<h2 id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October, the social media platform has made many tweaks to the user experience, including an overhaul to the verification process and an emphasis on “freedom of speech.”



<h2>KEY FACTS</h2>



Since Elon Musk’s highly publicized — and controversial — acquisition of Twitter in October, he’s made a series of updates to the platform, often live-tweeting them along the way.



Among the most notable changes is the overhaul to the verification process: Previously, blue checkmarks denoted public figures that the platform had independently verified, but now users can purchase a verified checkmark by subscribing to <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twitter Blue</a> for $8 per month.



After&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673339826212864?s=20&amp;t=6ANX0DjzIxKuKaV6BWa_Mw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">declaring</a>&nbsp;Twitter’s new policy to be “freedom of speech” in which negative or hate tweets will be “deboosted,” but not banned, Musk reinstated a number of accounts that were notably suspended, including Donald Trump,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673844996288512?s=20&amp;t=6ANX0DjzIxKuKaV6BWa_Mw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jordan Peterson and Kathy Griffin</a>&nbsp;(Musk reinstated Trump’s account after conducting a&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593767953706921985" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">poll</a>&nbsp;on Twitter — 51.8% of the 15 million respondents voted “yes” to return the former president’s account).



Each tweet now publicly displays how many views it has garnered, an update Musk made in an effort to&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601112753271209985?s=20&amp;t=wkeaG5Nb24XxhUcRRNZ4aQ" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">show</a>&nbsp;how “Twitter is much more alive than people think.”



Twitter now splits a user’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/10/23549368/twitter-for-you-page-tiktok-following-tab" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">timeline</a>&nbsp;between a TikTok-esque “for you” page, an algorithm-curated feed with tweets it thinks the user will like, and a “following” page, which consists solely of tweets that user follows.



Twitter <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/19/tech/twitter-elon-musk-deletes-policy/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">backtracked</a> from a short-lived policy banning users from sharing links to other social media platforms — after less than a day of backlash, the platform deleted the policy from its website.



<h2>NEW VERIFICATION PROCESS</h2>



One of the biggest — and most widely ridiculed — Musk-era Twitter updates is his drastic change to the verification process. Previously, blue verification badges confirmed that profiles of public figures, like celebrities, journalists or government officials, were legitimate. Those blue checks (which Twitter now refers to as “legacy” verified accounts) are still visible, but the platform has made blue checks available to anyone so long as they subscribe to&nbsp;<a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twitter Blue</a>, a service that permits users to preview new features. There’s no visual difference between the old and new blue checkmarks, which has raised concerns that people may impersonate public figures (though hovering over or tapping on the blue check reveals whether the account is subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account). Within hours of the new blue checks launching, users purchased checkmarks to impersonate people including Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Kobe Bryant,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/twitter-impersonators-paid-verification/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CNN reported</a>. A&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/11/twitter-blue-checkmark/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Washington Post</a>&nbsp;columnist got accounts impersonating comedian Blaire Erskine and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) verified within minutes. Twitter&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/11/twitter-fake-verified-accounts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">temporarily suspended</a>&nbsp;the ability to purchase a blue check the following day, pledging to address impersonation issues. Musk has said he plans to get rid of legacy verified checkmarks,&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/12/elon-says-twitter-will-remove-all-legacy-verifications-in-a-few-months/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">claiming</a>&nbsp;that the old process of verification was “corrupt and nonsensical.” In&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/tech/twitter-verification-relaunch/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">another shakeup</a>&nbsp;to the verification system, accounts owned by companies are denoted by gold checks while government entities and politicians are marked with gray checks.



<h2>CRITICISM OVER UPDATES</h2>



Musk’s changes to the platform have been criticized for a number of reasons, ranging from being unnecessary and annoying to opening the door for hate speech. The ability of anyone to purchase verification has been condemned for making it easy to impersonate public figures and spread misinformation. In January, members of the Taliban&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/17/twitter-blue-verified-taliban" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">purchased</a>blue checks, though these were later removed following backlash. Musk also&nbsp;<a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/12/17/1143796992/twitter-lifts-suspensions-on-several-journalists-amid-rift-between-the-site-and-" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">came under fire</a>&nbsp;in December after Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists who were critical of his ownership of the company (Musk&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603600001057185792" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tweeted</a>&nbsp;these accounts “doxxed my exact location in real time”), though these accounts were later reinstated. Criticisms of the verification process as well as Musk’s massive layoffs have prompted more than 500 advertisers to pause spending on Twitter,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twitter-manager-daily-revenue-has-dropped-40-500-top-advertisers-have-left" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Information reported</a>, causing a 40% drop in daily revenue. Some popular Twitter influencers&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/musk-making-twitter-worse-say-top-influencers-platform-rcna63606" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told NBC News</a>&nbsp;that daily use of the platform has gotten worse under Musk’s leadership, including an influx of hate speech in light of its new emphasis on freedom of speech, as well as an uptick in technical glitches as the company’s staff has been halved. These influencers — including Matt Nelson, who runs “<a href="https://twitter.com/dog_rates?s=20&amp;t=4h2872WW1RY106CSjpj1XA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">We Rate Dogs</a>,” an account with 9.3 million followers — told NBC News the verified notifications feature, which displays notifications received by verified accounts, is no longer useful as anyone can pay for a blue checkmark. The default “for you” feed has also&nbsp;<a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/01/13/twitter-faces-wave-complaints-tiktok-style-reboot/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">angered</a>&nbsp;some users who find the update unnecessary and now see tweets they are uninterested in. LGBTQ advocacy groups have also alleged that the platform’s “freedom of speech” approach is worsening anti-transgender speech on the platform. Among the accounts reinstated under Musk’s tenure are the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire news site, and author Jordan Peterson, who has previously made transphobic tweets,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-22/twitter-restores-anti-trans-accounts-and-fuels-hate-groups-say" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bloomberg reported.</a>



<h2>WHAT TO WATCH FOR</h2>



Musk has discussed future updates that have yet to debut on the platform. He will increase the current 280 character limit to 4,000 in February — a massive increase for the platform long known for its brevity — and users will soon be able to use formatting features like bold, underline, and font sizes, a move Musk hopes will keep people on Twitter instead of using other websites to publish work. The company is also considering selling usernames that have been dormant for years to free up the handles and generate revenue.



<h2>KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



After months of back-and-forth and the threat of going to trial, Musk&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/technology/elon-musk-twitter-deal-complete.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">purchased</a>&nbsp;Twitter in October in a highly publicized $44 million dollar deal. He quickly slashed the company’s workforce,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/technology/elon-musk-twitter-fired-criticism.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">claiming</a>&nbsp;that it could go bankrupt and needed to become “hard core” in order to survive, and began implementing his “free speech” vision for the platform. Musk had previously&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/27/musk-twitter-attacks/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">criticized</a>&nbsp;Twitter’s prior leadership, alleging they operated the platform with a “left-wing bias.”



<h2>WHAT WE DON’T KNOW</h2>



Will Musk actually step down as CEO of Twitter? He&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1605372724800393216" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tweeted</a>&nbsp;in December he will step down when he finds someone “foolish enough” to succeed him and will then run the company’s software and servers teams. He asked via Twitter&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097?s=20&amp;t=fo6JvyaSKDLpmPKgPuAPCQ" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">poll</a>&nbsp;if he should step down, stating he would “abide by the results of this poll” — and “yes” won a clear victory, securing 57.5% of the poll’s 17.5 million votes. Musk has not provided updates or a timeline on the search for a successor since creating the poll.



<h2>FORBES VALUATION</h2>



$149.4 billion. That’s Musk’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?sh=6c332b5d7999">net worth</a>&nbsp;as of Wednesday according to the Forbes real-time net worth tracker, making him the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#776435d23d78">second-richest person</a>&nbsp;in the world behind French fashion tycoon Bernard Arnault and his family. Musk&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/12/08/elon-musk-no-longer-worlds-richest-again-as-stock-hit-by-report-of-personal-margin-loan/?sh=ca7000927733">fell</a>&nbsp;from his prior position as the world’s richest person in December.



<h2>FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/4/23438917/twitter-verifications-blue-check-elon-musk" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twitter: Five ways Elon Musk has changed the platform for users</a>&nbsp;(BBC)



<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/17/twitter-blue-verified-taliban" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twitter ‘verified’ check marks bought by Taliban appear to have been removed</a> (The Guardian)



By Conor Murray, Forbes Staff

Twitter Losing Its Most Active Users

Verification To View Counts: Here’s Every Twitter Change Under Elon Musk

The misuse of artificial intelligence and the cost of deepfakes in a post-truth era. 



By Tiana Cline



In the beginning, it was a lot of fun. Anyone could create a deepfake video to merge their face with that of a celebrity. At first, these videos were shared across social media as a parody and everyone laughed. What could be better than becoming the star of your favorite streaming series? But now the technology has evolved. It has become more sophisticated to the point where it’s not as easy to tell what is real or not. From misinformation to identity theft, deepfake porn and copyright infringements, the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) is far from entertaining – it’s an epidemic.  



“As technology&#8217;s power increases, so the ability to cause harm increases exponentially,” says Professor Johan Steyn, a Research Fellow at the School of Data Science and Computational Thinking at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Adjunct Professor at the School of Business at Woxsen University in India.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“From both a legal and a government ethics point of view, it’s a massive problem and I don’t know how it is going to be regulated. How do you present evidence to a court of law when you cannot confirm if a video or voice is authentic? There’s almost no way of proving deepfakes are authentic.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



There are currently over 80 different deepfake software apps, many of which are free and allow anyone to take advantage of the advancement of AI. Deepfakes use artificial neural networks – data pattern-recognition systems that are trained to identify (and reconstruct) patterns. The technology is mind-blowing.&nbsp;&nbsp;



It gained Miles Fisher – a Tom Cruise lookalike and AI entrepreneur – nearly four million followers on social media. His TikTok account, ‘deeptomcruise’, has unofficially made him the poster child of the deepfake movement. The person behind the videos, Chris Ume, is a Belgian visual effects artist and the co-founder of an AI-generated content company called Metaphysic.ai.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“There’s a big philosophical, ethical and societal lens to deepfakes,” adds Steyn. “We&#8217;re living in a world where we cannot trust almost anything. There are limited ways in verifying the authenticity of something and the technology that should have brought us together and empowered us with knowledge is doing the exact opposite.”&nbsp;



One of the most interesting deepfake use cases is happening in the advertising sector. Where actors were once paid undisclosed sums for appearing in TV advertisements, some agencies are resorting to using deepfakes instead – with or without their consent. An advert for a Russian telecoms company starring Bruce Willis went viral and it was reported that the actor sold his image rights. It turned out that Willis was a deepfake and the agency that made the advert (called Deepcake) simply mapped a digital version of his appearance onto another actor. If images and videos of Willis are readily available to do this, it questions how anyone can protect their own identity.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“In the future of AI, people will not be quantum physicists or machine learning engineers but philosophers and ethicists. We’re now in a post-truth era and thanks to the power of technology. You can no longer trust anything or anyone,” warns Steyn. “If you’re a critical thinker, fake news should be relatively easy to pick up. Deepfakes are more serious. What happens when a bank, for example, accepts voice as a proof of identity?”&nbsp;



The link between deepfakes and cybercrime is inevitable. Throughout Africa, phishing remains one of the continent’s biggest threats and by using deepfake technology, cybercriminals will be able to increase the effectiveness of their attacks exponentially. “Any new technology, development or technology will inevitably be exploited by criminals to target the vulnerable or unwary,” says Carl Wearn, Mimecast’s Head of Threat Intelligence Analysis and Future Ops. “The quicker they can utilize a new technology, before it is properly understood or awareness of it is raised, the more likely they are able to monetize some form of it.”&nbsp;



With deepfakes, cybercrime can be socially engineered because threat actors (posing as friends, family, or colleagues) exploit the inherent trust that comes with interpersonal relationships. “Deepfakes are at their core seeking to exploit key relationships to compel action,” adds Wearn. “As the technology matures – aided by machine learning and AI – this will almost certainly become indistinguishable to the real thing for ordinary humans when undertaking virtual or telephony-communication medium reliant interactions.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



Deepfakes scams are increasing. They’re not only being used in cyberbullying and smear campaigns to harass and silence individuals; synthetic identity fraud can cost businesses and government millions. “People are, for example, edited into a humiliating video that is then spread on social media highlights the risk for public figures and activists,” says Vladislav Tushkanov, a Lead Data Scientist at Kaspersky. Scammers recently used a deepfake interview with Elon Musk to promote a cryptocurrency scam called BitVex. The CEO of a British energy firm was tricked out of $243,000 by a voice deepfake from the head of his parent company requesting an emergency transfer of funds. And in the United Arab Emirates, bank robbers deepfaked the voice of a company executive to an unsuspecting bank manager – it was reported that he recognized the voice and then authorized a transfer of $35 million.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“Deepfakes can significantly undermine trust in audio and video content,” adds Tushkanov. “Deepfakes, and mis- and disinformation, is a rising concern around the globe. It is particularly worrying that deepfakes can be used to incite violence and stoke civil unrest. This places high importance on public education and raising awareness about this technology, as well as furthering digital literacy.”  



<h2 id="h-how-to-spot-a-deepfake">How to spot a deepfake?&nbsp;</h2>



“It all starts by having good cybersecurity procedures and practices in place – not only in the form of antivirus software, but also in the form of developed IT skills and cybersecurity awareness of the employees,” says Tushkanov. “The following are key characteristics of deepfake videos to be aware of and look out for, to avoid becoming a victim: jerky movement; shifts in lighting from one frame to the next; shifts in skin tone; strange blinking or no blinking at all; lips poorly synched with speech; digital artifacts in the image; and video is intentionally encoded down in quality with poor lighting.”

3D virtual reality space and people

When Seeing Is No Longer Believing: An African Take On The Cost Of Deepfakes

When award-winning artwork can be generated by algorithms, where does that leave artists?



