Leo Gura, founder of Actualized.org, shows what is necessary to get the most out of life. Through discipline, self mastery, and a compelling vision, you can unleash your full potential through your life purpose.

The full speech can be found here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey3x1...

Edited by Focus Shift Media: https://www.facebook.com/TheFocusShift

Music by PBO: https://soundcloud.com/pbo25

Produced by Conscious Evolution: http://www.consciousevolution.tv/

Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/focusshiftmedia

Posted: September 8, 2017 at 12:36 pm

Posted: September 7, 2017 at 6:07 pm

Posted: September 6, 2017 at 9:57 am

Download copy from here alan-watts-the-eternal-now.mp4

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVVk67UZMJ0

"If the universe began in the past, when that happened it was Now. And it trails off like the wake of a ship from Now and just as the wake fades out, so does the past. Things aren't explained by what happened in the past. They're explained by what happens Now"-Alan Watts

Posted: July 30, 2017 at 7:59 am

Posted: July 28, 2017 at 4:29 am

Download copy from here jason-silva-the-power-of-awe.mp4

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRPYwxuH9bI

Exponential technological and cultural progress have given us the opportunity to more fully realize our potential.

Speech by Jason Silva

Posted: July 23, 2017 at 6:23 pm

Posted: July 9, 2020 at 5:12 pm

By Rose Vaughan

Student Intern, Davie

Cooperative Extension

The trend of the agricultural industry in Davie County is looking up.

Despite the threats of farmland loss, Davie farmland is growing. North Carolina ranks number two in the top 12 states at risk for loss of farmland due to urbanization.

Davie County is resisting that trend. Before 2012, the county was losing 12 percent of its farmland. Since then, there has been a 29 percent increase in the total amount of farmland. Farmers in Davie County are beginning to gain land back and they have used it to more than double the income of the industry.

Across all farms in the county, costs are decreasing and profits are increasing. In just five years the net profits for farmers increased by 270 percent. These improvements took place despite the fact that the number of farms declined by eight percent. Theres no doubt that the strength of agriculture in Davie County has grown.

Although data shows that Davie County agriculture is becoming stronger, it is evident that some things are changing. Some crop sales have decreased substantially. The production of tobacco has gone to zero dollars in sales, which was a significant decline since 2012 when the sales were nearly $1 million. On the other hand, the value of fruit, nut and berry products has gone up by 29 percent and the value of sod, greenhouse, nursery and floriculture products is up by 17 percent.

The amount of land used to harvest forage, corn, soybeans and wheat has grown.

Even more, modern and unique forms of agriculture like agritourism have taken off. In less than a decade, revenue from agritourism has increased by 121 percent. Therefore, many crops and other forms of agriculture have been in an upward trend in terms of production and profits. Its easy to think that the loss of one crop leads to a decline in agriculture as a whole based on those numbers, but the industry is making progress in other areas.

Being ranked No. 20 in the state, one of the strongest agricultural programs in Davie County is in the production of layer hens. Layers are the breed of chickens that are produced primarily for the purpose of laying eggs, hence the name layers. Whereas pullets are the chickens that are produced to replace the layers that die. The numbers of both the layers and the pullets have been increased to more than 318,000 chickens. On top of that, the county was able to raise the profits from egg production by $782,000 in a single year; thats a lot of eggs. The growth in layer hen and egg production has coincided with a 14 percent increase in the value of animal products since 2012.

What does that mean?

While the county is experiencing loss in some areas of agriculture, its making up for those losses by making progress in other areas of production. The shift from tobacco to grains and forages, for instance, may be more profitable for farmers because it allows them to focus their efforts on the more successful crops. On top of that, Davie County is resisting the threat for loss of farmland and even gaining more farmland back.

Ultimately, the changes in the industry seem to just be redirection. As George Bernard Shaw said, Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. The changes in Davie County agriculture has produced an overwhelmingly positive result which is evidence of progress, not decline.

Farmers are supported by consumers through local sales. They have grown their sales to consumers by 21 percent in five years. The Cooperative Extension Davie County Center has made an effort to increase the connection of farmers to consumers through local farmers markets and by giving consumers access to local farm information. You can support these farmers further by visiting our Web page at https://davie.ces.ncsu.edu/davie-local-farms/ for more information on how to reach local farms.

Link:Agriculture alive and well in Davie County - Davie County Enterprise Record - Davie Enterprise Record

Posted: at 5:12 pm

If one wishes to count in decades, the 1920s was surely the greatest single decade in Irish writing in English. What other one could equal it for the sustained quality of its artistry, the immediate and lasting impact of its major works, its conviction in the value of the written word?

There is scarcely a year in the decade in which something remarkable did not occur. In 1920, George Bernard Shaws Heartbreak House premiered in New York. In 1921, WB Yeats published Michael Robartes and the Dancer, the volume that contains Easter 1916, The Second Coming and A Prayer for My Daughter. Ulysses made 1922 a watershed in modern literary history. Yeats received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.

The Abbey Theatre produced The Shadow of a Gunman, the first work in Sean OCaseys Dublin trilogy, that year, and Shaws Saint Joan, a play about political martyrdom, was premiered in New York. In 1924, OCaseys Juno and the Paycock was staged at the Abbey; Daniel Corkerys The Hidden Ireland, probably the most significant work of cultural criticism produced in Ireland that decade, appeared too. In 1925, Shaw received the Nobel Prize and Yeats published A Vision. This was the only the decades midpoint.

In 1926, OCaseys The Plough and the Stars was staged in the Abbey, prompting riots. The year 1927 was a quiet one, though Shakespeare and Company published Joyces Pomes Pennyeach in Paris. In 1928, The Tower, one of Yeatss finest volumes, was published. Anna Liva Plurabelle, extracted from Joyces Work in Progress, was also published by Faber & Faber and the Gate staged Oscar Wildes Salom for the first time in Ireland. Elizabeth Bowens The Last September was published in 1929.

In 1930, Yeatss Words Upon the Window Pane appeared and a 24-year old Samuel Beckett, making a beginning, published Whoroscope.

Across the Atlantic, Irish-American writers made a real mark in the 1920s. Eugene ONeills The Emperor Jones was staged in New York in 1920 and established ONeills reputation as an experimental playwright. F Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. In 1927, ONeills All Gods Chillun Got Wings premiered with Paul Robeson starring in New York, and in 1928 ONeill won a Pulitzer Prize for Strange Interludes, premiered in New York that year.

They dont belong to Irish writing in any direct sense, but ONeills and Fitzgeralds works mark a moment when Irish-Americans left a permanent stamp on American literature. ONeills grandparents emigrated from Kilkenny in the wake of the Famine. His Irish-born father, James, grew up in a Buffalo slum, the family cared for by his mother Mary ONeill when her husband returned to Ireland. James made a considerable fortune in American touring theatre. In two generations, the family had moved well up the class system, though Eugene ONeill never forgot his fathers terror of the famine poorhouse or his familys Irish or class origins.

The collective contribution these writers Irish and Irish-American made to the arts of modern poetry, fiction and theatre in a single decade is immense. It is worth remembering, too, that many of them engaged, some occasionally, some consistently, with public political issues.

Roy Fosters biography of Yeats relates how on February 7th, 1921, the poet gave an address to the Oxford Irish Society, declaring to a young Irish republican student, James OReilly, that he would tell his audience their kings soldiers are murderous. As good as his word, he used his oration to praise Sinn Fin justice and denounce the Prussianism of the Black and Tans.

On November 8th, 1923, he defended Joyce in Trinity College against the charge of dullness. Ulysses, Yeats responded, might be as long as Johnsons dictionary and as foul as Rabelais, but Joyce was the only Irishman who had the intensity of the great novelist.

His 1925 Senate speech challenging the Cosgrave governments anti-divorce legislation is better remembered today than these earlier contributions. Knowing his side would lose, Yeats told his listeners on that occasion that There is no use quarrelling with icebergs in warm water and that while his opponents would now carry the day when the iceberg melts [Ireland] will become an exceedingly tolerant country.

OCaseys The Plough and the Stars prompted a riot at the Abbey which still possessed an audience passionate or excitable enough to make one. Norah Hoults short story collection Poor Women! (1928) portrayed the inner consciousness of women from varied class backgrounds struggling with religion and suggested that new constituencies were starting to find their own voices. Bowens first novel launched the career of a superb stylist.

Still, if the 1920s was a glorious literary decade, changes soon to come would irrevocably alter Irish writing and literary production generally. The first Pan-African Congress met in Paris in 1920 and the Harlem Renaissance was getting into its swing in New York. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1920 and in 1922 Gandhis Non-Cooperation Movement began in India.

ONeills The Emperor Jones, in its own way a critical commentary on the 1915 US occupation of Haiti, and a work that gave a leading role to an African-American character, now looks a decidedly dated play that deploys crass stereotypes of African-Americans and Caribbean peoples. The African-American actor Charles Gilpin, who played the lead role of Brutus Jones quarrelled continuously with ONeill and throughout the production changed the n-word in the dialogue to Negro or coloured to ONeills chagrin.

As the non-white colonies of Britain and the US asserted themselves in the decades ahead, the kind of casual racism to be found in most white writing in the 1920s would be called out more and more vigorously. And as Irish society settled into conservative state consolidation, and most Irish writers failed to connect with new struggles emerging across the British Empire, much Irish writing lapsed into its own version of a post-independence insularity and would not long remain to the fore in the annals of anti-colonial struggle.

In 1925, John Logie Baird transmitted the first television image and in 1928 made the first transatlantic TV transmission from London to Hartsdale, New York. In 1929, the Academy of Motion Pictures conferred its first awards, known as the Oscars, in Los Angeles. Though the full effects would take time to impinge on Ireland, when TV and cinema created new publics locally and globally, and shaped new kinds of attention and distraction, the literary authors authority, like an iceberg in hot water maybe, slowly declined.

In the familiar narratives of the 20th century, TV and cinema threw light on a darkened autarchic Ireland and created a more open society. This seems at best partially true. They also locked Ireland even more firmly into an Anglo-American transatlantic perspective, to the point that it could sometimes seem that anything happening beyond Great Britain or the United States scarcely mattered.

In any event, as the world became media-saturated over the course of the 20th century, in western-style liberal democracies especially, fewer and fewer writers would enjoy the immense public esteem once commanded by major 19th-century writers such as Victor Hugo or mile Zola in France, Charles Dickens or George Eliot in England, or Leo Tolstoy in Russia. Yeats in Ireland and Sartre in postwar France could inspire and provoke a nation in ways few writers in any contemporary liberal democracy can do today.

It is easy to criticise in retrospect, but the writers themselves may not always have helped matters. When Yeats rejected Sean OCaseys The Silver Tassie in 1928 and OCasey left in dudgeon for London, the fallout may have damaged both. The Abbey Theatre lost its only serious left-wing political writer; OCaseys experimental works in London never had the impact of his Dublin plays . The Abbey, Irish political drama and OCasey may all have been the long-term losers.

