Investors move from coronavirus woes to Biden wins as markets rally on Super Tuesday results

While the aftermath of Super Tuesday has left the Democratic Party riven between its more liberal and moderate wings, investors viewed last night’s results as a win for business and markets.

Shaking off the steady beat of bad news about the advance of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 within the U.S., major markets rose on Wednesday following the news of Joe Biden’s surge to the front of the Democratic Primary pack on Super Tuesday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up a whopping 1,173.45 or 4.5% to close at 27,090.86, while the Nasdaq was up 334 or 3.85% to close at 9018.09 and the S&P 500 was up 126.75 or 4.22% to 3130.12.

Biden’s moderate position contrasts with the more liberal policies endorsed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ positions on how to combat climate change and reshape the healthcare industry diverged sharply from the incrementalism that Joe Biden promoted, both as vice president and on the campaign trail this year.

It’s been a rocky road for the major stock indices, but over the past few days investors’ fears about the economic impact of the coronavirus seem to have stabilized as the U.S. government begins to take more decisive action.

Since hitting their troughs of the year on Friday, the Dow has risen 1,681.50 points, the Nasdaq is up 748.35 points and the S&P 500 is up 265.20 points — buoyed in part by today’s news.

Tech’s biggest companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, all saw their stocks rise on a day that the market soared. Health insurance companies and pharmaceuticals were among the day’s big winners buoyed both by the Biden victory and new congressional cash coming from the U.S. government to finance the development of tests, treatments and potentially vaccines for the new coronavirus.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/04/investors-move-from-coronavirus-woes-to-biden-wins-as-markets-rally-on-super-tuesday-results/

Investors move from coronavirus woes to Biden wins as markets rally on Super Tuesday results

While the aftermath of Super Tuesday has left the Democratic Party riven between its more liberal and moderate wings, investors viewed last night’s results as a win for business and markets.

Shaking off the steady beat of bad news about the advance of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 within the U.S., major markets rose on Wednesday following the news of Joe Biden’s surge to the front of the Democratic Primary pack on Super Tuesday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up a whopping 1,173.45 or 4.5% to close at 27,090.86, while the Nasdaq was up 334 or 3.85% to close at 9018.09 and the S&P 500 was up 126.75 or 4.22% to 3130.12.

Biden’s moderate position contrasts with the more liberal policies endorsed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ positions on how to combat climate change and reshape the healthcare industry diverged sharply from the incrementalism that Joe Biden promoted, both as vice president and on the campaign trail this year.

It’s been a rocky road for the major stock indices, but over the past few days investors’ fears about the economic impact of the coronavirus seem to have stabilized as the U.S. government begins to take more decisive action.

Since hitting their troughs of the year on Friday, the Dow has risen 1,681.50 points, the Nasdaq is up 748.35 points and the S&P 500 is up 265.20 points — buoyed in part by today’s news.

Tech’s biggest companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, all saw their stocks rise on a day that the market soared. Health insurance companies and pharmaceuticals were among the day’s big winners buoyed both by the Biden victory and new congressional cash coming from the U.S. government to finance the development of tests, treatments and potentially vaccines for the new coronavirus.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/04/investors-move-from-coronavirus-woes-to-biden-wins-as-markets-rally-on-super-tuesday-results/

The paradox of selfishness

Often, we choose to be selfish because we feel insufficiency.

“I don’t have that much, how can I possibly share it?”

The insecurity that comes from feeling like our foundation is weak or our future is uncertain can cloud our instinct to be generous. Like a drowning person, we cling ever tighter to the life buoy.

You see where this is going…

The single best way to find sufficiency and confidence and trust and forward motion is to do precisely the opposite of what our instincts might tell us.

In an economy based on connection, trust and attention, the posture of generosity is not only the highest-yielding strategy, it’s also the right thing to do.

Ideas shared go up in value. Doors opened turn into new opportunities for all.

 

TODAY is the last day for signups for The Podcast Fellowship. It’s not too late to be heard. Hope to see you there.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/619405618/0/sethsblog~The-paradox-of-selfishness/

Africa Roundup: TLcom closes $71M fund, Jumo raises $55M, AWS partners with Safaricom

VC firm TLcom Capital closed its Tide Africa Fund at $71 million in February, and announced plans to invest in 12 startup over the next 18 months.

The group —  with offices in London, Lagos, and Nairobi — is looking for tech-enabled, revenue-driven ventures in Africa from seed-stage to Series B, according to TLcom Managing Partner Maurizio Caio.

He told TechCrunch the fund was somewhat agnostic on startup sectors, but was leaning toward infrastructure, logistics ventures vs. consumer finance companies.

On geographic scope, TLcom Capital will focus primarily on startups in Africa’s big-three tech hubs — Nigeria, Kenya,  South Africa — but is also eyeing rising markets, such as Ethiopia.

TLcom’s current Africa portfolio includes Nigerian trucking logistics venture Kobo360, Kenya’s Twiga Foods,  a B2B food supply-chain company and tech-talent accelerator Andela.

Both of these companies have gone on to expand in Africa and receive subsequent investment by U.S. investment bank, Goldman Sachs .

