Benefit Daily

2019-11-19 10:00:44 Narrative Economics — How Stories Influence Decision-Making

Why so-called "narratives" keep investment managers trapped by prohibiting them from putting money in risky projects?

Why does recession start when everyone is preparing for it?

How do earthquakes change people's perception of the market?

Why do narratives cause epidemics and how did it happen to the BRICS countries?

All the answers are in our new longread. Open / Comment

2019-11-18 13:00:35 Blocking Transactions at PornHub, New Aramco's Valuation & Elavon's Acquisition

World's Biggest Company Set Its Valuation

Saudi Arabia will seek a valuation of $1.6-1.7 trillion for Aramco’s initial public offering. The company will sell just 1.5% of its shares on the local stock exchange, about half the amount that had been considered.

While that would allow Aramco to overtake Apple Inc. as the world’s biggest public company by some distance, the plans are a long way from Prince Mohammed’s initial aims: a local and international listing to raise as much as $100 billion for the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.

Elavon Acquires Sage Pay

Elavon, the payments company that is a subsidiary of US Bancorp, announced that it will acquire Sage Pay, one of the bigger payment processors in the UK and Ireland serving small and medium businesses. Sage Pay’s owner Sage Group said the deal is being done for $300 million at today’s currency rates.

Elavon is active in 10 countries and says it’s the fourth-largest merchant acquirer in Europe, competing against the likes of  Global Payments, Vantiv, FIS, Ingenico, Verifone, Stripe, Chase, MasterCard and Visa. The deal is still subject to regulatory approval (both by the Federal Reserve in the US and the Central Bank of Ireland), and if all proceeds, the deal is expected to close in Q2 of 2020.

PayPal Blocks Transactions at Pornhub

PayPal took steps to stop the Pornhub transactions. “We have discovered that Pornhub has made certain business payments through PayPal without seeking our permission,” the online-payment giant said.

Pornhub Vice President Corey Price has another point of view:“The payments PayPal is referring to are only the payments that were being made to models in our Model Program. Pornhub’s growing Model Program was launched in order to empower content creators within the adult industry by providing a secure, highly visible, sex-positive space on our platform to sell and share original video content and earn a large share of the advertising revenue on their free-to-watch videos.” Price added that the site is now considering other options for paying models, including cryptocurrency.

Read and Ponder

Every tech company wants to be a bank — someday, at least. Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Uber are all eyeing financial services as the next frontier. Getting there might take some work.

How Google interferes with its search algorithms and changes your results. The internet giant uses blacklists, algorithm tweaks and an army of contractors to shape what you see.

It’s bad tech etiquette to take other peoples' phone chargers.
The unofficial guide to tech etiquette. Open / Comment

2019-11-12 10:00:37 Replacement for Adam Neumann, Fight with Deepfakes, Google's Secrets & One Investor's Big Loss

WeWork's Potential CEO

WeWork's series of trials and tribulations has been one of the biggest business stories of the last few months. Co-founder Adam Neumann exited as CEO in September, then SoftBank bought a majority stake in the troubled co-working company after WeWork's failed attempt at an IPO. WeWork might already have a new chief executive lined up, though: T-Mobile CEO John Legere, whom the Wall Street Journal reported is in talks to take over.

Twitter vs. Deepfakes

Twitter said last month it was working on ways to better to handle deepfakes. It just released draft guidelines on how to address the problem and it's looking for the public to weigh in and help shape policies on what it describes as "synthetic and manipulated media." The guidelines aren't yet set in stone, and Twitter's looking for feedback through a survey and tweets with the hashtag #TwitterPolicyFeedback. You'll have until Wednesday, November 27th at 6:59 p.m. ET to weigh in.

Google Secretly Collecting Data

Google’s secret ‘Project Nightingale’ gathers personal health data on millions of Americans. Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data on tens of millions of patients.

Mind Your Crypto
Crypto investor Michael Terpin lost roughly 1,500 bitcoins on January 7, 2018, after falling victim to a SIM swap attack. The bitcoin stake was worth $24 million that day, roughly three weeks after the asset hit its record high price.

Read and Ponder

The group’s great success in calling and enacting enormous protests at the drop of a hat has been enabled, to a large degree, by technology. In fact, tech is powering the future of civil disobedience.

