Lifeboat Foundation

Medical tech company Viz.ai, a developer of an AI-powered stroke detection and care platform, has pulled in a new investment of $100 million at a valuation of $1.2 billion, making it Israel’s newest unicorn (a private company valued at over $1 billion).

The company said Thursday that the Series D funding will be used to expand the Viz platform to detect and triage additional diseases and grow its customer base globally.

Viz.ai’s newest round was led by Tiger Global Management, a New York-based investment firm focused on software and financial tech, and Insight Partners, a VC and private equity firm also based in New York. Tiger Global has invested in Israeli companies such as cybersecurity companies Snyk and SentinelOne as well as payroll tech companies Papaya Global and HoneyBook. Insight Partners is a very active foreign investor in Israeli companies, with at least 76 local portfolio startups to its name including privacy startup PlainID, bee tech startup Beewise, and music tech startup JoyTunes.

A banking trojan for Android that researchers call Fakecalls comes with a powerful capability that enables it to take over calls to a bank’s customer support number and connect the victim directly with the cybercriminals operating the malware.

Disguised as a mobile app from a popular bank, Fakecalls displays all the marks of the entity it impersonates, including the official logo and the customer support number.

When the victim tries to call the bank, the malware breaks the connection and shows its call screen, which is almost indistinguishable from the real one.

What follows is one of the most fascinating and eye-opening conversations I’ve had about crypto. We cover America’s casino mindset, the echoes of the financial crisis she’s sensing right now, how to regulate crypto, and how to innovate without exploiting others. Allen offers a lacerating but level-headed criticism of the space that is well worth your time.

Charlie Warzel: Your essay is about DeFi, or decentralized finance. Like a lot of terminology in the crypto space, DeFi is pretty broad and vague but also very much accepted in the lexicon. How do you define it?

Hilary J. Allen: Like any evolving space, the terminology is hard to pin down. People inside the crypto world have different definitions for DeFi and would probably argue with mine. But the way I think of DeFi is as a way to describe any analogue of traditional financial-service transactions—loans, deposits, etc.—that are provided using technological tools like the blockchain or facilitated through smart contracts or stablecoins. The technology is what is different, but the financial transactions are very much similar to traditional finance.

ABOUT PETER DIAMANDIS

Peter is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, and has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He is also the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including his latest, Life Force, which he published early in 2020 with Tony Robbins.

Peter joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to discuss transformational changes needed in education, how the pandemic accelerated global trends, and the astonishing medical and health technologies he believes will be widely available, sooner than you think.

Hackers so far are focusing on decentralized finance (DeFi) projects to steal crypto this year, a new report found, a reversal from 2021 when they used scams and online fraud for most of their exploits.

So far, investors have lost over $1.22 billion to hackers in the first three months of the year, nearly eight times more than the $154 million lost in the first quarter of 2021, according to crypto security firm Immunefi. Ninety-nine percent of those losses were from software exploits, the report found, specifically the hacks against Wormhole and Ronin.

This is not an anomaly, experts warn. It’s likely this kind of nefarious activity will become more common, while scamming of investors could wane.

As an investor in emerging technology and a nascent observer of Web3, I’ve spent some time researching this phenomena that has brought many skeptics to the fore, in the midst of whales, and dare I say, a handful Crypto and NFT Kool-Aid drinkers, who have amassed fortunes in the process.

I get that the current web needs some serious fixing. If anything, Web2 has continued to tighten and centralize more control in the hands of Big Tech, governments, and financial institutions. The publishing industry is dying as FB and Google have all but severed the revenue streams for the Guardian, now Buzzfeed and New York Times, relegating these once-giants to plead for monthly donations to stay afloat.

The mortgage crash of 2008 gave rise to Bitcoin, with the promise to separate the financial system from the powers of a sovereign nation, effectively democratizing wealth and financial control for each individual on the planet. And while the last decade has seen an explosive growth in Bitcoin valuation, the extreme volatility within its expensive financial system has kept the mainstream at bay.

Innovations in computing tech have improved the accuracy of DNA synthesis and enabled synthetic biology to work in the real world.

I don’t know about you, but I’m constantly looking for the “next big thing” in the stock market. And I think synthetic biology might just be it.

Why? If you invested just $10,000 into any of those world-changing stocks back in their early days, you’d have MILLIONS today. Forget the Iraq War, the housing crash, the European debt crisis. Forget the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. Through it all, you’d have millions today.

Continue reading “The Biggest Revolution Since the Computer Is Here — Synthetic Biology 🧫” »

A U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts safely landed in Kazakhstan after leaving the International Space Station aboard the same capsule despite heightened antagonism between Moscow and Washington over the conflict in Ukraine.

#Space #RussianCosmonauts #USastronaut #News #Reuters.

Continue reading “U.S. & Russian crew return to Earth from ISS” »

US home prices have soared to new heights and they keep on climbing, and some researchers and economists say they have seen signs of a housing bubble brewing.

Home prices are rising faster than market forces would indicate they should and are becoming “unhinged from fundamentals,” according to a new blog post written by researchers and economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Until recently, the possibility of a bubble wasn’t widely supported. But after looking at housing markets across the US, the Fed researchers said new evidence is emerging.