Lifeboat Foundation

Who has the best odds of winning?

In October, Musk tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” According to Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, Musk is “thinking about a super app like WeChat Pay.” Keep in mind that Musk founded X.Com and merged it with Confinity to create PayPal.

For context, China’s WeChat launched as a messaging service in 2011 and has since become a combination of Meta, Apple Pay, Venmo, Amazon, Uber, Robinhood, Rocket Mortgage, Kayak and Healthcare.gov — as well as more than 3.5 million partner “mini programs” that operate inside the app. PayPal and Walmart have been teasing their own versions of financial super apps since at least September 2021 but with much less fanfare.

Roger Spitz is co-author of the forthcoming book The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption; President of Techistential (Global Foresight Strategy); and Chairman of the Disruptive Futures Institute. He has given over 100 keynote talks globally, and he has two decades of experience leading investment banking and venture capital (VC) businesses, advising CEOs, founders, boards, and shareholders, evaluating their competitiveness, strategic investments, and disruptions ahead. Roger’s expertise lies at the intersection of futures studies, systems thinking, and sustainable value creation.

#futurism #disruption #innovation

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers meets PayPal Co founder David Sacks.

Read the accompanying article:
https://unherd.com/thepost/david-sacks-the-tech-purge/

Continue reading “David Sacks: The tech reset has only just begun” »

Mastercard, one of the biggest financial payments providers in the world, is launching a web3-focused incubator to help artists connect with fans through a new medium, the company shared at CES 2023 on Friday.

“The core of this program is providing emerging artists with the web3 tools and skills they need to excel and advance their music careers in this digital economy,” Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard, said to TechCrunch. “By providing access to experts and innovators in the space, the artists will be guided on how to incorporate web3 into their work throughout the entire program and then beyond.”

Mastercard partnered with Polygon, a scaling blockchain built on top of Ethereum, which has been making huge strides in the Web 2.0 ecosystem lately. In the past year, Polygon partnered with a number of other big brands like Starbucks for its Odyssey digital collectible rewards program and Disney for its accelerator program, while also having major clothing brands like Prada and Adidas launch NFT projects through its blockchain.

Quantum computers hold the promise of performing certain tasks that are intractable even on the world’s most powerful supercomputers. In the future, scientists anticipate using quantum computing to emulate materials systems, simulate quantum chemistry, and optimize hard tasks, with impacts potentially spanning finance to pharmaceuticals.

However, realizing this promise requires resilient and extensible hardware. One challenge in building a large-scale quantum computer is that researchers must find an effective way to interconnect quantum information nodes—smaller-scale processing nodes separated across a computer chip. Because quantum computers are fundamentally different from classical computers, conventional techniques used to communicate electronic information do not directly translate to quantum devices. However, one requirement is certain: Whether via a classical or a quantum interconnect, the carried information must be transmitted and received.

To this end, MIT researchers have developed a quantum computing architecture that will enable extensible, high-fidelity communication between superconducting quantum processors. In work published in Nature Physics, MIT researchers demonstrate step one, the deterministic emission of single photons—information carriers—in a user-specified direction. Their method ensures quantum information flows in the correct direction more than 96 percent of the time.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

Over the last half-decade, quantum computing has attracted tremendous media attention. Why?

After all, we have computers already, which have been around since the 1940s. Is the interest because of the use cases? Better AI? Faster and more accurate pricing for financial services firms and hedge funds? Better medicines once quantum computers get a thousand times bigger?

North Korea’s infamous Lazarus Group is mimicking venture capital firms and banks to steal cryptocurrency, according to a report from cybersecurity company Kaspersky.

The state-sponsored cybercrime group, which was was behind the $625 million Axie Infinity hack in April, is creating domains that present themselves as well-known Japanese, US and Vietnamese companies.

Kaspersky said Lazarus’ BlueNoroff subgroup is using new types of malware delivery methods that bypass security warnings about downloading content. They can then “intercept large cryptocurrency transfers, changing the recipient’s address, and pushing the transfer amount to the limit, essentially draining the account in a single transaction.”

This segment originally aired on December 28, 2022.
Colin Rusch, Oppenheimer & Co. Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst, sits down with Yahoo Finance Live anchors Seana Smith and Jared Blikre to talk about Tesla’s stock outlook in 2023 following Elon Musk’s invested interest in managing Twitter this past year.
Don’t Miss: Valley of Hype: The culture that built Elizabeth Holmes.
WATCH HERE:

About Yahoo Finance:
At Yahoo Finance, you get free stock quotes, up-to-date news, portfolio management resources, international market data, social interaction and mortgage rates that help you manage your financial life.

Continue reading “Tesla stock concerns lie around ‘brand damage’ from Elon Musk, Twitter: Analyst” »

“M-PESA”: that is a name in global fintech history that can never be erased. Not that anybody would want to. Forever it will be the perfect example of a viable financial ecosystem based on rules unthinkable before. A living masterpiece that was created by a mosaic of unique circumstances, choices and risks taken at a particular time and place, and that continues to evolve in the changes it brought to the country.

Since I’m neither a local, nor deeply involved with the African markets (yet), I would not dare to simply impose my DIY analytics on my readers. Instead, I invite you to listen to my conversation with M-PESA’s own Kevin Amateshe reflecting on Kenya’s digital financial services space, M-PESA’s role, the past, present and future: https://youtu.be/QlZuKwnsAS4

Continue reading “Kenya Case Study Part I: M-PESA story” »