Lifeboat Foundation

The financial-technology boom that turned China into the world’s biggest market for electronic payments is now changing how banks interact with companies that drive most of the nation’s economic growth. As MYbank and its peers crunch reams of new data from payment systems, social media and other sources, they’re growing more comfortable with smaller borrowers that they previously shunned in favor of state-owned giants.

Jack Ma’s online bank is leading a quiet revolution in the way China lends to small businesses, taking aim at a credit bottleneck that has held back Asia’s largest economy for decades.

Using real-time payments data and a risk-management system that analyzes more than 3,000 variables, Ma’s four-year-old MYbank has lent 2 trillion yuan ($290 billion) to nearly 16 million small companies. Borrowers apply with a few taps on a smartphone and receive cash almost instantly if they’re approved. The whole process takes three minutes and involves zero human bankers. The default rate so far: about 1%.

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César Pelli, the architect whose firm designed Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia and other of the world’s most recognizable buildings, died on Friday at his home in New Haven. He was 92.

The Argentine state news agency Telam confirmed the death, as did Anibal Bellomio, a senior associate architect at Pelli’s firm in Connecticut, with news organizations. Mr. Pelli had been dean of the Yale School of Architecture there, from 1977 to 1984.

Mr. Pelli’s many distinctive works include the World Financial Center in New York (now Brookfield Place), famous for its glass-roofed Winter Garden; the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, known for its bright blue-glass facade; and a terminal at Washington’s Reagan National Airport. He won hundreds of awards, including the American Institute of Architects’ 1995 gold medal.

The Longevity industry will dwarf all other industries in both size and market capitalization and will require unprecedented sophistication in its approach for assessment and forecasting from the start to neutralize challenges and manifest opportunities

The Longevity Industry is not just about biotechnology and biomedicine. Rather, it consists of several distinct segments: Geroscience, Biomedicine, AgeTech and Finance. Despite this seemingly clear market segmentation, many of these sectors intersect with various domains of science and technology, such as advanced biomedicine, preventive medicine, digital health, AI, financial systems, pension systems and government national strategies.

One of the biggest challenges in assessing the Longevity industry is the extreme broadness of the sector. Hundreds of sectors, industries and domains of science and technology must be analyzed in order to obtain a concrete and comprehensive understanding of the dynamics, trends and direction of the industry. This situation is entirely unique to the Longevity industry. Due to this extreme level of complexity, realistic assessment and forecasting is extremely challenging, and the methods currently being applied for assessment of the biotech and biomedical industries are completely inadequate.

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To finance the containment structure, the EBRD managed a fund with contributions from 45 countries, the European Union, and the bank’s own resources. Ukraine contributed 100 million euros (about $112 million).

Deputy project manager Victor Zalizetskyi, who has been part of construction and repairs at the Chernobyl plant since 1987, said he was “filled with pride” that he got to work on a job “that has such a big importance for all humankind.”

However, Zalizetskyi expressed concern in an interview last week that war-torn Ukraine might struggle to cover the maintenance costs for the reactor’s new enclosure. He noted that costly and complicated work such as dismantling unstable sections of the power plant still needs to be done.

The Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting healthy longevity and aging research through crowdfunding and advocacy initiatives, is hosting its second annual scientific conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects and Advances in Research, at the Cooper Union in New York City on July 11th-12th.

The goal of this conference is to promote collaboration between academia, biotech companies, investors, regulators, public health advocates, and doctors in order to foster the creation of interventions to relieve our aging society from the burden of age-related diseases. It is supported by Genome Protection Inc., which is developing therapies to counteract harmful viral elements in our genome that provoke chronic inflammation, and Icaria Life Sciences Inc., which provides contract research in the field of geroscience.

The morbidity from chronic age-related diseases is increasing proportionally to the aging of the global population, representing a challenge to social protection and healthcare systems around the world. The development of next-generation drugs and therapies that could directly target the processes of aging to more effectively prevent and cure age-related diseases has now become a priority, yet the industry is clearly facing unique financial, development, and regulatory bottlenecks.

Revolut was the subject of negative media coverage earlier this year. A Wired report on the company highlighted toxic workplace behavior and high employee turnover, while multiple reports out of The Telegraph suggested a lapse in the company’s sanctions screening system could have resulted in illegal transactions going through.

Employees with a performance rating that missed expectations significantly “will be fired without negotiation after the review,” Storonsky told staff on the workplace messaging tool Slack last year, according to a screen grab obtained by Wired.

“There were some moments that were true in the Wired article,” Revolut’s CEO said, without pinning down which of those claims were valid.

Continue reading “Inside Revolut’s bid to be the Amazon of banking, and the lessons it’s learned from breakneck growth” »

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According to futurist and author Daniel Jeffries, there are five key factors missing for crypto to fully succeed as a technology. Will Libra be the end of the traditional financial order as we know it? Does it pose an existential threat to people’s freedom?

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Introducing the SBOL Industrial Consortium

To this end, a group of companies are now launching a pre-competitive consortium to support the industrial application of these technologies. The SBOL Industrial Consortium is a non-profit organization supporting innovation, dissemination, and integration of SBOL standards, tools and practices for practical applications in an industrial environment. The six founding companies of the consortium are Raytheon BBN Technologies, Amyris, Doulix, IDT, Shipyard Toolchains, TeselaGen, and Zymergen, representing a diverse set of interests and business models across the synthetic biology community.

The SBOL Industrial Consortium will facilitate industry-focused development of representational technologies in several ways. The consortium will help coordinate development of standards and tools, both with the academic community and from member to member, in order to ensure that the SBOL standards are well-tuned to support the specific industrial needs of the members of the consortium. Financial support will also be provided by the consortium for selected projects and activities, and for key pieces of community infrastructure.

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