By Tiana Cline 



What is an artist? In the age of artificial intelligence, machine learning and text-to-image tools, it’s questionable. Anyone with a computer can generate stunning images in seconds thanks to tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Craiyon. These algorithmic programs, which work with text prompts and data sets, are already starting to shift the creative economy. In August 2022, an American game designer named Jason Allen won first place at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. His award-winning work – which has been described as ‘Renaissance meets steampunk’ – was created using Midjourney. And even though the category in which Allen came first was ‘digital arts/digitally-manipulated photography’, it left a lot of people in the creative world angry, questioning whether this kind of AI-generated art could replace human artists.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“There&#8217;s no doubt that the whole visual world is totally oversaturated with imagery. I know a lot of people who do AI art. I see it on Instagram or Facebook and some of the images have stuck in my head,” says Roger Ballen, an American artist who lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. “So, I think they’re successful from the point of view of conveying an aesthetic message from one person to another. And how they were able to achieve this, is this important or not important?”&nbsp;&nbsp;



For some industries, AI-generated art is simply a natural progression of where we’re heading – it’s a key part of Web3, the metaverse and how AI algorithms can be integrated into different industries. According to Midjourney founder David Holz, business owners, game designers and people in the movie industry use the tool for storyboarding, strategy and content development. But that’s not where AI-art ends. The Economist used Midjourney to produce one of its 2022 covers and The Atlantic chose AI-generated art for an editorial in lieu of hiring an illustrator – going so far as to credit Midjourney as the artist.&nbsp;&nbsp;



For Ballen, AI-generated art is similar to a computer beating a world chess champion – it’s inevitable. “You look at the work that&#8217;s been done and some of it is amazing. This is where we&#8217;re going – going into a world where our lives and viewpoints and experiences are more virtual rather than physical and it’s happening at an accelerating pace, he says. “I’ve been doing photography for 54 years now. When I started, you needed to go to university and there was a lot of training that took place to get there. Now anyone can do photography. For one photograph that was produced 30 years ago, there may be 50,000 now.”&nbsp;



Plagiarism by machine&nbsp;



There are many ethical considerations around creating (and selling) AI-generated art. AI often reflects human bias which means that the images contained in online datasets are subjective to what is available online.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Ballen questions being able to put a price on an artwork when the material comes from endless sources. He also asks if there is a difference between using an image of a tree (as one example) or from a well-known artist. “Some of these people are trying to produce works of art but actually, the work itself isn&#8217;t necessarily theirs – it&#8217;s an amalgamation of other people&#8217;s work compiled by a computer. So, the issue then is can that person sell it as their own when it&#8217;s ultimately other people&#8217;s work?”&nbsp;



Joh Del, a Cape Town-based artist and illustrator’s understanding that that all artists learn from other pieces of art – both human and AI. “Every time you put something out into the world, someone else can see it, and learn from it. I think almost all species of animals on earth learn from each other,” says Del.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Mikhael Subotzky, an award-winning artist based in South Africa, doesn’t see AI-generated art as something fundamentally new or different. “I think that the power and relevance of art is that its boundaries are always expanding – there should be space for every kind of art,” he says. For Subotzky, the trickiest issue is copyright. “There really should be a way for artists to opt in or out of the algorithms learning from their work. Or even a royalty system where they get a cent or whatever for every time their work is used in this way. Of course, this would require a fundamental change in how images circulate. I wish that the blockchain crowd would focus on this type of thing rather than the latest NFT prices.”&nbsp;



For now, the law is yet to catch up with the advances in AI technology. Under copyright law, copyright depends on human input and AI-generated art is made by machine. In order to avoid future legal issues, Getty Images has banned the sale of AI generative artwork created using image synthesis models. “In one way, it’s an image that somebody initiated to put on a wall and show other people and on the other hand, it’s a mixture of other people’s property. In the commercial world you have copyrights, you have patents, you have rights of property and with this, it’s not as clear because it’s a mishmash of thousands of things that are put together into an artwork,” says Ballen. “You have to look at the image itself. You have to deal with the aesthetics in the image, the message in the image, the type of artwork, where the information came from, how it was put together – there&#8217;s all sorts of things that make it almost impossible to come up with a clear answer… where this ends and where it begins, I don’t know.” 



But Is It Art?&nbsp;



“I’m the type of person who believes in the autonomy of the work, that you don’t necessarily need to know anything about the artist, the place, the time – anything,” says Roger Ballen. “It doesn&#8217;t matter whether you know anything about anything. Art should be like coming into contact with a flower. All of a sudden, you smell it, you feel it, the color leaves an imprint on you and you don’t necessarily need to be a botanist, all that matters is the experience of the art itself.”&nbsp;&nbsp;

Screenshot 2023-01-13 at 19.07.53

The Rise Of AI Art: An African Perspective

While researchers applaud Amazon’s safeguards to ensure the tech is safe for kids, some experts are concerned that generative AI could lead children to believe these algorithms are more intelligent than they actually are.



Generative AI, which is known for churning out fantastical art based on text prompts, is now sneaking into one of the most sacred bonding experiences for parents and children: bedtime storytelling.



Amazon is hopping into the generative AI craze with a new Alexa feature that creates short, five-scene stories for kids based on a few prompts. Called ‘Create With Alexa,’ the feature lets children and parents select from given themes like underwater, enchanted forest and space exploration and pick a character, a descriptive word and a color. Then, they sit back and wait as the AI comes up with different stories, visuals, audio dialogues and background music.



With Amazon hopping aboard the generative AI craze, some experts say that the company has created safeguards to ensure that the technology isn’t spouting anything inappropriate for young ears, and Create With Alexa could help foster more shared experiences for children and parents. But AI researchers also warn that stories made with generative AI could mystify children’s understanding of AI’s capabilities and intelligence.



The feature, which is available on Echo Show devices, relies on generative AI, algorithms that use existing content to create new content. Specifically, it implements language models, which ingest large amounts of text to learn how to create sentences similar to how people talk. The algorithm that powers Create With Alexa is trained on a database of commercially available visuals as well as Amazon’s own proprietary content.



Eshan Bhatnagar, head of product for Alexa AI at Amazon, says that Create With Alexa was designed with safety in mind. The technology has three safeguards in place, including content filtering, training the AI on a curated dataset that is free of toxic content, and most importantly, setting up a structured and restricted experience. “We wanted to avoid the garbage in garbage out kind of tendency of AI,” says Bhatnagar, referencing the likelihood of AI to render improper content based on the type of inputs fed into it. “We are being cautious, and conservative in our approach to how we want to expose some of the generative capabilities to our customers.”



Stefania Druga, a researcher on creative AI at the University of Washington, says Amazon’s decision to build Alexa’s new storytelling feature by structuring it around a few input prompts that ask users to select from a given set of templates can help make generative AI safer for kids. “I think this approach of providing curated templates, and really trying to curate the experience and control the types of generations that can be entered into the system is very promising,” Druga told Forbes.



But these safeguards can’t fully protect kids from the influence of intelligent computer systems like Alexa. Druga found in her research paper &#8220;<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3078072.3084330" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hey Google is it OK if I eat you?&#8221; Initial Explorations in Child-Agent Interaction</a>” that interacting with voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home can influence how children understand the intelligence of computers. She says Create With Alexa could mystify the abilities of AI for children, influencing their judgments about how intelligent the computer actually is and whether it’s a trustworthy source.



“What I’ve seen in my research is that the kids don&#8217;t even know how to read and write when they start interacting with a voice assistant. And if that&#8217;s their first introduction into searching anything on the web, that really colors their experience on how they process information,” Druga says. “Because if it&#8217;s spoken to them with a nice voice as a human would talk, they don&#8217;t really see that this is just like the first result from a search on the web, then it&#8217;s harder to develop this critical sense of whether they should trust this or not.”



Rather than showcasing generative AI as a magical and all-knowing technology, it should be seen as a technology that can be tinkered with and used to further a craft, Druga says. In order to do so, it’s also important to make sure children understand the technology and know what is happening under the hood. “I think it&#8217;s important to not give them these applications and content already pre-chewed but also to give them tools of creation with this technology,” she says.



Sandra Cortesi, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet &amp; Society at Harvard University, says that parents should steer clear of technologies that would make their children passively consume media. In the case of Create With Alexa, Cortesi questions whether parents want to expose their children to more screen time in the form of video storytelling. “I prefer technologies that have some kind of active character to it than just another thing where you watch and consume,” says Cortesi.



This isn’t the first time Amazon has ventured into storytelling technology. In 2017, the company launched Magic Door, an interactive adventure game that lets users decide each step of a story. The nonlinear experience doesn’t use any kind of AI but has 200 different scenes. Similar to ‘Create With Alexa,’ it gives users the agency to choose prompts such as settings like forests, seas, and enchanted lands and decide which scene will appear next. Earlier this year, Amazon also launched CodeWhisperer, a machine learning-powered coding assistant.



Over the last year, high-profile startups have launched buzzy text-to-image generative AI models like Dall-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, which have captured the imaginations of millions on social media. Startups behind these types of algorithms such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2022/09/07/stability-ai-funding-round-1-billion-valuation-stable-diffusion-text-to-image/?sh=1486bf0d24d6">Stability AI</a>and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2022/12/05/runway-ml-series-c-funding-500-million-valuation/?sh=330de10a2e64">Runway ML</a>&nbsp;have raised tens of millions of dollars in venture funding and garnered high valuations. OpenAI, the company that released Dall-E 2, unveiled ChatGPT last week, a chatbot that is able to write essays, code and provide detailed (but sometimes inaccurate) answers to questions.



These companies use machine learning to generate new text and image content rather than combining the two in a video format as Amazon Alexa has done. But other generative AI tools focus on storytelling, including&nbsp;<a href="https://www.storywizard.ai/?ref=producthunt" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Storywizard AI</a>, which uses generative AI to create stories with images based on plots that illustrate moral concepts like friendship and overcoming fear, and Novel AI, which touts itself as “a GPT-powered sandbox for your imagination.”



Storytelling that uses generative AI can be a means of inspiration and creativity among children. Cortesi says that the stories produced by generative AI could inspire users to build fanfiction communities online and create additional stories that build on what the AI produces.



Amazon Alexa’s Bhatnagar says the tablet will never replace the storybook; instead, it will augment the experience. Cortesi adds that traditional storytelling is far from being thrown out for a digital version.



“For parents and children, stories are something we can be nostalgic about,” says Cortesi. “I still remember when my parents told me stories.”



“I hope that for parents, who already have a ton of tasks and responsibilities, they will not just give this tool to their children and say, ‘You go ahead, do the story. Good night.’&#8221;



By Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes Staff

Mother holding ill son’s hand sleeping on bed

Amazon Alexa Wants To Put Your Child To Bed With Generative AI Storytelling

Daniel Marfo is managing operations in Africa for Zipline, ensuring that life-saving medical products are sent almost instantly to inaccessible areas using drones. The company has operated 300,000 flights in Ghana and Rwanda over the last five years. Up next: Kenya and Côte d&#8217;Ivoire, also alleviating food insecurity on the continent.



When logistics system Zipline began operations in Africa, it piqued the interest of Daniel Marfo, a Ghanaian pharmacist, because he wanted to use technology to solve healthcare issues in the developing world.



He saw a chance to solve a logistical challenge; with all the roads that need constructing and maintenance in Africa, he knew infrastructure development would take too long, and so he joined Zipline in October 2018.


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It was a long road from the world of pharmaceuticals, but with the same purpose: helping save lives.



As Senior Vice President of Zipline’s operations in Africa, at 35 years old, he is leading the market efforts across the continent, expanding the company’s reach geographically and expanding the use cases for drones.



When Marfo began, he made a point to visit as many rural areas of Ghana before deploying the technology – once having to take a ferry, followed by canoes and a long hike.



“The people, they&#8217;re dependent on whatever means of transportation that exist to be able to access their medications. When we started service, and they received their first supply of medications by drone, it was remarkable, you had just changed their lives,” he says.



He refers to a small village called Gbintri in the north eastern region of Ghana. Anytime it rains, access to roads gets cut off, and the health facility shuts down.



In 2019, it was the first time the health facility didn’t shut down.



A challenge they faced was integrating a new system into an old way of operating; so Zipline created a department called systems integration, which looked at ways to merge drone technology with existing health systems and existing aviation systems.



It’s one of the hardest parts, he says, as they’re asking airspace regulators to allow hundreds of drones to fly every day.



Another challenging aspect has been community integration, as a lot of people in the rural areas have never seen a drone until now. He says the first impression of drones from people was that they were military or spy vehicles.



Marfo now takes dummy drones into the communities and uses community champions to explain the functions of the service.



When they launched the fifth center in Ghana, they were connecting to a health facility. Two elderly gentlemen happened to be sitting under a tree, enjoying the day. A drone swooped in, dropped the package, catching them by surprise, as they together exclaimed that “God had just delivered something from heaven”.



Health staff had to explain that this is the new way they receive medication – and they were still blown away.



When speaking about the potential of drone use in Africa, Marfo mentions that the airspace in Africa isn’t as busy as Europe or America – positing that in the future, Africa could have the most advanced drone network and regulatory systems.



Zipline has operated 300,000 flights in Ghana and Rwanda combined over the last five years. Usually, the flights are round trips of 100 or more kilometers.



They started using it to deliver blood in Rwanda, and realized they could use it for medical products.



When Covid hit, they delivered over a million doses of vaccines in Ghana.



In Ghana, 70,000 malaria test kits and nearly 1.3 million courses of malaria treatment were delivered partnering with Ghana’s Health Service. In five months, 5,000 malaria vaccines were transported to piloted districts by May 2022.



“In Africa, the other use case that resonated deeply with me was food security. If I can make sure that people have access to food and [their] livelihood, I&#8217;m actually fulfilling 50% of our healthcare mission.”



In January 2022, they piloted their agriculture use case, focusing on animal health, delivering semen for artificial insemination in pigs. They extended the use case to delivering animal vaccines.



He adds that they have scaled to sending nutrients for kids two years old and younger in rural areas.



“It&#8217;s just become an amazing way of how drones have morphed from being seen as a spy or a military tech to a recreational tech, and now, it&#8217;s really a life-transforming tech.”



Soon, they will open operations in Kenya, beginning with Kisumu, a port city on Lake Victoria. From there, they can reach 13 counties from one location. They are also moving to Côte d&#8217;Ivoire.



“We are very excited about our planned expansion into the Ivory Coast. It&#8217;s the first French-speaking country that we are entering…It also brings about its own set of challenges, cultural understanding and cultural integration.”



Marfo says if they want to be a truly global company, this is part of the evolution.



In June 2022, they commissioned the first distribution center in Nigeria in Kaduna State. He says the uptake of the service has been good, with medical products, vaccines and blood being distributed.



