participation rate. He adds: “I don’t believe in wage-price spirals, but if they are going to happen anywhere, the UK seems like the obvious candidate.”
High demand with constrained supply has left some parts of the economy, such as professional services and hospitality, running hot while others, including the health service, struggle with bottlenecks and strikes. Fullers, a brewer, says it is tapping under-18s and the over-50s to work in pubs this summer. Other bars and restaurants are just cutting hours, says Tony Wilson of the Institute for Employment Studies, a think-tank. In professional services, including banking, consulting and accountancy, year-on-year pay growth is in double-digits, he says, as “firms are competing and outcompeting one another on pay”.
Inflation needs to fall, quickly. A study by the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, earlier this year found that British inflation is unusually persistent: previous increases in core inflation had more power to predict further increases than those seen in Canada or the euro area. No one should expect the workforce to suddenly grow: rates of economic activity have only modestly improved over the past year as fewer workers retired and more students took on jobs. The likely alternative is for interest rates to rise.
That means heavily indebted mortgage holders will feel more financial pressure. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has ruled out government help, such as tax breaks on mortgage interest, saying, correctly, that would “make inflation worse, and not better”. He is due, however, to host a meeting with banks on June 23rd, where he is expected to ask them to show flexibility to struggling borrowers. Should he want to break Britain’s pattern of sticky inflation and ever-rising interest rates he could consider one other option: putting up taxes. ■
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Global economy running into a sharp slowdownBY DAVID J. LYNCH
The Washington Post 07/6/2023 World Bank’s forecast cites war, inflation and higher interest rates
A pair of central bank decisions next week will shape the outlook for a wobbly global economy that the World Bank warns in a downbeat new assessment is battling stubbornly high inflation amid the pandemic’s aftermath and the war in Ukraine.
The gloomy forecast arrives days after one threat to global growth was eliminated when President Biden signed legislation Saturday to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and avert a potentially catastrophic government default.
But other risks remain: China’s reopening after the end of its “zero covid” policy is starting to flag, while the German economy has shrunk for two consecutive quarters, meeting one definition of a recession. Even in the United States, where growth remains resilient, most analysts expect that activity will ebb in the coming months.
The World Bank said in a report Tuesday that the global economy is slowing dramatically as higher interest rates take a toll on both advanced and developing economies. Overall, global growth is projected to slump to an anemic 2.1 percent annual rate this year, down from 3.1 percent in 2022, and will remain “frail” through next year, according to the bank’s latest forecast.
Investors now are focused on how much more work the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank must do to stem inflation, which has declined from last year’s highs but remains elevated.
Fed officials have signaled they may pause at next week’s meeting
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The Washington Post 31/5/2023
As AI becomes more popular, chatbots still routinely pass off false answers to simple questions as factual.
san francisco — Recently, researchers asked two versions of Openai’s CHATGPT artificial intelligence chatbot where Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Tomás Lozano-pérez was born.
One bot said Spain and the other said Cuba. Once the system told the bots to debate the answers, the one that said Spain quickly apologized and agreed with the one with the correct answer, Cuba.
The finding, in a paper released by a team of MIT researchers last week, is the latest potential breakthrough in helping chatbots to arrive at the correct answer. The researchers proposed using different chatbots to produce multiple answers to the same question and then letting them debate each other until one answer won out. The researchers found using this “society of minds” method made them more factual.
“Language models are trained to predict the next word,” said Yilun Du, a researcher at MIT who was previously a research fellow at Openai, and one of the paper’s authors. “They are not trained to tell people they don’t know what they’re doing.” The result is bots that act like precocious people-pleasers, making up answers instead of admitting they simply don’t know.
The researchers’ creative approach is just the latest attempt to solve for one of the most pressing concerns in the exploding field of AI. Despite the incredible leaps in capabilities that “generative” chatbots like Openai’s CHATGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard have demonstrated in the last six months, they still have a major fatal flaw: They make stuff up all the time.
Figuring out how to prevent or fix what the field is calling “hallucinations” has become an obsession among many tech workers, researchers and AI skeptics alike. The issue is mentioned in dozens of academic papers posted to the online database Arxiv, and Big Tech CEOS like Google’s Sundar Pichai have addressed it repeatedly. As the tech gets pushed out to millions of people and integrated into critical fields including medicine and law, understanding hallucinations and finding ways to mitigate them has become even more crucial.
Most researchers agree the problem is inherent to the “large language models” that power the bots because of the way they’re designed. They predict what the most apt thing to say is based on the huge amounts of data they’ve digested from the internet, but don’t have a way to understand what is factual or not.
