A New Way of Digital Advertising

9

October

2017

4/5 (1)

We have all been there: you are watching an interesting video on YouTube and halfway through the video a random 15 second advertisement starts to play. This example is just one of many reasons why people install an ad-blocker. However, the creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla have found a different way to deal with advertisements: if you do decide to watch advertisements, you will get paid in tokens called Basic Attention Tokens (BAT).

 

To earn BATs, you will need to use a browser called Brave. This is a browser that blocks wasteful advertisements and trackers, and as result it claims to be two times faster than Chrome on a desktop. Besides blocking advertisements and trackers, users will be given the choice to opt-in to see advertisements. These advertisements will be privately matched to the user’s interests and anonymously confirmed. What is important is the fact that the user remains anonymous to all parties. However, any advertising measurement will be limited to the active tab, so ads in a background tab won’t count toward a user’s BAT allocation

 

The three parties involved in the BAT system are the advertisers, the publishers and the users. Advertisers acquire tokens and then package the tokens with ads. This combination is locked until a user views the advertisement on a publisher’s website. At this point the token is unlocked and a small part of its value is stored in the user’s digital wallet and the rest is forwarded to the publisher whose website ran the ad. The tokens obtained by the users can be spent in various ways: users may donate the tokens to a website to support the selected site. Alternatively, users may keep half of the tokens for themselves and give half of the tokens to a website they support. Of course there’s also an option of keeping all the tokens to yourself. If you have chosen to opt-out of advertisements, you will obviously not see any advertisements on the Brave browser and you will not receive any tokens.

 

All in all, I think BATs can have a major impact on people’s privacy and the online advertisement industry and I personally would be open to use the Brave browser in which I can decide to opt-in or opt-out of (paid) advertisements.  Basic Attention Tokens currently have a value of around $0.19 per token and it will be interesting to see how the price will develop in the future when more parties become aware of the Brave browser and BATS. Please be aware though that this blog post is intended for informational purposes only and is in no means an investing advice.

 

For more information, check out the website of BAT

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Technology Of The Week – E-learning As An Information Good

29

September

2017

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Education is at the heart of human survival as it facilitates progress and development of humanity. Education drives change, but ironically education itself has gone through limited change since the conventional classroom education was initiated. However, this is bound to change soon. With the mass adoption of internet and high speed broadband worldwide, concepts of E-learning could come to existence.

 

E-learning is comprised of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC’s), Mobile Learning apps and Learning Management Systems (LMS). Together they allow wide access to education to anybody with an internet connection.

 

E-learning is an information good. Just like with other information goods such as CDs and books, initial fixed costs of creating the content are high but the costs of replication and distribution are low. Due to these attributes, E-learning can be easily be scaled to hundreds of thousands of students globally.

 

In comparison to traditional classroom education, the variety of courses is much larger online, leading to the long tail product variety effect. Next, flexibility in terms of course choice and time spent also rises as the students can choose to do the course of their choice at their pace. However, E-learning suffers from a low retention rate caused by a huge number of course drop-outs. And despite the fact that MOOC providers are trying to simulate the classroom environment online, E-learning courses still lack the face-to-face communication aspect of education that is vital for student-to-student knowledge sharing.

 

In terms of industry attractiveness, E-Learning is still a fairly new industry with few major players leading the market. Due to the difficulty of entering the market caused by the strong barriers of entry, the threat from new entrants is low. The barriers are the high initial investments for the content and credibility building. Yet, the threat of substitution is moderate as E-learning can only partially substitute traditional education. And although switching from one provider to another by consumers is easy, their independent nature causes the bargaining power of the consumer to be moderate.

 

Since the inception of  E-learning, the industry has been going through rounds of evolution. Some major trends that in our opinion shall evolve in this industry are integration of E-learning in social media and gamification of the content. Given the fact that on average people spend over two hours on social media in an unproductive manner, E-learning could enter the field with short educational content videos that would be both useful and effortless to the viewer. We expect to see more micro-courses that shall appear on social media feeds in the form of short customized videos. Similarly, in the hope of making education more natural and effortless, gamification of studies shall be more common. Contrary to traditional education, gamification will always set the problems in context, making it easier for students to maintain their attention.

 

Overall, E-learning has the potential to create a global classroom that is free from inequality and prejudice allowing everybody to have access to the knowledge from top universities worldwide.