There’s been a lot of interest in agricultural use cases in Nigeria too, and they are planning to open another facility in Bayelsa State by the first quarter of 2023, as well as Cross River State. There was flooding affecting 33 out of 36 states in Nigeria by October 2022.



“No one prays for natural disasters, but in case it ever comes again, we are in a position to bring at least some relief to people during such a difficult time.”



In Rwanda, from February to November, the company introduced animal health deliveries, which now make up 17%-18% of deliveries.



“Sixty percent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa are farmers, and so, we are making sure that farmers are able to get the vaccines for the animals so that they don&#8217;t lose any of these animals, to be able to get them better semen so that they can get a better breed of animals, which generates more meat, means that we are actually changing the economy of these people&#8217;s lives.”



If the farmers are earning $10 a month from agriculture, he posits they may be earning double with the addition of drone technology. These are the use cases that excite him; technology that is not just saving lives with much-needed blood for transfusions or vaccines, but improving food security and putting more money in the hands of the people who matter, and who are the bulk of the population of the continent.



In Ghana, they also began focusing on poultry vaccines for farmers, specifically for Newcastle disease, in partnership with CowTribe – a Ghana-based for-profit organization focused on supporting livestock farmers via a mobile platform.



“Newcastle&#8217;s disease ravages about 70% of the chicken population, and it&#8217;s really terrible. But over the last few months, we&#8217;ve been able to make sure that farmers within our catchment areas have been able to get all their vaccines and they haven&#8217;t lost animals.”



For some, this is going to be the first time in years that the disease didn&#8217;t affect most of their flock. Marfo says around Christmas, farmers sell a lot of chicken and beef, and this will put more money in their pockets.



By September, Zipline and a leading e-commerce platform Jumia partnered up in Ghana to deliver retail products, with the goal of expanding into the other countries Jumia operates in.



“In increasing access for consumers, we’re also helping the small and medium businesses that use Jumia grow.”



The partnership makes Jumia’s existing logistics system more efficient and sustainable as the electric fleet reduces carbon emissions by 98% compared to delivery by car, according to Marfo.



“I think we are at that point where we did healthcare for five years, we&#8217;ve added on agriculture and even with agriculture we are just scraping the surface.”



When he began at Zipline four years ago, they were delivering a product to a health facility every four minutes. Now, they deliver every two minutes.



He wants to continue working on improving in terms of use cases, volume and scale – and make it so every minute, someone is getting a necessary or life-saving product.

Zipline Aircraft

‘Life-Transforming Tech’: Using Drones To Change Economies In Africa

<h2 id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



Twitter will relaunch Blue—its subscription service that offers verification badges to users who pay a monthly fee—on Monday, the company announced Saturday, a much-delayed move that comes more than a month after the original rollout of the service was plagued by “verified” impersonator accounts sowing chaos on the platform.



<h2>KEY FACTS</h2>



The company&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1601692766257709056?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1601692766257709056%7Ctwgr%5E3212198c03f98a379240e6ea3cb1f866cdc98ef7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2022%2F12%2F10%2F23503355%2Ftwitter-blue-verification-elon-musk-phone-number-ads" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced the relaunch in a tweet</a>, noting Twitter Blue subscriptions will cost $8 a month for those who sign up on the website and $11 per month for those who subscribe through the Twitter iPhone app.



As previously&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/11/30/twitter-blue-launch-reportedly-delayed-again-as-musk-takes-issue-with-apple-store-fees/">reported</a>, the higher price for the iPhone app subscription is to cover the cost of Apple’s 30% fee on all in-app purchases—but users who sign up on the website should be able to access all of Twitter Blue’s benefits on the app.



Subscribers will need to register their phone number with Twitter in order to receive a blue verified badge, part of an effort to combat impersonator accounts that plagued the original rollout of Twitter Blue.



Twitter Blue subscribers who change their display name, profile picture, or handle will lose their verified badge until the account is reviewed again.



Aside from the verification badge, Twitter Blue subscribers will have the ability to edit tweets, upload higher-quality videos and access a reader mode.



The company is also promising a set of upcoming perks for subscribers that includes fewer ads, the ability to post long-form videos and their accounts being boosted in search results or replies.



<h2>WHAT WE DON’T KNOW</h2>



The addition of a phone number verification process could mitigate some concerns around impersonator accounts, but it&#8217;s unclear how Twitter will use customers&#8217; phone numbers to confirm that their accounts are genuine. Twitter also hasn&#8217;t specified whether it plans to manually review all subscribers before granting a verified badge or if the process will be automated. Before Musk purchased Twitter, verification checkmarks were generally only available to people the company&nbsp;<a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/legacy-verification-policy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">deemed notable</a>, and the company often required proof of identity from a news outlet or an ID.



<h2>WHAT TO WATCH FOR</h2>



Aside from rolling out Twitter Blue once again, the platform is also set to make changes to how it displays other verified accounts.&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/1601693276225998848" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According to</a>Twitter’s Head of Product Esther Crawford verified business accounts on Twitter will soon display gold checkmarks, while government and other official accounts will carry gray checkmarks.



<h2>CRUCIAL QUOTE</h2>



In a&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601851685915095040" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cryptic tweet</a>&nbsp;early on Sunday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk wrote: “The bots are in for a surprise tomorrow.” Although it is unclear if this is linked to the relaunch of Blue, Musk has previously pitched the service as a means to combat spam and bot accounts on the platform.



<h2>KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



Twitter first rolled out the $8 per month Twitter Blue subscription last month as part of a broader effort by the company to shore up revenue and reduce its reliance on advertisers, many of whom left over content moderation concerns. It was Twitter’s first high-profile product launch since Musk closed his purchase of the social media company in late October. The rollout was a disaster, as the platform was soon&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/11/10/twitter-tries-to-clamp-down-on-verified-impersonator-accounts-as-musk-hints-at-more-changes/?sh=4681c88b7afb">flooded by impersonator accounts</a>&nbsp;with “verified” badges which made them hard to distinguish from real high-profile accounts. Musk, who had&nbsp;<a href="https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-only-trusts-elon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ignored repeated</a>&nbsp;warnings about a rapid rollout of the service from his own trust and safety team, attempted to resolve the issue by first issuing diktats about parody accounts. The company, however, was eventually forced to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/11/11/twitter-blue-new-signups-for-paid-verification-appear-suspended-after-impersonator-chaos/?sh=3940684a385c">suspend new signups</a>&nbsp;to deal with the chaos.



<h2>FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2022/11/25/elon-musk-says-twitter-is-launching-a-new-color-coded-verification-scheme-next-week---heres-what-we-know-so-far/?sh=3d6ae307617b">Elon Musk Says Twitter Is Launching A New Color-Coded Verification Scheme Next Week — Here’s What We Know So Far</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/11/30/twitter-blue-launch-reportedly-delayed-again-as-musk-takes-issue-with-apple-store-fees/?sh=1b5a99965d9b">Twitter Blue Launch Reportedly Delayed—Again—As Musk Takes Issue With Apple Store Fees</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



By Siladitya Ray, Forbes Staff

Twitter Blue Subscription Service Relaunched Monday—Here’s Everything You Need To Know

ElonMusk has received praise for his attempts to tackle Twitter’s long-documented child exploitation problems. Yet Forbes finds many users who appear to be trading egregious illegal content.



Last week, influential podcaster Liz Wheeler, who describes herself as “unapologetically one of the conservative movement&#8217;s boldest voices,” took to Twitter to praise its new CEO, Elon Musk, for purging the site of “child pornography and child trafficking hashtags.” (Child advocates have long argued these terms indicate legitimacy and compliance on the part of the victim, and that such content should be called “child sexual abuse material.”)



“Think about how many little children he’s saving from sexual abuse, exploitation &amp; torture,” she added. Responding to Wheeler’s comments on Tuesday, Musk tweeted, “This will forever be our top priority.”



Yet such illegal material remains alarmingly easy to find on Twitter—in multiple languages. Hashtags and search terms long related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) still return lots of associated content. And recently departed Twitter employees, from the rank-and-file to the executive level, told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;the issue will be far more difficult to combat now that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2022/11/18/elon-musk-twitter-csam-lawsuit/?sh=3b76e95b3733">Musk has obliterated the teams charged with policing it</a>, as well as their institutional knowledge.



As one such team member explained: “No one is left who is an expert on these issues and can do the work. . . . It’s a ghost town.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“No one is left who is an expert on these issues and can do the work. . . . It’s a ghost town.”Recently departed Twitter executive</blockquote>



While it is true that some hashtags previously used by those trading child sexual abuse material (CSAM) appear to have been rendered useless—something for which Musk was <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/while-blue-checks-whine-about-extremism-elon-musk-protecting-sexually-exploited-children-opinion-1761383" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recently celebrated</a>—plenty have not.



In under an hour of searching on Tuesday,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;found dozens of users offering to buy and sell child sexual abuse images and videos. One offered footage of nude children ages 5 to 17. Another mentioned an exchange of images of children being abused on Telegram. Both these tweets, as well as nearly 30 others either promoting or seeking CSAM, were posted in the last week.



Simply searching the same words in banned hashtags revealed advertisements for much of the same content. One Twitter search for links to a well-known online storage platform returned a number of tweets offering videos of young boys and girls having sex with fathers and “with adult,” as well as images of “forced sex.”



Other questionable hashtags were still searchable. One containing an abbreviation long associated with CSAM returned ads, including one containing the image of what appeared to be an underage girl, offering an RFID tag that could be scanned and promised to take the user through to a CSAM-themed website.&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;also found multiple Spanish-language users offering what appeared to be images of minor girls over on Telegram, with Spanish hashtags attached.



Such posts often had other hashtags attached. These could be clicked on to reveal yet more problematic content, such as a tweet with a cartoon depiction of a minor and male genitalia, with overlaid text asking for, “anything illegal or legal. This person is horny.”



Even some hashtags that were ostensibly banned before Musk took over Twitter returned a handful of problematic results. While no new posts were visible when searching one such hashtag, one popped up from June in which a user said they were looking for images of newborns. That user was still on Twitter as of Tuesday. With only three posts, all carrying the same text and image, it’s possible they were a bot, another bugbear Musk has promised to tackle. It’s unclear why the account remains online. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“I don’t see any meaningful action taken by Musk so far.”Carolina Christofoletti, CSAM threat analyst for TRM Labs</blockquote>



Experts who have long studied the pervasiveness of this material on social media have warned that reducing Twitter’s CSAM problem to a handful of hashtags is a gross oversimplification. They say Musk is essentially being applauded for something he hasn’t done, or even tried to do.



“I don&#8217;t see any meaningful action taken by Musk so far,” said Carolina Christofoletti, a CSAM threat analyst for TRM Labs and researcher at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. She&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/carolina-christofoletti-26b0a01b1_elon-musks-says-the-issue-of-child-sexual-activity-7000611728015118336-1kBu/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">has cautioned</a>&nbsp;that the issue “is far bigger than a bunch of hashtags” and “much bigger than ‘easy to catch’ fishes.” She noted that the wiping of some troubling CSAM hashtags and other associated actions “were all things done under the previous leadership.”



“He has drained the child safety team on Twitter without any risk impact whatsoever,” she added, pointing to a Musk tweet asking users—rather than his internal team—for ideas on how to better tackle CSAM. “Twitter is exactly how it was, nothing new under the sun here,” she wrote in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/carolina-christofoletti-26b0a01b1_after-acquisition-elon-musk-taking-down-activity-7000390970529742848-zLcG/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop#" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a LinkedIn post</a>. “The CSAM networks are still there, as active as before.”



Meanwhile, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation is warning that Musk’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/01/elon-musk-twitter-paywalled-video/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported plans</a>&nbsp;to move forward with a paywalled video feature, akin to OnlyFans, would only exacerbate the already urgent children’s safety issues on the site. “Musk cannot confront child sexual abuse material on Twitter while creating another means that would only fuel sexual abuse and exploitation on the platform,” Lina Nealon, director of corporate and strategic initiatives, said in a&nbsp;<a href="https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/if-elon-musk-is-serious-about-confronting-child-exploitation-he-must-shut-down-idea-of-an-onlyfans-competitor/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">public statement</a>&nbsp;Tuesday.



At least one person who remains at the company said the leadership shakeup has not changed Twitter’s policy on, or employees’ commitment to, the issue. A current child safety specialist said Musk is “fully aware” of Twitter’s “<a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/sexual-exploitation-policy#:~:text=Twitter%20has%20zero%20tolerance%20towards,%2C%20or%20computer%2Dgenerated%20images." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">zero tolerance</a>” approach to child exploitation material and that “our team is working 24/7” across three regions—San Francisco, Singapore and Dublin—to keep children safe.



“I&#8217;m proud of the work we do for our team,” she wrote to Forbes over LinkedIn. “And despite all the outside/internal noise, our team is focused on our work.”



By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff and Alexandra S. Levine Forbes Staff

If Child Protection Is Musk’s ‘Top Priority,’ Why Is It So Easy To Find Users Selling Images Of Nude Minors On Twitter?

<h2 id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



Apple may fall short of its production target for its flagship iPhone 14 Pro models by nearly 6 million units worldwide, Bloomberg&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-28/apple-to-lose-6-million-iphone-pros-from-tumult-at-china-plant" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>&nbsp;Monday, after workers at the world&#8217;s largest iPhone manufacturing plant in Zhengzhou, China, protested delayed bonus payments, poor living conditions caused by China’s stringent Covid restrictions.



<h2>KEY FACTS</h2>



According to Bloomberg, the exact size of the shortfall still remains unclear and will likely depend on manufacturer Foxconn’s ability to hire enough workers for the iPhone assembly line to keep up with production targets.



Earlier this month, Apple had cut its production target for the iPhone 14 by 3 million units due to Covid-related disruptions at the Foxconn plant and that number has now been revised by double, the report adds.



Workers at the Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou—sometimes referred to as “iPhone city”—have been forced to live on-site in a closed bubble, only being allowed to move from the factory floor to their dorm rooms due to the city’s Covid control measures.



While sales of the cheaper iPhone 14 and 14 Plus have slowed down, the pricier iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max have continued to remain in strong demand in the U.S., the report adds.



While the company has diversified its manufacturing line by making some of its devices in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/26/apple-starts-manufacturing-the-iphone-14-in-india.html#:~:text=Apple%20on%20Monday%20said%20it,on%20the%20outskirts%20of%20Chennai." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">India</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/08/24/iphone-shipments-from-vietnam-saw-major-growth-in-q2-2022" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Vietnam</a>, nearly all of its flagship iPhone 14 Pro models are made in the Zhengzhou factory.