For those startups who wish to pitch to TLcom Capital, Caio encouraged founders to contact one of the fund’s partners and share a value proposition. “If it’s something we find vaguely interesting, we’ll make a decision,” he said.

TLcom Capital closes $71M Africa fund with plans to back 12 startups

One $50 million round wasn’t enough for South Africa’s Jumo, so the fintech firm raised another — $55 million — in February, backed by

Goldman Sachs led the Cape Town based company’s $52 million round back in 2018.

“This fresh investment comes from new and existing…investors including Goldman Sachs,  Odey Asset Management and LeapFrog Investments,” Jumo said in a statement —  though Goldman told TechCrunch its participation in this week’s round isn’t confirmed.

After the latest haul, Jumo has raised $146 million in capital, according to Crunchbase.

Founded in 2015, the venture offers a full tech stack for partners to build savings, lending, and insurance products for customers in emerging markets.

Jumo is active in six markets and plans to expand to two new countries in Africa (Nigeria and Ivory Coast) and two in Asia (Bangladesh and India).

The company’s products have disbursed over $1 billion loans and served over 15 million people and small businesses, according to Jumo data.

Jumo joins a growing list of African digital-finance startups raising big money from outside investors and expanding abroad. A $200 million investment by Visa in 2019 catapulted Nigerian payments firm Interswitch  to unicorn status, the same year the company launched its Verge card product on Discover’s global network.

South African fintech startup Jumo raises second $50M+ VC round

Amazon Web Services  has entered a partnership with Safaricom — Kenya’s largest telco, ISP and mobile payment provider — in a collaboration that could spell competition between American cloud providers in Africa.

In a statement to TechCrunch,  the East African company framed the arrangement as a “strategic agreement” whereby Safaricom  will sell AWS services (primarily cloud) to its East Africa customer network.

Safaricom — whose products include the famed M-Pesa  mobile money product — will also become the first Advanced Consulting Partner for the AWS partner network in East Africa.

Partnering with Safaricom plugs AWS into the network of one East Africa’s most prominent digital companies.

Safaricom, led primarily by its M-Pesa mobile money product, holds remarkable dominance in Kenya, Africa’s 6th largest economy. M-Pesa has 20.5 million customers across a network of 176,000 agents and generates around one-fourth of Safaricom’s ≈ $2.2 billion annual revenues (2018).

M-Pesa has 80% of Kenya’s mobile money agent network, 82% of the country’s active mobile-money subscribers and transfers 80% of Kenya’s mobile-money transactions, per the latest sector statistics.

A number of Safaricom’s clients (including those it provides payments and internet services to) are companies, SMEs and startups.

The Safaricom-AWS partnership points to an emerging competition between American cloud service providers to scale in Africa by leveraging networks of local partners.

The most obvious rival to the AWS-Safaricom strategic agreement is the Microsoft -Liquid Telecom collaboration. Since 2017, MS has partnered with the Southern African digital infrastructure company to grow Microsoft’s AWS competitor product — Azure — and offer cloud services to the continent’s startups and established businesses.

More Africa-related stories @TechCrunch

• These specialized Africa VC funds are welcoming co-investors
• After VCs spend millions Nigeria restricts ride-hail motorbike taxis
• Africa e-tailer Jumia reports first full-year results post NYSE IPO
• Sokowatch raises $14M to digitize Africa’s informal B2B supply-chain
• African crowdsolving startup Zindi scales 10,000 data scientists

African tech around the ‘net

• Ethiopian ed-tech company Gebeya raises $2m funding round
• Nigerian crypto platform Bitfxt lands $15m from UK investors, Payitup parent company

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/africa-roundup-tlcom-closes-71m-fund-jumo-raises-55m-aws-partners-with-safaricom/

Stack Overflow expands its Teams service with new integrations

Most developers think of Stack Overflow as a question and answer site for their programming questions. But over the last few years, the company has also built a successful business in its Stack Overflow for Teams product, which essentially offers companies a private version of its Q&A product. Indeed, the Teams product now brings in a significant amount of revenue for the company and the new executive team at Stack Overflow is betting that it can help the company grow rapidly in the years to come.

To make Teams even more attractive to businesses, the company today launched a number of new integrations with Jira (Enterprise and Business), GitHub (Enterprise and Business) and Microsoft Teams (Enterprise). These join existing integrations with Slack, Okta and the Business tier of Microsoft Teams.

“I think the integrations that we have been building are reflective of that developer workflow and all of the number of tools that someone who is building and leveraging technology has to interact with,” Stack Overflow Chief Product Officer Teresa Dietrich told me. “When we think about integrations, we think about the vertical right and I think that ‘developer workflow’ is one of those industry verticals that we’re thinking about. ChatOps is obviously another one, as you can see from our Slack and Teams integration. And the JIRA and GitHub [integrations] that we’re building are really at the core of a developer workflow.”