More generally, with the advent of what was already beginning to be called mass culture (FR Leaviss Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture was published in 1930), many of the greatest writers of the time tacked in the opposite direction towards avant-garde difficulty and specialist-audience obscurity.

Joyces Work in Progress, published as Finnegans Wake in 1939, is an astonishing feat with many admirers but few avid readers. Yeatss alienation from the new Ireland to which he had tied his fortunes led to works such as On the Boiler, published by the The Cuala Press in 1939; it was a fanatic rant seething with eugenicist disdain for the lower classes, mainly Catholic in Ireland. The strident anti-populist impulse that disfigures his later life especially set a pattern in Irish letters repeated later by others including Francis Stuart and Conor Cruise OBrien, the former drawn to Hitlers Germany, the latter indulging in late career belligerent Zionism and Islamophobia.

In an age of celebrity, Beckett would win celebrity by apparently eschewing celebrity. One way or another, the tango between writer, media and public remains even now tortuously difficult.

For those to whom it matters, the coming decade will be a time to look back, to celebrate, to think critically about Irish literary achievement. No commemorations or conferences in the 2020s, however, will return us to the 1920s. Nor will any amount of Booker Prizes or Tony Awards greatly change the situation of the contemporary writer either.

Today, accomplished poetry, literary drama and maybe even the literary novel are typically quiet niche pursuits closer to ballet or opera than to the novel and poetry a century ago. TV or cinema can make an occasional sensation of The Commitments, The Butcher Boy, Brooklyn or Normal People, but transmedia adaptability doesnt typically do much for the work of a Derek Mahon or Sinad Morrissey. Even when they do serve fiction writers, such as Colm Tibn with Brooklyn, they rarely serve as their more ambitious works, such as Tibns The Master.

The streaming companies that secure strong ratings on the back of works like Normal People rarely repay the favour to the literary world. Though a good novel with a neat story will always serve their purpose, it would be idle to look to Hulu or Netflix for serious critical programming on modern writing. Since writers contract to publishing corporations, and publishing corporations to distribution behemoths like Amazon, or to conglomerates like Disney or Time Warner, the writer, as much any other profession, lives in a world saturated in neoliberal capitalist hierarchy and values.

Looking back on Irish writing in the 1920s, two obvious things stand out: how male that world was and how Protestant. After the fall of Gaelic Ireland, the world of Irish writing and the Irish visual arts were a Protestant stronghold and Joyces exile and Daniel Corkerys crankiness need to be understood in that context.

Neither privileged masculinism nor Protestant patricianism inhibited work of quality. Yet, like ours now, the 1920s world was changing faster then than anyone could keep up with. Did Yeats in 1901 look farther into the future than he knew in Ireland and the Arts when he wrote: We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of any almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if we would win the people again, take upon ourselves the method and fervour of a priesthood. We must be half humble and half proud.

In a 21st-century Ireland where almost forgotten faiths are the norm, writers struggle, like priests or ministers, for real vocation and publics that care. Still, young writers continue to appear and even Trinity College, the early 20th-century heart of Irish dullness, continues to produce a few. The Irish generation that came of age after the 2008 financial crash has moved sharply leftwards and wants its own new Ireland. Its support for causes like that of the Palestinians or Black Lives Matter indicate that its views are more internationalist than narcissistically nationalist. The current pandemic and its fallout may push them further to the left.

Today, several youthful Irish writers, most prominently Sally Rooney and Oisn Fagan, announce themselves Marxists, resurrecting another almost forgotten faith, and are doing their best to create a new Irish political fiction capable of speaking to their own era. Their task will not be easy. For all the attention, nationally and internationally, lavished recently on Rooney, what her Marxism might mean for Irish writing today has generated little comment.

What does it mean to be a Marxist writer in the 21st century? Or to be an Irish one more particularly? How can it become something more than a marketing tag a distinguishing brand image? These are questions for critics even more than for writers like Rooney. However, for Irish critics to address such questions well, they will need to take capitalism, Marxism and literature all equally seriously, a rare enough occurrence in Irish studies.

The fact that Rooney and Fagan both attended Trinity reminds us, if reminder is needed, that the literary arts have always been, for better or worse, the preserve of elites. This has not changed greatly since the 1920s. No one can cut a leftist swathe in that world without difficulty. Still, the ambition is to be admired and bespeaks of the writers a faith in themselves and in literature, and a hope for a responsive public willing to consider the issues they raise seriously.

As we move into the centenary of the 1920s, we must wish these young starters well and hope that they, and their readers, can be half humble, half proud, and set our ambitions high. There is a literary tradition to inspire, much in it to emulate, much to avoid, much to renew.

Joe Cleary teaches English and Irish literature at Yale University. Cambridge University Press will publish his Modernism, Empire, World Literature next year.

See original here:Golden decade: How Irish writing roared in the 1920s - The Irish Times

Posted: at 5:12 pm

By Vejas Liulevicius, Ph.D., University of Tennessee, Knoxville The Haymarket Riot, May 4, 1886, Chicago. Beginning as a strike rally, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb that killed eight police and a number of civilians.. (Image: Everett Historical/Shutterstock)

During the decades after the death of Karl Marx, the socialist movement expanded in many countries. Although there were fears among the Marxists that his ideology might grow faint or diverge from its initial principles, it continued to thrive, although with internal clashes between theory and practice. Also, there were many factions based on the interpretations of the principles in many countries.

Learn more about the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

In Austria-Hungary, under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, Marxists struggled to reconcile Marxs idea of fading nationalism with their ethnically diverse social structures. These Austro-Marxists came up with novel ideas and models such as federalism and autonomy to prevent the fading of ethnic identity. This was a problem that was persistent in the coming years and proved especially challenging to practice.

Another peculiar aspect of the Austro-Hungarian socialist movement was the immense mass power it had. This power was demonstrated through rallies in the streets. This was hugely impressive for a young man who had just arrived in the city in 1908. His name was Adolf Hitler. Although he was not attracted by the Social Democrats, the idea of mass politics was highly fascinating to him. In his book, Mein Kampf, he recalls how impressed he was with those masses selling to the proportions of a menacing army.

In the late 18th century, Poland was divided by Russian, German, and Austrian empires. Different regions of the country were ruled by these empires. As a result, the socialist parties were not able to form unified and long-lasting parties in this country. Different parties under different names were formed, including the Proletariat Party, a Polish Socialist Party, the Polish Social Democratic Party, and the radical party of SDKPiL (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania). These were all underground parties that broke up in the early stages.

This is a transcript from the video series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

Original post:

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The big pump: ETH and BTC soar – Decrypt

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

And then, whoosh! it all happened at once. In under an hour, late on Wednesday night, the price of Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, rose from $245 to $269, an increase of 9.7%.

Bitcoin, as well as Bitcoin Cash, TRON, and XRP, followed, although their 24 hour increases werent nearly as sharp. Bitcoin, which followed the same upward trajectory, rose from $9,377 to $9,516, an increase of 1.48%.

The pumpso far without much of a dumpstarted at around 11 pm UK time. Then, the price started rising ever so slightly, from $245 to $247, a price unseen since July 13. The real pumpa crude, straight line pointing upward with barely any gradientoccurred at around 11.30 pm UK time. The price then plateaued.

This is Ethereums highest price since February. Then in March, the pandemic swept through the US; when global markets took a beating, so did the entire crypto market. Ethereum crashed to the lowest point its been this year: $95.

If the price keeps rising, this could be a big day for Bitcoin, too. Bitcoin has been struggling to push past the elusive $10,000 price pointits price before the pandemic hit. But for the past two months, Bitcoins been incredibly, frustratingly stable.

In a recent report, Coin Metrics found that Bitcoins price had budged just 1% in the past month and that it hadnt been this stable since 2018.

The CEO of crypto exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao, even remarked in an interview with Bloomberg earlier this week that some had started to call Bitcoin a stablecoin, referring to those coins whose value is pegged to a fiat currency, like the US dollar.

Meanwhile, Ethereum has been having a moment, thanks to the growing frenzy around DeFi, and yield farming in particular. The platform is celebrating its anniversary next week and the much-anticipated Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, which will improve the speed and capacity of the network, is on track to roll out by November.

See the article here:

The big pump: ETH and BTC soar - Decrypt

EOS, Ethereum and Ripples XRP Daily Tech Analysis July 19th, 2020 – Yahoo Finance

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

EOS

EOS slipped by 0.04% on Saturday. Following on from a 0.19% loss from Friday, EOS ended the day at $2.5054.

It was a bearish start to the day. EOS fell to an early morning intraday low $2.4862 before finding support.

Steering clear of the first major support level at $2.4761, EOS struck a late morning intraday high $2.5213 before easing back.

Falling short of the first major resistance level at $2.5227, EOS fell back to end the day at sub-$2.51 levels.

At the time of writing, EOS was up by 0.19% to $2.5101. A bullish start to the day saw EOS rise from an early morning low $2.5075 to a high $2.5101.

EOS left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

EOS would need to avoid a fall through the $2.5043 pivot level to support a run at the first major resistance level at $2.5224.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for EOS to break out from Saturdays high $2.5213.

Barring an extended crypto rally, the first major resistance level and Saturdays high $2.5213 would likely cap any upside.

Failure to avoid a fall through the $2.5043 pivot would bring the first major support level at $2.4873 into play.

Barring an extended sell-off, EOS should steer clear of sub-$2.45 levels. The second major support level at $2.4692 should limit the downside.

First Major Support Level: $2.4873

Pivot Level: $2.5043

First Major Resistance Level: $2.5224

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $6.62

38% FIB Retracement Level: $9.76

62% FIB Retracement Level: $14.82

Ethereum rose by 1.33% on Saturday. Reversing a 0.33% decline from Friday, Ethereum ended the day at $235.79.

It was another mixed start to the day. Ethereum fell to an early morning intraday low $232.34 before making a move.

Steering clear of the first major support level at $230.86, Ethereum rallied to a late intraday high $236.97.

Ethereum broke through the first major resistance level at $234.54 and the second major resistance level at $236.39.

A pullback late in the day saw Ethereum fall back through the second major resistance level to sub-$236 levels.

At the time of writing, Ethereum was up by 0.17% to $236.18. A mixed start to the day saw Ethereum fall to an early morning low $235.66 before rising to a high $236.18.

Ethereum left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

Story continues

Ethereum would need to avoid a fall through the $235 pivot to support a run at the first major resistance level at $237.76.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Ethereum to break out from Saturdays high $236.97.

Barring an extended crypto rally, the first major resistance level should cap any upside.

Failure to avoid a fall through the $235 pivot would bring the first major support level at $233.03 into play.

Barring another extended sell-off, Ethereum should continue to steer clear of sub-$230 levels. The second major support level at $230.27 should limit any downside.