Apple’s shares were down 1.87% in pre-market trading on Monday morning following the report.



Forbes&nbsp;has reached out to Apple for a comment.



<h2>BIG NUMBER</h2>



90 million. That was Apple’s initial target for the total number of iPhone 14 series devices that Apple planned to manufacture this year, Bloomberg&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-11/apple-expects-to-sustain-iphone-sales-in-2022-as-market-slows#xj4y7vzkg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">previously reported</a>.



<h2>CRUCIAL QUOTE</h2>



In an analyst note, investment firm Wedbush Securities said: “We estimate that Apple now has significant iPhone shortages that could take off roughly at least 5% of units in the quarter and potentially up to 10% depending on the next few weeks in China around Foxconn production and protests” The note added, “The zero China Covid policy has been an absolute gut punch to Apple&#8217;s supply chain with the Foxconn protests in Zhengzhou a black eye for both Apple and Foxconn.”



<h2>NEWS PEG</h2>



Anticipating a disruption due to China’s anti-Covid measures, Apple issued a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/11/update-on-supply-of-iphone-14-pro-and-iphone-14-pro-max/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">statement</a>&nbsp;earlier this month warning of a delay in shipments for the Pro model iPhones. The statement blamed “Covid-19 restrictions” for impacting production at the Foxconn plant and said customers trying to purchase the top-end models will face longer wait times. At present on Apple’s website, the wait time for an iPhone 14 Pro or Pro Max shows up as exactly one month. The cheaper iPhone 14 and 14 Plus are available for same-day pickup at most Apple stores.



<h2>KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



Last week, violent clashes broke out between security personnel and workers at the Foxconn plant over delayed payments and poor living conditions. Several workers&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-24/foxconn-offers-staff-1-400-to-leave-after-iphone-city-violence?" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said they feared</a>&nbsp;they would not receive their promised bonus payouts for joining the factory unless they stayed until March. The new recruits had been lured by promises of higher wages and a bonus payment after hundreds of workers fled the factory campus in October, fearing the impact of stringent Covid measures. Foxconn eventually apologized and blamed the problems on a “technical error” in its hiring process. In an effort to assuage angry recruits, the company&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/11/24/foxconn-apologizes-after-workers-revolt-at-worlds-largest-iphone-factory/?sh=61d8a80a245f">offered</a>&nbsp;a ¥10,000 ($1,400) compensation to those who wanted to leave the plant.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/more-than-20000-new-hires-have-left-apple-supplier-foxconns-zhengzhou-plant-2022-11-25/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According to</a>&nbsp;Reuters, nearly 20,000 recruits took up Foxconn’s offer, nearly 10% of iPhone City’s 200,000-strong workforce.



<h2>FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-28/apple-to-lose-6-million-iphone-pros-from-tumult-at-china-plant?sref=PFCuwcPr&amp;leadSource=uverify%20wall" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple to Lose 6 Million iPhone Pros From Tumult at China Plant</a>(Bloomberg)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/11/23/apple-shares-dip-in-premarket-amid-covid-protest-at-chinas-biggest-iphone-factory/?sh=6fa253a54d68">Apple Shares Dip In Premarket Amid Covid Protest At China’s Biggest iPhone Factory</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/11/24/foxconn-apologizes-after-workers-revolt-at-worlds-largest-iphone-factory/?sh=61d8a80a245f">Foxconn Apologizes After Workers Revolt At World’s Largest iPhone Factory</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



By Siladitya Ray, Forbes Staff

Apple’s iPhone 14 Series On Sale In China

Apple Reportedly Faces Shortfall Of 6 Million iPhones Amid China Factory Protests￼

Wall Street billionaires Carl Icahn, Ken Griffin, Israel Englander and Daniel Loeb can thank Elon Musk for what might be 2022’s easiest money trade.



For many hedge funds,&nbsp;Elon Musk’s $44 billion “forced” purchase of Twitter represented an easy money trade.



“You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that he was going to finish that deal,” said Carl Icahn at the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2022/11/03/carl-icahn-would-have-waged-a-proxy-fight-for-twitter-if-musk-deal-fell-through/?sh=684d42f74623">Forbes Iconoclast Summit</a>&nbsp;on November 3, adding that he would have&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2022/11/03/carl-icahn-would-have-waged-a-proxy-fight-for-twitter-if-musk-deal-fell-through/?sh=5928e07d4623">considered waging a proxy fight</a>&nbsp;if the deal fell through.



Icahn told the audience at New York’s Historical Society that he made a profit of around $250 million by investing in Twitter this summer. But he was far from the only one to benefit. Regulatory filings show that billionaire-led hedge funds including Citadel Advisors, Millennium Management, D.E. Shaw and Third Point built large positions in Twitter in the second and third quarters, as well as other firms like Pentwater Capital and Farallon Capital.



Musk signed a merger agreement to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share in April, but the stock was trading as low as $32.65 by July when he tried to terminate the deal. That created an arbitrage opportunity for as much as a 66% return for investors who doubted Musk had much of a chance in the Delaware Court of Chancery to back out.



Icahn’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/921669/000153949722001801/xslForm13F_X01/infotable.xml" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">third-quarter 13-F filing</a>&nbsp;with the SEC shows that he owned 12.5 million Twitter shares as of September 30. He said at the&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;summit he bought in the mid-$30s–if he bought at an average price of $35 per share and made a $19.20 profit on each one when the deal closed at the original price of $54.20 per share on October 28, he would have netted a $240 million profit.



The only fund that made a bigger bet than Icahn was Naples, Florida-based Pentwater Capital Management, founded by Matthew Halbower in 2007. It bought 18.1 million shares during the second quarter and added another 5.3 million shares as of the end of the third quarter. If it bought those 24 million shares at Twitter stock’s median closing price of $40.16 in the first quarter and $41.05 in the second quarter and held them through the completion of the acquisition in October, it would have made $324 million in profit, though its 13-F filing shows it hedged some of those gains by buying put options as well. Pentwater didn’t respond to a request for comment.



In all,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;found 13 hedge funds that spent upwards of $100 million adding to their Twitter stakes between the end of the first quarter and the end of the third quarter this year. We reached out to each fund to ask for average purchase prices, and estimated that they bought at Twitter’s median closing price in each quarter if more precise information wasn’t available. These funds cumulatively purchased more than 10% of the company in the six months leading up to September 30 and likely made well over $1 billion in profits on the deal.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h4 id="h-twitter-winners">TWITTER WINNERS</h4>



<h4 id="h-these-hedge-funds-added-the-most-to-their-twitter-positions-this-spring-and-summer-and-likely-minted-profits-if-they-held-on-through-elon-musk-s-purchase">These hedge funds added the most to their Twitter positions this spring and summer and likely minted profits if they held on through Elon Musk&#8217;s purchase.</h4>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="800" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49-1024x800.png" alt="" class="wp-image-56886" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49-1024x800.png 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49-300x234.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49-768x600.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49.png 1480w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption>Source: SEC 13-F Filings</figcaption></figure>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



These numbers don’t include any additional shares the firms may have purchased in October, when the margins were slimmer while Musk finalized the acquisition, and don’t include possible trading that took place within each quarter. 13-F filings show a simple snapshot of each firm’s long stock holdings on the last day of each quarter and don’t provide enough information to pin down exact gains and losses, but often represent the most thorough picture of what funds are buying and selling.



The biggest winners included Hong Kong-based Segantii Capital Management, founded by British investor Simon Sadler, and Farallon Capital, the San Francisco-based firm founded by Thomas Steyer in 1986 and now run by Andrew Spokes.



David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital initiated a position of 4.3 million shares in the third quarter, his 13-F filing shows, and he wrote in a letter to investors viewed by&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;that the average purchase price was $37.24 per share. He expected that the Delaware Court of Chancery would be wary of inviting future buyer’s remorse suits if it let Musk walk away.



“The case law on this is quite clear. If it were anyone other than Musk, we would handicap the odds of the buyer wiggling out of the deal to be much less than 5%,” Einhorn wrote in the letter prior to the completion of the deal. “At this price there is $17 per share of upside if TWTR prevails in court and we believe about $17 per share of downside, if the deal breaks. So, we are getting 50-50 odds on something that should happen 95%+ of the time.”



Musk saw the writing on the wall and reversed course in October, agreeing to pay the full price as these investors expected. His first weeks as Twitter’s owner have been marked by confusion and complaints after he opened verification to anyone willing to pay $8 per month, causing a wave of “verified” parody accounts, and laid off 3,700 employees, almost half of its staff. He has&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/11/10/musk-tells-staff-twitter-could-go-bankrupt-without-financial-turnaround-reports-say/?sh=5cc89ccc7257">warned Twitter’s staff</a>&nbsp;that “bankruptcy is not out of the question,” but if his $44 billion equity investment goes up in smoke, the hedge funds he paid that cash to will be laughing all the way to the bank.



By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff

Elon Musk’s Twitter Buyout Was A Billion Dollar Windfall For These 13 Hedge Funds

gettyimages-1176382466-594×594

Meta Reportedly Preparing ‘Large-Scale’ Job Cuts—Here Are The Biggest U.S. Layoffs This Year￼

<h2 id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



A textless meme of a dog in a T-shirt tweeted by the world’s wealthiest man Elon Musk sent one of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies up 12% Tuesday, the latest instance of tongue-in-cheek social media activity causing big money moves.



<h2>KEY FACTS</h2>



Musk’s&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587297730631696384?s=20&amp;t=LyxmZux9A7OErRktrr3ddw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tweet</a>&nbsp;of a Shiba Inu adorned with a Twitter logo instantly went viral, picking up nearly 600,000 likes.



The image is an apparent reference to&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reports</a>&nbsp;Musk will heavily incorporate dogecoin, a coin with a Shiba Inu’s face on it, on Twitter.



Dogecoin rose to a six-month high of $0.14, and is up a whopping 131% over the last month, according to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/digital-assets/traded-assets/">Forbes’ tracker of digital assets</a>.



Also gaining was the cryptocurrency Shiba Inu, which rose 8% Tuesday.



Outside from the canine tokens, the crypto market broadly rose, with bitcoin and Ethereum gaining 2.6% and 5%, respectively.



<h2>BIG NUMBER</h2>



$10.2 billion. That’s how much in market capitalization dogecoin has gained since October 4, the day Musk’s intent to close the Twitter deal went public. Its $19.1 billion market cap is roughly the same as Hewlett Packard.



<h2>KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



Dogecoin briefly reached a market cap of about $70 billion last year when it peaked near $0.70 before quickly losing its luster, falling to as low as $0.05. Much of dogecoin’s surge came as Musk relentlessly touted the coin. This year has been bleak for crypto, with bitcoin down 57% year-to-date, compared to a 19% loss for the S&amp;P 500. Doge’s rise and fall mirrored that of several other meme assets, including stocks like AMC, Bed Bath &amp; Beyond and GameStop.&nbsp;



<h2>TANGENT</h2>



The potential dogecoin adoption is one of many changes to his new social network teased by Musk on his Twitter account, with the billionaire also putting out feelers for the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/10/31/vine-20-twitter-reportedly-working-to-bring-back-video-service-after-musk-poll/?sh=1a725f763f42">return of</a>&nbsp;the short-form video service Vine and a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/10/31/a-verified-badge-on-twitter-may-cost-users-20-a-month-report-says/">monthly fee</a>&nbsp;for users to retain their verified badges.



<h2>FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/10/28/crypto-markets-gain-nearly-100-billion-after-elon-musks-twitter-deal-boosts-dogecoin/?sh=3e486d062540">Crypto Markets Gain Nearly $100 Billion After Elon Musk&#8217;s Twitter Deal Boosts Dogecoin</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



By Derek Saul, Forbes Staff

File: Crypto Losses Near $700 Billion In Worst Week Since Bubble Burst

Musk Meme Fuels $2 Billion Gain For Dogecoin￼

<h2 id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



Many of Twitter&#8217;s most active users abandoned the platform in recent years and have shown no sign of coming back, according to company documents obtained by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Reuters</a>, sparking serious concerns about Twitter&#8217;s future just days before Elon Musk is slated to take control of it.



<h2>KEY FACTS</h2>



The number of &#8220;heavy tweeters,&#8221; which Twitter defines as someone who uses the platform six or seven days a week and tweets at least three times a week, has been in &#8220;absolute decline&#8221; since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to an internal report viewed by Reuters.



Interest in mainstay topics popular with advertisers like sports, news and entertainment has been in decline among English-speaking frequent users, according to Reuters, while interest in cryptocurrency and pornographic &#8220;not safe for work&#8221; content has been on the rise.



&#8220;Heavy tweeters&#8221; are reportedly responsible for 90% of tweets and half of the company&#8217;s revenue, despite making up less than 10% of all monthly users.



The most significant user losses appear to be among accounts that tweeted about celebrities like the Kardashians, with the company reportedly finding a &#8220;devastating&#8221; decline in that area, possibly due to users migrating to Instagram or TikTok.



Interest in world news and liberal politics have also suffered massive declines, according to Reuters.



Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from&nbsp;Forbes.



<h2>CRUCIAL QUOTE</h2>



“It seems as though there is a significant discrepancy between what I might imagine are our company values and our growth patterns,” a company researcher reportedly wrote.



<h2>BIG NUMBER</h2>



237.8 million. That&#8217;s how many total daily active users Twitter&nbsp;<a href="https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Final_Q2'22_Earnings_Release.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>&nbsp;in the second quarter of this year, up almost 17% from a year prior. Some 41.5 million active users were U.S.-based.



<h2>WHAT TO WATCH FOR</h2>



A Delaware judge has given Musk, the world&#8217;s richest person, until Friday afternoon to close his $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter and take it private. If the deal doesn’t close by then, a lawsuit from the social media company seeking to force him to follow through with the deal will go to trial. Musk told bankers he plans to abide by the Friday deadline,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/10/25/elon-musk-reportedly-tells-bankers-hell-buy-twitter-by-friday-deadline/?sh=6cbd56814a4c">Bloomberg reported Tuesday</a>.



