New-Tech Europe Magazine | April 2017

subway station in Beijing

Mobile Payment

M-Pesa Do you know what M-Pesa is? Pesa is the Swahili for "money" (this blog is nothing if not educational) and the "M" stands for mobile. It is a money transfer system in Kenya and Tanzania for moving money around using cheap (not smart) phones. It is ahead of anything else until, maybe, smartphones came along. Almost nobody in those countries has a bank account, and so everything operated in cash. Of course, if your son were in the city and wanted to get money to you, either he or a trusted friend had to hop on a bus and give it to you in person. Of course, lots of robberies took place. M-Pesa now carries nearly half the country's GDP. When I was in Tanzania doing Kilimanjaro a couple of years ago, there were shacks at the side of the road with M-Pesa signs that were effectively mini-banks. Mobile payments have been slow to take off in the US because we already have a good credit card system. It even took a decade after most of the world to put a chip in the credit

be to build a new one and cutover like Munich or Denver did. However, there does seem to be another problem with public infrastructure projects in the US, which is that they are not regarded as a way to get infrastructure built, but as a way to deliver patronage and employ people. If we were serious about building the Second Avenue subway line in Manhattan, we'd just get a Chinese company to do it for 25 cents on the dollar or less. Instead, we have a fiasco. The line was planned in 1919 and construction started in 1972. The first small phase opened finally at the start of this year. The "big dig" in Boston, the new Bay Bridge, every light rail line ever, all run multiple times over budget in both dollars and time because we are not serious about getting them built, we are more concerned to use American steel, and union labor and so on, and lots of it. If you lived in the Bay Area about ten years ago, you might remember when a tanker truck caught fire under a section of 580 and took down a bridge. For once, people

cards since there were pretty good fraud detection systems by then. Now Apple Pay works really well, taking only a split second, whereas those credit cards with chips seem to take forever to do a transaction, confusingly saying "thank you" and then going back to telling you not to remove your card. Airports and Bridges The US is famous for bad airports, especially as compared to Asia. Changi in Singapore is regularly rated best airport in the world. To be honest, I think we do OK here, and SFO is fine, and with the best food of any airport anywhere. Famously, Paris's main airport CDG has really bad food, especially for a country that prides itself on its food. (And here's another bit of education for you: if you are in Paris, it is considered hick behavior to call it "Charles de Gaulle" airport - it is always Roissy, the village beside where the airport was built.) But again, part of the problem is those bad airports (like JFK) were built really early and it is hard to rebuild an airport and keep it running. The best solution would

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