Lifeboat Foundation

Conversational AI is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that allows consumers to interact with computer applications as if they were interacting with another human. According to Deloitte, the global conversational AI market is set to grow by 22% between 2022 and 2025 and is estimated to reach $14 billion by 2025.

Providing enhanced language customizations to cater to a highly diverse and vast group of hyper-local audiences, many practical applications of this include financial services, hospital wards and conferences, and can take the form of a translation app or a chatbot. According to Gartner, 70% of white-collar workers purportedly regularly interact with conversational platforms, but this is just a drop in the ocean of what can unfold this decade.

Despite the exciting potential within the AI space, there is one significant hurdle; the data used to train conversational AI models does not adequately account for the subtleties of dialect, language, speech patterns and inflection.

Revolut founder Nik Storonsky appears to have named the CEO of his AI-powered venture capital firm Quantum Light Capital.

Ilya Kondrashov, most recently the founder and advisor to Dubai-based family office Five8 Foundation, joined Quantum Light Capital as its chief executive this month, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Before Five8, Kondrashov held executive positions and founded small business credit startup MarketFinance, which was backed by banking giant Barclays and venture capital firm Northzone. On his Twitter page, he describes himself as an “entrepreneur and investor”, with interests in fintech, SaaS and Web3.

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Deepfakes aren’t new, but this AI-powered technology has emerged as a pervasive threat in spreading misinformation and increasing identity fraud. The pandemic made matters worse by creating the ideal conditions for bad actors to take advantage of organizations’ and consumers’ blindspots, further exacerbating fraud and identity theft. Fraud stemming from deepfakes spiked during the pandemic, and poses significant challenges for financial institutions and fintechs that need to accurately authenticate and verify identities.

As cybercriminals continue to use tools like deepfakes to fool identity verification solutions and gain unauthorized access to digital assets and online accounts, it’s essential for organizations to automate the identity verification process to better detect and combat fraud.

Excerpt from an interview by Rich Roll to Peter Diamandis, founder and executive officer of XPrize Foundation, co-founder of Singularity University in Silicon Valley, CA., three-time best selling author, public speaker, philanthropist, and prolific investor.

Peter Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education.

Continue reading “Peter Diamandis on Longevity Escape Velocity (clip from Rich Roll Podcast) (S/T en Español)” »

Researchers have found a spike in ransomware, banking trojans and other cyber-attacks across the globe including in India and as per recent data from Japanese cybersecurity firm, Trend Micro. The data showed that India ranks third in terms of Emotet attacks, a kind of malware originally designed as a banking Trojan and is aimed at stealing financial data.

Data from Trend Micro shows that Emotet has continued to thrive in 2022. The first half of 2022 saw a whopping 976.7% increase in Emotet detections at 148,700, compared to the first half of 2021 which was pegged at 13811.

Japan leads with 107,669, followed by the US (4,937) in the second spot and India occupying the third place (3,729) number of detection. Italy (3,442) and Brazil (3,006) are the other countries with the highest number of Emotet detections in the first half of 2022. These attacks have globally increased by over 10 times in the first half of 2022 compared to the first half of the previous year, likely because of prolific threat actors using it as part of their operations, the research said.

Marketing is one of the areas of business operations where it is widely predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will drive enormous change. In fact, a McKinsey study found that, along with sales, it is the single business function where it will have the most financial impact. This means that if you’re a marketer and you’re not using AI, you’re missing out on the benefits of what is possibly the most transformational technology.

Actually, though, the chances that there are people out there doing marketing today and not using AI in any shape or form is somewhat unlikely.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence And The Future Of Marketing” »

Y Combinator’s latest cohort of founders have opinions on the future of fintech. One-fifth of the accelerator’s Summer 2022 batch, which spans 240 companies, is working on solving issues in the financial space. The pitches range from building the Square for micro-merchants in Latin America to creating a way to angel invest in your favorite athlete.

And while the pitches are diverse, some concentrations show key ways that a group of vetted entrepreneurs are thinking about the landscape’s shift in light of finicky venture markets, a downturn, and some public market meltdowns. The most popular problem area among this batch’s fintech cohort has to do with payments, which is unsurprising. The story really begins with which focus made second place: neobanks.

Circa 2016 face_with_colon_three

The Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) with a tradition extending back to 1,845 is the largest physical society in the world with more than 61,000 members. The DPG sees itself as the forum and mouthpiece for physics and is a non-profit organisation that does not pursue financial interests. It supports the sharing of ideas and thoughts within the scientific community, fosters physics teaching and would also like to open a window to physics for all those with a healthy curiosity.

The droppers are designed to drop a new version of SharkBot, dubbed V2 by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, which features an updated command-and-control (C2) communication mechanism, a domain generation algorithm (DGA), and a fully refactored codebase.

Fox-IT said it discovered a newer version 2.25 on August 22, 2022, that introduces a function to siphon cookies when victims log in to their bank accounts, while also removing the ability to automatically reply to incoming messages with links to the malware for propagation.