First Major Support Level: $233.03

Pivot Level: $235.00

First Major Resistance Level: $237.76

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $257

38.2% FIB Retracement Level: $367

62% FIB Retracement Level: $543

Ripples XRP rallied by 2.94% on Saturday. Following a 0.03% loss on Friday, Ripples XRP ended the day at $0.20019.

It was a relatively bearish start to the day. Ripples XRP fell to an early morning intraday low $0.19413 before making a move.

Steering clear of the first major support level at $0.1913, Ripples XRP struck a late afternoon intraday high $0.20232.

Ripples XRP broke through the first major resistance level at $0.1982 and the second major resistance level at $0.2018.

A late pullback saw Ripples XRP fall back to $0.19960 levels before wrapping up the day at $0.20 levels.

At the time of writing, Ripples XRP was up by 0.63% to $0.20145. A mixed start to the day saw Ripples XRP fall to an early morning low $0.19988 before striking a high $0.20150.

Ripples XRP left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

Ripples XRP will need to avoid a fall through the $0.1989 pivot to support a run at the first major resistance level at $0.2036.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Ripples XRP to break out from Saturdays high $0.20232.

Barring a broad-based crypto rally, the first major resistance level and Saturdays high should cap any upside.

In the event of a breakout, Ripples XRP should test the second major resistance level at $0.2070 before any pullback. Resistance at $0.21 would likely cap any upside, however.

Failure to avoid a fall through the $0.1989 pivot would bring the first major support level at $0.1954 into play.

Barring an extended crypto sell-off, Ripples XRP should avoid sub-$0.19 levels. The second major support level at $0.1907 should limit any downside.

First Major Support Level: $0.1954

Pivot Level: $0.1989

First Major Resistance Level: $0.2036

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $0.3638

38.2% FIB Retracement Level: $0.4800

62% FIB Retracement Level: $0.6678

Please let us know what you think in the comments below.

Thanks, Bob

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

Ethereum (ETH) Up $19.7 Over Past 4 Hours, Outperforms All Top Cryptos to Start the Day; Came Into Today Up For the 2nd Day In A Row – CFDTrading

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Ethereum 4 Hour Price Update

Updated July 23, 2020 03:20 PM GMT (11:20 AM EST)

Ethereum closed the previous 4 hours up 0.28% ($0.75); this denotes the 2nd candle in a row an increase has occurred. Relative to other instruments in the Top Cryptos asset class, Ethereum ranked 2nd since the previous 4 hours in terms of percentage price change.

Ethereum closed the day prior up 7.5% ($18.45); this denotes the 2nd day in a row an increase has occurred. The price move occurred on stronger volume; specifically, yesterdays volume was up 11.95% from the day prior, and up 85.82% from the same day the week before. Ethereum outperformed all 5 assets in the Top Cryptos asset class since the day prior. Below is a daily price chart of Ethereum.

Trend traders will want to observe that the strongest trend appears on the 90 day horizon; over that time period, price has been moving up. For additional context, note that price has gone down 8 out of the past 14 days.

Over on Twitter, here were the top tweets about Ethereum:

Heads up, we are ripping out Whisper from the go-ethereum code base. Will move it into its own repo and archive it for posterity, add some links to current work done by @ethstatus. All in all SHH died a long time ago and theres no point to tiptoe around it. #Ethereum

The Ethereum 2.0 final testnet is set to go live on Aug 4th. If successful, we may see the launch of the Mainnet as early as Nov 4th.Already in June the testnets had over 20,000 validators which is a huge accomplishment.#Ethereum and #DeFi will spark the next bullrun! $ETH

Reminder #VeFam. Sunny Lu believes #VeChain market cap can overtake Ethereum. Ethereums all time high market cap was around $138b. If #VeChain can reach this, it will make each $vet worth around $2.50. All we need is one more bull run and I believe this is a possibility.

In terms of news links for Ethereum heres one to try:

Sunny Lu: VeChain will overtake Ethereum in market capitalisation

The CEO of VeChain (VET), Sunny Lu, spoke in an interview with Boxmining about the rivalry with Ethereum, the competition from big tech companies and the mass adaptation of VeChain.Lu replied that he always pays full respect to Ethereum and Vitalik, but this is also one of his goals: Well, I wont stop until we get there.However, according to the CEO, this is not a major threat as VeChain has been on the market for nearly four years and is leading the industry with its technology: No, not really.Ultimately, the market is big enough, and VeChain has its advantages even over large tech companies: Generally speaking, I am not really worried about that kind of situation because right now the market is like so big.

Originally posted here:

Ethereum (ETH) Up $19.7 Over Past 4 Hours, Outperforms All Top Cryptos to Start the Day; Came Into Today Up For the 2nd Day In A Row - CFDTrading

Thats why VeChains governance model is better than Bitcoins and Ethereums – Crypto News Flash

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Source: RuskaDesign -Shutterstock

In a new episode of the BootCamp webinar series, VeChains chief scientist, Peter Zhou, discussed the highlights of the VeChainThor blockchain governance model. Compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum, VeChains governance model is especially aimed at business use and creating value for its users. According to Zhou, VeChains governance model follows the elected board design which he summarized as followed:

(VeChains governance model) has a robust detailed design, utilizing a mutually reinforcing mix of legal, cultural, market, and code elements to help steer the collective.

Zhou then explained that VeChains governance model consists of 3 bodies or components: the Steering Committee Board, the Economic Node and X Node operators. In that sense, Zhou explained that the first component is in charge of managing daily operations, proposing and voting on critical changes (for example, the price of Gas for validating transactions in VeChainThor). Additionally, board members can decide whether a proposal is submitted to a shareholder vote.

On the blockchain, however, the majority of the voting rights are held by the nodes. The new governance introduced in December 2019 gives the majority of votes and authority back to the community by giving Economic Node and X Node operators a voting right that can account for up to 60% of votes. The remaining 40% of the votes are held by the owners of the Authority Masternodes

The individual voting power varies in relation to the number of tokens a user has and the time he has kept them. The minimum vote for any user is 1 and the maximum number of votes is held by the Authority Masternodes, as shown in the following chart.

Source: https://medium.com/@thomasbcox/walk-through-of-vechain-governance-d3453a1987a6

Finally, the chief scientist of VeChain explained that the Steering Committee Board makes decisions about all emergencies in the network. In this sense, the members have the possibility to take temporary measures, but decisions with greater weight still require the votes of the shareholders, even if they are only approved for a limited period of time.

In contrast, Bitcoins governance model makes its decisions through proposals that are approved by the core developers. Then, the proposals are put to a vote on-chain and the miners decide if the proposal is implemented. This occurs through a soft or hard fork. However, as stated in by VeChains Zhou, proposed changes are not implemented because of a lack of consensus with the core developer community.

On the other hand, Ethereums governance model has similarities with Bitcoin. The changes are proposed by the developers and have to be approved by the miners. However, Zhou also criticized the lack of transparency regarding the Ethereum governance model and the way decisions are made. Specifically, he criticized the plutocratic decision-making at Ethereum and the lack of a mechanism for community participation in decision-making.

One of the advantages of VeChains governance model is that the Steering Committee Board members who make the most important decisions can be elected. In that sense, there is greater transparency about who proposes changes, who can vote and how many votes a given stakeholder has.

Below you can see the full episode of VeChains webinar:

Mempool Manipulation Enabled Theft of $8M in MakerDAO Collateral on Black Thursday: Report – CoinDesk – CoinDesk

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

A clever hustle in Ethereums mempools enabled attackers to steal $8.3 million from MakerDAO users on Black Thursday, according to research published Wednesday.

To recap: The price of ether (ETH) plummeted on March 12 and the Ethereum network was congested by a flood of attempted transactions. As investors fled to fiat, ETHs price sunk low enough to trigger liquidations of the collateral held on the MakerDAO lending platform. These programmatic liquidations enabled attackers to walk away with $8.3 million in ETH, for free, shorting borrowers and MakerDAO itself.

The congestion, though, was key and completely intentional, according to Blocknative, a company focused on studying action in blockchain mempools.

The new research suggests Marchs Black Swan event for Ethereum may have actually been a sophisticated plan to cash in on a global sell-off fueled by COVID-19 concerns.

The entire affair meant [the attackers] were able to achieve over 1,000 zero-bid auctions and collect that underlying value with almost no out-of-pocket expense, Blocknative CEO Matt Cutler told CoinDesk in an interview.

Mempool manipulation

At the heart of Blocknatives work is mempools: the temporary storage on every Ethereum node where transactions wait to get mined and finalized.

In mid-March, mempools got congested with useless transactions on purpose, Blocknative said, as part of a plan to win zero-bid auctions for ETH on MakerDAO under just these conditions.

Indeed, the Maker Foundation wrote as much in its post-mortem published in April:

"Network congestion and high gas prices caused transaction delays and, in many cases, failures. Those issues, combined with the unprecedented drop in the value of assets, caught Maker Vault owners, Keepers, and liquidity pools off-guard."

(The Maker Foundation referred CoinDesk to the above blog post and declined to comment further for this story.)

Obviously, many Ethereum users will wonder whether the drop in ETH price itself was somehow manufactured, but that question is outside the scope of Blocknatives investigation. The attackers could have been poised to opportunistically take advantage of a dramatic drop in ETHs price; whether the price drop itself was manufactured remains unknown.

That said, Blocknative did find what appears to be a March 8 test run of the attacks mechanics, a fact the research firm doesnt describe in its report.

It is an interesting coincidence that the test and the attack were within just four days of each other, Cutler told CoinDesk. [But] we dont have any evidence that this is anything other than opportunistic.

Either way, the attackers took advantage of some very subtle insights about both Ethereum and MakerDAO. They basically exploited some techniques that had never been seen before, Cutler said.

More on those techniques later. First, we need to cover a few basics about MakerDAO and Ethereum.

MakerDAO basics

MakerDAO is known as the creator of dai (DAI), the decentralized stablecoin currently beloved by yield farmers. DAI is created with debt. Users put ETH or other crypto-assets up as collateral on the Maker platform to then withdraw a portion of the value of those assets in the form of brand-new DAI.

To get back their collateral, users must repay the DAI they borrowed plus whatever interest the loan has accrued (in MakerDAO parlance this is the stability fee, but its just a variable interest rate). MakerDAO enforces the DAI price by liquidating collateral if its value falls below the minimum threshold to maintain proper collateralization. For ETH, thats 150%, but most users put in a lot more ETH than the minimum.

So, if ETH were at $200 and the user posted 1 ETH to borrow 100 DAI, they wont get liquidated unless ETH drops below $150.

But on Black Thursday, ETHs price fell almost $100, from $193, so that triggered a lot of liquidations.

Liquidations can be done by anyone, by the way, with bots called Keepers. MakerDAO itself runs a Keeper, but a few other unknown entities do as well.