How to save your data when you quit your job. First of all, check your corporate policies to see what, if anything, you’re allowed to take with you when you go. What to do next? Find the answers here. Open / Comment

2019-11-11 11:01:52 Future is coming too fast. How to keep up with it? Learn the latest trends in tech and business industries

What are the biggest challenges technology must overcome in the next 10 years? Futurists, engineers, anthropologists, and experts in privacy and AI have answered this question.

Inside the Microsoft team tracking the world’s most dangerous hackers. From Russian Olympic cyberattacks to billion-dollar North Korean malware, how one tech giant monitors nation-sponsored hackers everywhere on earth.

Teens love TikTok. Why Silicon Valley is worried about it.

How rebranding helped tech company to ‘unbreak the internet’ and gain trust. Photobucket’s case.

Dawn of the neobank: the fintechs trying to kill the corner bank. Open / Comment

2019-11-08 13:01:29 “It smells like apple pie!”, the robot says.

This statement won't sound ridiculous in the future, as the machines are already learning how to smell. Google researchers are training neural networks with a new technique to predict how a molecule smells based on its chemical structure.

It's not that easy to make a robot tell one odor from another. One atom or bond, “and you can go from roses to rotten eggs,” says Wiltschko, who led the Google research team for the project. Many other scientists tried to figure out how to make it possible, but Wiltschko’s team took a different approach. They used something called a graph neural network, or GNN. Most machine-learning algorithms require information to come in a rectangular grid. But not all information fits into that format. GNNs can look at graphs, like networks of friends on social media sites or networks of academic citations from journals. They could be used to predict who your next friends on social media might be. In this case, the GNN could process the structure of each molecule and understand that in one molecule, a carbon atom was five atoms away from a nitrogen atom, for example.

The Google team used a set of nearly 5,000 molecules from perfumers who have expert noses and carefully matched each molecule with descriptions like “woody,” “jasmine,” or “sweet.” The researchers used about two-thirds of the data set to train the network, then tested whether it could predict the scents of the remaining molecules. It worked.

However, this research doesn’t tell us much about mixtures or combinations of scents, which can radically alter how we perceive single molecules. But figuring out what properties or patterns lead molecules to smell a certain way would be a huge advance for the field.

Alexei Koulakov, a researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, says that the project is valuable for introducing thousands of new molecules into the smell data sets, which are often relatively small, and that this data “could form the basis for improvements of this and other algorithms in the future.”

There is still a long way to go. Open / Comment

2019-11-07 13:01:28 Read and ponder

The story of the creation of ARPANET, the groundbreaking precursor to the internet.

Are you looking for a job and feel like boosting your profile? Learn 9 Linkedin growth hacks that influencers don't want you to know.

How to tell deepfakes from reality (for now).

Bill Gates 5 secrets to happiness, universalized in a relatable way by Remy Blumenfeld, coach and entrepreneur.

Creative infographic from Fundera uses pie to visualize each stage of startup funding, from pre-seed funding to initial public offering. Open / Comment

2019-11-06 21:30:56 A Deeper Look Into Uber’s Fintech Strategy

Forbes discussed the new features and improvements in the company with Peter Hazlehurst, Head of Uber Money. Uber's fintech strategy includes

Banking underserved drivers
As 60% of Uber drivers go negative on their accounts six times a month, the company is interested in helping them to escape from overdraft fees. Uber is also searching for ways to motivate people to save up money.

Remittances
Up to 25% of their income back to their home countries. The firm is well-positioned to provide money transfer services directly through the driver app.

Lending
Uber is testing microloans. Uber Money will use data about drivers’ income and cash flow to make smart lending decisions.

Target Audience of Uber's Financial Services

An older Millennial or Gen X, non-white driver who relies on the service for his income, with unmet insurance and borrowing needs.
Uber drivers who, in addition to driving for Uber, have other gig economy jobs.
Other drivers who rely less on Uber for their income and non-Uber driving gig economy workers, but who may still benefit from insurance or loans provided by the rideshare service.

Uber Money's Business Model

Uber Money is going to become a force in financial services. The company is in position to capitalize on two trends:
The rise of the gig economy
The emergence of headless banking.

Its pricing strategies – lower fees and interest rates on loans to drivers who make more trips – will help grow overall trip volume. And its data about drivers’ cash flow and income will enable smart – and fast – lending decisions. Open / Comment

2019-11-05 14:01:04 ​​If you're asked to name a legendary investor, who would it be? Warren Buffet? Peter Lynch? Well, they are but none of them topped the list of investors with the biggest average annual returns.

