User blogs

Looking back on 2020 is a bit different from our usual annual perspectives. Communication and work over the internet have taken a completely new meaning in the past 12 months.

Millions of online meetings happen every day in teleconferencing rooms, webinars, Skype, and other online facilities. The nature and dynamics of meetings have been changing. An important impact of online participation can be a reduction in our carbon footprint. This issue is becoming prominent on many national agendas. Only this month, the Swiss federal government has pledged to cut CO2 emissions up to 30% in the next decade.

When Greta Thunberg travelled by boat and train to attend the recent UN Climate Change Summit in 2019, she sent a wake-up call to diplomats and policymakers to search for innovative digital diplomacy tools, such as online conferencing, to reduce flying and thus, their carbon footprints.

Fortunately, the technology is available. There is a wide range of tools and platforms that can facilitate engaging meetings at an affordable cost.

Last year’s rise in the price of cryptocurrency, and the emergence of a new way for collecting money from the public - Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) - introduced a massive rise of the cryptocurrency market valuation. At one point it peeked at USD$500 billion, and current stats are putting it at a USD$350 billion mark.   

Bitcoin is growing rapidly. As we wrote two years ago, Bitcoin’s future was uncertain. The scalability of the network was at the centre of a dispute among major Bitcoin developers. Several solutions were fighting for primacy. Two years of harsh words and failed compromises finally reached closure last week, in a quite unusual twist.

The Internet entered the conference room out of sheer necessity. It has become a common part of all conference venues and provides the twenty-first century way of conducting events, as well as reporting from them.

With contributions from Adriana Minovic.

Observation and participation are two different things.

With the emergence of television in late 50’s people were mesmerized with this new technology which allowed them to observe things that had been unreachable so far in their lifetimes. Observing is what we have done for the last fifty years.

At last, a new era has arrived, the era of participation.

Bitcoin, as a leading cryptocurrency, is at a point that everyone knew it would come to. Everyone hoped this wouldn’t be potentially threaten the stability of the whole blockchain invention. Nevertheless.