Keepers win liquidations through an auction (described step-by-step in plain language by CoinList), so different Keepers bid to close the loan, and on Black Thursday, those auctions only lasted 10 minutes, or a few dozen Ethereum blocks.

The idea is that these auctions should (and normally have) resulted in users getting back their collateral minus however much they owed, plus the stability fee and the liquidation fee (its the last part that hurts). But thats not what happened this time.

Borrowers got nothing and, in fact, MakerDAO got paid back much too little DAI, and the whole system was undercollateralized.

Ethereum basics

Ethereum is a blockchain, which means its always gathering up transactions and miners are competing to compose blocks of those transactions, encrypt them, break the encryption and then prove their work to the rest of the miners to win a block reward.

Transactions arent real until they are in a mined block. And there are usually more transactions out there waiting to get into a block than there is room for more transactions. Those delayed transactions wait in whats called the mempool.

Mempools are one of those things that most people dont really need to think about most of the time, except they become really important when situations get urgent: like when the price of ETH is falling off a cliff.

When you most need to be sure that things are happening are happening in an orderly fashion, Cutler said, is when things are least reliable.

This is the whole point of Blocknative. The firm keeps a detailed account of mempools all over the world, studying what it calls value in motion. Blocknative helps its customers decide if they need to be more aggressive in things like gas payments when things are going crazy. Mempool data is value in motion; finalized blockchain data is value at rest.

Crucially, miners cannot process a new transaction if the prior transaction hasnt gone through. Every transaction on Ethereum from a wallet gets a number, and 515 wont go through if 514 hasnt (this is tracked by the transaction nonce, in Ethereum-speak). This sequential reality turns out to be the key to the attack.

What Blocknative found

Blocknative has been keeping mempool data for Ethereum going back to early 2018 (also its testnets and for the Bitcoin network as well). The firm decided to take a look at the mempool data to see what happened around March 12.

Blocknative found that an unusually high proportion of the mempool was clogged by transactions with very low gas prices on them.

Usually this proportion isnt very high because users actually want their transactions to go through, so they will monitor gas prices and set them at levels that are likely to get picked up by a miner. But thats not what was happening on March 12. There were loads of transactions in the pool that had low gas prices on them. Too many.

This allowed the attackers to submit zero bids in MakerDAOs collateral auctions with strong gas prices attached knowing full well they could likely win those auctions against well-intentioned Keeper bots who couldnt get their bids through.

Blocknative describes something called Hammerbots. These would be bots designed to craft transactions precisely for the purpose of clogging the mempool.

The bots hammered the mempool with transactions that were never intended to be finalized. These Hammerbots consumed mempool resources by issuing extremely high rates of replacement transactions without any corresponding increase in gas, Blocknative wrote on its blog.

These transactions were additionally designed with a lot of pointless operations that could be shifted and changed easily to vary the hash, but appeared to serve no real purpose.

These particular transactions, they would be particularly good at consuming mempool resources, Chris Meisl, a Blocknative co-founder, told CoinDesk.

Cascading problems

So thats the first problem: Congestion made it hard for borrowers on MakerDAO to add more collateral and it made it hard for Keepers to get bids through.

This resulted in anomalous mempool conditions, which would ultimately favor certain transactions, the Blocknative post reports.

But there was another crucial observation the attackers appear to have made about Keepers: they didnt seem to be checking to see if transactions were getting through.

When you do transactions on an account or address on Ethereum, they have to be ordered, Meisl said.

As we wrote above, if a nonce is missing in a blockchains record, miners cant take later transactions until one with the prior nonce comes through. So a later transaction will get stuck, even if it has a very high gas price attached, until the prior one goes through.

This had a bizarre upshot. From the Blocknative blog post:

"When viewed in aggregate, even though the volume of transactions entering the mempool increased dramatically, the gas price of a significant portion of the mempool collapsed to an artificially low value."

In short: The attackers knew Keepers would fail to get their first bids through and it would result in subsequent bids probabilistically (in Cutlers words) getting stuck. And it worked often enough.

The open-source code that MakerDAO published for Keeper bots didnt have measures to check for stuck transactions.

This created a potential gap that allowed the attacker to submit a bid with a strong gas price but a 0 DAI bid for the collateral, starting that short 10-minute auction clock ticking.

While automated trading systems are often designed to programmatically increase the gas price of transactions, many such trading systems do not handle nonce gaps well if at all, the Blocknative post warns.

In 1,462 cases, the Keepers failed to notice that their bids were getting stuck in the mempools, the attackers won the bid, stealing millions of dollars in ETH and nearly forcing an emergency shutdown on MakerDAO.

MakerDAO has since extended the auction time to six hours. Blocknative has opened its data set of mempool activity for members of the community to study further.

"The mempool is a critical yet ephemeral and often overlooked element of the blockchain ecosystem. As such, mempools present many 'unknown unknowns' to builders and users alike."

In this case, however, the attackers studied Makers Keeper code and realized it was possible to know what the real Keepers didnt.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Mempool Manipulation Enabled Theft of $8M in MakerDAO Collateral on Black Thursday: Report - CoinDesk - CoinDesk

Stocks fall to session low, with Dow the dropping 250 points as tech falters – CNBC

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Stocks traded lower on Thursday as Microsoft led shares of major tech companies lower and traders pored through disappointing unemployment data.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 271 points, or 1%. The S&P 500 slid 1% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 1.9%.

Microsoft shares were down by 3.7% despite reporting better-than-expected earnings for the previous quarter.Though the company's results were largely positive, Microsoft said its transactional license purchasing continued to slow and that subsidiary LinkedIn was negatively impacted by the weak job market.

Other tech giants were also under pressure. Amazon dropped 3%. Apple traded 3.7% lower. Netflix slid 1.9%. Tesla, meanwhile, gave back its earlier gains falling 4.2% despite reporting earnings thatblew past analyst expectations.Elon Musk's automaker also said it's set "for a successful second half" and reiterated its goal of delivering 500,000 vehicles this year.

Christopher Harvey, senior analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, noted these "uber-cap" tech stocks have led the sharp gains off the 2020 lows, adding: "We are seeing growing similarities to the late 1990's."

"Overall, our intermediate-term worry is that a melt-up may destabilize the marketplace and easy come, easy go i.e., as stocks aggressively discount easy 1H21 comps but do not factor in political risks," Harvey said in a note.

The latest unemployment figures also dented market sentiment.

U.S. weekly jobless claims came in at 1.416 million for last week, marking the 18th straight week in which initial claims totaled more than 1 million. Economists expected another 1.3 million workers to have filed initial claims for state unemployment benefits, according to Dow Jones.

"The surge of COVID cases in the Sun Belt and the stalling out of reopening activities in other states has seemingly caused another round of layoffs that has stymied the nascent labor market recovery," said Thomas Simons, money market economist at Jefferies, in a note.

This stalling in the labor market comes as lawmakers work on an additional stimulus package for those impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

On Wednesday, sources told CNBC that Republicans wereconsidering extending a $600-per-week unemployment benefit at a reduced rate of $100 per week. On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin saidan extension in unemployment benefits will be based on "approximately 70% wage replacement."

CNBC's Michael Bloom contributed to this report.

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Stocks fall to session low, with Dow the dropping 250 points as tech falters - CNBC

These 5 tech giants could buy VMware if Dell chooses to sell the software giant, according to analysts: ‘VMware would be a valuable property to any…

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Dell is considering spinning off VMware next year, raising questions on the future of a critical player in cloud computing.

Dell acquired VMware in 2015 after its $67 billion merger with EMC ,giving it control of a powerhouse in virtualization software, which made it possible for businesses to tap disparate computer systems, reducing the need for hardware. VMware in particular has struck partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft making it a secret superpower in the cloud wars.

Dell announced last week that it was exploring the spinoff which it said would benefit the shareholders, partners and customers, although it is also open to maintaining its 81% ownership of the software giant.

Some experts point to another scenario: VMware being acquired by another tech giant.

VMware's virtualization technology made it a rising star of cloud computing, the fast-growing trend which allows businesses to set up their networks in web-based platforms, making it possible to scale down or even abandon private, on-premise data centers.

VMware has become even more important in a newer trend called hybrid cloud, in which businesses maintain networks in web-based platforms, while keeping huge chunks of data and applications in private, on-premise data centers.

These trends actually made VMware, an influential players in the cloud, and a valued partner for its top players: Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

"The virtualization layer arbitrates whatever is below and above it," analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates told Business Insider. "VMware is the king of that. VMware would be a valuable property to any company in the enterprise space with the means to execute the deal. What any of them gains is a competitive edge."

But he also said VMware is "a pretty big fish to swallow. So, whoever bought it would have to have a pretty big war chest."

VMware has a market cap of about $57 billion. Analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research estimated that VMware's price tag would be at least $70 billion, which means the pool of would-be buyers would be limited.

These are 5 tech giants that may be interested in buying VMware if Dell decides to sell it, according to experts:

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These 5 tech giants could buy VMware if Dell chooses to sell the software giant, according to analysts: 'VMware would be a valuable property to any...

Typewise taps $1M to build an offline next word prediction engine – TechCrunch

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Swiss keyboard startup Typewise has bagged a $1 million seed round to build out a typo-busting, privacy-safe next word prediction engine designed to run entirely offline. No cloud connectivity, no data mining risk is the basic idea.

They also intend the tech to work on text inputs made on any device, be it a smartphone or desktop, a wearable, VR or something weirder that Elon Musk might want to plug into your brain in future.

For now theyve got a smartphone keyboard app thats had around 250,000 downloads with some 65,000 active users at this point.

The seed funding breaks down into $700K from more than a dozen local business angels; and $340K via the Swiss government through a mechanism (called Innosuisse projects), akin to a research grant, which is paying for the startup to employ machine learning experts at Zurichs ETH research university to build out the core AI.

The team soft launched a smartphone keyboard app late last year, which includes some additional tweaks (such as an optional honeycomb layout they tout as more efficient; and the ability to edit next word predictions so the keyboard quickly groks your slang) to get users to start feeding in data to build out their AI.

Their main focus is on developing an offline next word prediction engine which could be licensed for use anywhere users are texting, not just on a mobile device.

The goal is to develop a world-leading text prediction engine that runs completely on-device, says co-founder David Eberle. The smartphone keyboard really is a first use case. Its great to test and develop our algorithms in a real-life setting with tens of thousands of users. The larger play is to bring word/sentence completion to any application that involves text entry, on mobiles or desktop (or in future also wearables/VR/Brain-Computer Interfaces).

Currently its pretty much only Google working on this (see Gmails auto completion feature). Applications such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Telegram, or even SAP, Oracle, Salesforce would want such productivity increase and at that level privacy/data security matters a lot. Ultimately we envision that every human-machine interface is, at least on the text-input level, powered by Typewise.

