Rhino in the Room

Privacy breaches, information dragnets, darknet, hacks, cybercrime, leaks, sometimes it makes you wonder what good information technology actually brings to human kind. Sure, media has always focused on things that can go sour; our first interest is in what disasters or negative effects inventions and innovations bring to us. And, they usually do. Alfred Nobel’s…

Microsoft Beefing Up Big Data Portfolio

Last week’s Microsoft event in Redmond contained mostly consumer centric news. Free upgrades to Windows 10 and the Hololens were the stars of the event. Nadella probably saves the business stuff for later. So nothing on the Microsoft cloud or where Azure is heading for. Nevertheless there was a sound bite that almost drowned in…

From Turing to Watson

Can machines think? This was the question Alan Turing asked himself in his research paper ‘Computing machinery and Intelligence‘ in 1950. To address that question he had to change it since the term ‘thinking’ was too difficult to define. He therefore choose to change the question into “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do…

Charting The Digital Economy: Part II

In our previous blog The METISfiles argued that charting the Dutch digital economy should be done in a much broader context than just measuring end-user value of digital products and services. But new digital services based on the principle of sharing, as practiced for instance by Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, Taskrabbit, SpullenDelen or Thuisafgehaald, pose a…

Is It Safe?

Are you a firm believer in the good government and its self acclaimed right to sift through your communication in order to protect you from terrorists whenever they see fit? Or do you think governments have nothing to do with your personal stuff and can only do so with a court order? It is a…