Time to say goodbye to the gadgets and services that met their demise this year, including Windows Phone, the Kinect, 3D TVs, Apple's Shuffle and Nano, and AIM.
We’d bet that the vast majority of people reading this, regardless of gender, race or socioeconomic background, carry the same few basic items with them at all times; a phone, some keys, a few dollars, a debit card, and maybe some I.D are all items you’d reliably expect to find if you asked an average person on the street to turn out their pockets. But what would you find if you asked a millionaire, or even a billionaire, to do the same thing? As it turns out, it would appear you’d find they’d produce more or less the same or less from their pockets as the average Joe.
Bangalore-based software company Ezetap has developed a platform that makes it easy to pay anywhere with any device you like. It has created software allowing a merchant with a smartphone to accept any type of payment and see that money moved seamlessly into their own bank account.
Bitcoin’s meteoric rise is attracting a ton of attention. Is it ready for the mainstream?
David Clarke, a top 10 GRC influencer discusses the future of risk and compliance facing corporate and banks.
British farmers are being hit by a shortage of migrant workers and are warning a dysfunctional Brexit will have a devastating impact on their industry. They are calling on the government to provide direction and answers on the future of British farming after the UK leaves the European Union. Bloomberg’s Angus Bennett travelled to Kent, in Southern England, to meet the farmers and migrant workers on the front lines of Brexit.
Video by Angus Bennett and Gloria Kurnik
Velshi & Ruhle grade the economy's performance under President Trump.
Today’s biggest tech ideas, explained so anyone can understand. A new series from Microsoft Story Labs. More: microsoft.com/storylabs
Ray Dalio, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, told Henry Blodget that investors should have 5% to 10% of their portfolio in gold. During that same interview, Dalio called bitcoin a "speculative bubble" and said "bitcoin is not an effective medium exchange by and large" and "it's not easy to buy things with the bitcoin."
Dalio isn't the only one asking these questions about bitcoin. If bitcoin really is a currency, then it is important that you can buy things with it. But this may not be a fair argument. We all seem to accept gold as a storehold of wealth and as an alternative currency even though you really can't make purchases with gold.
So in an effort to fairly compare gold and bitcoin in this vein, we went out into the world to see how easy it was to spend both in everyday transactions. It turns out it isn't easy to spend either. The only person we could find who accepted gold in New York City was Donald Trump in 2011.
Bitcoin is slightly easier to spend. We couldn't use our bitcoin at Subway, which is on a few lists of retailers that accept bitcoin. Le Village, a restaurant in New York's East Village that many have reported accepts bitcoin, was closed down when we tried to eat there. But we did have some luck spending bitcoin.
We found that it was easy to use bitcoin on Overstock.com. Also, my daughter's preschool accepts bitcoin for tuition payments. But if you really want to use bitcoin in everyday transactions, you can get a debit card that allows you to spend bitcoin easily. But maybe we are simply using the wrong words when we talk about bitcoin.
As Adam Ludwin, the founder and CEO of Chain, says in his open letter to Jamie Dimon, "since this isn't about cryptocurrencies vs. fiat currencies let's stop using the word currency." He goes on to say that he prefers to think of them as "crypto assets."
Vincenzo Dimase (@vincedimase), Head of Market Development, Trading at Thomson Reuters (@mifidii), gives an overview of MiFID II and the many different aspects of the financial market it will affect. Visit http://mifidii.com for more information.
Blockchain will disrupt everything from Silicon Valley to the New York Stock Exchange.
Odds are that you’ve been hearing more and more about cryptocurrency as digital tokens like bitcoin and ethereum have become valuable commodities. Converts (and investors) say that cryptocurrencies built on blockchain technology represent the future of money, finance, and commerce.
But skeptics say that digital currencies represent crowd-sourced pyramid schemes or are fuel for another tech bubble. We met with Olaf Carlson-Wee, who was the first employee at the cryptocurrency broker Coinbase, where he famously took his entire salary in bitcoin. Now, Carlson-Wee runs a hedge fund that deals exclusively in crypto-assets. We talked with Carlson-Wee in San Francisco about money, trust, and how he made his friends rich.
