How Blockchain Applications Will Move Beyond Finance

In their seminal work on the theory of the firm, Michael Jensen and William Meckling defined the firm as a “nexus of contracts” — the idea that firms are nothing more than a collection of contracts between various parties, such as employees, customers, and shareholders. Cryptocurrencies may one day enable a completely new type of organization by allowing us to securely transfer value and allocate resources through smart contracts. Whereas this new type of organization may achieve the speed and efficiency of

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Digital Currency: What the Heck Is It?

When you consider the fact that any series of transactions can be tracked with one hundred per cent accuracy (what’s called an immutable audit trail), and that built-in encryption means it’s inherently secure, blockchain suddenly becomes the ideal technology for a variety of financial functions and exchange mechanisms. And forward-thinking companies, including some of our country’s big banks, are already investing in that potential.

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Cognitive law outthinks data overload | IBM

It used to take up to 23 days to conduct routine legal research. Now, working with Watson, ROSS Intelligence is using cognitive technology to read legislation, court decisions and secondary sources to find answers in seconds, that help lawyers move quickly from the routine to the essential.

Few law firms of any size can survive in their present form unless they make affordable, quality representation a top priority. Now that ROSS Intelligence has tapped into Watson’s cognitive abilities, firms have the ability to do just that. Along the way, they just might just transform the entire industry.

Source: ROSS and Watson tackle the law – IBM Watson

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Disrupting Industries With Cognitive Computing

With cognitive computing, we are now able to unlock the value in ALL the data — from internal, external and even publicly available sources — available to a business. Much of this data was previously inaccessible as it existed in was unstructured (documents, emails, social media posts and images etc.), or was dispersed among any many systems and silos. Hear how two companies are already using cognitive computing to disrupt their industries:

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Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking? – Only Dead Fish

It’s difficult to navigate through all the myriad factors to identify what might really be behind this picture, but perhaps the real story is less about the impending death of large businesses and more about their need to adapt – to move through business and product life cycles more quickly than before, to be more focused on systematic experimentation and organising swiftly around opportunity.

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Low-End Disruption in Consumer Markets | Tech-Thoughts by Sameer Singh

In the 1960s, General Motors held a ~50% share of the US automobile market and 80% of the industry’s profits. General Motors’ integrated value chain allowed it to dominate the industry in an era where products were still not “good enough” (with respect to performance and reliability). But as automobile performance improved, modular, “low-end” disruptors like Toyota attacked it from below and profits evaporated. Toyota did not succeed by immediately attacking the premium segment of the market. It started with the low-end Corona and “then moved up-market by introducing sequentially its Tercel, Corolla, Camry, Avalon and 4-Runner models, and ultimately its Lexus”. Honda and Nissan followed similar approaches to disrupt integrated incumbents like General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Now, these disruptors are in turn facing low-end disruption from the likes of Kia and Hyundai.

Source: Low-End Disruption in Consumer Markets | Tech-Thoughts by Sameer Singh

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The Checklist Manifesto | Atul Gawande

Over the past decade, through his writing in The New Yorker magazine and his books Complications and Better, Atul Gawande has made a name for himself as a writer of exquisitely crafted meditations on the problems and challenges of modern medicine. His latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, begins on familiar ground, with his experiences as a surgeon. But before long it becomes clear that he is really interested in a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world–and that is how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities. It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking.

Source: The Checklist Manifesto | Atul Gawande

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