Still, researchers and companies are throwing themselves at the problem. Some firms are using human trainers to rewrite the bots’ answers and feed them back into the machine with the goal of making them smarter. Google and Microsoft have started using their bots to give answers directly in their search engines, but still double check the bots with regular search results. And academics around the world have suggested myriad clever ways to decrease the rates of false answers, like MIT’S proposal to get multiple bots to debate each other.
The drive to improve the hallucinations problem is urgent for a reason.
Already, when Microsoft launched its Bing chatbot, it quickly started making false accusations against some of its users, like telling a German college student that he was a threat to its safety.
In Australia, a government official threatened to sue Openai after CHATGPT said he had been convicted of bribery, when in reality he was a whistleblower in a bribery case. And last week a lawyer admitted to using ChatGPT to generate a legal brief after he was caught because the cases cited so confidently by the bot simply did not exist, according to the New York Times.
Even Google and Microsoft have missed hallucinations their bots made during key announcements and demos.
None of that is stopping the companies from rushing headlong into the space. Billions of dollars in investment is going into developing smarter and faster chatbots, and companies are beginning to pitch them as replacements or aids for human workers. Earlier this month OpeNAI CEO Sam Altman testified before Congress saying AI could “cause significant harm to the world” by spreading disinformation and emotionally manipulating humans.
On Tuesday, Altman joined hundreds of other AI researchers and executives, including some senior leaders from Google and Microsoft, in signing a statement saying AI poses an existential risk to humanity on par with pandemics and nuclear war.
Hallucinations have also been documented in Ai-powered transcription services, adding words to recordings that weren’t spoken in real life.
“No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems. All models do have this as an issue,” Pichai said in an April interview with CBS. Whether it’s even possible to solve it is a “matter of intense debate,” he said.
Depending on how you look at hallucinations, they are both a feature and a bug of large language models. Hallucinations are part of what allows the bots to be creative and generate never-before-seen stories. At the same time they reveal the stark limitations of the tech, undercutting the argument that chatbots are intelligent in a way similar to humans.
“There is nothing in there that tells the model that whatever it’s saying should be actually correct in the world,” said Ece Kamar, a senior researcher at Microsoft. The model itself also trains on a set amount of data, so anything that happens after the training is done doesn’t factor into its knowledge of the world, Kamar said.
Hallucinations are not new. They’ve been an inherent problem of large language models since their inception several years ago, but other problems such as the AIS producing nonsensical or repetitive answers were seen as bigger issues. Once those were largely solved, though, hallucinations have now become a key focus for the AI community.
Potsawee Manakul was playing around with CHATGPT when he asked it for some simple facts about tennis legend Roger Federer. It’s a straightforward request, but the bot kept giving contradictory answers.
“Sometimes it says he won Wimbledon five times; sometimes it says he won Wimbledon eight times,” Manakul, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge and ardent tennis fan, said in an interview. (The correct answer is eight.)
Manakul and a group of other Cambridge researchers released a paper in March suggesting a system they called “Selfcheckgpt” that would ask the same bot a question multiple times, then tell it to compare the different answers. If the answers were consistent, it was likely the facts were correct, but if they were different, they could be flagged as probably containing made-up information.
When humans are asked to write a poem, they know it’s not necessarily important to be factually correct. But when asking them for biographical details about a real person, they automatically know their answer should be rooted in reality. Because chatbots are simply predicting what word or idea comes next in a string of text, they don’t yet have that contextual understanding of the question.
“It doesn’t have the concept of whether it should be more creative or if it should be less creative,” Manakul said. Using their method, the researchers showed that they could eliminate factually incorrect answers and even rank answers based on how factual they were.
It’s likely that a whole new method of AI learning that hasn’t been invented yet will be necessary, Manakul said. Only by building systems on top of the language model can the problem really be mitigated.
“Because it blends information from lots of things, it will generate something that looks plausible,” he said. “But whether it’s factual or not, that’s the issue.”
That’s essentially what the leading companies are already doing. When Google generates search results using its chatbot technology, it also runs a regular search in parallel, then compares whether the bot’s answer and the traditional search results match. If they don’t, the AI answer won’t even show up. The company has tweaked its bot to be less creative, but less likely to lie.
By limiting its search bot to corroborating existing search results, the company has been able to cut down on hallucinations and inaccuracies, said Google spokeswoman Jennifer Rodstrom. A spokesperson for OpeNAI pointed to a paper the company had produced in which it showed how its latest model, GPT4, produced fewer hallucinations than previous versions.