Youd be forgiven for thinking all this sounds a bit retro, given the earlier boom in smartphone AI keyboards such as SwiftKey (now owned by Microsoft).

The founders have also pushed specific elements of their current keyboard app such as the distinctive honeycomb layout before, going down a crowdfunding route back in 2015, when they were calling the concept Wrio. But they reckon its now time to go all in hence relaunching the business as Typewise and shooting to build a licensing business for offline next word prediction.

Well use the funds to develop advanced text predictions first launching it in the keyboard app and then bringing it to the desktop to start building partnerships with relevant software vendors, says Eberle, noting theyre working on various enhancements to the keyboard app and also plan to spend on marketing to try to hit 1M active users next year.

We have more innovative stuff [incoming] on the UX side as well, e.g. interacting with auto correction (so the user can easily intervene when it does something wrong in many countries users just turn it off on all keyboards because it gets annoying), gamifying the general typing experience (big opportunity for kids/teenagers, also making them more aware of what and how they type), etc.

The competitive landscape around smartphone keyboard tech, largely dominated by tech giants, has left room for indie plays, is the thinking. Nor is Typewise the only startup thinking that way (Fleksy has similar ambitions, for one). However gaining traction vs such giants and over long established typing methods is the tricky bit.

Android maker Google has ploughed resource into its Gboard AI keyboard larding it with features. While, on iOS, Apples interface for switching to a third party keyboard is infamously frustrating and finicky; the opposite of a seamless experience. Plus the native keyboard offers next word prediction baked in and Apple has plenty of privacy credit. So why would a user bother switching is the problem there.

Competing for smartphone users fingers as an indie certainly isnt easy. Alternative keyboard layouts and input mechanism are always a very tough sell as they disrupt peoples muscle memory and hit mobile users hard in their comfort and productivity zone. Unless the user is patient and/or stubborn enough to stick with a frustratingly different experience theyll soon ditch for the keyboard devil they know. (Qwerty is an ancient typewriter layout turned typing habit we English speakers just cant kick.)

Given all that, Typewises retooled focus on offline next word prediction to do white label b2b licensing makes more sense assuming they can pull off the core tech.

And, again, theyre competing at a data disadvantage on that front vs more established tech giant keyboard players, even as they argue thats also a market opportunity.

Google and Microsoft (thanks to the acquisition of SwiftKey) have a solid technology in place and have started to offer text predictions outside of the keyboard; many of their competitors, however, will want to embed a proprietary (difficult to build) or independent technology, especially if their value proposition is focused on privacy/confidentiality, Eberle argues.

Would Telegram want to use Googles text predictions? Would SAP want that their clients data goes through Microsofts prediction algorithms? Thats where we see our right to win: world-class text predictions that run on-device (privacy) and are made in Switzerland (independent environment, no security back doors, etc).

Early impressions of Typewises next word prediction smarts (gleaned by via checking out its iOS app) are pretty low key (ha!). But its v1 of the AI and Eberle talks bullishly of having world class developers working on it.

The collaboration with ETH just started a few weeks ago and thus there are no significant improvements yet visible in the live app, he tells TechCrunch. As the collaboration runs until the end of 2021 (with the opportunity of extension) the vast majority of innovation is still to come.

He also tells us Typewise is working with ETHsProf. Thomas Hofmann (chair of the Data Analytic Lab, formerly at Google), as well as having has two PhDs in NLP/ML and one MSc in ML contributing to the effort.

We get exclusive rights to the [ETH] technology; they dont hold equity but they get paid by the Swiss government on our behalf, Eberle also notes.

Typewise says its smartphone app supports more than 35 languages. But its next word prediction AI can only handle English, German, French, Italian and Spanish at this point. The startup says more are being added.

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Typewise taps $1M to build an offline next word prediction engine - TechCrunch

Meet Gaia X Europe’s answer to the power of U.S. and Chinese cloud giants – CNBC

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Peter Altmaier (CDU), Federal Minister of Economics and Energy, speaks at the virtual Gaia-X expert forum of the Federal Ministry of Economics.

picture alliance

The two biggest economies in the European Union hope they have an answer to the domination enjoyed by American and Chinese companies in the cloud computing industry: Gaia X

Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba are the four main players globally when it comes to cloud services. However, European policymakers have grown anxious about their dependence on a small number of major tech companies, which aren't European.

That has been the case in particular since the United States enacted a law in 2018 that compels U.S. firms to hand in data to American authorities, even if the latter is stored elsewhere in the world. Germany and France have concerns that the data of European citizens is at risk.

"Gaia X is a two-fold approach to a problem we face in Europe and a problem that every company in the world faces right now," Marco-Alexander Breit, head of Task Force Artificial Intelligence at the German economy ministry, told CNBC's "Beyond the Valley" podcast.

"We combine infrastructure services like data storage, data processing in Europe, but it is open for participation even for companies that are not from European origin, as long as they stick to our rules and adhere to our standards," said Breit, who heads the Gaia X project in Germany.

It is about realizing that relying too much maybe on external players, whether they are American or Chinese or from anywhere else, is not great in the new economy...

Dexter Thillien

senior industry analyst, Fitch Solutions

The Franco-German project, born in 2018, aims to provide a secure infrastructure for data, while simultaneously allowing companies to move data across borders. Its overarching principle is to enable European nations to become digitally sovereign a concept that has gained traction in recent years and could prove challenging for the traditional tech giants.

It's a "first step toward a broader ambition," said Dexter Thillien, senior industry analyst at Fitch Solutions.

"It is about realizing that relying too much maybe on external players, whether they are American or Chinese or from anywhere else, is not great in the new economy where data is going to be more important, and you need a European alternative," he added.

More than 300 organizations worldwide are involved with the project so far, including Orange, Deutsche Telekom and SAP. The goal is to launch the infrastructure in late 2020 or early 2021.

Gaia X would, for instance, give health care providers the ability to exchange data and algorithms in a safe way with other hospitals in their proximity. That could in turn help with emergency transplants and other life-threatening conditions.

However, the initiative has to become more attractive than the big players if it wants to succeed, Thillien said.

"It is not going to be easy for that product to find its place," he said, citing budget and technical constraints.

The annual budget for Gaia X is 1.5 million euros ($1.7 million).

Nonetheless, Breit said he believes those seemingly limited financial resources "are not important."

"The X framework and the X entity has only the responsibilities to make the ecosystem work, to negotiate the standards, to negotiate the rules, and to provide standardized IPs for example to make the software run," he said, adding that the major advancements in artificial intelligence would remain a task for the big tech companies themselves.

IP, or internet protocol, refers to a set of rules that facilitates the movement of data across networks. There are varying IP standards.

Read the rest here:

Meet Gaia X Europe's answer to the power of U.S. and Chinese cloud giants - CNBC

5G takes the Senate stage – Politico

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

With help from John Hendel and Cristiano Lima

Programming announcement: Our newsletters are evolving. Morning Tech will continue to publish daily for POLITICO Pro subscribers, but starting in fall 2020 will consolidate to a weekly newsletter for all others. There will be no changes to the policy newsletters available to POLITICO Pro subscribers. To continue to receive Morning Tech daily, as well as access POLITICO Pros full suite of policy tools and trackers, get in touch about a Pro subscription. Already a Pro subscriber? Learn more here.

Airwaves in the air: Senators will dive in today on ways to get the U.S. ready for 5G, a debate coming right as a long-awaited FCC spectrum auction kicks off.

Surveillance fight continues: More Democrats are backing bicameral legislation banning the federal governments use of facial recognition, including former presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Ten points for Twitter: Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, one of the civil rights leaders spearheading the #StopHateforProfit advertising boycott against Facebook, commended Twitter for doing what he thinks Facebook wont.

ITS THURSDAY; WELCOME TO MORNING TECH! Im your host, Alexandra Levine.

Got a news tip? Write Alex at [emailprotected], or follow along @Ali_Lev and @alexandra.levine. An event for our calendar? Send details to [emailprotected] Anything else? Full team info below. And don't forget: Add @MorningTech and @PoliticoPro on Twitter.

TODAY: 5G AIRWAVES IN THE SPOTLIGHT Wireless spectrum will take center stage across a number of fronts today. At 10 a.m., the Senate Commerce telecom subcommittee will hear from a slate of industry and analyst witnesses about how the FCC and administration have managed the airwaves in the wake of a series of high-profile 5G spats.

If wireless companies dont have enough airwaves, rural areas will fall behind in getting 5G, subcommittee chair John Thune (R-S.D.) plans to warn in opening remarks. Hell call for the federal government to focus on making more efficient use of its own federally held airwaves and to better use the Spectrum Relocation Fund, a federal pot of money that helps cover the cost of agencies moving to new spectrum bands. We need to make sure the interagency process when making these decisions is transparent, the GOP whip will say.

Tom Power, general counsel for wireless trade group CTIA, plans to warn of global implications surrounding limited availability of prime mid-band spectrum. Other nations are beating us to the punch, Power will testify. Hell recommend the lower 3 MHz band, currently held by the Pentagon, as the next best target.

And watch for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who just introduced new spectrum legislation, S. 4234 (116), with fellow GOP Texan Sen. John Cornyn. The Ensuring Public Safetys Access to Airwaves Act would safeguard public safety spectrum known as the T-band while also imposing deadlines on the Commerce Department to identify government-held airwaves to reallocate for the private sector.

One timely hook: The FCC is today kicking off its first auction of this prized mid-band spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band. If given my choice, I would have started it three years ago, Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who has long advocated for freeing such mid-band spectrum, said during an event Wednesday. In todays auction, 271 applicants won the right to bid, including big carriers like T-Mobile.

FACIAL RECOGNITION BAN BILL: WHOS IN, AND WHOS OUT? Digital rights group Fight for the Future and members of the Ban Facial Recognition coalition are pressuring members of Congress to come out for or against recent legislation that is one of the most ambitious Capitol Hill crackdowns to date on facial recognition technology. The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act would stop the federal governments use of facial recognition in the U.S., but the bill still has no GOP backers.

Even so, support among Democrats is growing: In addition to Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who jointly introduced the legislation in late June, the bill has picked up about a dozen new co-sponsors across both chambers of Congress, most notably former 2020 hopefuls Warren and Sanders. At a time when Americans are demanding that we address systemic racism in law enforcement, the use of facial recognition technology is a step in the wrong direction, Merkley said Wednesday. The federal government must ban facial recognition until we have confidence that it doesnt exacerbate racism.

An online congressional scorecard launched by the advocacy groups on Wednesday is keeping tabs on who has and has not formally gotten on board.

Jim Jordan. | Kevin Dietsch/Pool via AP

JORDANS LATEST BIG TECH HEARING ASK Top House Judiciary Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio on Wednesday called for the committees Democratic leaders to invite Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to the upcoming blockbuster hearing with the Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon chiefs. Jordan wrote in a letter that he wants to hear from Twitter about its power in the marketplace, its role in moderating content on its platform, and the causes for its recent highly publicized security breaches. Twitter, which is dwarfed by rivals like Facebook, has not been a target of antitrust scrutiny. But Republicans have accused it of stifling conservative viewpoints.

