New forms of technology application

A few days ago, I lived one of those coincidences that remind us that the world is small. A friend I had not seen for more than ten years sat next to me on a plane. The nearly two-hour flight passed, obviously, flying. We took this opportunity to update each other on family and personal topics, and then moved on professionals and labor issues. At some point, commenting on my work, Gustavo asked me if he was still developing programs. I replied that almost nothing. At least in the traditional sense, because also I told him that at the beginning of the year, out of what some would call pure intellectual curiosity, I wrote an application for the iPad, a game, with the intention of simultaneously discover the iOS ecosystem and to remember a little bit some concepts of what we call artificial intelligence.

I was not surprised much that Gustavo in turn told me me that he also, and more or less with the same interest, had developed an application for that platform. His app, which he showed me on his iPhone, is an assistant to the Income Tax return of his country. This application, which does not have any link with the tax administration, has some curious elements such as suggesting the user one unique tax deduction when the sum of all related costs of health, education and similar results in a higher tax. An interesting thing: the payment of taxes with the return may be split in three installments. If the user chooses this fractioning, the application makes the calculations and it includes a payment reminder, with amounts, on the corresponding dates in the telephone agenda.

The application has no cost and has been downloaded some two thousand times by independent users, mainly after a tweet of a local journalist, who had many followers.

This brief history of this application, today, at the end of 2014, does not seem to have anything extraordinary. However, it would have been inconceivable a few years ago. Starting with the simple fact that without having been programmed or planned, an application was presented to me from a handheld device, continuing with the fact that the application was downloaded free of charge by a couple of thousands of people from the app store, a virtual market that has also a hundred thousand more applications available. You imagine that the relative success of that application correspond to the development effort, with a minimal promotion campaign executed from one single message no more than 140 characters in a social network, on the one hand. In addition, that the developer decided to share his work free of charge to anyone who wants to use it – probably out of altruism and just for a moment of glory. On the other hand, the download, storage and the promotion of this and other applications is supported and sponsored by a company that like many others today, offers many things, within certain limits, at no cost to users.

Some examples of these services are: The email (Gmail, yahoo); file storage (Dropbox, AppleDrive, OneDrive); note books and synchronization (Evernote, OneNote) collaboration in editing files (Google Docs), web site hosting (Amazon); virtual machines (Bitnami), instant messaging (WhatsApp), telephone or similar(Skype) news notification (Flipboard, Digg, Reddit), blogging (Blogger), microblogging (Twitter); social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn); platforms for sharing photos (Instagram) or videos (Vine, Vimeo, YouTube); music on demand (Spotify), etc.

Those companies earn their incomes with different business models: simple and basic use is without cost; services that are more sophisticated are paid; a non-negligible amount of storage is free, and additional storage costs a fee. All the free service is provided in return for accepting advertising, usually customized to frightening levels; in return for accepting that more or less anonymous information about our habits and preferences is sold online to third parties; the service with advertising is free and absence of advertising means payment, and so on. Alternatively, it is free for a trial period, with the option of opting out of service after trying it.

Here we talk only about things that include the term “free” in their product portfolio. When we add those that are paid, the panorama expands significantly. It is possible today, for example, to pay a subscription to a prestigious newspaper and receive it punctually every day in a tablet or phone of our choice, seconds after it is published in another country, five thousand kilometers away.

In the digital economy in which we live, tax administrations must face the challenges of determining what can be taxed, and how to do it. Press releases in one of our countries have shown the recent dispute at court because of a tax on consumption of paid content which would apply to payment transferred abroad by credit or debit cards without specifying how they would operate when using third-party payment services (Paypal, for example).

In this digital economy, things are already complex in their form. Even if for some countries the importance in volume and amount of transactions is still limited, it is foreseeable that the near future, things will keep growing in complexity.

One of the features of this digital economy is to bring things together, and bring users closer to things. In the same way that the daily publication promptly reaches the tablet, technologies such as three-dimensional printing makes possible that other things, spare parts for example, comes to the comfort of your home, but not by a super efficient courier service but as a file sent to your printer. Questions about tariffs and import taxes are of course hanging in the air. Current advances in robotics, which will continue, present even greater challenges and opportunities, including the location of factories and employment. The popularization of the things such as everything-as-a-service (XaaS) begins to extend outside the domain of information technology. From software, platform and infrastructure as services, we are moving to cars as services, and, although it sounds curious, concepts such as fraud detection as a service.

Does anyone doubt that the digital economy is already here? It is likely that the readers of this post are users from more than one of the services and systems mentioned above. To those willing to comment, and more out of curiosity and fun for than a statistical purpose, I invite you to place in parentheses the number of those services that you use, in my case (17)

Greetings, happy and lucky 2015

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