<h2>KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/20/musk-twitter-acquisition-staff-cuts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Washington Post</a>&nbsp;reported last week that Twitter is planning massive staffing cuts due to its turbulent financial situation. The company has a reported goal of slashing $800 million in payroll by 2023, which would impact critical infrastructure such as data centers, potentially making the platform and its users more susceptible to security threats. Musk, meanwhile, has reportedly told prospective investors he’s eyeing even deeper cuts: According to the&nbsp;Post, he plans&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/10/20/musk-plans-to-cut-75-of-twitter-workforce-report-says/?sh=7f91de2e496c">to eliminate about 75%</a>&nbsp;of Twitter&#8217;s 7,500-person workforce if the deal closes. The billionaire also reportedly promised potential investors he will triple the number of users who see ads by the end of his third year as owner, while he&#8217;s also floated a subscription service offering users access to premium content for a fee as a way to raise revenue.



<h2>FORBES VALUATION</h2>



We estimate Musk to be worth $219.6 billion, making him the richest&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?sh=2c0b1ec77999">person in the world</a>.



<h2>FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Exclusive: Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents show</a>(Reuters)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/10/20/musk-plans-to-cut-75-of-twitter-workforce-report-says/?sh=7f91de2e496c">Musk Plans To Cut 75% Of Twitter Workforce, Report Says</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/10/25/elon-musk-reportedly-tells-bankers-hell-buy-twitter-by-friday-deadline/?sh=6cbd56814a4c">Elon Musk Reportedly Tells Bankers He’ll Buy Twitter By Friday Deadline</a>(Forbes)



By Nicholas Reimann, Forbes Staff

In this photo illustration the Twitter logo seen displayed

Twitter Hemorrhaging Its Most Active Users, Report Says￼

Some of the ads include descriptions of sexual violence, paired with images of battered women and photos of male fitness influencers, which were used without permission.



Apps backed by ByteDance and Tencent have been running hundreds of ads on Facebook and Instagram containing sexually explicit content, descriptions of graphic violence and content promoting acts of self harm.



The ads, which violate Meta’s policies, contain excerpts from&nbsp;<a href="https://restofworld.org/2022/china-romance-novels/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">erotic web novels</a>&nbsp;featuring young adult fantasy themes like werewolves and vampires, often paired with short videos and images that appear to be taken from influencers, movies and TV shows. With descriptions of sexual assault and images of distressed women and girls next to muscular men, these ads push users to download apps where they can pay to read stories by the chapter.



One ad, teasing a story about a “night of terror” where a teen girl will be “mated” to a “creature,” featured a shirtless photo of Brazilian football star Neymar mashed up with a stock image of a beaten woman. A representative for Neymar told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;the image was used without permission.&nbsp;



The ad was for iReader, an app into which TikTok parent company ByteDance invested $170 million in 2020. As of Saturday morning, 83 other live ads for iReader featured a story chapter titled “His Personal Cum Bucket” and a graphic description of sexual violence. Multiple requests for comment sent to numerous iReader representatives went unanswered.&nbsp;



Ads for the Mytopia app, which is owned by ByteDance, contained similarly troubling content. Three ads for the app included a text description of a teen girl being molested by her step-brother, and three other ads contained a romanticized account of a teen girl cutting herself. After being contacted by&nbsp;Forbes, ByteDance paused Mytopia’s ad campaign, and ByteDance spokesperson Billy Kenny said that the ads “do not match our values.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">Ads paired excerpts of violent erotica with images of distressed women and girls and muscular men, which were sometimes used without permission. Note: some images may be disturbing.</blockquote>



On Wednesday, an app called Webnovel, which is owned by Tencent subsidiary China Literature, began running ads featuring sexually explicit comics that implied incest between a mother and her son. China Literature stopped the ad campaign when contacted for comment by&nbsp;Forbes. In a statement, spokesperson Maggie Zhou said: “We can confirm these ads were posted by third-party agencies without informing China Literature and in violation of our content policies.”



ByteDance (which owns TikTok) and Tencent (which owns WeChat and some of the most popular videogames in the world) have long struggled to show that their products do not expose people to content&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-sex-drugs-minors-11631052944?mod=business_lead_pos5" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">promoting sex</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-china-8da6d2d346475bfb8e0942fe9c650cc2" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">abuse</a>, or&nbsp;<a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2093538/groups-linked-suicide-game-found-chinese-messaging-site" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">self harm</a>. But while the Chinese tech giants have invested heavily in removing this kind of content from TikTok and WeChat, they have at the same time paid for erotic web novel businesses to create it and promote it to Meta users through ads.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">Ads for Webnovel, which is owned by Tencent subsidiary China Literature, featured sexually explicit comics that implied incest between a mother and her son. They have now been taken down.</blockquote>



Meta, for its part, has appeared largely incapable of halting this flood of violent fantasy erotica ads that violate its rules. The company’s Ad Library reveals that while Meta has detected and removed dozens of these ads, advertisers have just put more up. Moreover, Meta’s detection appears weak and haphazard, with weeks-old ads still live featuring text that obviously violates its rules. Before&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;contacted Meta about the ads, searches of the Ad Library for phrases like “his cock” and “rape me” returned hundreds of results, nearly all of them ads for web novel apps.&nbsp;(Disclosure: in a past life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)&nbsp;



Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company had removed dozens of ads from web novel companies before it was approached by&nbsp;Forbes, and that it has removed nearly 200 ads and pages since being presented with our findings. Still, five new renditions of the “cum bucket” ad began running last night from a page that&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;had flagged to Meta, and a quick search of the Ad Library returns hundreds of similar results.&nbsp;



Apps like Webnovel, Mytopia and iReader have boomed during the pandemic. The apps first became popular in China, where ByteDance’s Tomato Novel app has been downloaded more than 60 million times. But they have recently become popular in the U.S., too. iReader was downloaded 1.5 million times in 2021, and Webnovel was downloaded more than 2 million times in 2022, according to Sensor Tower. Although Chinese apps dominate the sector, domestic apps offer similar wares: Amazon’s Kindle Vella features identical themes and even some of the same stories featured on other apps. It does not appear to advertise on Facebook or Instagram.&nbsp;



Earlier this year,&nbsp;<a href="https://restofworld.org/2022/china-romance-novels/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rest of World reported</a>&nbsp;that the profit margin for China-based web novels is often very high, with companies making as much as 10 times as much as they pay authors for each story. But that profit margin may depend in significant part on ads: In 2021,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.protocol.com/china/chinese-web-novels-china" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Protocol reported</a>&nbsp;that 42.7% of China-based web novels were introduced to overseas readers through advertising.



This market also extends beyond just apps backed by Tencent and ByteDance. Last week,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;identified more than 1,000 ads running from more than 100 Facebook pages representing China-based web novel apps. Some of the ads stayed within bounds, offering largely standard romance novel fare, but others violated Meta’s policies barring explicit sexual content.&nbsp;



One ad running on Thursday morning promoted an app called MoboReader, and described a scene in which a woman’s husband tries to kill her by hitting her with a car, and then another man subsequently rapes her. Moboreader did not respond to a request for comment.&nbsp;



A text excerpt used in at least 32 other ads on Thursday included a graphic, romanticized description of a teen girl engaging in self-mutilation after being abused. The ads were for Supernovel, an app whose Terms of Service claim it is owned by Cloudary Holdings, a subsidiary of Tencent. When asked about the app, Tencent and Cloudary denied any relationship to it.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



In 2019, the China-based blog TechNode&nbsp;<a href="https://technode.com/2019/08/30/bytedance-promotes-new-online-reading-app-as-regulators-clamp-down/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>&nbsp;that a ByteDance web novel app popular with domestic Chinese audiences was shut down for three months by the Chinese government for distributing “lowbrow and sexually suggestive content.” But as the web novel industry has grown, ByteDance and Tencent have deepened their investments in it.&nbsp;



In December 2019, ByteDance&nbsp;<a href="https://en.pingwest.com/w/7080" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">acquired a majority stake</a>&nbsp;in MyMind Culture, the parent company behind several Chinese-language novel apps. In July 2020, it&nbsp;<a href="https://en.pingwest.com/w/7080" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bought a 10% stake</a>&nbsp;in Beijing Dingtian Culture Entertainment, which runs similar apps, including SweetRead and DmRead. Later that year, ByteDance&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/04/bytedance-to-pump-170-million-into-e-book-reader-zhangyue/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">paid $170 million</a>&nbsp;for 11% of the China-based e-book company Zhangyue, which makes the iReader app, as well as ForNovel, Novelink, Favoread and Noveltells. In 2021, it&nbsp;<a href="https://pandaily.com/bytedance-bets-on-web-novel-business-launching-mytopia-application-overseas/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">launched Mytopia</a>, which, like iReader, is targeted to foreign audiences.&nbsp;



Billy Kenny, the ByteDance spokesperson, said that ByteDance (which invested in Zhangyue through its acquisition arm, Quantum Jump) “doesn’t have any involvement in the product and business strategy of Zhangyue’s global businesses.” Zhangyue, however, told shareholders in April: &#8220;Mr. Zhang Chao, head of ByteDance&#8217;s novel business department, is a director of the company. The company and Byte have cooperated in various aspects such as content copyright and advertising cooperation.&#8221; Kenny did not answer follow-up questions about the nature of this cooperation.



Tencent owns the conglomerate China Literature, which controls the flagship English-language Webnovel app through a company called Cloudary Holdings. Terms of service for a cluster of other apps running ads on Facebook, including iNovel, eReader, SuperNovel, PopNovel, Mobooks and MyNovel, list Cloudary Holdings as their operator; however, Maggie Zhou, a spokesperson for China Literature, told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;that the entities are not owned or operated by China Literature or Cloudary.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h3 id="h-ads-for-various-apps-also-used-clips-from-major-movies-including-star-wars-marvel-comics-and-dc-comics">Ads for various apps also used clips from major movies, including Star Wars, Marvel Comics, and DC Comics.</h3>



Many of these ads also appear to rip content from influencers, television shows and movies. In addition to its Neymar ad, Zhangyue has also featured images of other celebrities, including Kylie Jenner and fitness influencer Chadoy Leon. Leon, whose image was stitched together with photos of frightened women, told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;he had never heard of iReader. “Whoever is using my pictures are using them without my permission,” he said. Jenner’s rep declined to comment on the record.&nbsp;



Ads for Zhangyue apps, as well as iNovel, Supernovel and others, also used content from major movies, including those from the&nbsp;Twilight&nbsp;movies, Star Wars, DC Comics and Marvel Studios. A representative from Warner Brothers (which owns DC Comics) said its content had been used without permission; Disney (which owns Marvel and Star Wars) and Summit Entertainment (which owns&nbsp;Twilight) did not respond to a request for comment.



Many of the Facebook pages running these ads also bore signs of ban evasion, suggesting the companies are intentionally avoiding takedowns by Meta. Some apps used intentional misspellings for words that might lead to flags. One ad for iReader described a character by the “visible V running down to his gen.ita1s.” Other iReader-owned pages, including those promoting Noveltells and Novelink, added a letter to profane terms, including bitcch and whoree.&nbsp;



Novel apps have also spread their ads out across numerous pages — a tactic often used by networks trying to ensure that one or two takedowns will not cripple an entire campaign. Ads promoting an app called Noveland have been placed from pages labeled Noveland1 through Noveland8, as well as pages with title variations like Noveland App and Noveland Romance Story. Pages called Noveland11, Noveland12, and Noveland13 were created earlier this month, but are not running ads at this time. Requests for comment sent to Noveland were not answered.



Other ads have come from pages with more colorful names: Some ads promoting iReader were placed from werewolf-themed pages with names like Alpha King, Gamma Fire and Ugly Mate, as well as pages with nonsense names like Genius Babies and Llj-Hhh. A Philippines-based app called Pinky Novel has been running ads from a page called Kz Car Tint &amp; Accesories [sic], and an app called AhaNovel, has been running ads from a page titled “Raped by Mr. CEO.” (Pinky Novel and Aha Novel did not respond to requests for comment.)&nbsp;



Despite&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;reporting the page to Meta on Wednesday morning, at time of this writing, “Raped by Mr. CEO” is still live on the platform today.&nbsp;



No longer live, though, is a page Facebook published in 2021, highlighting Webnovel as “success story” in advertiser partnerships. Stone did not respond to a question about whether Meta still considers Webnovel a model for other advertisers today.



By Emily Baker-White, Forbes Staff

Smartphone apps from Facebook

Facebook And Instagram Are Full Of Violent Erotica Ads From ByteDance- And Tencent-Backed Apps

BY TIANA CLINE



Current processes that track commodities such as palm oil through the supply chain require a lot of time and effort to perform, and often leave out valuable information around sustainability claims. Can blockchain solve the problem?



IN ITS PUREST FORM, PALM oil has a deep red color and a rich fragrance. When it was first discovered by Ca’da Mosto, a 15th-century explorer, he documented that it has “the scent of violets, the taste of olive oil and a color which tinges food like saffron”. Palm oil has been consumed as both food and medicine for thousands of years in West and Central Africa. While it remains a beloved, traditional part of African cuisine, it is a product that has become industrialized globally – bleached, refined, deodorized and relabeled to the point that it is now a hidden, food-like substance. Today, palm oil can be found in everything from ultra-processed foods to cosmetics and household cleaning products. It’s an indispensable ingredient, one linked to controversy ranging from slave labor to deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Can the blockchain help?



“Technology is a significant enabler of traceability and transparency, especially when it comes to knowing exactly where our raw material is coming from, even when it passes through many different hands on its way to us,” says Andrew Wilcox, the senior manager for sustainable sourcing and digital programmes at Unilever. “Getting full traceability and transparency in our supply chain is a crucial part of this journey.”



According to Wilcox, current processes that track commodities – such as palm oil – through the supply chain require a lot of time and effort to perform, and often leave out valuable information around sustainability claims. “There are currently no viable methods for preserving origin data at the scale of the commodity supply chain. This means that by the time the commodities are manufactured into products for consumers, products are simply marked as being sustainable or non-sustainable. This results in consumers rightfully questioning some of these claims.”



And that is where GreenToken comes in, a ‘chain-of- custody’ blockchain developed by SAP to help companies keep track of their bulk commodity supply chain sourcing, especially for raw materials like palm oil which is known for being especially difficult to trace.



“The supply chain is long and complex and until recently, has not had the benefit of a joined up digital transformation in recording palm [oil] movements from end-to-end,” says James Veale, GreenToken’s co-founder. GreenToken is one of the first initiatives to address that and make it into a repeatable standard.