Some big tech critics said adding Twitter would divert from the sessions focus: allegations of anticompetitive behavior by the four tech giants. Republicans concerned by Google & other Big Tech companies (i.e. not Twitter, which is less than 1/20th the size of Facebook) should be alarmed by this strange demand, said Luther Lowe, SVP of public policy at Google competitor Yelp. Its only effect would be diluting the substance of a historic hearing with the 4 CEOs.

Dont expect to see @Jack on the (virtual) dais: Its the third such letter by Jordan calling for changes to the hearing format, and thus far, Judiciary Democrats havent indicated any interest in following through on his demands. He has not been invited, a spokesperson for Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), chair of the antitrust subcommittee hosting the hearing, tweeted Wednesday in response to a post about Republicans call for Dorsey to testify. Twitter declined comment. (More on how groups and lawmakers are jockeying to shape the hearing here.)

Plus: Do tech companies have too much power to shape politics? A majority of Americans think so, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. 72% of U.S. adults say social media companies have too much power and influence in politics today, and just one-fifth feel the tech giants have the right amount of political power, per the study. About half of Americans would like to see more regulation of these companies.

THUMBS UP FOR TWITTER, DOWN FOR FACEBOOK One of the civil rights leaders behind the ongoing Facebook advertising boycott jabbed the social network Wednesday as he praised one of its rivals. Twitter that day announced a clarification on its treatment of Jewish symbols on the platform, characterizing the 'yellow star' or yellow badge symbol [as] being used by those seeking to target Jewish people and as a violation of the Twitter Rules. Twitter declared that the Star of David, on the other hand, should not be classified as a hateful symbol, despite some accounts being incorrectly flagged over those images.

Greenblatt praised Twitter for clarifying the difference between images used to harass and when used to express identity and empathy, adding that the league had reached out to the company to help it understand and fix the issue. Notable that they moved swiftly to correct this problem, Greenblatt said, taking a subtle swing at Facebook: While we can't expect social media platforms to be perfect, we can expect them to correct problems when they learn of them. #StopHateForProfit.

The ADL is also out with a new video this morning accusing Mark Zuckerberg of still giving hate groups the biggest platform theyve ever had, profiting from hate, and keeping intact a business model that rewards division. It continues: Are you finally going to listen to us, Mark? Are you willing to stop profiting from hate?

Julie Elmer, a former trial lawyer with the Justice Departments antitrust division, has joined the law firm Freshfields as a partner. Matthew Haskins, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for legislative affairs, is now working for the new public policy practice of Amazon Web Services. Jack Wilmer, the Pentagon's top cybersecurity official, is slated to leave his post at the end of July, POLITICO reports.

Lobbying latest, via POLITICO Influence: Twitter has added TwinLogic Strategies to its lineup of outside lobbying firms, which also includes the Integrated Solutions Group and the Joseph Group. And T-Mobile has hired BL Partners Group to lobby on telecommunications, financial services and tax reform issues, according to a disclosure filing. The company also recently brought on Howard Symons of Jenner & Block and retains about 30 other Washington lobbying firms.

Setting a precedent: After Twitter did so first, other Silicon Valley companies, including Facebook and YouTube, said they were also considering crackdowns on QAnon, WaPo reports.

Opinion: Europe must not rush Google-Fitbit deal, a group of academics and antitrust and privacy experts in Europe write in POLITICO.

ICYMI: A Senate committee Wednesday approved a bill to ban federal employees from downloading or using video-sharing app TikTok on government devices, a proposal gaining broad momentum across Washington, Cristiano reports.

Eyeballs watching emoji: A group of U.S. tech investors has launched an ambitious plan to buy TikTok from its Chinese owner, as the popular short-video app tries to escape being banned by the White House, Ars Technica reports.

A message from Facebook:

Facebook launches Global State of Small Business Report. At Facebook, we are committed to helping small businesses succeed. We partnered with the World Bank and the OECD to survey businesses in 50+ countries and regions to understand the challenges they face and ways we can better support them. Go further: Read the first report

View from the West Coast: These California privacy initiative opponents might surprise you, via POLITICOs Katy Murphy in Sacramento.

Reality check: Elon Musks controversial comments about the pandemic had little effect on Teslas bottom line, WaPo reports.

Funny seeing you here: The DoD recently gave a slice of cash from the CARES Act to U.S. drone companies, POLITICO reports, hoping it would juice the domestic market in the Trump administration's latest gambit to try to undercut Chinese dominance in the drone marketplace.

New on the competition scene: Slack is accusing Microsoft, which has long escaped antitrust allegations, of corporate bullying taking the complaint to European regulators, WaPo reports.

Tips, comments, suggestions? Send them along via email to our team: Bob King ([emailprotected], @bkingdc), Heidi Vogt ([emailprotected], @HeidiVogt), Nancy Scola ([emailprotected], @nancyscola), Steven Overly ([emailprotected], @stevenoverly), John Hendel ([emailprotected], @JohnHendel), Cristiano Lima ([emailprotected], @viaCristiano), Alexandra S. Levine ([emailprotected], @Ali_Lev), and Leah Nylen ([emailprotected], @leah_nylen).

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As many storefronts remain closed, Boost with Facebook's Summer of Support program is helping millions of people and small business owners gain skills and find resources they need to grow and transition online.

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5G takes the Senate stage - Politico

Apple, Google and Sony will be critical to MLB season shortened by coronavirus – CNBC

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Major League Baseball will look to Big Tech companies like Apple and Google to help with its shortened season that is scheduled to begin Thursday.

On Monday, MLB provided a preview of how games will look and sound during the pandemic, with features like artificial crowd noise and an upgraded replay system for fans watching from home.

Two games are scheduled for opening night: The defending World Series champion Washington Nationals host the New York Yankees at 7 p.m. ET, followed by theLos Angeles Dodgers hosting the San Francisco Giants at 10 p.m. ET.

As part of the league's Covid-19 health and safety protocols, MLB said it would ban traditional video stations shared throughout clubhouses. The league took advantage of its 2016 partnership with Apple to expand the dugout iPad program. It will now distribute 15 iPads to each team for players and staff to dissect performances and additional team content like scouting reports.

Google will also play a part, with all 30 teams using Google Cloud to run MLB's stat-tracking system, Statcast, and provide digital infrastructure for everything from team websites to online ticket sales.

MLB partnered with the Google in March to be the league's official cloud partner.Jason Gaedtke, MLB chief technology officer, said Monday that the league selected Google for the firm's "strength in large scale data processing, analytics and specifically machine-learning."

With its Statcast 3D platform powered by Google, MLB said broadcasts can re-create game footage in a variety of virtual perspectives. Concepts like displaying a player's home run trails, pitching angles from a catcher and umpire's perspective and how play is affected by weather conditions will now be available for national and regional broadcast partners.

Before Covid-19 delayed the current season, MLB completed its first significant technology refresh, an overhaul of its replay operation. It's the first upgrade since the league rolled out its expanded instant replay system in 2014, according to Chris Marinak, MLB executive VP of strategy technology and innovation.

Canadian telecommunications company Mitel assisted league with its new Replay Center located in New Jersey. The system can receive 48 channels of video and take in 24 isolation cameras from all over the field, said Marinak.

Also, the league placed 4K cameras to overlook fields. The cameras are generally used to look at a base runner's placement and "other wide-angle things that may not be available during the broadcast," Marinak said.

MLB said the tech upgrades will help get footage to umpires faster to cut down on the time spent reviewing plays. It will also help the team to decide whether or not to challenge a call.

And with the new camera angles added, MLB decreased the time a team can decide to dispute a call from 30 seconds to 20 seconds for the 2020 season.

Another critical partner will be Sony.

Ballparks will have 12 4K cameras and feature Sony's Hawk-Eye tracking system, which MLB said will help it better track player positioning and movement and "everything that is happening on the field, with no blind spots," according to Gaedtke.

Sony, which renewed its deal with MLB last December, will also provide teams artificial crowd noise. Clubs are required to use some form of fake sounds designed to emulate regular contests with spectators, since games will be held in empty stadiums.

Sony has made available 75 samples of crowd sounds from its MLB video game. The league will provide teams with an iPad filled with the samples that will be controlled by an audio technician during games.

Ryan Zander, MLB vice president of broadcast products and services and new broadcast technology, said clubs would continue to provide traditional organists and batter walk-up music in games, too.

"The idea is to enable the clubs with as much as possible as it relates to creating a realistic environment," Zander said, adding that broadcasters will pick up the sound with natural microphones normally used for crowd noise.

MLB said its baseball operations department would handle any disputes around the artificial sounds, but added it's not anticipating any problems.

MLB will also use virtual ads this season to "make up for lost brand exposure" and "create some new inventory for our partnerships," according to Marinak.

The league generally uses virtual signage at premier events like postseason games and the MLB All-Star Game, but not for regular season regional games.

MLB will oversee the ads on national broadcasts and clubs will manage local ad placements. But if a club decides to install physical ads for a particular game, MLB could restrict virtual ads.

"What we've done this season is qualified a bunch of technologies and devised a plan and framework to make this technology available for all clubs who want to take advantage of the program," said Zander.

Zander added there are guidelines to ad placements in efforts to "make the signage look as authentic as possible, not have it be disruptive to the viewer." The ads can be placed in areas including seating sections, foul ball territory and the pitcher's mound. Teams will be allowed to rotate virtual ads every half inning.

And with fans tuned in, some teams could take advantage of more augmented reality experiences. The New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies experimented with AR options in 2017and Michael Harris, Phillies VP of marketing and new media, told CNBC the team also had success with an their AR bobblehead promotion last season featuring pitcher Aaron Nola.

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Apple, Google and Sony will be critical to MLB season shortened by coronavirus - CNBC

11 China-based Suppliers of US Tech Giants Sanctioned Over Alleged Human Rights Abuses vs the Uighur – Tech Times

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

The U.S. commerce department is adding 11 China-based companies on the list of companies allegedly committing human rights violations against the Uighur, an ethnic group in east and central Asia, The Telegraph reported.

But how did Amazon, Google, Apple, and other tech companies find themselves into this issue?

Right as these Chinese companies are added to the list for allegedly committing human rights abuses against these minorities and Muslim groups from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, one of these companies, Nanchang O-Film Tech is reportedly partnered with several mainstream tech and automobile companies.

These companies include Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Dell, GM, Google, and more.

(Photo : World Uyghur Congress / Facebook)World Uyghur Congress shares photos of the campaign for human rights.

The U.S. commerce department said that these companies have committed "mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, involuntary collection of biometric data and genetic analysis" against these minorities, and will face restriction on American products, particularly in technology.

