How YouTube gaming commentators use anger to gain views on their videos, which researchers and some YouTubers say are amplified by YouTube's recommendations — How to make a successful video on one of the internet's most popular sites: — Step 1: Find something to be angry about.
It’s official. After much anticipation, China named the first companies to receive 5G licenses for commercial use on Thursday.
The announcement from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the country’s telecoms authority, came as Huawei, the Chinese company that captured nearly 30% of the world’s telecom gear revenues in 2018, faces mounting scrutiny in the west over potential security concerns.
The greenlight arrived months ahead of the long-expected due date for China’s 5G licenses, which was said to be late 2019. The acceleration clearly demonstrates Beijing’s ambition to race ahead in the global 5G race where the United States and South Korea already had a head start in commercial deployment.
The MIIT approved three network operators — China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom — and cable network company China Broadcasting Network to run the next-gen cellular connectivity.
Other players in 5G, including network equipment makers, smartphone manufacturers, chip makers and apps creators, are also gearing up. Over the last few months, Samsung, Oppo, Xiaomi and Huawei have each announced plans to bring 5G into their handsets.
In the meantime, internet giant Tencent has been quietly testing cloud-based games with Intel, and Netflix-like iQiyi has joined hands with China Unicom to make virtual reality products, representing just two of the many applications that rely on 5G-enabled low latency and higher bandwidth to work.
It’s easy to be skeptical of lending companies of every stripe. They uniformly rely on customers who don’t have enough money to cover their bills and are willing to pay interest on money borrowed in exchange for capital they can spend sooner — sometimes immediately.
Unfortunately, those consumers with the worst credit, or no credit at all, are sometimes left with few options other than to work with payday lenders that typically charge astonishingly high annual percentage rates. Until recently, for example, the state of Ohio had the dubious distinction of allowing payday lenders to charge higher rates than anywhere else in the country — with a typical ARR of 591%.
It’s one reason that venture capitalist Rebecca Lynn, a managing partner with Canvas Ventures and an early investor in the online lending company LendingClub, has largely steered clear of the numerous startups crowding into the industry in recent years. It’s also why she just led a $10.5 million investment in Possible Finance, a two-year-old, Seattle-based outfit that’s doing what she “thought was impossible,” she says. The startup is “helping people on the lower end of the credit spectrum improve their financial outlook without being predatory.”
At the very least, Possible is charging a whole lot less interest on loans than some of its rivals. Here’s how it works: a person pulls up the company’s mobile app, through which she shares the bank account that she has to have in order to get a loan from the startup. Based on her transaction history alone — Possible doesn’t check whether or not that person has a credit history — the company makes a fast, machine-learning driven decision about whether a loan is a risk worth taking. Assuming the borrower is approved, it then transfers up to $500 to that individual the following day, money that can be paid over numerous installments over a two-month period.
Those repayments are reported to the credit agencies, helping that person either build, or rebuild, her credit rating.
If the money can’t be repaid right away, the borrower has up to 29 more days to pay it. ( By federal law, a late payment must be reported to credit reporting bureaus when it’s 30 days past due.)
Possible has immediate advantages over some of the many usurious lenders out there. First, it gives people more time to pay back their loans, where traditional payday lenders give borrowers just 30 days. It also charges APRs in the 150% to 200% range. That may still seem high, but as Possible’s cofounder and CEO Tony Huang explains it, the company has to “charge a minimum amount of fees to recoup our loss and service the loan. Smaller ticket items have more fixed costs, which is why banks don’t offer them.”
More important to Lynn, traditional payday loans are structured so those payments don’t impact credit scores, often trapping consumers in a cycle of borrowing at excessively high rates from shady issuers. Meanwhile, Possible, she believes, gives them a way off that path.
Yet Possible has another thing going for it: the apparent blessing of the Pew Charitable Trust’s Alex Horowitz, who guides research for Pew’s consumer finance project. As Horowitz tells us, his group has spent years looking at payday loans and other deep subprime credit lending, and one of their key findings about such loans “isn’t just that interest rates or APRs are high, but they’re unnecessarily high.”
