Leveraging Micropayment Technology to Increase Access to Safe Drinking Water. Matchmaking Impact Stories


Book Description

Since connecting at Innovate 4 Water 2017 – a matchmaking event co-organized by WIPO GREEN – Cubo Environmental Technologies and Susteq have joined forces to make affordable, safe drinking water more accessible in rural Kenya and Nigeria.




Blockchain Revolution


Book Description

Blockchain technology is powering our future. As the technology behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Facebook's Libra, open software platforms like Ethereum, and disruptive companies like Ripple, it’s too important to ignore. In this revelatory book, Don Tapscott, the bestselling author of Wikinomics, and his son, blockchain expert Alex Tapscott, bring us a brilliantly researched, highly readable, and essential book about the technology driving the future of the economy. Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolution­ary protocol that allows transactions to be simultaneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledger of value. Though it’s best known as the technology that drives bitcoin and other digital cur­rencies, it also has the potential to go far beyond currency, to record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certifi­cates to insurance claims, land titles, and even votes. Blockchain is also essential to understand if you’re an artist who wants to make a living off your art, a consumer who wants to know where that hamburger meat really came from, an immigrant who’s tired of paying big fees to send money home to your loved ones, or an entrepreneur looking for a new platform to build a business. And those examples are barely the tip of the iceberg. As with major paradigm shifts that preceded it, blockchain technology will create winners and losers. This book shines a light on where it can lead us in the next decade and beyond.




Remittance Markets in Africa


Book Description

Remittances sent by African migrants have become an important source of external finance for countries in the Sub-Saharan African region. In many African countries, these flows are larger than foreign direct investment and portfolio debt and equity flows. In some cases, they are similar in size to official aid from multilateral and bilateral donors. Remittance markets in Africa, however, remain less developed than other regions. The share of informal or unrecorded remittances is among the highest for Sub-Saharan African countries. Remittance costs tend to be significantly higher in Africa both for sending remittances from outside the region and for within-Africa (South-South) remittance corridors. At the same time, the remittance landscape in Africa is rapidly changing with the introduction of new remittance technologies, in particular mobile money transfers and branchless banking. This book presents findings of surveys of remittance service providers conducted in eight Sub-Saharan African countries and in three key destination countries. It looks at issues relating to costs, competition, innovation and regulation, and discusses policy options for leveraging remittances for development in Africa.




The Intel Trinity


Book Description

Based on unprecedented access to the corporation’s archives, The Intel Trinity is the first full history of Intel Corporation—the essential company of the digital age— told through the lives of the three most important figures in the company’s history: Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove. Often hailed the “most important company in the world,” Intel remains, more than four decades after its inception, a defining company of the global digital economy. The legendary inventors of the microprocessor-the single most important product in the modern world-Intel today builds the tiny “engines” that power almost every intelligent electronic device on the planet. But the true story of Intel is the human story of the trio of geniuses behind it. Michael S. Malone reveals how each brought different things to Intel, and at different times. Noyce, the most respected high tech figure of his generation, brought credibility (and money) to the company’s founding; Moore made Intel the world’s technological leader; and Grove, has relentlessly driven the company to ever-higher levels of success and competitiveness. Without any one of these figures, Intel would never have achieved its historic success; with them, Intel made possible the personal computer, Internet, telecommunications, and the personal electronics revolutions. The Intel Trinity is not just the story of Intel’s legendary past; it also offers an analysis of the formidable challenges that lie ahead as the company struggles to maintain its dominance, its culture, and its legacy. With eight pages of black-and-white photos.




Introduction to Information Systems


Book Description

WHATS IN IT FOR ME? Information technology lives all around us-in how we communicate, how we do business, how we shop, and how we learn. Smart phones, iPods, PDAs, and wireless devices dominate our lives, and yet it's all too easy for students to take information technology for granted. Rainer and Turban's Introduction to Information Systems, 2nd edition helps make Information Technology come alive in the classroom. This text takes students where IT lives-in today's businesses and in our daily lives while helping students understand how valuable information technology is to their future careers. The new edition provides concise and accessible coverage of core IT topics while connecting these topics to Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Management, Human resources, and Operations, so students can discover how critical IT is to each functional area and every business. Also available with this edition is WileyPLUS - a powerful online tool that provides instructors and students with an integrated suite of teaching and learning resources in one easy-to-use website. The WileyPLUS course for Introduction to Information Systems, 2nd edition includes animated tutorials in Microsoft Office 2007, with iPod content and podcasts of chapter summaries provided by author Kelly Rainer.







In the Bubble


Book Description

How to design a world in which we rely less on stuff, and more on people. We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World. These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if "tech" ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives. Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how? In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now—not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology—ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles—above all, lightness—inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.




Blockchain for Smart Cities


Book Description

Focusing on different tools, platforms, and techniques, Blockchain and the Smart City: Infrastructure and Implementation uses case studies from around the world to examine blockchain deployment in diverse smart city applications. The book begins by examining the fundamental theories and concepts of blockchain. It looks at key smart cities' domains such as banking, insurance, healthcare, and supply chain management. It examines Using case studies for each domain, the book looks at payment mechanisms, fog/edge computing, green computing, and algorithms and consensus mechanisms for smart cities implementation. It looks at tools such as Hyperledger, Etherium, Corda, IBM Blockchain, Hydrachain, as well as policies and regulatory standards, applications, solutions, and methodologies. While exploring future blockchain ecosystems for smart and sustainable city life, the book concludes with the research challenges and opportunities academics, researchers, and companies in implementing blockchain applications. - Independently organized chapters for greater readability, adaptability, and flexibility - Examines numerous issues from multiple perspectives and academic and industry experts - Explores both advances and challenges of cutting-edge technologies - Coverage of security, trust, and privacy issues in smart cities




Smart Phone and Next Generation Mobile Computing


Book Description

This in-depth technical guide is an essential resource for anyone involved in the development of "smart mobile wireless technology, including devices, infrastructure, and applications. Written by researchers active in both academic and industry settings, it offers both a big-picture introduction to the topic and detailed insights into the technical details underlying all of the key trends. Smart Phone and Next-Generation Mobile Computing shows you how the field has evolved, its real and potential current capabilities, and the issues affecting its future direction. It lays a solid foundation for the decisions you face in your work, whether you're a manager, engineer, designer, or entrepreneur. - Covers the convergence of phone and PDA functionality on the terminal side, and the integration of different network types on the infrastructure side - Compares existing and anticipated wireless technologies, focusing on 3G cellular networks and wireless LANs - Evaluates terminal-side operating systems/programming environments, including Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian, J2ME, and Linux - Considers the limitations of existing terminal designs and several pressing application design issues - Explores challenges and possible solutions relating to the next phase of smart phone development, as it relates to services, devices, and networks - Surveys a collection of promising applications, in areas ranging from gaming to law enforcement to financial processing




Impact of Information Society Research in the Global South


Book Description

The second volume in the SIRCA book series investigates the impact of information society initiatives by extending the boundaries of academic research into the realm of practice. Global in scope, it includes contributions and research projects from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The international scholarly community has taken a variety of approaches to question the impact of information society initiatives on populations in the Global South. This book addresses two aspects— Impact of research: How is the research on ICTs in the Global South playing a role in creating an information society? (e.g. policy formulation, media coverage, implementation in practice) and Research on impact: What is the evidence for the impact of ICTs on society? (i.e. the objectives of socio-economic development). This volume brings together a multiplicity of voices and approaches from social scientific research to produce an engaging volume for a variety of stakeholders including academics, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and those in the business and civil sectors of society.