Articles in The Economist
Bit loans
WANT to get some cash at automated teller machines in Nairobi? Don’t be surprised by the guards with machine guns. ATMs attract plenty of muggers and pickpockets.
Unsurprisingly, cashless transactions have been catching on fast in …
The power of money
HIGH-SPEED currency trading uses oodles of computing power to exploit short-lived price differences in international foreign-exchange markets. Jonathon Keats proposes an alternative: exploit the electrical differences between currencies to power a low-speed computer. In an …
Dispatching the middleman
MANY cabbies pay a dispatcher to keep the fares coming. The dispatchers are an information clearing-house, offering customers a central point of contact and offering on-the-move drivers directions to the nearest prospective passenger. But location-enabled …
Signs of progress
WHERE the internet has yet to take firm root, people plump for the next-best thing. In many emerging markets this means text messaging. Customers have embraced the short message service (SMS) not just to communicate with each other, …