Companies are also spending time and money improving their models by testing them with real people. A technique called reinforcement learning with human feedback, where human testers manually improve a bot’s answers and then feed them back into the system to improve it, is widely credited with making CHATGPT so much better than chatbots that came before it. A popular approach is to connect chatbots up to databases of factual or more trustworthy information, such as Wikipedia, Google search or bespoke collections of academic articles or business documents.
Some leading AI researchers say hallucinations should be embraced. After all, humans have bad memories as well and have been shown to fill-in the gaps in their own recollections without realizing it.
“We’ll improve on it, but we’ll never get rid of it,” Geoffrey Hinton, whose decades of research helped lay the foundation for the current crop of AI chatbots, said of the hallucinations problem. “We’ll always be like that and they’ll always be like that.”
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The Guardian 26/5/2023
Households looking for a new mortgage deal have been warned to expect 5%-plus fixed-rate deals in the coming weeks, after Wednesday’s inflation figures sent the money markets back into turmoil.
Nick Mendes, mortgage technical manager at brokers John Charcol, said yesterday that he doubts there will be any two-year fixed-rate mortgages and probably few five-year deals priced at less than 5% in the coming weeks, as lenders are forced to reprice their mortgages upwards.
Within hours of his comments, one of the UK’s biggest lenders, the Nationwide, said it was increasing selected fixed and tracker rates by up to 0.45%, from today.
The prospect of 5% mortgages would be a further blow to potential first-time buyers and households hoping to remortgage their existing deal. It’s the latest turn in what is fast becoming a year of mortgage turmoil.
A household with an expiring 2.99%, £150,000 mortgage would have to find an extra £175 a month or £2,100 a year if their replacement mortgage was priced at 5.19% – on top of nearly 20% higher food prices.
The publication on Wednesday of April’s annual inflation figure of 8.7% – which was higher than expected – prompted a sharp sell off on the London stock market, raised the prospect of a 13th interest rate rise by the Bank of England and pushed swap rates further upwards. The cost of fixed-rate mortgages are largely determined by the swap rates paid by lenders.
“In the current economic environment swap rates have continued to fluctuate and, more recently, increase, leading to rate rises across the market. This change will ensure our mortgage rates remain sustainable,” said a Nationwide spokesperson.
With Britain likely to experience a long period of high inflation and weak growth – known as stagflation – investors sold UK government bonds, or gilts, depressing the price and raising the interest rate. Shifts in bonds typically feed through into swap rates, which lenders use to guide their mortgage-pricing decisions.
After Liz Truss’s disastrous minibudget last September, the yield, or interest rate, on a two-year government bond rose to 4.7%, pushing two-year fixed rate mortgages above 5%. The yield rose as high as 4.478% yesterday, up on the 4.35% rate the day before, and from 4% at the end of last week.
“The market is now factoring in higher interest rate peaks and this will soon be reflected in fixed-rate mortgage pricing. Gilt yields have therefore shot up,” said Mendes.
“When lenders have used up funds already bought I doubt there will be any rates available significantly below 5%. Anyone waiting to see what happens to mortgage rates following the recent announcement should look to get their mortgage application under way,” he added.
David Hollingworth, of L&C Mortgages, said it was too early to say definitively what would happen to fixed rates, but the direction of travel was “very much upwards” at the moment. “Until recently there were plenty of five-year fixed-rate mortgages at or around the 4% figure, now they are mostly all gone.”
Within hours of Wednesday’s inflation figure being published, two buy-to-let lenders pulled their mortgage products before repricing.
Lloyds/Halifax increased the cost of a fixed-rate mortgage by 0.2%, and a number of other lenders withdrew their 10-year deals the day before.
Uswitch’s mortgage expert, Claire Flynn, said the average twoyear fixed-rate mortgage (75% loan to value) had risen by 0.25 percentage points to 5.6% over the last week alone.
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Business Spotlight 22/2/2023
It’s hard to change something when no one likes to talk about it. Hannah Williams recognized this problem, so she started the Tiktok account Salary Transparent Street, for which she walks around various U.S. cities asking strangers what’s traditionally been considered an inappropriate question: How much money do you make?
Gen Z is known for sharing a lot of their lives on social media, and Williams, a 26-year-old from Virginia, wanted to start a discussion about pay — successfully, it seems, as her account has more than 950,000 followers and almost 22 million likes. Williams herself was surprised how quickly people opened up. She met an IT worker who earns $70,000 a year; a lifeguard who said she makes $15 an hour; and a research scientist who said passion mattered more than money.