Current Stack Overflow for Teams customers include the likes of Microsoft, Expensify and Wix. As the company noted, 65 percent of its existing Teams customers use GitHub, so it’s no surprise that it is building out this integration.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/stack-overflow-expands-its-teams-service-with-new-integrations/

Amazon makes its same-day delivery service faster in select U.S. cities

Amazon this morning announced another step it’s taken to speed up same-day deliveries. The company has installed what it’s calling “mini-fulfillment centers” closer to where customers live in select U.S. markets, including Philadelphia, Phoenix, Orlando, and Dallas. The new facilities allow Amazon to reduce same-day delivery times down to just a few hours for Prime members in those areas.

Shoppers will be able to order from up to 3 million items across dozens of categories, where they’re marked as “Today by.” This is slightly different from how other same-day services operate, as they require you to fill a cart and pick a time slot for delivery. Prime members will instead be able to view how quickly a given item can arrive on their doorstep as they’re browsing Amazon.com.

This also allows customers to shop throughout the day, rather than having to hop online in the morning to reserve an afternoon or evening time slot, for example. In addition, Amazon says Prime members can order as late as midnight to receive packages on their doorstep by the next morning by choosing the “overnight by 8 AM” delivery option. In these cases, drivers will arrive between 4:30 AM and 8 AM — meaning packages will arrive before customers have to leave for work, in some cases.

Amazon touts, too, that having facilities closer to customers will help it to reduce its carbon footprint as drivers won’t have to travel as far in order to make their deliveries. The company claims it will help reduce aircraft transport as well.

The move is meant to help Amazon better compete against rivals like Walmart and Target, both of which leverage their local stores to make online ordering, followed by either curbside pickup or delivery, more convenient for customers. Walmart, for example, has a store within 10 miles of 90% of the U.S. population. That’s been one of its competitive advantages against Amazon, which has many of its fulfillment centers located outside the cities they serve. This has been particularly helpful when it comes to competing in online grocery, which later forced Amazon to snap up Whole Foods in order to have square footage closer to its customers.

Amazon said last year it was working to reduce the delay on Prime shipping, promising it would bring Prime from 2-day delivery down to just one. By placing mini-fulfillment centers in local markets, it’s taking steps to being able to serve Prime members even more quickly.

Today, Amazon offers same-day delivery to Prime members on orders over $35 or with a $2.99 delivery fee for orders under $35.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/amazon-makes-its-same-day-delivery-service-faster-in-select-u-s-cities/

Honeywell says it will soon launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer

“The best-kept secret in quantum computing.” That’s what Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) CEO Ilyas Khan called Honeywell‘s efforts in building the world’s most powerful quantum computer. In a race where most of the major players are vying for attention, Honeywell has quietly worked on its efforts for the last few years (and under strict NDA’s, it seems). But today, the company announced a major breakthrough that it claims will allow it to launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer within the next three months.

In addition, Honeywell also today announced that it has made strategic investments in CQC and Zapata Computing, both of which focus on the software side of quantum computing. The company has also partnered with JPMorgan Chase to develop quantum algorithms using Honeywell’s quantum computer. The company also recently announced a partnership with Microsoft.

Honeywell has long built the kind of complex control systems that power many of the world’s largest industrial sites. It’s that kind of experience, be that that has now allowed it to build an advanced ion trap that is at the core of its efforts.

This ion trap, the company claims in a paper that accompanies today’s announcement, has allowed the team to achieve decoherence times that are significantly longer than those of its competitors.

“It starts really with the heritage that Honeywell had to work from,” Tony Uttley, the president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions, told me. “And we, because of our businesses within aerospace and defense and our business in oil and gas — with solutions that have to do with the integration of complex control systems because of our chemicals and materials businesses — we had all of the underlying pieces for quantum computing, which are just fabulously different from classical computing. You need to have ultra-high vacuum system capabilities. You need to have cryogenic capabilities. You need to have precision control. You need to have lasers and photonic capabilities. You have to have magnetic and vibrational stability capabilities. And for us, we had our own foundry and so we are able to literally design our architecture from the trap up.”

The result of this is a quantum computer that promises to achieve a quantum Volume of 64. Quantum Volume (QV), it’s worth mentioning, is a metric that takes into account both the number of qubits in a system as well as decoherence times. IBM and others have championed this metric as a way to, at least for now, compare the power of various quantum computers.

So far, IBM’s own machines have achieved QV 32, which would make Honeywell’s machine significantly more powerful.

Khan, whose company provides software tools for quantum computing and was one of the first to work with Honeywell on this project, also noted that the focus on the ion trap is giving Honeywell a bit of an advantage. “I think that the choice of the ion trap approach by Honeywell is a reflection of a very deliberate focus on the quality of qubit rather than the number of qubits, which I think is fairly sophisticated,” he said. “Until recently, the headline was always growth, the number of qubits running.”

The Honeywell team noted that many of its current customers are also likely users of its quantum solutions. These customers, after all, are working on exactly the kind of problems in chemistry or material science that quantum computing, at least in its earliest forms, is uniquely suited for.

Currently, Honeywell has about 100 scientists, engineers and developers dedicated to its quantum project.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/honeywell-says-it-will-soon-launch-the-worlds-most-powerful-quantum-computer/