“Ninety percent of the world’s raw materials are traded on a bulk basis. This means they are mixed with other identical raw materials at some point in the supply chain, causing most of the information to get hidden or lost,” adds Wilcox. “With GreenToken, tokens are created by commodity buyers (mills in the case of palm oil) and a range of information related to the crop (origins or sustainability credentials) are captured within the token. As the crop moves to each stage of the supply chain (e.g., a refinery), a request is made 



o transfer the digital tokens.” The blockchain tokens are therefore a digital twin for the crops, enabling a ‘virtual segregation’ even if the materials have been mixed with materials from a different source.



“The GreenToken blockchain has the ability to record RSPO certified palm at the grower delivery to the mill level and track that palm throughout the extended supply chain,” explains Veale. “In this way, the sustainable volume is made transparent on the blockchain wherever it may be in the supply chain, giving the end buyer a lot of confidence in their purchase.”



Certification from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) can take many years to achieve and the proven certified sustainable percentage is relatively small.



“End users can only claim that their palm oil is certified sustainable if they can trace it back to grower deliveries to an originating crush mill. As the supply chain is long and complex with much commingling and processing, and as off takers do not want to make unsubstantiated claims,” says



Veale. “Digital systems like blockchain can help carry this proven sustainable certification along the value chain to the off-taker, quicker, cheaper and with full auditability and so accelerate the evidence down the supply chain to the end consumer.”



Palm oil is the most land-efficient vegetable oil and the main source of livelihoods for millions of farmers and communities from Cameroon to Sierra Leone. There are 10 countries that make up the Africa Palm Oil Initiative with the biggest plantation (to date) sitting in Liberia.



As Russia’s War on Ukraine rages on and sunflower oil exports drop significantly, food producers are struggling to seek replacements and palm oil is making an unforeseen comeback that could potentially derail sustainability efforts if technology like the GreenToken blockchain doesn’t step in.



According to one plant-based company in South Africa that originally abstained from using palm oil, the sunflower oil shortage has made them seriously



Ultimately, the GreenToken blockchain will not only give consumers much-needed assurance that the palm oil they’re using is ethically-grown, it will help recognize the sustainability efforts of growers and smallholder farmers. “When we have a system that is potentially able to maintain and verify a tamper-proof record of commodities and their credentials, it gives more confidence that the premiums we pay for sustainable raw materials are impactful and can incentivise the production and purchase of sustainable commoditiesthroughoutthesupplychain,”saysWilcox.“We want our consumers to have the confidence when picking up a Unilever product that the product has been made with sustainable palm oil.”

Screenshot 2022-09-14 at 10.22.33

Connecting Palms In Africa: Blockchain For The Supply Chain

By Tiana Cline



THE INTERNET MAY HAVE evolved from a niche pastime to an essential part of our day-to-day life but for many, it’s problematic.



The internet in its current form, Web 2.0, has become too centralized with only a handful of big technology companies – and governments – dominating the market. There’s even a collective name for these giants who have transformed the way we work, shop and socialize: FAANG – Facebook (now Meta), Amazon.com, Apple, Netflix and Google-owner Alphabet.



Web 3.0 is the third generation of the internet, a decentralized online ecosystem based on the blockchain. The term was coined by a computer scientist named Gavin Wood in 2014. Wood co-founded Ethereum, the decentralized blockchain platform behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH).



In a podcast with CNBC, Wood explained that the biggest issue with Web 2.0 is trusting the people behind the services: “We’ve managed to architect ourselves into this somewhat dystopian version of what the world could be,” he said. This is why, for many, Web 3.0 is about looking at the internet in a more distributed and democratic way. It’s also a critical building block towards creating the metaverse, an immersive online world. Venture capitalists are investing billions of dollars into this future vision while others remain sceptical, calling Web 3.0 a marketing buzzword and a pyramid scheme. Both Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, are known to be ‘against’ the concept, Musk tweeting that “Web 3 isn’t real” and that he couldn’t see a compelling use-case for the VR-driven metaverse.



Brian Solis, a world-renowned digital anthropologist and futurist, explains to FORBES AFRICA that even though the promise of the internet that we’re using today was wonderful, it has negative impacts and consequences that we’re only just beginning to understand: “I was one of the biggest champions of social media and I still believe in its promise,” he says. “I don’t necessarily believe in the capitalism behind it and how it has evolved&#8230; but those same principles can apply and should apply to Web 3.0.”



Solis also differentiates between the aspirational sense of what Web 3.0 could be and where we are today. “There are many aspects of the hype cycle in Web 3.0 – the metaverse, blockchain, NFTs, crypto&#8230; they lay the foundation for what we can build in terms of utility and scale.”



While global research and consultancy agency Gartner says Web 3.0 won’t necessarily overtake Web 2.0 before the end of the decade, it will enable new business and social models where users own their own data, identity, content and algorithms. And that is what makes Web 3.0 so valuable – it shifts digital power back into the hands of the user, rather than to a secondary platform, integrating both the physical and digital world.



Will Africa enter the Metaverse?



For Africa, it’s a little different. While the concept of a digital currency may be confusing at first, Africa embraced mobile money in 2007 with M-Pesa. Africa’s willingness to adopt new technologies that benefit its growing population should not be taken for granted – what was once a basic SIM card-based money transfer application is now a fully-fledged financial service.



Liebe Jeannot, the founder and manager partner of Akazi Capital, a blockchain-based impact fund that invests in female entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa, is optimistic about Web 3.0. “We’re still in early days. This is only the beginning of the cycle so I’m excited to see how things will evolve based on what’s happened in the past but also in terms of new entrants coming into the space,” she says.



A study by Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform with an extensive global research hub, found that Africa not only had the third-fastest growing cryptocurrency economy globally in 2021, it led the world in the share of overall crypto transaction volume coming from peer-to-peer. Today, the second-largest bitcoin market can be found in Nigeria, which also happens to be only one of five nations with a government-introduced central bank digital currency.



“Even though there are countries in Africa with really high crypto-adoption rates, so much of the continent hasn’t jumped on board. It speaks to the fact that when we talk about Web 3.0, it’s a concept that’s quite removed from a lot of people in terms of their lives and what they think it can do,” adds Jeannot. “As soon as you can bring those concepts close to home and show them concepts that they can relate to, that’s when you’ll have more people entering the space with things becoming more user-friendly in terms of the way in which we interact with technology.”



Jeannot believes that Africa is ready to unlock Web 3.0. And that this new, future vision for the internet will become a reality in the same way that we use email.



“We don’t have to understand the technology behind it, what goes on behind the scenes in terms of code, but we understand the way we interact with it and how we 



apply it to our daily life,” she says. “It’s going to be a similar thing with Web 3.0. NFTs, for example, play an interesting role because people relate to art – you collect it or you enjoy it but in order to buy NFTs, it doesn’t have to be complicated,” says Jeannot.



“The space is so diverse with many different projects that speak to different parts of who we are as people. There’s still a lot of room for African projects by Africans and as we start bringing more people from the continent into the space as investors, there’ll be more of an appetite from people wanting to consume and be a part of Web.3.0.”

Silhouette of a man interacting with virtual computer graphics

Web 3.0 & THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET: Is Africa ready for the digital and physical worlds to merge into the metaverse?

<h2 id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



Apple has warned of serious security flaws for iPhones, iPads and Macs that could allow hackers to take complete control of devices and may have been “actively exploited,” urging customers to update their devices as soon as possible in a rare admission from the tech giant that takes pride in its security measures.



<h2>KEY FACTS</h2>



Apple dropped two surprise software updates on Wednesday to fix major&nbsp;<a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213412" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">security</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213413" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">vulnerabilities</a>&nbsp;it said could allow hackers to take&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/iphone-ipad-mac-zero-days/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">complete control</a>&nbsp;of users’ devices.&nbsp;



Updates have been made available to affected devices, which include the iPhone 6s and later models, all iPad Pro models, the iPad Air 2 and later, the iPad 5th generation and later, the iPad mini 4 and later, the iPod touch 7th generation and Mac computers running macOS Monterey.



<a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/apple-security-flaw-iphones-update-ipad-iwatch-hacking-risk-cybersecurity-b1019648.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Security</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/18/apple-security-flaw-hack-iphone-ipad-macs" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">experts</a>&nbsp;have&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/apple-warns-of-security-flaw-for-iphones-ipads-and-macs/2022/08/18/2a1d146a-1f40-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">urged</a>&nbsp;affected users to update software swiftly in order to fix the flaw and secure their devices.&nbsp;



To update software on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch—either iOS 15.6.1 or iPadOS 15.6.1—go into “Settings,” tap “General,” then “Software Update” and “Download and Install.”



To update a Mac running macOS Monterey, go to “System Preferences,” then “Software Update” and hit “Update Now” or “Upgrade Now.”&nbsp;



Apple did not disclose how many people had been affected by the vulnerabilities but said it is aware of credible reports that both had been “actively exploited.



<h2>WHAT WE DON’T KNOW</h2>



How the vulnerabilities were discovered. Apple provided few details on how it became aware of the flaws or who had made the discoveries, crediting both to anonymous researchers. There have been no confirmed reports so far of cases where the vulnerabilities were used against users or their devices. In its security reports, Apple said it does not disclose, discuss or confirm any security issues until after an investigation has occurred and patches are available.



<h2>KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



Vulnerabilities discovered before the producer, in this case Apple, is aware of them are known as zero-day vulnerabilities, referring to the fact that the creator has zero days warning to counter it. Such flaws can be extremely valuable and both hackers and vendors will pay large sums of money to get ahold of them. While serious flaws have been exploited to spy on users through smartphones—Israeli firm<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/11/16/candiru-spy-tool-provider-linked-to-website-hacks/?sh=38990af746c0">&nbsp;NSO Group</a>&nbsp;has allegedly&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/07/22/nso-group-ceo-defends-1-billion-spyware-company-against-pegasus-project-hacking-allegations/?sh=30a8f969472d">hacked</a>&nbsp;high-profile journalists and world leaders—they are often directed at high-profile individuals rather than the public at large.&nbsp;



<h2>FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/iphone-ipad-mac-zero-days/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple releases iOS, iPadOS and macOS security fixes for two zero-days under active attack</a> (TechCrunch)



By Robert Hart, Forbes Staff

Apple Store Opens In Knightsbridge

Apple Security Flaw Could Let Hackers Control iPhones, iPads And Macs—What You Need To Know And How To Fix It

<h2 id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



Google <a href="https://blog.google/products/search/more-content-by-people-for-people-in-search/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a> Thursday it will take more steps to promote high-quality content in its search results, while the Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-tests-tiktok-like-feed-in-app-11660754386" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a> this week Amazon will try out a new video feature for shoppers, becoming the latest tech giants to introduce changes to try to compete with the increasingly popular TikTok.



<h2>KEY FACTS</h2>



Google said it is making updates to ensure high quality content is promoted in its search results, while cutting back on the amount of low-quality, unoriginal content designed “for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.”



The changes come after Google’s Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/12/google-exec-suggests-instagram-and-tiktok-are-eating-into-googles-core-products-search-and-maps/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> last month younger people are using apps like TikTok and Instagram instead of Google for searches.



Amazon, meanwhile, is trying out a stream of TikTok-like photos and videos in its app called “Inspire,” where shoppers can like, share and purchase items in the same place, the&nbsp;Journal&nbsp;reported, citing a person familiar with the product.&nbsp;



The new portal is being tested by Amazon employees, but could be launched more broadly, the&nbsp;Journal&nbsp;reported.&nbsp;



Amazon spokesperson Alyssa Bronikowski told Forbes the company is “constantly testing new features to help make customers’ lives a little easier.”



<h2>BIG NUMBER</h2>



One billion. That’s how many monthly active users TikTok&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-hits-1-billion-monthly-active-users-globally-company-2021-09-27/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a>&nbsp;it had in September 2021, a 45% increase from the year before.&nbsp;



<h2>KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has taken a series of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-11/google-is-remaking-search-maps-for-the-tiktok-generation?sref=5EPYOKdS" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">steps</a>&nbsp;this year to make improvements to Google’s search engine and maps function to help draw in younger users, including new features for people to search for nearby items using images and discover physical objects using their phone cameras. Raghavan&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-11/google-is-remaking-search-maps-for-the-tiktok-generation?sref=5EPYOKdS" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told</a>&nbsp;Bloomberg in May the company was aiming for Google Search to “be something that you can do anywhere, in any way you want, using any of your senses.” Meta, too, has attempted to compete with TikTok’s popularity, launching short videos known as reels in 2020 for Instagram users, followed by Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/metas-facebook-escalates-tiktok-rivalry-launches-reels-globally-11645549200?mod=article_inline" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">users</a>&nbsp;this year. Alphabet also created a new feature called “Shorts” for YouTube, a short-form video platform designed to look like TikTok. TikTok is currently&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/09/tiktoks-latest-test-feature-improve-search-capabilities/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">trying</a>&nbsp;out a new feature to improve its own search functions by identifying keywords in comments and linking to search results for the words. The app has surged in popularity since it was launched in 2016, becoming the third largest worldwide social media platform behind Instagram and Facebook in 2021,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.insiderintelligence.com/newsroom/index.php/tiktok-is-the-third-largest-worldwide-social-network-behind-instagram-and-facebook/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according</a>&nbsp;to Insider Intelligence. Raghavan&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/12/google-exec-suggests-instagram-and-tiktok-are-eating-into-googles-core-products-search-and-maps/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a>&nbsp;in July Google has found about 40% of young people turn to popular social media apps like TikTok or Instagram “when they’re looking for a place for lunch,” instead of Google Maps or Search, key products for Alphabet.&nbsp;



<h2>CONTRA</h2>



Instagram last month decided to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2022/07/28/instagram-pauses-on-some-tiktok-like-changes-for-now-after-complaints/?sh=5a474aea6526">pause</a>&nbsp;changes designed to make the app look more like TikTok, including a redesign of its feed, after facing a host of criticisms from users, including major creators like Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian. It had planned to prioritize video content over photos, but decided to “take a big step back and regroup,” after facing a backlash over the modifications, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said at the time.