Williams isn’t the only young person who wants more pay transparency. “Talking about pay really helps people who are more likely to be discriminated against and taken advantage of in the workplace, such as women and people of color,”
Williams told
Insider. “When we don’t talk about pay, we make it difficult for others to grow professionally.”
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Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise”
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Business Spotlight 22/2/2023
Eternity, a girl band from South Korea, does all the things that other performers do. They sing, dance and interact with their fans. Their 2021 debut single, called “I’m Real”, has had millions of views online. But Eternity is not like other bands. None of the 11 members actually exists — they are all hyperreal avatars made with artificial intelligence (AI).
Korean pop (or “K-pop” for short) has gone mainstream in the past two decades, becoming one of South Korea’s most valuable export industries. But it’s a high-stakes business that can be brutal. Park Jieun is the CEO of Pulse9 — the company that created Eternity. She told the BBC: “The advantage of having virtual artists is that, while K-pop stars often struggle with physical limitations, or even mental distress because they are human beings, virtual artists can be free from these.”
The avatars are created with deepfake imagery, and Korean entertainment companies plan to use the technology to augment their human stars. Park is aware of concerns that it could be used to manipulate people’s images and spread misinformation. She says Pulse9 follows the EU’S ethical AI guidelines. “I’m always trying to make it clear that these are fictional characters,” she says.
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Von MELITA CAMERON-WOOD
Business Spotlight 26/4/2023 Kein Bankkonto und trotzdem bargeldlos einkaufen? Das Bezahlsystem Mobile Money macht das in Afrika möglich. Das kann sogar die Wirtschaft ankurbeln.
What is life without a bank account like? It would be difficult (though not impossible) to use online payment services, like Paypal, or to pay bills electronically with the click of a button. Employees and other workers would get paid with envelopes of cash. None of this is unusual in Africa, where an estimated 57 per cent of people are “unbanked” — meaning they have no bank account. For this reason, African countries have pioneered a popular alternative to traditional banking, known as “mobile money”. Many people prefer this option to pre-paid debit cards or money orders because it offers greater speed and ease of the service.
What is mobile money?
Not to be confused with online banking, which requires the internet and a bank account, mobile money is a payment service that allows monetary transactions between mobile phones, either smartphones or “old-school” mobiles. Even without a bank account, money can be sent and received. The funds are added to or deducted from the customer’s phone credit, and this can be converted into cash when necessary.
The African mobile-money revolution really began when a Kenyan service called M-PESA was launched in 2007. Unlike traditional banks, which often have monthly fees and minimum deposit requirements, mobile-money accounts can be opened at a low cost. There are no monthly fees — users are charged on a per-transaction basis. For many ordinary African citizens, mobile money has been life-changing, especially for those living in rural areas, far away from traditional banks.
According to the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), an industry body, the global market for mobile-money payments reached $1 trillion in 2021. Nearly 70 per cent of that came from sub-saharan Africa, as many countries in this region have underdeveloped banking infrastructure.
There’s plenty of evidence that mobile money helps to increase economic growth and reduce extreme poverty. Data from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation indicates that mobile money has given a significant boost to food security, household savings and financial resilience. Businesses also benefit from the use of mobile money. Data on firms in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda suggests that it lowers transaction costs and increases the likelihood that companies will invest. These advantages, however, are dependent on widespread access to mobile phones.
Mobile services
According to GSMA, there will be 613 million unique mobile subscribers in sub-saharan Africa, about 50 per cent of the population, by 2025. With many cheap mobile phones on the market, including lots of pre-paid models, mobile-money users are able to top up their credit whenever they need to and transfer some of that credit to other phone users.
The problem, however, is that most online merchants cannot easily accept this type of transaction. “Mobile money is built on USSD (unstructured supplementary service data),” Cameroon-based entrepreneur and fintech specialist Otto Beseka Isong explains. “USSD comes with 2G and has bandwidth limitations. You cannot carry a lot of data with it — just simple
instructions. That means you cannot rely on USSD for full payments.” While USSD allows users to transfer money, it does so without transferring any extra information about the customer, the recipient or the payment itself, making it incompatible with many e-commerce platforms. Mobile-money users often have no choice but to choose the cash-on-delivery payment option, which is not offered by all vendors.
Beseka Isong noticed this problem and developed Pursar, a fintech platform that can be linked to mobile-money accounts and used for digital payments to help users in Cameroon access e-commerce markets. “For digital payment to work, you need to take the technology to http or https for secure internet protocol,” he says. “That’s when you start talking about 3G and 4G. Because telecom providers are targeting the mass market with their mobile-money solution, they don’t want to upgrade to http or https, because they want everyone to have access to their solution.” Across Africa, there are currently more than 800 million people with no internet access, so such an upgrade could be devastating for all those offline users. However, although avoiding an update to the mobile-money service may allow greater inclusion across the continent, this also leads to greater exclusion from global e-commerce markets.