According to another report on Digital Trends, information from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's International Cyber Policy Centre entitled Uyghurs For Sale, revealed that since 2017, millions of Uighur and members of the Turkic Muslim minorities are sent to camps in Xinjiang for re-education, but are subject to forced labor and political indoctrination to give up their current beliefs.

The Institute is a think tank supported by the Australian government, and funded by the country's defense department, the report further noted..

"Beijing actively promotes the reprehensible practice of forced labor and abusive DNA collection and analysis schemes to repress its citizens," commerce department secretary Wilbur Ross said. "This action will ensure that our goods and technologies are not used in the Chinese Communist Party's despicable offensive against defenseless Muslim minority populations."

The company being accused, Nanchang O-Film Tech, has made no comments with the media as of press time. Even the tech companies they are partnered with, Amazon, Apple, GM, Microsoft, and Dell have not responded to the accusation.

These actions are part of the efforts from the U.S. government to curb these illegal activities from mainland Chinese companies. O-Film is allegedly using cameras, fingerprint sensors, and more to impose their principles upon these minorities, as they source out their information.

For instance, Apple is known for its yearly reports on its supplies, but apparently, it seems to hide several poor working conditions, including child labor and workers' safety. Also, Amazon has been accused of not providing sufficient health benefits to their employees in light of the pandemic.

There are now more than 40 companies listed by the U.S. Department of Commerce that allegedly violates human rights policies. These efforts are expected to further protect the rights of these groups.

Also Read: U.K. News: After Interfering with Gov't on Huawei Deal, the Tory Rebels Now Wants Chinese Nuclear Station Out

Could the pandemic affect our perspective on smart cities? – Tech Wire Asia

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

A concept image of Net City. Source: NBBJ

For a long time, the concept of smart cities powered by sensors, artificial intelligence and big data have captured our imaginations. And while these concepts wont fall into place overnight, we are beginning to see them slowly take route in the urban environments around us.

As we approach what we hope are the tailwinds of the Covid-19 pandemic, we also approach a point of reflection. The potential power and practicality of smart cities continues to be a topic of debate. A recent TechHQ article documented Sidewalk Labs abandoned plans for a smart city development in an area of Toronto.

With lingering question marks over privacy and the monetization of citizens data, many cities and governments are skirting around the unmediated adoption of smart city technology. However, with life in the fast lane stymied the world over and with the chance to think differently about the use of space around us the case around smart city technology is as prominent as ever, and some tech giants are pressing on with what they see as rethinking cities to be for and about people.

Chinese technology Tencent is one such business. As we covered recently, it has drafted up plans for a 2 million square meter smart city to occupy the southeastern region of Shenzhen, dubbed by some as Chinas Silicon Valley. According to Jonathan Ward, design partner at the smart citys architectural firm NBJJ, the area has been planned to focus its technology on people and the environment first.

Net City. Source: NBBJ

This sentiment speaks to an idyllic model of urban planning, detaching itself (linguistically, at least) from data-oriented concerns surrounding other smart cities, but it will likely portend the way that public bodies increasingly introduce smart city concepts to citizens as we continue to emerge from the pandemic, and as smart city technology continues to permeate in the years to come.

Net City will comprise Tencent offices and residences for its employees, as well as public amenities such as parks and a waterfront area. Ward goes on to claim that the city which will have few streets for cars and hence very few vehicles is a model for the future of city building [] such a precedence on green spaces points to advanced urban agriculture and a rethinking of traditional city values.

Alongside cutting-edge technology in artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles, all under the shadow of metallic buildings, Ward believes urban innovation should go hand-in-hand with the design of spaces, buildings and cities that are restorative [] with plentiful indoor-outdoor spaces. As society reboots after a pandemic, we will see whether these kind of smart city experiments bear fruit within the coming decade, or begin to churn up some of the same concerns as Sidewalk Labs dalliance.

Kris Hartley, assistant professor, Education University of Hong Kong, upholds such optimism, but with a word of warning. If technology is to shape the post-Covid world and theres no doubting that itll play a big role then technological progress must [] assert itself as a tool for positive change in urban residents everyday lives.

For smart cities to really be smart, then, Hartley suggests they must prioritize sustainability by reducing car use, increasing planning strategies around the needs of people, allowing greater public access, and with increased environmental conservation. At the same time, powered by thousands, if not millions of IoT sensors and AI technology, connected cities also mean data-intensive ones. Will efforts to make cities clean with technology simply offload their carbon footprint to the data center?

A piece in The Engineer mulls this very question, and points to work across UK, US, Germany and India where digital transformation and tech is being used as a unifying asset. Ravi Gopinath, chief cloud & product officer at AVEVA, talked of the potential for tech to overcome its own energy issues to contribute to a citys resilience.

A rendering of the Quayside, part of the now scrapped Sidewalk Labs Toronto smart city concept. Source: Sidewalk Toronto

The outlook from Michael Ganser an engineer with German telematics systems firm Kapsch TrafficCom is similarly bright. He forecasts that the introduction of new digital technologies like networked cars and adaptive traffic lights if installed in all of the worlds cities with populations of more than 200,000 people would save the planet 2% in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

More than 500 smart cities are being built across China, according to government data. These cities are equipped with sensors, cameras, and other gadgets that can crunch data on everything from traffic and pollution, to public health and security. The data anxiety can certainly be excused, and such concerns are not going to go away.

Throughout the coronavirus lockdown, surveillance took on an even more pertinent role than usual, and in smart cities this kind of monitoring will be at worst a kind of under-the-surface, biopolitical hazard. In China, Covid-19 has left the door open for Beijing to ramp up citizen surveillance by introducing new and invasive methods under the guise of fighting the pandemic, whether thats talking drones berating people for not wearing masks, or CCTV installed outside the homes of quarantined individuals.

In the case of Tencents proposal, there may be implications, with time, for Shenzhens neighbor to the South: Hong Kong. In Chinas communist state, though, the general public has less say (Xu Chengwei; public-policy researcher at Singapore Management University).

Smart cities are and will remain, according to authorities a major part of Chinas plan to spur growth amidst a global economic downturn. Hartley warns that the narrative around Covid-19 recovery and resilience is likely to be shaped around urbanism. There may well be an increase in purpose-built towns as demonstration projects or test-bed experiments.

Whether Net City proves to be such a test-bed for heightened surveillance and problematic data processing or whether it can pave the way for the post-Covid, green city revolution remains to be seen. Its construction is scheduled to begin later in 2020.

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Could the pandemic affect our perspective on smart cities? - Tech Wire Asia

Google has a plan to lure shoppers away from Amazon – CNET

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google on Thursday said it's nixing commission fees for retailers selling products on the company's shopping platform, as the search giant tries to catch up to Amazon and its dominant ecommerce operation.

Previously, Google charged merchants to list items with the company's Buy with Google program, which lets people buy items directly through Google's website instead of being sent to an outside digital store. The fee was about 10 to 15% of the sale, comparable to Amazon's rates. The pilot is starting in the US before expanding internationally.

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The apparent goal is to build up Google's shopping service by luring sellers to list their items there in addition to other platforms, instead of skipping Google because of extra fees.

"This removes a major barrier for marketplaces to participate because the duplicate commission has gone," Bill Ready, president of Google's commerce division, said in an interview. "Now they can more easily participate."

For consumers, the change could mean seeing a bigger selection of products when they search on Google. The company could then try to persuade sellers to run more paid product ads on its platform. As it stands now, Google isn't a major ecommerce player. In the US, Amazon is the undisputed leader in online sales, with 38% of the share, according to research firm eMarketer. Walmart is a distant second, with just shy of 6%, followed by eBay's 4.5%. Google doesn't crack the top 10.

Google also said it will let sellers import their inventory data to Google's service from other ecommerce platforms, including Amazon. The company is also partnering with PayPal and Shopify, which helps people create online stores, for payment processing and order management.

The changes intensify an already fierce rivalry with Amazon. The two tech giants have been warring on multiple fronts, including smart home technology. Google's Home smart speaker and Assistant voice software have been sprinting to catch up to Amazon's Echo and Alexa.

Ready wouldn't address Google's competition with Amazon. Google also declined to disclose how many merchants it has in its Buy with Google program, or how much revenue the company has generated through commission fees in the past year.

Thursday's updates come as Google makes a bigger push into ecommerce. In April, the company brought free retail listings to its search engine's shopping tab. Last month, Google expanded the listings to be shown directly in the company's search results, some of the most prized real estate on the internet.

Google has drawn blowback in the past for its shopping efforts. Two years ago, Google was hit with a $1.7 billion fine from the EU for what the commission called "abusive" ad practices, especially when it came to the placement of Google's shopping ads.

Next week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai will join the heads of Facebook, Amazon and Apple at an antitrust hearing as part of an investigation by a House Judiciary subcommittee. Google is expected to address questions about its digital ad business, as well as accusations the company's platforms give preferential treatment to its own products.

Google has a plan to lure shoppers away from Amazon - CNET

Cramer says moves in tech stocks are ‘truly insane’ as Amazon and Tesla climb – CNBC

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Jim Cramer

Scott Mlyn | CNBC

CNBC's Jim Cramer said Monday that the moves of three major tech stocks were "truly insane and unlike any i have ever seen in my life."

Cramer's comments in a tweet came as shares of Amazon and Microsoft, two of the largest U.S. stocks by market cap, jumped by 7.9% and 4.3% respectively during Monday's session. Electric vehicle company Tesla also surged 9.5%, continuing a blistering run that has seen its shares rise 60% since June 29.

The gains helped to push the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite up 2.5% on Monday.

Amazon's move represents a share reversal for the e-commerce and cloud company, which saw its shares sink all five days last week. Monday's jump erased almost all of those losses.

Both Amazon and Microsoft, which fell in four of five sessions last week, have outpaced the broader market this year, with their subscription and cloud businesses proving to be resistant to the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.

Tesla has left both of those tech giants behind with is run this year, rising nearly 300%. Tesla and Microsoft are scheduled to report quarterly earnings results on Wednesday.

What does the pandemic mean for the smart city revolution? – TechHQ

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

The potential power and practicality of smart cities continues to be a topic of debate in the midst and tailwinds of Covid-19. A recent TechHQ article documented Sidewalk Labs abandoned plans for a smart city development in an area of Toronto. With lingering question marks over privacy and the monetization of citizens data, many cities and governments are skirting around the unmediated adoption of smart city technology.

However, with life in the fast lane stymied the world over and with the chance to think differently about the use of space around us the case around smart city technology is as prominent as ever, and some tech giants are pressing on with what they see as rethinking cities to be for and about people.

Chinese technology Tencent is one such business. It has drafted up plans for a 2 million square meter smart city to occupy the southeastern region of Shenzhen, dubbed by some as Chinas Silicon Valley. According to Jonathan Ward, design partner at the smart citys architectural firm NBBJ, the area has been planned to focus its technology on people and the environment first.