In fact, though payday lenders once warned that they would exit certain states that set price limits on how much they can wring from their customers, a “kind of remarkable finding is that states are setting prices as much as four times lower — and these lenders are still coming in and providing credit.”
Horowitz gives Possible credit for not pricing its loans at the ceilings that those states are setting. “Usually,” he explains, “customers are price sensitive, so if a lender comes in two to three times lower than others, they’ll win a lot of customers.” That’s not true in the market in which Possible is playing, says Horowitz. Customers focus on how fast and how easily they can line up a loan, making it “unusual for a lender to offer loans that’s at a price point far below its rivals.”
Worth noting: Ohio, which once allowed payday lenders to get away with murder, is one of those states that more recently implemented interest rate ceilings, with a new payday lending law that went into effect in late April. It’s now one of six states where Possible operates (“with many more to come,” says Huang).
Possible, which currently employs 14 people, has processed 50,000 loans on behalf of users since launching the product in April of last year.
With its new round of funding, it has now raised $13.5 million altogether, including from Columbia Pacific Advisors; Union Bay Partners; Unlock Venture Partners, and angel investor Tom Williams.
The wheels are turning on Didi Chuxing’s first major expansion in Latin America after the Chinese ride-hailing firm announced moves into Chile and Colombia to double its presence in the region.
Didi said it rolled into Valparaiso, Chile’s third largest metropolis, and Colombian capital city Bogota this week. The company plans to expand beyond those cities over time, and, in terms of services, it said that it will add dedicated licensed taxis in Colombia this year.
Anchored in China, where it is the country’s dominant ride-hailing service, Didi began to place focus on international expansion last year and Latin America is a key part of its global ambitions.
In the region, Didi currently operates in Brazil — where it acquired local player 99 for $1 billion — and Mexico, but recent reports have linked it with more countries in Latin America. In February, Reuters reported that the company was hiring for operational staff in Chile, Peru and Colombia. Other reports have put its total headcount in Latin America at over 1,000 staff, that’s a clear indication of its intent for the region.
In a statement, Mi Yang — who leads Didi’s operations in Central and South America — called Chile and Colombia “two important centers of growth and innovation in the region.”
Outside of Latin America and its homeland, Didi is present in Taiwan and Australia, where it has other global connection through its investment deals. The company owns a significant stake in Southeast Asia-based Grab — it doubled down with a $2 billion investment alongside SoftBank in 2017 — as well as Bolt (formerly known as Taxify) across Europe and Africa, Ola in India and Lyft in the U.S.
Didi also has relations with Uber as a mutual investment was part of the deal that saw it acquire the Uber China business in 2016, and it invested in Middle East-based Careem, which is being acquired by Uber.
That’s a pretty complicated web of relationships and, with Didi’s global expansion, it often pits the Chinese company against its investments. In Australia, for example, Didi is up against Uber, Bolt AND Ola.
In Latin America, Uber is again a competitor and others the field include local players Cabify, Easy Taxi and Beat from Greece — companies that Didi hasn’t backed.
On offer is a market with vast growth potential. Latin America is the world’s second-fastest-growing mobile market. In a region of approximately 640 million people, there are more than 200 million smartphone users and, by 2020, predictions say that 63% of Latin America’s population will have access to the mobile Internet.
Didi’s globetrotting comes at a challenging time for its domestic business, where it is still reeling from the murder of two passengers last year.
As TechCrunch reported last month, Didi is revamping its security systems to put an increased focus on passenger security in the wake of those tragic deaths. That’s come at significant cost and it is said to have pushed back plans to take the company. Uber and Lyft have, of course, completed IPO this year, but Didi’s own timeline for doing so is unclear.
Wall Street Journal : What to expect in 2025: increased hype around AI agents, new generative AI-powered gadgets, better weather forecast...