References

  1. Albatch P. (2014)., MOOCs as Neocolonialism: Who Controls Knowledge? INTERNATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION Pg. 5-7 No. 75
  1. Bakos Y., Brynjolfsson E., Lichtman D., (1998). Shared Information Goods. MIT & NYU & University of Chicago.
  1. Christensen G, Steinmetz A, Alcorn B, Bennett A, Woods D, Emanuel EJ (2013). “The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why?” Working Paper Pennsylvania
  1. Chen Zhenghao, Brandon Alcorn, Gayle Christensen, Nicholas Eriksson, Daphne Koller, Ezekiel J. Emanuel. (2015). Who’s benefiting from MOOCs and Why
  1. (2013) The MOOC Marketplace Takes Off [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/11/30/the-mooc-marketplace-takes-off/#79323385556f
  1. Hal R. (1994). Buying, Sharing and Renting Information Goods. Varian University of California at Berkeley
  2. Hal R. (1998). Markets for information goods. Varian University of California at Berkeley
  1. Marshall SJ. (2013). “Evaluating the Strategic and Leadership Challenges of MOOCs” in MERLOT Journal of online learning and teaching, Vol 9, No. 2
  2. Nelson, C. (2012).Whose intellectual property? Inside Higher Ed. 
  3. Porter, J. E. (2013).  MOOCs, “Courses,” and the question of faculty and student copyrights, The CCCC-IP Annual: Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2012.
  4. Porter, J. (2013).MOOCs, outsourcing, and restrictive IP licensing.
  5. Porter, M. (2008). On Competition- updated and expanded edition: 2nd Ed, Harvard Business School Press, USA
  1. Saltzman, G.M. (2014) The Economics of MOOCs in Harold S. Wechsler (ed.), The NEA 2014 Almanac of Higher Education (Washington: National Education Association, 2014), pp. 19- 29
  1. Shah D., (2014). MOOCs in 2014: Breaking Down the Number https://www.edsurge.com/news/2014-12-26-moocs-in-2014-breaking-down-the-numbers 
  1. Stepan A. (2013) “Massive open online courses (MOOC) disruptive impact on higher education”
  1. Harvard Business Review (2017) ‘’The return of MOOC. Established education providers vs new contenders.’’

 

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Would you fly with a pilotless plane?

25

September

2017

5/5 (2)

Autonomous driving is currently one of the hottest topics in the field of artificial intelligence. However, a much less talked-about mode of transportation that could also become autonomous in the future is flying. The airline industry is known for its low profit margins, and in 2012 airlines made an average of $4 per passenger carried. It thus makes sense that airlines always try to find ways to cut costs and one of the ways to do that is by cutting the number of crew members per flight. The number of crew members in the cockpit has already declined over the years, but will we soon see commercial airplanes without a cockpit at all?

 

During the 1950s, when commercial flying began to grow rapidly, there were five crew members in the cockpit: a pilot, a co-pilot, a flight engineer, a navigator and a radio operator. As technology improved, the tasks of the navigator, the radio operator and the flight engineer were replaced by computers. And with the introduction of the autopilot, constant hands-on control by a human was not necessary anymore. It is however important to note that the autopilot cannot replace human operators, as it merely assists them in controlling the aircraft. The pilot and co-pilot have to constantly monitor and adjust the aircraft’s navigation and systems, communicate with air traffic control and prepare for the next phase of the flight.

 

Tests have been done to reduce the number of pilots from two to one, but this reduction is not expected to come in the very near future. If the reduction from two to one is already such a difficult task, how likely would it be to go from two pilots to no pilots at all? Last June, Mike Sinnett, Boeing’s vice president of product development, announced that Boeing wants to test aspects of self-flying passenger aircrafts next year. He also stated that the basic building blocks of the technology are already available. These are however only tests on the aspects of self-flying aircrafts and an aeronautics professor at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida says that even optimists predict that pilotless flying is at least 50 years away from now.

 

However, even if autonomous flying would be possible, it would be difficult to convince people to actually fly with an autonomous aircraft. A survey of 8.000 people done by UBS found that only 17% of respondents would buy a ticket for a pilotless flight. Nevertheless, I think that this percentage could rise with the commercialization of autonomous transportation for other modes of transport. For many people, autonomous transportation still sounds like something from movies, but if there are more and more autonomous cars on the road, the consensus on autonomous transportation including autonomous flying could drastically change. Even though it seems likely that we will not see any pilotless commercial flights in the next 50 years,  I am wondering what your current thoughts are on getting on a pilotless flight. Do you feel safer on a flight knowing that there are human operators on board or do you think taking out the human error factor makes flying safer?

 

 

[1] – IATA. (2013, March). Strong Passenger Growth Trend Continues. Opgehaald van IATA: http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2013-07-03-01.aspx

[2] – Kottasová, I. (2017, August). Pilotless planes could save airlines billions. But would anyone fly? Opgehaald van CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/07/technology/business/pilotless-planes-passengers/index.html

[3] – Lerner, P. (2017, August). Would You Fly on an Airliner Without a Pilot? Opgehaald van Air & Space Magazine: http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/02_aug2017-airplanes-without-pilots-180963931/

[4] – Scott, A. (2017, June). Boeing wants to build a futuristic plane that can fly without a pilot. Opgehaald van Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/r-boeing-studies-pilotless-planes-as-it-ponders-next-jetliner-2017-6?international=true&r=US&IR=T

 

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