Uneven progress
According to Mckinsey & Company, Africa’s electronicpayments market is expected to grow by 152 per cent between 2020 and 2025, but this growth will be very uneven. Despite significant infrastructure developments in a number of African countries, particularly Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, many sub-saharan countries continue to lag behind when it comes to digital payments.
It is likely, however, that the rise of smartphones will force Africa’s mobile-money and fintech markets to evolve. This transition won’t be easy, as mobile-money providers will have to acquire new skills to diversify their offering. Regulatory solutions and corporate collaboration between the key stakeholders will also be essential to ensure that the needs of the local consumer within the global market are met.
Mats Granryd, the director general of GSMA, says: “Over the past ten years, mobile money has grown from a niche offering in a handful of markets, to a mainstream financial service.” The mobile-money market isn’t going anywhere, but the coming decade is likely to see a radical modernization of Africa’s fintech industry, in which a tricky balancing act between digitalization and inclusion will have to be performed.
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Von RACHEL PREECE
Business Spotlight 24/5/2023 Das Metaverse könnte die Welt ebenso stark verändern wie das Internet. Es ist ein virtueller Ort, an dem sich Menschen vernetzen oder sogar Immobilien kaufen können.
Virtual real estate and design
You might have heard that, in the future, we’re all going to live in the “metaverse”. It may be in the headlines almost daily, but for most of us, the metaverse is very abstract. So, what is it exactly? Combining various technologies, including virtual reality (VR), the metaverse is a parallel, virtual world. It copies the real world in some ways — you can go to work, meet friends, etc. Over the next few years, more and more people will spend time in the metaverse, and organizations will offer products and services there.
The four big metaverse platforms are currently Decentraland, The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels and Somnium Space. According
to Mckinsey, more than $120 billion was invested in the metaverse in the first five months of 2022 alone, and 79 per cent of consumers who use it have spent money there. Interestingly, while the metaverse isn’t in the physical world, one of its biggest markets is real estate, which has been growing despite cryptocurrency’s instability.
Like a social media account, your home in the metaverse is somewhere you can present who you are and connect with others. From a business perspective, it’s potentially very lucrative, particularly for e-commerce. Many hope the metaverse will offer a new way to interact with consumers.
Sarah Mittiga, a management consultant at KPMG, advises clients on the impact of the metaverse on real-estate businesses. She told Business Spotlight that “due to globalization, but also the Covid-19 pandemic, the wish to meet virtually has grown exponentially.” Companies and organizations are also looking at virtual real estate. Mittiga says: “I believe that we are currently experiencing the same situation as with the dawn of the internet and the questions surrounding the need for companies to have a website.”
Who’s buying and building?
US rapper Snoop Dogg was one of the early metaverse property owners. In January 2022, global consultancy PWC announced it had bought some land on The Sandbox. A month later, Jpmorgan Chase became the first bank to announce it was opening a metaverse branch.
It’s not just for companies and music stars, however. Barbados is planning an embassy in the metaverse, where people can attend real embassy appointments remotely. Sotheby’s has a virtual gallery, a replica of its London home, and Manchester City Football Club partnered with Sony to recreate its stadium.
For architects and designers, the barrier between the physical and virtual worlds has largely disappeared. Pallavi Dean, founder of Dubai-based design studio Roar, told Business Spotlight: “Designing with AR and VR is second nature. Traditionally, we would hand the designs to engineers and builders to create a physical space — the metaverse simply cuts out that part of the process.”
Virtual designs can also be more innovative than in the real world. VICE Media Group has a new metaverse office, called Viceverse. The company’s global executive creative director, Morten Grubak, described it as a large cube with a tunnel inside, through which people reach different levels and rooms — a virtual meeting place, designed to serve the needs of a global team. “It’s a unique structure. Clients, collaborators and journalists can meet for briefings, presentations and in-situ demonstrations of recent projects,” Grubak explains.
Despite this activity, however, the metaverse is still new, with much uncertainty about how it will develop. One of the many unanswered questions is about scarcity. In the real world, land is limited, while the metaverse creates scarcity artificially, but there’s no guarantee that will always be the case. There’s also the fear of market volatility. Metaverse real estate depends on crypto, and buyers could lose a lot if the value of crypto were to fall suddenly — which has happened from time to time.
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