Snippings

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The claim is that Hubbard offered the Bell telephone patent to Western Union — the telegraph monoply and telecom giant of the day — in 1876 for $100,000.  Western Union said no.  According to this great story:

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and his financial backer, Gardiner G. Hubbard, offered Bell’s brand new patent (No. 174,465) to the Telegraph Company – the ancestor of Western Union. The President of the Telegraph Company, Chauncey M. DePew, appointed a committee to investigate the offer. The committee report has often been quoted. It reads in part:

“The Telephone purports to transmit the speaking voice over telegraph wires. We found that the voice is very weak and indistinct, and grows even weaker when long wires are used between the transmitter and receiver. Technically, we do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles.

“Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their “telephone devices” in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?

“The electricians of our company have developed all the significant improvements in the telegraph art to date, and we see no reason why a group of outsiders, with extravagant and impractical ideas, should be entertained, when they have not the slightest idea of the true problems involved. Mr. G.G. Hubbard’s fanciful predictions, while they sound rosy, are based on wild-eyed imagination and lack of understanding of the technical and economic facts of the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious limitations of his device, which is hardly more than a toy… .

“In view of these facts, we feel that Mr. G.G. Hubbard’s request for $100,000 of the sale of this patent is utterly unreasonable, since this device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase.”

It’s an absolutely awesome quote, perfectly capturing the stupidity and arrogance of an entrenched monopoly in dismissing an upstart disruptive technology.

The only problem is, the quote isn’t true.  It’s a made-up blend of several different, but related, stories.

From: The History of Phone Phreaking Blog: The Greatest “Bad Business Decision” Quotation That Never Was.

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At Meta Connect 2024, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled two significant advancements in AI and AR technology that ‘will likely replace smartphones one day.’
Enhanced Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses: Highlighted by Zuckerberg as “the perfect form factor for AI” interactions, these glasses are designed to integrate AI capabilities into daily life, with features like real-time translation and remote assistant integrations.
Orion AR Glasses with Neural Interface: These are a more advanced prototype that incorporates a neural interface via a wrist-worn device. This allows users to control the glasses using their brain’s electrical activity.
Holographic AR: Orion offers holographic AR capabilities with a 70-degree field of view. The glasses use micro LED projectors and waveguides in the lenses to project visuals directly in front of the user’s eyes.
Future Vision: Zuckerberg described Orion as a “time machine” into the future emphasizing its potential to revolutionize how we interact with technology.
Commitment: He didn’t change his company’s name from Facebook to Meta for nothing. The device is still in its prototype phase but demonstrates Meta’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of AR technology (and yes, the much derided but still very relevant, in my opinion, metaverse).
Orion is expected to come sometime in 2027. Ray-Ban Meta glasses are available today at $299 for the base model. I’m super tempted to get one! I’ve literally run into people at conferences wearing them, and they look awesome.

From: Mark Zuckerberg Plans to Kill the Smartphone.

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At the end of January 2006, Western Union closed down their telegraph business. But its most important value-added network service, money transfers, continues. Over the course of the technology lifecycle, it earned far more more than the basic service ever did. Shouldn’t mobile operators spend their time trying to make money transfer work rather than messing around with music downloads?

So, farewell then, Western Union. Of course it’s fun at this time to point out that the management of Western Union turned down what subsequently became the most valuable patent ever: the telephone. In fact, they rather famously said

“The ‘telephone’ has too many short-comings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

That’s management for you, you might say. There was no more reason for a telegraph company to catch the telephone wave than there was for Microsoft to invent Google or for BT to come up with Skype. Or, for that matter, for a bank to invent the successor to the payment card.

But were Western Union management crazy? The fact is that on the evidence available to them, they made the right decision for them (but not necessarily for the future management). It took 25 years for the telephone to make any serious dent in their telegraph business, a business that peaked in 1929. In “Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change” (Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Erik A. Roth) Western Union is used as an interesting case study.

Western Union will always have a special place in the history of Digital Money though. They invented electronic funds transfer in 1871, which is something to be proud of, and in 1914 they gave some of their best customers a charge card for deferring payment (without interest). These became known as “metal money”. I have a suspicion, although a round of googling has failed to either confirm or deny it, that the reason that payment cards are the size and shape they are today can be traced back to those Western Union cards in 1914.

It now appears that FDC is going to sell off its money transfer business, which includes Western Union. This processes 275 million money transfers a year from 271,000 locations in more than 200 countries. Last year this was a $4 billion business with a net income of $1.3 billion, but I guess they’ve seen the writing on the wall. With new e- and m-payment schemes coming along all the time, there is going to be real pressure on the remittances business. Surely Western Union’s management are again making the right decision.

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Self-service kiosks at McDonald’s and other fast-food chains have loomed as job killers since they were first rolled out 25 years ago. But nobody predicted what actually happened.

In one of the earliest mentions of kiosks in fast-food settings in 1999, now-defunct trade industry publication Business Information said that McDonald’s was working to “develop an electronic order-taking system that may eventually replace some of its human equivalents.”

Instead, touchscreen kiosks have added extra work for kitchen staff and pushed customers to order more food than they do at the cash register. The kiosks show the unintended consequences of technology in fast-food and retail settings, including self-checkout. Chains are now experimenting with artificial intelligence at drive-thru lanes, and the experience with kiosks holds lessons for them.

Today, instead of replacing workers, companies deploy kiosks to transfer labor to other tasks like handing off pickup orders, help increase sales, easily adjust prices and speed up service

From: McDonald’s touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers. Instead, something surprising happened | CNN Business.

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HSBC UK’s head of fraud, David Callington, has now entered the fray, telling the Guardian: “The wider ecosystem, and key players in that ecosystem, have to be held to account,” adding that “they [tech firms] need the financial incentive.”

Last year, 11 tech and social media firms signed up to a UK Online Fraud Charter to combat the rising level of scams from fake adverts and romance fraud.

From: HSBC calls for tech giants to help refund APP fraud victims.

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An EY-Parthenon survey of high net worth and institutional investors found that 17% of them are already investing in them tokenisaed digital assets, 25% are planning to invest in then and 35% are interested in learning more. Overall more than half of those survey said that they will be allocating funds to tokenized assets in the short term so it is no surprise that forecasts for the growth of the digital asset market are rather bullish. Standard Chartered and Synpulse, for instance, recently estimated that the market size of real-world tokenised assets will climb as high as $30 trillion by 2034.

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Personhood credentials allow you to prove you are human without revealing anything else about your identity.

From: 3 Questions: How to prove humanity online | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Michael Maoz is senior vice president of innovation strategy at Salesforce.

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There are a few realities businesses need to deal with in Gen AI. The first is the need to de-risk every Gen AI project. To do that, good data governance is needed, so that the data for AI can be trusted. Then you need to be able to audit the data. Next, it has to get past the ‘ethical use’ test, so biases are not baked into results. A privacy layer has to exist. For a business, unlike external Gen AI tools, the data for the Gen AI must be ‘zero copy’, meaning it does not store any data. Unless you can do all that, you might run foul of existing or emerging regulations, such as the EU’s AI Act.

From: Early adopters are deploying AI agents in the enterprise now, with scaled adoption in 2025 | ZDNET.

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The problem is, how do you spot a bot?

From: How to Beat Online Poker: Russian Group Won Big With AI.

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