Survey data from Grayscale Investments shows the coronavirus pandemic played a role in new investors’ decision to buy Bitcoin.
“If I’m wrong about these things I would love to be corrected,” said Dalio.
Price appreciation in all cryptocurrencies this month is a factor behind the growth, but so are inflows.
Read more Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio asked for and received a heaping dose of “radical candor” Tuesday.
Read more Outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump has nominated Acting Comptroller Brian Brooks to take on a more permanent role leading the bank regulator.
Read more Cynthia Lummis, who won an open U.S. Senate seat in Wyoming, wants to explain bitcoin’s value to her new colleagues.
Read more Bitcoin is at price levels not seen since 2017, and it is outperforming ether in November.
Read more Chris Krebs, one of the most senior cybersecurity officials in the U.S. government, has been fired.
Krebs served as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) since its founding in November 2018 until he was removed from his position on Tuesday. It’s not immediately clear who is currently heading the agency. A spokesperson for CISA did not immediately comment.
President Trump fired Krebs in a tweet late on Tuesday, citing a statement published by CISA last week, which found there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Trump, who has repeatedly made claims of voter fraud without providing evidence, alleged that CISA’s statement was “highly inaccurate.”
Shortly after, Twitter labeled Trump’s tweet for making a “disputed” claim about election fraud.
Reuters first reported the news of Krebs’ potential firing last week.
Krebs was appointed by President Trump to head the newly created cybersecurity agency in November 2018, just days after the conclusion of the midterm elections. He previously served as an undersecretary for CISA’s predecessor, the National Protection and Programs Directorate, and also held cybersecurity policy roles at Microsoft.
During his time in government, Krebs became one of the most vocal voices in election security, taking the lead during 2018 and in 2020, which largely escaped from disruptive cyberattacks, thanks to efforts to prepare for cyberattacks and misinformation that plagued the 2016 presidential election.
He was “one of the few people in this administration respected by everyone on both sides of the aisle,” said Sen. Mark Warner, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a tweet.
Krebs is the latest official to leave CISA in the past year. Brian Harrell, who oversaw infrastructure protection at the agency, resigned in August after less than a year on the job, and Jeanette Manfra left for a role at Google at the end of last year. Cyberscoop reported Thursday that Bryan Ware, CISA’s assistant director for cybersecurity, resigned for a position in the private sector.
Seldon is a U.K. startup that specializes in the rarified world of development tools to optimize machine learning. What does this mean? Well, dear reader, it means that the “AI” that companies are so fond of trumpeting does actually end up working.
It has now raised a £7.1 million Series A round co-led by AlbionVC and Cambridge Innovation Capital . The round also includes significant participation from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners and Global Brain, with follow-on investment from other existing shareholders. The £7.1 million funding will be used to accelerate R&D and drive commercial expansion, take Seldon Deploy — a new enterprise solution — to market and double the size of the team over the next 18 months.
More accurately, Seldon is a cloud-agnostic machine learning (ML) deployment specialist which works in partnership with industry leaders such as Google, Red Hat, IBM and Amazon Web Services.
Key to its success is that its open-source project Seldon Core has more than 700,000 models deployed to date, drastically reducing friction for users deploying ML models. The startup says its customers are getting productivity gains of as much as 92% as a result of utilizing Seldon’s product portfolio.
Alex Housley, CEO and founder of Seldon speaking to TechCrunch explained that companies are using machine learning across thousands of use cases today, “but the model actually only generates real value when it’s actually running inside a real-world application.”
“So what we’ve seen emerge over these last few years are companies that specialize in specific parts of the machine learning pipeline, such as training version control features. And in our case we’re focusing on deployment. So what this means is that organizations can now build a fully bespoke AI platform that suits their needs, so they can gain a competitive advantage,” he said.
In addition, he said Seldon’s open-source model means that companies are not locked-in: “They want to avoid locking as well they want to use tools from various different vendors. So this kind of intersection between machine learning, DevOps and cloud-native tooling is really accelerating a lot of innovation across enterprise and also within startups and growth-stage companies.”
Nadine Torbey, an investor at AlbionVC, added: “Seldon is at the forefront of the next wave of tech innovation, and the leadership team are true visionaries. Seldon has been able to build an impressive open-source community and add immediate productivity value to some of the world’s leading companies.”
Vin Lingathoti, partner at Cambridge Innovation Capital, said: “Machine learning has rapidly shifted from a nice-to-have to a must-have for enterprises across all industries. Seldon’s open-source platform operationalizes ML model development and accelerates the time-to-market by eliminating the pain points involved in developing, deploying and monitoring machine learning models at scale.”
The musician’s life is rarely an easy one. That goes double for these last, oh, eight or so months. Most artists who haven’t risen the ranks to rock-star levels make the lion’s share of their money from live shows, and that’s just not in the cards for now — and likely won’t be for some time.
Bandcamp has been something of a lifesaver for many artists who make fractions of a cent on streaming revenue. Among other things, the site has set up the wildly popular Bandcamp Fridays, wherein it waves its fees for one week a month. Now it’s getting into live streaming, as musicians look for ways to offer remote performances for fans.
The service is pretty well positioned to offer the feature. For one thing, it’s got goodwill going for it. For another, integration with existing services means fans get notified when a show is coming up. And all their goods are offered up for sale during the shows as a kind of virtual merch table where they can buy swag while still watching the performance.
The setup process is pretty bare bones and there’s even an optional chat on board, if the artist wants to engage in a bit of banter. Honestly, the most appealing thing here is probably the low overhead. Musicians set their own prices, there are none of the usual surprise fees and Bandcamp only takes 10% off the top — a fee it’s waiving altogether through March of next year.
The service has already lined up a bunch of high-profile indie acts, including Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Pedro the Lion and Cloud Nothings. The feature is rolling out to users starting today.