Net City. Source: NBBJ

A rendering of the Quayside, part of the now scrapped Sidewalk Labs Toronto smart city concept. Source: Sidewalk Toronto

Continue reading here:

What does the pandemic mean for the smart city revolution? - TechHQ

Apple digs in over its App Store fees – BBC News

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Apple has defended the fees it charges developers to sell their digital products via its App Store.

The iPhone-maker says a study it commissioned shows content makers give away a similar cut to dozens of other online markets, and an even bigger share if their goods are sold offline.

Apple is facing complaints about the matter on both sides of the Atlantic.

The EU launched a competition probe in June, and chief executive Tim Cook will give testimony to Congress on Monday.

He will appear before the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee alongside counterparts from Amazon, Facebook and Google. The tech giants all face claims that they have abused their market-leading positions.

It has emerged that ahead of the hearing, Microsoft's president briefed the panel that his firm had concerns about the way Apple operated the App Store.

According to a report in the Information, Brad Smith has drawn attention to issues including::

The is the second time in two months that Apple has published a report from the Analysis Group about its digital store.

In June, the Boston-based consultancy suggested that the App Store had "facilitated half a trillion dollars" of trade in 2019.

But that report was quickly overshadowed by the European Commission's announcement that it was investigating complaints from the music streaming service Spotify and e-book store Kobo. They alleged that Apple's rules gave its own digital products an unfair advantage.

To compound matters, Apple also got involved in a public spat with the makers of email app Hey, who were refusing to give it a share of their subscription fees.

Apple subsequently announced changes to its apps review process as a concession. But the latest report indicates it is not willing to compromise over the charges it imposes.

The Analysis Group compared Apple's App Store to 37 other digital and e-commerce marketplaces.

It found the firm's standard demand of a 30% cut of sales was in line with what Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Samsung took.

But there were some exceptions. The group said:

The study also suggested that developers and publishers got a smaller share from offline "bricks-and-mortar" channels, where stores and other intermediaries typically take:

The report also highlighted that other e-commerce marketplaces also had rules to prohibit sellers from directing buyers to pay offsite in order to avoid fees. Examples given are:

However, when pressed on this last point, one of the report's authors conceded that while shoppers were aware they could always go elsewhere to buy physical goods, they did not always realise they could buy subscriptions and other digital products outside an app.

Developers often offer cheaper deals on their own sites as they do not have to split the charge with Apple, but the tech firm forbids them from alerting users to the possibility via a link or other "call to action" within their own apps.

The Analysis Group said it believed most users would be aware it was possible to subscribe to Netflix and the bigger brands via a smart TV or website, but acknowledged this was not the case for smaller publishers.

Apple is under fire - from developers big and small, from politicians and from regulators - over the way it runs its App Store.

The firm has indicated this report doesn't necessarily represent the testimony Mr Cook will offer when quizzed by the US Congress next week.

But if he does rebut claims of unfair practices with "we're no worse and sometimes better than Amazon, Google, Uber and Microsoft", he may not win over the politicians.

That argument certainly won't impress developers like Basecamp's David Heinemeier Hansson, who fell out badly with Apple over his email app Hey.

Although that dispute was settled, Mr Hansson still wants radical change.

"The power of Apple and the rest of the big tech monopolies is insufferable," he told me, making it clear he was working with regulators and politicians to change things.

"That's where permanent relief is going to come from."

Apple can expect a long battle, but we've begun to see the shape of its defence.

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Apple digs in over its App Store fees - BBC News

How Spotify and TikTok Beat Their Copycats – Harvard Business Review

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Executive Summary

In the digital economy, innovators often lose out to more agile imitators who can leverage new know-how very quickly and creatively. The best way to avoid that trap is to focus on innovation in products and services requiring complex solutions whose many elements can be continuously recombined and repurposed.

In the digital economy, the race is often won by imitators who turn out to be more agile and creative than even the most successful first movers. Take the case of Snapchat. Created in 2011, it quickly reeled in millions of teenagers and young adults with a standout app on which shared photos disappear after 24 hours. Facebook reportedly tried, but failed, to buy Snapchat. So it did the next best thing: copy.

Facebook-owned Instagram simply replicated the main features of Snapchat Stories, rolling out Instagram Stories in 2016. Within a year, Instagram had crossed Snapchats daily active user (DAU) numbers and then some while the latter faltered. Although Snapchat has since regained some of its early influence, its experience shows that barriers to entry in the digital realm are low, even for established platforms that have already captured a significant user base.

The usual approach taken by first movers to protect their lead involves heavy investment in deploying their innovative know-how through in-house knowledge transfer and collaboration, the idea being that the company with the idea can stay ahead if it leverages its knowledge more quickly across employees and encourages teamwork. The problem, as weve argued in a recent paper, is that companies that invest in leveraging their knowledge internally can actually end up benefiting the competition as much as themselves, particularly when the knowledge is easy to copy and can be shared among many rivals. We call this the knowledge-spillover sharing effect.

Given this, is there any hope for an innovator to succeed in the face of copycats?

The right formula, as we demonstrate in our paper, is one of complex continuous innovation, where individuals in the firm use recombination to repeatedly reconfigure elements of their existing knowledge, fusing this together to deliver new product solutions. While such a strategy can overcome the innovators imitation dilemma by thwarting rivals knowledge-spillover sharing effects, we also show that it can only do so if innovators tackle complex opportunities that are composed of many interdependent features. Lets look at a couple of case studies demonstrating the approach in action.

How TikTok outsmarted Facebook

The meteoric rise of TikTok, the short-form video sharing service owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, is instructive. Created in 2017, TikTok has reached 1 billion users faster than any other platform, and is consistently one of the top downloaded apps. According toMark Zuckerberg, it is the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world.

TikToks growth and (near-term) sustainable competitive advantage comes from its ability to combine and recombine products and services from different categories. On the consumer side, TikToks algorithms quickly learn individual preferences by capturing users likes, comments, and time spent on each video. On the producer side, AI simplifies video editing and suggests music, hashtags, filters, and other enhancements that are trending or have been proven popular. Essentially, TikTok has recombined elements of these different technologies and applications to create a new category of bite-sized amateur entertainment, distinct from the chronicling of real life offered by Facebook.

Facebooks efforts to replicate its triumph over Snapchat through imitation have thus far come to nothing. The social-media giants nixing of Lasso, the TikTok clone, in July speaks to the difficulty of emulating the Chinese app.

Outracing imitators the Spotify way

Another good example of using complex continuous innovation to stave off copycats is Spotify. Its seemingly simple music-streaming service is in fact a complex combination of a dynamically changing user-interface, behavioral prediction algorithms, and an ever-expanding catalog of music. Spotify learns a customers preferences and uses population-level predictions to suggest content that will ensure stickiness.

So successful is Spotify at innovating in a complex opportunity space that it has kept mighty Apple at bay. Despite extensive promotion of its service, Apple Music has not been able to capture a significant share of the music streaming market. Spotify meanwhile has continued to innovate via recombination, adding new features and categories that marry technology with content. The most recent example is its foray into podcasting, hitherto Apples domain, with a $100-million exclusive deal with popular podcaster Joe Rogan.

Ganging up on the innovator: Ubers troubles

Weve also found an interesting competitive dynamic working against the first mover. Copycats are willing to learn from one another probably more so than the original innovator. This makes it easier for them to catch up and overtake the first mover.

Look at what happened to Uber. Although the ride-sharing platform the company pioneered in 2010 was unique, it was relatively simple to replicate. Before long, rivals like Lyft in the US and Didi, Gojek, and Grab in Asia offered similar services and siphoned Ubers market share. These companies learned by copying not only Uber but also one another, effectively ganging up on the more established innovator, whose early market dominance may have made it complacent.

Grab, Gojek, and Didi quickly adapted Ubers map function to their own product, which they then adjusted based on one anothers modifications. There is some evidence Grab adapted Ubers rider promotions and driver incentives, only to see Gojek use the same ideas. Copying continued to heat up as all three Asian players then pursued a hyper-diversified super app strategy. Grab appeared to copy Gojeks proliferation of services in Indonesia, such as insurance, with their own offerings. And some believe Gojek entered Singapore with data it scraped from Grabs maps. The result was a highly competitive marketplace that led to Ubers exit from the region.

***

Given the knowledge-spillover sharing effects of the sort weve described, firms grappling with the imitation dilemma need to be careful about just how they mobilize their in-house knowledge resources. Trying to be faster than copycats, or focusing only on in-house knowledge transfer and collaboration, wont be a sustainable strategy. Rather, they should focus on thwarting potential imitators by recombining knowledge in novel ways to tackle complex opportunities.

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How Spotify and TikTok Beat Their Copycats - Harvard Business Review

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Up $7.33 Over Past 4 Hours, Entered Today Up For the 2nd Day In A Row; Crosses 50 and 100 Day Moving Averages – CFDTrading

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Danzig

Bitcoin Cash 4 Hour Price Update

Updated July 23, 2020 03:20 PM GMT (11:20 AM EST)

Bitcoin Cash closed the last 4 hour candle down 0.37% ($0.87); this denotes the 4th candle in a row a decline has happened. Relative to other instruments in the Top Cryptos asset class, Bitcoin Cash ranked 4th since the last 4 hour candle in terms of percentage price change.

Bitcoin Cash is up 4.2% ($9.68) since the previous day, marking the 2nd day in a row an increase has occurred. As for how volume fared, yesterdays volume was up 42.34% from the previous day (Tuesday), and up 66.13% from Wednesday of the week before. Out of the 5 instruments in the Top Cryptos asset class, Bitcoin Cash ended up ranking 2nd for the day in terms of price change relative to the previous day. The daily price chart of Bitcoin Cash below illustrates.

Notably, Bitcoin Cash crossed above its 50 and 100 day moving averages yesterday. The clearest trend exists on the 90 day timeframe, which shows price moving down over that time. Or to view things another way, note that out of the past 10 days Bitcoin Cashs price has gone down 6 them.

Over on Twitter, here were the top tweets about Bitcoin Cash:

#Tether USDt contributes to an important share of onchain volume over Bitcoin (via Omni), Ethereum and Tron blockchains.Tether is available on: Omni (Bitcoin), Ethereum, Tron, Liquid (Bitcoin), EOS, Algorand, SLP (Bitcoin Cash), OMG (Ethereum, still WIP) and more coming.

Unpopular opinion: Rebranding Bitcoin Cash with the name Cash would improve its image and adoption.

The pitch for Bitcoin in 2011 is the same pitch for Bitcoin Cash in 2020.You can send or receive any amount of money with anyone in the world, instantly, basically for free, anonymously, and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it.

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Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Up $7.33 Over Past 4 Hours, Entered Today Up For the 2nd Day In A Row; Crosses 50 and 100 Day Moving Averages - CFDTrading

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