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Kraken buys UK Crypto Platform in Mega Deal

Charlotte Henry ·

LONDON – Kraken, the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency trading platform, has acquired UK crypto platform Crypto Facilities.  The specific value of the deal is not known, but Yahoo Finance reported it is at least $100 million. This makes it one of the largest ever seen in the crypto industry, despite its current slowdown.

London-headquartered Crypto Facilities offers futures contracts for leading cryptos such as bitcoin and ethereum. Its data is also used to help calculate CME Group’s bitcoin reference rate. The company is regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. Kraken CEO Jesse Powell said in a release: “We are excited to introduce eligible clients to these industry leading futures and index products.

 

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How Populism is Taking on Tech

Charlotte Henry ·

Populism has dramatically shifted global politics in recent years. Tech companies, particularly Amazon, have not been immune. Populism led to political pressure on the online retail giant, both in the U.S. and in India, as looked it searched for a second HQ and expanded into a new market. Bloomberg News looked at what happened.

Amazon thought it had secured a warm welcome in New York and forged strong political ties in India. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo pledged during the HQ2 bakeoff to change his first name to “Amazon” and threw all of his political weight behind the deal. In India, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos met repeatedly with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in both Delhi and Washington and bragged on Twitter that he was “excited to keep investing and growing” in the country. In both cases, populism is now trumping politics. The political forces that are tilting elections and anointing new heroes on the left and right are now ensnaring one of the world’s largest companies.

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You Can Download the National Parks' Typeface

Andrew Orr ·

National Parks use a distinct typeface, featuring round edges in all caps carved into wooden signs. And now you can download it.

Shellhorn, who was on sabbatical from his current job as an associate professor of design at the University of Kansas, was redesigning the park’s newspaper and wanted to include the type found on National Park signs. But he soon discovered there was no digital typeface because the letters are simply formed with a CNC router in the park’s sign shop, chiseled into wood. The shape of the letters were determined by the size of the router bit.

Although it sounds like the typeface wasn’t intentionally designed, it’s a good choice for signage because of the legibility due to all capital letters and wide kerning.

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The Original Storyboard for Apple's 1984 Super Bowl Commercial

Charlotte Henry ·

As ever the morning after the Super Bowl, there is as much chatter about the adverts as there is about the football. Aside from the Game of Thrones/Bud Light tie-up, the ad spots during Super Bowl LIII were as uninspiring as large parts of the low-scoring match. Time to reflect then on the most iconic Super Bowl commercial of all time then – Apple’s 1984 clip. Business Insider posted the original storyboard and ideas behind the commercial.

Before the ad was even filmed, Apple’s ad agency needed buy-in from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and then-CEO John Sculley. The tech executives were shown a storyboard, or a series of pictures that describe what the ad would look like when it was actually filmed. The ad men were nervous – especially when Jay Chiat, an executive at Apple’s ad agency, was tearing up every idea before they were finished. But it turns out that Jobs loved the idea when they showed it to him.”

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Your Health Data is Turned Into a Risk Score and Sold

Andrew Orr ·

Yet another reason why we need privacy laws. Companies collect your health data and turn it into a “risk score” which gets sold to doctors, insurers, and hospitals.

Over the past year, powerful companies such as LexisNexis have begun hoovering up the data from insurance claims, digital health records, housing records, and even information about a patient’s friends, family and roommates, without telling the patient they are accessing the information, and creating risk scores for health care providers and insurers.

There is no law against collecting and using this data.

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3 Things Apple Does That Keep Annoying Us

John Martellaro ·

Dan Moren at Macworld reminds us that there are some Apple practices that continue to greatly annoy customers. In this case it’s all about revenue, and the argument is that Apple could please us greatly for not much loss of income. But at least we have a choice: buy or not buy.