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I write about the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly how technology can accelerate medicine..

The Trailblazer: Anggie Becorest of Empirico and Givatar 

Tracking time helps you find more free time. Sounds contradictory but it’s true. If you’re like me, you may feel as if there aren’t enough hours in the day, much less an entire week. There’s a solution though: time management.

According to time management expert Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, the secret is in time tracking. When we track our time, we realize that we might be spending time on activities with no value, rather than prioritizing projects important to our life goals.

When ride-hailing companies first hit the consumer landscape more than ten years ago, they were hailed as revolutionary for introducing user-friendly apps to share rides with complete strangers. Over time, users became accustomed to the embedded payment model employed by rideshare firms. Across emerging and developed markets alike, anybody can download an app, order a ride, and pay via the app. Embedded finance quickly became commonplace, and in the last few years, seamless payments have led to the birth of the “super app”, allowing users to perform (and pay for) a variety of functions from a central integrated hub. 

Telehealth, telemedicine, digital health, high-tech healthcare, health tech, medtech - there is a plethora of names for the increasingly ubiquitous convergence of healthcare and technology. Existing technology has been leveraged to meet the needs of the coronavirus pandemic, and adoption of virtual health services has subsequently accelerated faster than many experts anticipated.

As director of product management for Google Japan, Ken Tokusei has responsibilities that range from communicating with Google offices across the world’s 24 time zones, to refining search results for local users. When Tokusei started off in Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters in 2003, he was one of the first 1,000 people employed by the technology giant, which now has 50,000 employees. 

Kweku Mandela Amuah, grandson of Nelson Mandela, returned to South Africa as an adult and shares his grandfather’s dream of a better Africa for the future. With his cousin, he co-founded Africa Rising, an organization dedicated to empowering young people.

Recent cyberattacks on IT resources firm Solar Winds and energy supplier Colonial Pipeline may look like they have little to do with fintech, but they have one commonality that should make fintech companies take notice: supply chains were at the crux of the cyberattacks and made the companies vulnerable.

Climate fintech is being leveraged to help countries reach global net carbon neutrality by 2060, but its impact in turning the tide against global warming remains marginal. Industrializing countries and their burgeoning middle classes are seeing carbon emissions only increase. 

PayPal recently became the first foreign fintech to acquire a coveted domestic operations license in China, the biggest mobile payments market in the world. Around the same time, PayPal also announced it was ceasing domestic operations in India, where the market potential is estimated to reach US$1 trillion. 

The rapid onset of connected autonomous, shared and electric vehicles is ushering a new digital age in the auto industry. As vehicle-related components are digitalized, the path to interrelated automotive fintech solutions is being turbocharged through big data, IoT and AI.

As the pandemic forced school shutdowns around the world, digital solutions entered centerstage to support a sudden shift to remote learning, thrusting technology into the forefront of the educational sphere. 

When ride-hailing companies first hit the consumer landscape more than ten years ago, they were hailed as revolutionary for introducing user-friendly apps to share rides with complete strangers.

When it comes to cybersecurity, consumers want to trust that retailers are protecting them in some way, shape or form. But with high-profile breaches at Target, Home Depot and Neiman Marcus, among others, it behooves buyers themselves to know what to watch for, what scams can happen and what retailers can do.

While most eyes are on the dramatic shifts possible for U.S. economic policy as Donald Trump is sworn in as president on January 20, similarly deep political currents are on the move in Europe. Indeed, the state of economic and political affairs there mirrors the seismic shift in the United States in many ways. 

In a report, the European Commission potentially gave a boost to the sharing economy in the region by announcing that countries should give the green light for businesses, like Airbnb and Uber, to prosper rather than face hefty fines and outright bans. 

What do Silicon Valley and Stockholm have in common? Spawning billion-dollar tech companies. After Silicon Valley, the Swedish capital produces the highest number of so-called “unicorns” per capita than any other global city. 

While tech “unicorns” coming out of Silicon Valley are starting to sound like a dime a dozen, the first tech unicorn to come out of Africa, Africa Internet Group (AIG), is causing a stir. 

E ven in the most far-flung corners of the developing world, you can buy a bottle of Coca-Cola. But often in these same places, one in seven children die before their fifth birthday from preventable causes like dehydration from diarrhea. 

January 16, 2016 marked “Implementation Day” in Iran — the day when partial sanctions against the country were officially lifted in accordance with the Iran nuclear deal. Called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement cleared the way for Iran to sell oil, trade goods and engage in the banking sector in exchange for halting its nuclear program.  

Following the landmark nuclear deal with Iran, plans for the lifting of economic sanctions are moving forward with “Implementation Day” planned as soon as late 2015 or early 2016.  

At one point in his life, Azeem Ibrahim was living in government-subsidized housing in Scotland with his mother and six siblings. But that didn’t stop him from pursuing his bold ambitions in business and education. Learning the ropes of investing by dipping into the daily business sections of the newspapers for sale at his father’s newsstand, Ibrahim made his first £1 million (US$1.6 million) by the age of 27.  

In the face of plummeting oil prices, Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, has announced an economic strategy to shake off Saudi overreliance on fossil fuels. Dubbed “Saudi Vision 2030,” Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, second in line to the throne, has proposed changes to wean the Middle Eastern country to be less dependent on oil and generate $100 billion in additional non-oil revenue by 2020 

Roshaneh Zafar started a microfinance organization called the Kashf Foundation in Pakistan to help women out of poverty. With the mentoring help and a US$10,000 loan from Dr. Mohammed Yunus, founder of the Grameen Foundation in Bangladesh and winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for his work, Zafar has reached 1 million female entrepreneurs, while the current outreach of the program is 300,000 active clients. 

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, has recently published a book called An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies about how you can apply basic theories of economics to get the best meal for your money.

Much has been made about China’s commercial push into Africa. But a less-publicized facet of its foreign policy strategy there is actually helping millions of Africans. Sometimes dubbed “health diplomacy,” China has been offering much-needed medical aid to African countries for over half a century as a soft power strategy to strengthen bonds with African governments.  

When the Arab Spring took hold, protestors in the region discovered their most powerful weapon was neither a gun nor a charismatic leader. Instead, the lightening-fast, lassoing force of the Internet brought together hundreds of thousands. In response, fearful regimes cut off Internet access. 

Signaling the end of a chapter when financial risk was rife, General Electric has announced it’s selling off the bulk of GE Capital, divesting out of the financial-services market within the next two years. 

Recently, the value of the U.S. dollar has risen from strength to strength against a basket of currencies, notably against the euro and the yen. In fact, the dollar has reveled in the longest streak of gains since 1971. 

Deflationary forces have been kicking up turbulence in Europe, prodding eurozone leaders to finally embrace quantitative easing (QE) as a way to drive economic growth.

To get a sense of how the eurozone is handling its latest economic crisis, look no further than this key question: How is Germany handling the crisis?