<h2>FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/18/google-will-roll-out-new-updates-to-reduce-low-quality-and-unoriginal-content-in-search-results/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google will roll out new updates to reduce low-quality and unoriginal content in search results</a>&nbsp;(Tech Crunch)



<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-tests-tiktok-like-feed-in-app-11660754386" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Amazon Tests TikTok-Like Feed in App</a>&nbsp;(Wall Street Journal)



<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-11/google-is-remaking-search-maps-for-the-tiktok-generation?sref=5EPYOKdS" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google Is Remaking Search, Maps for the TikTok Generation</a>&nbsp;(Bloomberg)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2022/07/28/instagram-pauses-on-some-tiktok-like-changes-for-now-after-complaints/?sh=5a474aea6526">Instagram Pauses On Some TikTok-Like Changes—For Now—After Complaints</a> (Forbes)



By Madeline Halpert, Forbes Staff

In this photo illustration the TikTok logo seen displayed on

Tech Giants Are Racing To Compete With TikTok—Here’s How

A new study shows how websites and apps gather people’s sensitive health-related information, sometimes without consent, and channel it to the social media giant to generate business.



Digital health companies are funneling sensitive data that patients have shared with them to Facebook to help target advertisements, according to a new study from research group the Light Collective. In some cases this sharing is running afoul of the companies’ own privacy policies and raising concerns about HIPAA violations.



The peer-reviewed study, <a href="https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(22)00172-6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published Monday</a> in Patterns, a data science journal, examines the way data from individuals’ health-related activity online is tracked across websites or platforms and then used for advertising purposes on Facebook. The researchers studied the online activities of 10 participants active in the online cancer community who had used digital health tools from five different companies: Color Genomics, Myriad Genetics, Invitae, Health Union and Ciitizen. They found that third-party ad trackers used by those companies followed the patients online and marketed to them based on those activities. Three of the companies went against their own privacy policies in the process.



The authors said that after disclosing their findings to the five companies, only Ciitizen and Invitae responded, saying they were investigating the privacy issues with the tracking tools. (Health Union told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;after publication that they had no record of being contacted by the researchers.)&nbsp;



Health Union president Lauren Lawhon said the safety and security of people in its online health community are a priority and that it continually takes steps to ensure its data privacy practices are “transparent and compliant with the evolving regulatory environment.” She noted, in an emailed statement, that Health Union recently began using privacy management software that shows website visitors pop-ups giving them the choice to accept or reject cookie-based data collection and tracking. (There is also a “Do Not Sell My Information” link at the bottom of their pages, she said.)



“As a publisher, Health Union collects and tracks data pertaining to content consumption, traffic sources and other information about how users engage with our websites,” Lawhon wrote in the email. “This is done to better understand the types of content, content topics and advertising that are of the most interest to people who participate in our communities, so we can continue to provide engaging, relevant websites in the future.” She also emphasized that Health Union is not covered under HIPAA because it is not a healthcare provider, but rather, a publisher owning various health-related websites.



The other four digital health companies did not respond to requests for comment.



Dale Hogan, a spokesperson for Facebook&#8217;s parent, Meta, said these companies should not be sharing&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/business/help/361948878201809?id=188852726110565" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">personal health information</a>&nbsp;with the social media platform in the first place because that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1057016521436966?id=188852726110565" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">violates Meta&#8217;s rules</a>. &#8220;Advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools as doing so is against our policies,&#8221; he wrote in an emailed statement. &#8220;We educate advertisers on properly setting up Business tools to prevent this from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">“Health privacy is a basic requirement in digital medicine for reducing the abuse of power and supporting patient autonomy.”&nbsp;</blockquote>



Andrea Downing, cofounder of the Light Collective, which is focused on privacy issues in the online world, said “data gathering and predictive algorithms that are used for advertising and other purposes are one of the biggest threats to online patient communities.” It puts them at greater risk of discrimination and online scams, the authors wrote, adding that tracking software can make cancer-patient populations in particular more vulnerable to medical misinformation and privacy breaches.&nbsp;



Despite the small scale of the study, it is indicative of larger data-sharing trends across digital health and social media. An investigation&nbsp;<a href="https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/06/16/facebook-is-receiving-sensitive-medical-information-from-hospital-websites" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published earlier this summer</a>&nbsp;by&nbsp;The Markup, for example, revealed how hospital websites use trackers to gather and share sensitive patient information with Facebook for marketing, in possible violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.https://6f53fffc8a221d0154a1a92a1703947c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html



Lengthy, ambiguous privacy policies for these apps often leave users unclear on how their data will be collected, shared and used. Some platforms also engage in risky data practices without individuals’ consent. The new research, co-authored by Eric Perakslis, chief science and digital officer at the Duke Clinical Research Institute, is intended to raise awareness around both.



“Health privacy is a basic requirement in digital medicine for reducing the abuse of power and supporting patient autonomy,” the authors write.



“While the digital medicine ecosystem relies on social media to recruit and build their businesses” through ads and marketing, they add, “these practices sometimes contradict their own stated privacy policies and promises to users.”



By Alexandra S. Levine, Forbes Staff

Facebook  Friends Finance

Digital Medical Companies Funnel Patient Data To Facebook For Advertising

By Tiana Cline



Lead poisoning is an issue in Africa where lead-acid batteries reign supreme, powering cars and generators, providing solar power storage, and even backup for cell towers during rolling blackouts. But here’s How one company is transforming resources to power a more connected, sustainable world.



African children have died from lead poisoning. In countries like Botswana, Zambia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Kenya and Tanzania, blood lead levels is not only unusually high – they’re increasing, according to a report in the Lancet Planetary Health journal. Exposure to lead, a potent neurotoxin, is known to affect the brain resulting in disability (if not death). The World Health Organization states that children are more at risk because high lead exposure damages the brain before it has had a chance to fully develop so one has to ask: where is all this lead coming from?



While certain types of paint contain high levels of lead, America banned the use of these residentially in 1978. In South Africa, however, rules around lead paint were only enforced in 2010 and from October this year, lead paint will be officially classified as a hazardous substance. But paint isn’t the biggest problem – a growing danger is the informal recycling of lead acid batteries. Even though lithium-ion batteries are a better battery (technologically-speaking), lead acid batteries reign supreme across Africa, powering cars and generators, providing solar power storage, and even backup for cell towers during rolling blackouts.



“Batteries are everywhere,” says Jamie Lee, Ecobat’s Chief Information Officer. “You don’t think about it until you think about recycling. In the transportation and energy sector, 19 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from road transportation. If batteries could be recycled better, it would mean less transport and you’re actually making an impact.”



When lead acid batteries aren’t recycled properly, acid and lead dust enters the soil. The process emits toxic fumes that permeate the air with poison and the workers return home with hazardous dust on their clothing.



“In addition to this, there are certain countries that use child labor to break open batteries and get those materials out which are then sold to the open market,” adds Lee. “We need to configure our supply chain in a way that we can get that battery supply into our hands for recycling. Then when the materials are put out, they go back into the hands of the manufacturers to take over and the result is less mining.”



THE WORLD’S MOST EFFICIENT CIRCULAR ECONOMY



Lee says that while many people believe paper, plastic and glass are the most recycled materials globally, lithium-ion batteries come in second and lead sits at the top of the pyramid.



“The most recycled material worldwide is lead;130 million batteries come through the recycling process,” he adds. “There’s enough lead in the recycling process to not mine for new materials.”



But that’s only when lead-acid batteries are regenerated or refurbished safely – something Ecobat does around the world because lead poisoning isn’t simply an African issue. A new study out of UNICEF found that around 800 million children are exposed to lead annually and the numbers in South Asia are higher than anywhere else.



“We are in a unique position globally as the largest battery recycler. Ecobat’s true impact is its value – if we didn’t exist there would be landfills of batteries,” he says. Recycling batteries is complicated – there’s a chain of over five different work centers to open each battery up, draw chemistries out of it and melt it down before refining the materials and shipping them off. From a safety perspective, there also has to be specialized breathing apparatus in place to ensure the recycling plant meets regulatory standards.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">A new study out of UNICEF found that around 800 million children are exposed to lead annually and the numbers in South Asia are higher than anywhere else.</blockquote>



As battery technology evolves, Ecobat also have had to adapt the way batteries are collected and stored as well as enhance their technical capabilities in the cloud.



“We are in the business of making batteries safe and sustainable which means we need to apply technology and safety. Batteries are not going away – they’re only going up in consumption,” says Lee, adding that the battery market size is expected to grow exponentially by 2030. “That means more and more batteries as well as different types of batteries – we’re chasing technology that’s evolving.”



Lithium-ion batteries, for example, contain 20 different chemistries. Every material inside a battery requires specialization that goes into Ecobat’s engineering in order to maximize sustainability.



“If we maximize our performance, the battery manufacturers can maximize theirs and lead batteries could last longer. If you’re lengthening the cycle, by effectively bringing the product back to recycling, you’re almost completely circular and that’s an exciting place to get to.”



Ecobat have slowly been buying out recycling and manufacturing businesses across Europe, the United Kingdom, America and Africa. So far, they’ve consolidated 2,730 companies under one brand using SAP sustainable intelligence to help them scale their growth.



“We need to reclaim and reuse materials like lead rather than mine more,” says Lee. “Even renewable energies rely on lead acid batteries for backup. Electronic vehicles have lead acid batteries because if their security or intelligence systems go down, you need to transition seamlessly.”



Many African countries today still lack adequate recycling facilities and these informal, lead acid battery processing sites continue to put the health of millions of people at risk. To create an ecological impact, Lee believes that the conversation shouldn’t start with materials like plastic, aluminium and glass.



“That’s all low on the list because we see it being collected – even if it isn’t necessarily being recycled correctly,” he adds. “But we need to get recycling visible and help people understand where batteries of all kinds should not (and cannot) go. We do not want them in landfills – we need batteries to be a key consideration in the recycling process so we can make use of those materials.”

Old leaking batteries

COUNTERING THE DANGERS OF ONE OF THE MOST RECYCLED MATERIALS IN THE WORLD

BY RIDHIMA SHUKLA



Yussouf Ntwali’s edtech company has grown from idea to impact, changing the recruitment landscape in Rwanda.



IN THE BEATING HEART of the impeccably-green city of Kigali, in one of the most sought-after commercial zones, past a small gate and a garden is a shared space for home-grown Rwandan startups.



Entering the first building, a double- storied structure marked BAG, a white board reads ‘Training, Problem Solving, IoT and Education’.



Inside, there are more white boards in the middle of a large room, which looks like a cross between a classroom and a workplace, buzzing with youthful energy and the start of something bright and new.



Across the foyer is the office of Yussouf Ntwali, the 21-year-old CEO of BAG Innovation, an edtech company into innovation and social impact, one of Rwanda’s most popular tech companies today.



Since its inception, the company has grown from an idea to a real impact firm. Ntwali, who started out as a curious 17-year-old volunteer, climbed the ranks to becoming the Chief Operations Officer (COO) and now the CEO.



With no university degree or background in technology, Ntwali’s badge is his unwavering enthusiasm and unapologetic approach to learning on the job, which he reiterates during our interview.



Now resident in Rwanda, he spent his early years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, born to a Rwandan father and a Congolese mother.



After spending his formative years in 



Lubumbashi with his parents and three siblings, Ntwali moved back to Rwanda in 2007. Accustomed to the Congolese school curriculum, he was bilingual and spoke Swahili and French. To his surprise, Rwanda favored English.



“I spent the first few years in Rwanda without studying Kinyarwanda or English. But, around the age of 10, I began to pick it up.”



An extrovert brimming with confidence and with a penchant for conversation, Ntwali picked up the two languages quickly.



“I always like the challenge of learning new things, even as a child, I pursued everything with the same passion,” he says.



Apart from his professional zeal, he loved rap music, and for a while, even thought he was going to become the next Jay-Z. Ntwali spent a few years focused on music and was selected for a national competition in Rwanda.



But when it came to academics, he couldn’t be tied down to the conventional.



After high school, he instead opted to attend workshops and training sessions in business management and entrepreneurship.



Instead of going to university like most of his classmates, Ntwali made music, also working as an assistant manager at his father’s chain of barber shops. This is where he first faced the day-to-day challenges of running a business and realized the gaps in his own skill- sets as well as in others.



After months on the job, thanks to his brother – another entrepreneur in the family – he was motivated to attend an entrepreneurship event in Kigali unaware of the several early stage creative startups he was about to encounter.



Ntwali was 17 when he met the founder of BAG Innovation, Gabriel Ekman.



“He spoke about the lack of skilled youth in Rwanda and the gaps in training. How most students had degrees but did not know how to use them. Employers had employees that did not perform and I thought ‘yes! I have seen this’!”



Intrigued and excited by the social impact model illustrated by Ekman, Ntwali approached him to find out more and the two instantly connected on their shared energy and desire to solve problems.



Ntwali joined Ekman in his tiny workspace with a laptop and began to work on improving the recruitment, training and selection ecosystem of Rwanda.



Making use of simple tools like Facebook and interpersonal skills, the two would approach small companies in the country to learn about their challenges. After acquiring a fair understanding of the challenge, the two would brainstorm on solutions, but not alone.



“If a coffee shop told us they struggled with pushing higher sales, we would advertise to students on Facebook to solve the problem for the shop, to sell more coffee.”



Once they had worked out the solutions together, the group would offer them to the coffee shop. This was a social impact exercise that built the foundation of BAG Innovation.



After a few successful attempts, the two began training the students with the best solutions and preparing them for various job scenarios. By connecting the students with the shops/companies, they would not only offer solutions but a pipeline of potential employees.



This led to companies coming forth and asking to employ the students trained and acquired by BAG Innovation.



“When we noticed that our services were gaining demand, we sat down to chart a monetize-able model for our business.”



Ntwali joined the company in 2018, by which time, the company had reeled in many contracts and was able to pay off bills and expand operations.



When asked what differentiates them from a HR firm, he says: “We complement each other. We are not looking for the right candidate for you; we are creating the right candidate for a job. We are working with the same social impact model but one that is scalable, sustainable and profitable.”



Even though BAG Innovation makes its money from companies that hire talent through them on a per-person basis, its blended model of offline and online interactions for tackling specific challenges within a firm and the ability to offer a range of employee portfolios to choose from is their differentiator, they say.



“Those who do not perform in our trainings, we offer them further programs to learn from and improve while keeping them out of our talent pool, until they match the required standard.”



Ntwali’s ability to pitch his company’s unique model, ideas and potential to others has won him a few cash grants.



From the African Union startup challenge to the Hanga Pitchfest, he is now a name in the startup community.



“We have used the money from these competitions and grants to scale up operations and improve our marketing and sales team.”



As the non-technical founders of a tech company, a lot of BAG Innovation’s funds have gone towards outsourcing their IT services.