Who did? Jim Simons, a pioneer in the use of quantitative analysis. He has outperformed the biggest names in the investment world over the past three decades. Simons had to come through a number of difficulties before he created a perfect formula for profitable trading.

He began his career as a popular professor at MIT and Harvard University. During the Cold War, he broke Russian code working for an organization aiding the National Security Agency. At 37, while running Stony Brook University’s math department, he won geometry’s highest honor, cementing his reputation in mathematics.

When Mr. Simons left Stony Brook in 1978 to launch his trading firm, he was eager for a new challenge and bursting with self-confidence. At the time, some investors and academics saw the markets’ zigs and zags as essentially random, arguing that all possible information already was baked into prices, so only news, which is impossible to predict, can push prices higher or lower. Others believed price shifts reflected efforts by investors to react to and predict economic and corporate news, efforts that sometimes bore fruit.

In 1982, Simons founded a hedge fund — Renaissance Technologies. He was accustomed to scrutinizing large data sets and detecting order where others saw randomness. Despite the fact he failed to find the particular patterns, Simons was determined to build a high-tech trading system guided by preset algorithms, or step-by-step computer instructions.

To get more information to analyze, he started collecting data from the World Bank and various exchanges and even sent a staffer to Federal Reserve offices in lower Manhattan to record interest-rate histories and other information not yet available electronically. They gathered data going back to the 1700s—ancient stuff that almost no one cared about but Simons. He worked with other mathematicians such as Lenny Baum, James Ax and Elwyn Berlekamp and even reached some good results: Medallion scored a gain of 55.9% in 1990, a dramatic improvement on its 4% loss the previous year.

What happened next? The answer is in Gregory Zuckerman’s book “The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution”. Open / Comment

2019-11-01 19:08:50 How to...?

Launch a cryptocurrency wallet everyone is talking about? Ask Pavel Durov. His company Telegram has released an early desktop wallet for its “gram” token despite the SEC lawsuit. By the way, check it out.

Detect an "Airbnb scam" and get away with it? Be cautious and don't believe anything hosts say.

Survive without any notifications for every app, site, and tool for a month? Not that easy but possible.

And how...

A massive data breach can cause chaos within a company and put IT staff under extreme stress.

Find all the answers via the links and enjoy your Friday! Open / Comment

2019-10-31 13:30:03 No to Political Ads, Yes to 5G, Fintech and Femtech

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the company would no longer allow political ads on its social network. "While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions," he emphasized. Twitter's policy banning political ads will go into effect on November 22, and the full policy will be posted one week earlier, on November 15. Dorsey pushed back against the reasoning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who defends Facebook's policy of allowing paid political ads with intentional lies and misinformation.

Berlin-based femtech startup Inne is coming out of stealth to announce an €8 million (~$8.8M) Series A and give the first glimpse of a hormone-tracking subscription product for fertility-tracking and natural contraception that’s slated for launch in Q1 next year. The Series A is led by led by Blossom Capital, with early Inne backer Monkfish Equity also participating, along with a number of angel investors — including Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of TransferWise; Tom Stafford, managing partner at DST; and Trivago co-founder Rolf Schromgens.

UK-founded fintech startup Koyo, which gives loans to people with younger or partly-wiped credit scores, has raised $4.9 million in a mixture of debt and equity funding. Koyo is designed to help those who have a short, untested credit history behind them. Led by London-based ‘venture fund meets startup studio’ Foward Partners, the round also saw participation from European global market investor Seedcamp, founder and CEO of non-bank mortgage lender LendInvest Christian Faes, and founder and CEO of real-time financial crime insights platform ComplyAdvantage Charles Delingpole.

China plans to turn on its first 5G networks on Friday, setting up the country to leapfrog other nations in deploying the superfast cellular technology. China’s three major state-owned wireless carriers, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, will open the country’s 5G network for public use in about 50 major cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, said Chen Zhaoxiong, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Thursday at a Beijing conference. That will allow those with the few available 5G-compatible smartphones to buy a subscription to access the network.

Read and Ponder

He used to work at Starbucks. Now this founder's coffee empire is closing in on a valuation of $1 billion. How? Open / Comment