Incode, which is developing a biometric identity platform for enterprises, raises a $10M seed round — Incode, a San Francisco startup developing what it describes as an omnichannel biometric identity platform, today announced that it's raised $10 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors.
Sources: after SEC injunction, Telegram Open Network ICO investors extended the deadline for the TON token launch from the end of October to April 30 — Investors in Telegram's blockchain project have opted to stick with the firm despite the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) …
As I write this, massive fires are erupting all over California, and massive protests are erupting all over the world. Is the former a facet of the climate crisis? Is the latter a symptom of hyperpolarization caused by hyperconnectivity? Yes, I mean no, I mean it’s impossible to say. That’s what it means to live in a stochastic age.
During the past few weeks there has been an extraordinary outburst of popular protests in all corners of the world.
Here's a map of the locations, and primary causes, of recent unrest around the world. @gzeromedia pic.twitter.com/V7Lelxw9kj
— Xavi Ruiz
(@xruiztru) October 23, 2019
This is an era of stochastic terrorism: “The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random.” It is also an era of climate crisis as a stochastic disaster, causing a whole spectrum of ‘random’ natural disasters to become ever more probable and terrible.
Is ours also an era of stochastic political strife? Does the world’s increased connectivity, aided by social media’s inherent amplification of outrage, have second-, third-, or fourth-order effects which heat rhetoric and protest, triggering secession movements and massive rejection of the status quo? Is our hyperconnectivity the political equivalent of global warming?
If so, it would explain a lot. The baffling and horrifying rise of neo-Nazis and white supremacy around the world. The increasing political polarization of seemingly every polity. The growing dearth of anything like a political middle ground. The huge protests scattered across the globe, against almost every form of government.
But let’s not be too quick to diagnose this. This might be somehow periodic: terrorism and protests were both more common (per capita) in the late 60s and early 70s than they are today. It might just be a symptom of, and backlash against, a global trend of neoliberalism-morphing-towards-antidemocratic-oligarchy, which, sadly, is the recent economic / political history of much of the world.
The hypothesis is that this stochastic strife has something to do with technology and hyperconnectivity, that across the world we’re experiencing the political equivalent of global warming. Intriguing, but far from proven. How might we test or measure it?
The obvious test is to introduce a control group, A/B across a representative slice of the planet — but that seems pretty unlikely, and I’m not aware of any reliable quantitative measures of political strife, and either way it suffers from the inevitable problem that it’s impossible to tease out just one of the myriad factors which accumulate (or not) into political fury and protest.
— At least it’s impossible at any given moment. But we do know that connectivity is likely to just keep increasing, especially across the developing world, and that averaged across nations it is likely to change faster than almost any other factor at play.
So if this hypothesis is correct, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Political outrage, massive protests, and secession movements will continue to grow worldwide, eventually at a pace which makes California wildfires seem leisurely.
Let’s hope that either the hypothesis is proved wrong, or that we find a new way, transcending traditional nation-states, to distribute political power … before all those eruptions turn into conflagrations.
Welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of the latest events that happened at major Chinese tech companies and what they mean to tech founders and executives around the world.
Alibaba’s new rival is shaking up China’s internet landscape.
This week, four-year-old e-commerce upstart Pinduoduo displaced JD.com to be the fourth-most valuable internet company in the country. Its market capitalization of $47.6 billion on Friday put it just behind e-commerce leader Alibaba, social networking behemoth Tencent and food delivery titan Meituan in China. Baidu, the search equivalent of Google in China, has fallen off the top-three club, ending a decade of unshakable dominance of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (the “BAT”) on the Chinese internet.
The story of Pinduoduo comes down to growing internet penetration and the rise of social commerce. Pinduoduo, which is known for selling ultra-cheap products, is particularly popular with price-sensitive residents in small towns and rural regions, a market relatively underserved by online retail pioneers Alibaba and JD.com. However, Pinduoduo has set about targeting more urban consumers by heavily subsidizing big-ticket items such as iPhones.
Its seamless integration with WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging app owned by Pinduoduo investor Tencent, contributes to adaptability among a less tech-savvy population. WeChat users can access Pinduoduo via the messenger’s built-in lite app, skipping app downloads; they also get deals from group-buying, thus the name Pinduoduo, which means “shop more together” in Chinese.
Earlier this month, Pinduoduo founder and chief executive Colin Huang, a 39-year-old former Google engineer of few words, gave a 45-minute speech at the company’s anniversary, according to a summary published by local tech media Late News. He announced that Pinduoduo has surpassed JD.com in gross merchandise volume, or the total dollar value of goods sold. It’s unclear whether the companies use the same set of metrics for GMV, for instance, whether the figure includes refunded items.
While its rivalry with JD.com is nuanced as both companies are backed by Tencent, Pinduoduo’s competition against Alibaba is more blatant. In his missive to staff, Huang acknowledged that Pinduoduo is “standing on a giant’s shoulders,” hinting at Alibaba’s sheer size. When it comes to fighting the impending battle during the upcoming Single’s Day shopping festival (11/11), the founder sounded poised. “Pinduoduo should not feel pressured. The one who should is our peer.”
Xi: Blockchain, Blockchain, Blockchain (undertone is not Bitcoin as usual)
Market: pumped Bitcoin 13%
More reads below – pic.twitter.com/RayGwbtKkv
— Dovey Wan
(@DoveyWan) October 25, 2019
Facebook AI Research says it has created a system that can modify human faces in live video feeds to thwart state-of-the-art facial recognition software — Facebook AI Research says it has created a machine learning system for de-identification of individuals in video.
Stripe launches in Mexico, three weeks after the country's central bank launched CoDi, a mobile payments system that lets consumers make payments using QR codes — Mobile payment startup Stripe Inc. began operations in Mexico, three weeks after after the launch of a similar central bank-backed system aimed …
Profile of vTaiwan online service, created after 2014 protests, to help groups of people with different interests achieve consensus to guide new regulations — There is one thing that practically everyone can agree on: politics has become bitterly divided.
Two FTC commissioners say the Sunday Riley settlement, which involved no return of gains, despite strong evidence of wrongdoing, may usher in more review fraud — “Dishonest firms may come to conclude that posting fake reviews is a viable strategy.” — Like much of the Internet, online reviews are often fake.
Financial Times : Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid weste...
