At the Ethereum Developer Conference on November 9, Microsoft announced that it would offer blockchain building blocks as part of its Azure cloud hosting platform; the Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) offering allows developers to quickly launch an Ethereum environment which includes code building blocks for SmartContracts and a semi-private testing environment with a blockchain which then can be migrated to the public Ethereum environment; the offering is in partnership with development house ConsenSys. Source
This week, we look at:
The 10% collapse in GDP across the US & Eurozone, and how it compares with China's second quarter
The geopolitical battle over TikTok, its alleged spying, and understanding the winners and losers of the Microsoft deal
A framework for how to win in open source competition, explaining both Shenzhen manufacturing success and decentralized finance growth to $4 billion
As more financial services firms beginning using Google, Amazon and Microsoft for cloud based services regulators are starting to take...
OpenAI, backed with $1B+ by Elon Musk & MSFT, can now program SQL and write Harry Potter fan-fiction
This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.
In an American Banker op-ed the author acknowledges the amazing potential of AI; it has been said that it could...
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, or GAFAM as they are beginning to be know are continuing their move towards financial services; payments have become one area in particular where they have seen the tech giants making inroads; mobile wallets for in-store payments, money transfers between friends and even loans to small businesses; tech giants have only started to disrupt fintech as they look to become bigger players in consumers financial lives. Source.
Federal banking regulators issued a cloud security reminder as most banks have shifted their employees to work from home mode;...
This week, let's dive into the Apple augmented reality glasses leak, the Magic Leap $350 million financing, and the uncanny imagery created by Epic Games' Unreal Engine. We summarize and pull apart the thesis of the Metaverse -- a virtual world as realistic and economically important as our own -- and how media and financial companies should think about the opportunity.
Reusable identities will be vital tools that support identity verification, but how they will work exactly is yet to be determined.
Minnesota based Sunrise Bank, like most other banks, needed to make some quick decisions about how they would lend Paycheck...