TechPlus+
Technology and Development Redux
Financial Inclusion and Democratizing Finance – I
From Noise to Signal A couple of weeks ago, El Salvador’s CryptoPopulist President shared on social media news about an international “Bitcoin” meeting his country was hosting starting May 16. He also listed the names of the 44 entities participating
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Contesting Innovation
Innovation is always good. Innovation regulation is always wrong. These are the two innovation axioms we repeatedly hear in unison from mainstream media, innovators and innovative companies, big and small. Indeed, the two are connected. They are, in fact, two
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Innovation in the Public Sector
I. Introduction For the last 30 years, relentless technological innovation has seemingly conquered most, if not all, corners of the world. While the focus was on infrastructure and social networks in its early stages, the latest phase has set its
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A Glance at Carbon Dioxide Emissions Data
Lack of data is certainly not one of the issues at the table when discussing energy production and carbon emissions. Well-known sources for the former include the UN Statistics Division, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the U.S. Energy Information Administration
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Waste no time waiting for e-Waste data
The town where I currently reside is planning to change its e-Waste collection policy starting next year. As it is today, town people can go downtown once a month and drop their old computers, laptops, monitors and the rest. This
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Chasing ICOs (away?)
Recent events seem to suggest the cryptocurrency bubble is finally starting to deflate. Bitcoin, Ethereum and most of their crypto cousins are significantly down while regulators in several countries are finally beginning to take action on the ground. Nobel laureate economists
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Overall Perspectives on Technology
Disruptive, transformative and revolutionary are some adjectives commonly used to describe the potential impact of new and emerging technologies on society. Joblessness, human decay, and the Singularity sit on the opposite side, constantly reminding us of the darker side of
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Social Innovation Redux
Context I was invited to the Social Innovation – Driving Force for Social Change (SI-DRIVE) final conference, which took place earlier this week in Brussels. SI-DRIVE is a four-year project funded by the EU and launched in 2014. The project
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25 Years of the Sustainable Development Networking Programme, SDNP
The Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) was a UNDP global program that ran between 1992 and 2004. SDNP’s core goal was to enhance access to sustainable development information on a multi-stakeholder basis using new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Its
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Theories of the Mobile Internet: Book Review
There is indeed no scarcity when it comes to books and articles dealing with the so-called mobile revolution. While most present the now usual techno-utopian perspective, only a few offer an adequate analytical framework to try to explain the rapid
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Innovation and Inequality in an Unequal World
Innovation has taken the world by storm. More than a pure storm, it is now looking more like a stationary looping hurricane. No escape. Embrace or die. Only a few have opted for the latter. In any event, this is,
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ICTs and Inequality: An Overview
Not without reason, Inequality seems to have taken command of most development, socio-economic and even political discussions. The fact that a supposedly “technical” and long (and excellent too!) book such as Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a best-seller of
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Women, empowerment and new technologies
Yesterday we celebrated the International Women’s Day (IWD) for the 108th time. The celebration first took place in 1908 in New York CIty. Back then it was called the International Working Women’s Day (IWWD), first organized by the Socialist Party
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Governments, Crowdsourcing and Innovation
The paper on the role of governments in crowdsourcing I presented at the last ICEGOV 2014 gathering in Guimaraes, Portugal, is now available here – in this blog. The paper was supposed to be published by ACM Press as part
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Pakistan Interview: e-governance and development
I gave the following interview to a local business newspaper during my mission to Pakistan. The interview was published on 15 December. BR Research: You have previously worked in Pakistan. How was the e-governance situation like back then, and how
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The Role of ICTs in Empowering People
In the last twenty years, we have witnessed a very rapid and dramatic evolution of ICTs, at a pace perhaps unprecedented in history. This evolution, however, has come in a series of waves. First, we saw the advent of the
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