Just last year, they hired an engineer to lead tech and a full marketing-sales team to support the founders in bringing more clients.



“I always function like a COO – I like to work closely with the team and know everything that happens in the company, that’s how I learned and grew.”



Ntwali has a spring in his step as he walks around the office, saying hello to his colleagues and stepping out the main door to stop and stand next to the sign, Bag, beaming with pride.



As a 21-year-old business head, he has enough reason to smile.

Screenshot 2022-07-07 at 17.00.26

The Making Of A 21-Year-Old Rwandan CEO

<h2 id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has assembled a team to study unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) – popularly described as UFOs, or unidentified flying objects – the agency&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-to-set-up-independent-study-on-unidentified-aerial-phenomena/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a>&nbsp;Thursday, a year after a highly anticipated report from U.S. intelligence agencies into a host of sightings since 2004.



<h2 id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h2>



The NASA study aims “to move the scientific understanding of UAPs forward” as well as look at how they impact national security and air safety, NASA said in a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-to-set-up-independent-study-on-unidentified-aerial-phenomena/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">statement</a>.



Don’t expect the commissioned study to provide any breakthroughs about the existence of aliens: NASA said in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-to-set-up-independent-study-on-unidentified-aerial-phenomena/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">release</a>&nbsp;there is “no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin.”



The project’s budget will be no more than $100,000, Dan Evans, the NASA official overseeing the study, told reporters Thursday,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1534948757246197764" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according</a>&nbsp;to SpaceNews.



It will take about nine months to conduct the study, which will rely on data collected by governments, private companies, non-profit organizations and even civilians, NASA said.



<h2 id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



Last June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/06/25/intel-agencies-say-most-ufo-sightings-they-investigated-were-real-objects-no-that-doesnt-mean-theyre-alien-spacecraft/?sh=3391a6e7544c">released</a>&nbsp;a report stating that the federal government&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/ufo-report-government-can-t-explain-143-144-mysterious-flying-n1272390" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">couldn’t explain</a>&nbsp;143 of 144 of the UAPs identified by military pilots, but offered a number of possibilities, including aerial clutter like birds or balloons; natural atmospheric phenomena like thermal fluctuations or ice crystals; classified U.S. programs; or advanced Russian or Chinese technology. The report made no mention of extraterrestrial origins, a popular but unsupported conspiracy theory, but did identify UAPs as a national security threat. In November, the Pentagon&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/11/24/year-of-the-ufo-continues-pentagon-launches-program-to-investigate-sightings/?sh=efe182a16340">established</a>&nbsp;the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group&nbsp;<a href="https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2853121/dod-announces-the-establishment-of-the-airborne-object-identification-and-manag/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">designed</a>&nbsp;to “address the challenges associated” with UAPs. Last month, Congress held its&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2022/05/17/real-but-still-unexplained-congress-holds-its-first-ufo-hearing-in-50-years/?sh=e6df1852e707">first</a>&nbsp;public UFO hearing in over 50 years.



<h2 id="h-big-number">BIG NUMBER</h2>



About 400. That’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2022/05/17/real-but-still-unexplained-congress-holds-its-first-ufo-hearing-in-50-years/?sh=e6df1852e707">how many</a>&nbsp;UAP sightings are in the U.S. military’s databases, Scott W. Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, said during last month’s congressional hearing.



<h2 id="h-further-reading">FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/11/24/year-of-the-ufo-continues-pentagon-launches-program-to-investigate-sightings/?sh=efe182a16340">Year Of The UFO Continues: Pentagon Launches Program To Investigate Sightings</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2022/05/17/real-but-still-unexplained-congress-holds-its-first-ufo-hearing-in-50-years/?sh=e6df1852e707">Real But Still Unexplained: Congress Holds Its First UFO Hearing In 50 Years</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/06/25/intel-agencies-say-most-ufo-sightings-they-investigated-were-real-objects-no-that-doesnt-mean-theyre-alien-spacecraft/?sh=3391a6e7544c">Intel Agencies Say Most UFO Sightings They Reviewed Were Likely Real Objects (No, That Doesn’t Mean They’re Alien Spacecraft)</a> (Forbes)



By Derek Saul, Forbes Staff

Logo Photo Illustration

NASA Launches Study On UFOs

A pair of twentysomethings from Uganda and Ghana thought there was a fortune to be made bringing transnational financial services to Africa’s 1.2 billion people. With 5 million users, San Francisco-based Chipper Cash is just getting started.



It was the summer of 2018, and Ham Serunjogi, a 24-year-old Ugandan immigrant, thought the pitch he was making to a Palo Alto venture capi­tal firm was going well. He had explained how his fintech startup, Chipper Cash, would enable African consumers to send money to each other, across national borders, more cheaply and easily than the antiquated banking system—a sort of Venmo for the continent.



Then came a question from one of the partners: “Why don’t you go look for donations and grants to fund this?” Because, Serunjogi replied, this will be a profit-making business. The clueless partner persisted: “Why don’t you talk to Unicef or an impact investing firm?” Serunjogi discreetly declines to name the firm, or to say which VC later told him that “regardless of what the metrics are, I have to apply a discount to this business because it’s in Africa.”



Those memories still sting, even though Chipper Cash has now raised $300 million from a roster of blue-chip VCs, most recently in November at a $2.2 billion valuation. “These were things I’d have to take with a straight face. But it was outrageous, and it still is,” Serunjogi says from the San Francisco office where he, cofounder Maijid Moujaled and nearly a fifth of the company’s 350 employees are based. The two founders each have an estimated 10% stake in Chipper, translating into paper fortunes north of $200 million.



Sheel Mohnot, a former partner at 500 Startups—Chipper Cash’s first backer—chalks up some early investor resistance to ignorance about Africa. “No one was investing in Africa at the time,” he says. That has changed. Per CB Insights, venture capitalists invested $1.5 billion in African fintech companies last year, up sevenfold from 2020. Sub-Saharan Africans today have 605 million registered mobile money accounts—with which they can send cash via text message—up from 469 million in 2018. That makes the area fertile ground for more advanced consumer financial apps.



Four years after its founding, Chipper Cash has 5 million registered users in seven countries, including Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria. It offers not only low-cost money transfers but bill payment, crypto trading and the ability to buy U.S. stocks. Excluding crypto transactions, it booked more than $75 million in revenue in 2021, compared with $18 million in 2020.



The idea for Chipper Cash was seeded when high-school-age Serunjogi saw the problems his father encountered trying to move money through Africa’s ossified banking system. Serunjogi’s family lived in Gayaza, a Ugandan town 10 miles outside Kampala, the capital. His parents owned a farm, and his father also ran an IT operation helping local businesses set up networks. Though hardly rich, the family sent Serunjogi and his two brothers to a private high school and enrolled them in a competitive swim club. In 2010, Serunjogi, then 16, made the Ugandan Youth Olympic team. After having problems completing a bank transfer, his father was forced to fly to South Africa with an envelope full of cash to pay his son’s swim coach while they were training there.



After high school, Serunjogi followed his older brother to Grinnell, a small liberal arts college in Iowa known for its strong academics, where both swam varsity. At Grinnell he met Moujaled, a Ghanaian computer science major who had started a popular student coding group. Almost immediately, the two began talking about developing an African money transfer app. But first they wanted real-world tech experience and needed work visas. So during his junior year Serunjogi sent cold emails to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and snagged an internship with Facebook, which turned into a full-time job in Dublin after he graduated in 2016.



In the spring of 2018, Serunjogi texted Moujaled, who was working as a software engineer in San Francisco, to say it was time to get going. Serunjogi quit his job and moved into Moujaled’s studio apartment, sleeping on an air mattress in the kitchenette. The two used their combined savings of less than $30,000 and Moujaled’s ongoing salary as seed capital. They&nbsp;<a href="https://digestafrica.com/chipper-cash-money-whatsapp" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">launched</a>&nbsp;a test version of their app in July 2018, letting customers send money from Uganda to Ghana for free.



They took pitches to more than 50 VC firms until, in November 2018, 500 Startups agreed to invest $150,000. Before the papers were signed, Mohnot wired $40,000 to Chipper after Serunjogi told him he was about to miss rent. “I will be eternally grateful to him for that,” Serunjogi says.



Chipper’s free, easy-to-use app was a big improvement over the available alternatives. For example, Kenya’s M-Pesa, which launched in 2007, charges <a href="https://www.safaricom.co.ke/personal/m-pesa/m-pesa-rates" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1% to 2%</a> for many domestic transfers.



By mid-2019 Chipper Cash was available in Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda. It soon expanded to Nigeria, Africa’s biggest market with more than 200 million people, and by the end of the year, it had 600,000 customers. It also introduced a foreign-exchange markup fee of 2% to 5% to start generating revenue. As bitcoin rose from $14,000 to $20,000 in the fall of 2020, Chipper began to let users buy and sell bitcoin and ether, establishing a second lucrative line of business: trading fees. It reached a $2.2 billion valuation in late 2021, with investment from firms including Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, Ribbit Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Transactions grew from $200 million in the first quarter of 2021 to $1.6 billion 12 months later.



All that growth comes with added high-stakes challenges. One is liquidity: Chipper needs to make sure it has enough funds in each country to support instant transfers. When it doesn’t, transaction times can slow to a full day or longer. Money can solve that problem. A bigger worry is competition. Senegal-based startup Wave offers similar services (albeit in different countries so far) and notched a&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/sequoia-heritage-stripe-and-others-invest-200m-in-african-fintech-wave-at-1-7b-valuation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">$1.7 billion</a>&nbsp;valuation last year. Other remittance companies such as Remitly and Wise don’t yet let people send money from one African country to another, but there’s nothing stopping them from entering the market.



For now, Serunjogi is focused on maintaining Chipper’s steep growth, moving to profitability—and helping Africans while doing so. Customers benefit, he says, when they can move money easily and have new ways to invest and build wealth. “I’m a deep believer in the role of entrepreneurship and capitalism in improving the lives of people who live in developing countries.”



By Jeff Kauflin, Forbes Staff

Screenshot 2022-06-07 at 09.24.29

How Two Africans Overcame Bias To Build A Startup Worth Billions

BY TIANA CLINE



According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, microchips are the world’s most complex, costly, and research- intensive product humankind has ever manufactured. Microchips, also known as chips or semiconductors, are packed with tens of billions of transistors on a piece of silicon real estate the size of a fingernail. As technology advances and the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, more chips are needed. Because of the chip shortage, 7.1 million fewer cars were built last year at a $210 billion loss in profits for automakers.



“We often refer to semiconductors as if there were homogenous but there are many different types of semiconductors and over time, they become smaller and smaller,” explains Paul Lee. “The latest technology goes into smartphones and is a few nanometers thick. There’s also old generation technology and that’s where a lot of the shortages are. That’s why there is a lack of supply in cars – lots of elements require screen and you don’t need the latest, smallest technology because cars are big.” There has also been a shift in demand in the car market. Global electric car sales more than doubled in 2021 to 6.6 million and these vehicles have more semiconductors inside, not only because of their electrification, but for digital displays and other high-tech features.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">Because of the chip shortage, 7.1 million fewer cars were built last year at a $210 billion loss in profits for automakers.</blockquote>



Crosscall, a French specialist of waterproof and rugged devices, managed to avoid the chip shortage by optimizing their product line. While many technology brands have complex ranges with endless product variations (many of which are built to order), Crosscall’s focus was on durability. If a device doesn’t break easily, there’s no need to replace it and all the components that go with it. “Of course we are seeing the impact – the chip shortage is a huge problem, especially when it comes to price increases,” says Crosscall South Africa Sales Director Julien Fouriot.



“From components to transport, the overall cost of everything is increasing. We managed to secure components at the right time and created stock but lead times of getting new supplies in at the moment is crazy – what once took four to six weeks, can now be up to six months.”



<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/technology/2022/05/25/where-did-all-the-chips-go/">Read more here </a>(FORBES AFRICA)

Screenshot 2022-06-06 at 17.43.26

THE YEAR OF THE MICROCHIP…But where does this leave Africa?

Even though the world has begun to open up, the after-effects of the pandemic on the supply chain are noticeable. Limited shipping containers and flights have created a backlog putting massive pressure on component manufacturers. Where does that leave Africa?



By Tiana Cline



EMICONDUCTORS POWER the modern world. They’re not only in every single device that we use on a daily basis, they’re a key part of data centers, factories, cars, household appliances, gaming consoles and aircraft. But now, there are simply not enough to go around. As the demand for electronic devices grows, the global chip shortage continues to impact a number of industries and what Africa is now experiencing is less product, significant price hikes and a slower supply chain as big brands prioritize high profits over stocking up the emerging world.



“Because of the chip shortage, logistics has really become a real challenge for us. 



The North African markets are really suffering when it comes to stock allocations. Distributors would rather service bigger markets where logistics are easier,” says Johannes Groenewald, the head of Demand Factory at the Tarsus Technology Group, an IT reseller with offices throughout southern Africa. Another issue is that 70% of the technology reseller market in Africa is made up of government spend but when the pandemic hit, IT investments were cancelled in order to focus on Covid-19 programs.



“Botswana was our biggest market by quite a margin but for the past two years, they’ve invested nothing in IT purchases,” adds Groenewald. “This puts the market back a couple of years because in Botswana, for example, students get subsidies to buy hardware for their studies. Because the budget has been reallocated, the technology becomes outdated and there is now no availability to supply that market.”



Instead of supplying entry-level devices at a lower margin, many manufacturers are chasing volume, choosing to serve more profitable markets with products and services where the risk of losing business is much higher. 



“If you compare selling a professional device in a country like Zimbabwe compared to the US, it’s much more than margin reach, it’s the surrounding peripherals, the docking station, the support. In Zimbabwe, it’s just a naked device and very few units are sold in these markets,” says Groenewald.



“The backlog has to be caught up first,” adds Mark Broude, Kemtek Imaging Systems’ CEO and COO. “The demand will continue to outstrip the ability to produce product chipsets and I believe it will take between five and seven years to get production to full capacity.”



While the instability in Eastern Europe may not directly impact Africa’s component supply, there are fears that it could intensify tensions between Taiwan and China. “Some components are exclusively manufactured in Taiwan so any conflict would have a huge implication on local availability,” adds Groenewald. Taiwan and Samsung Electronics in South Korea currently dominate the automotive chip market.



While new chip factories are currently being built, they will only become operational in 2023.



“There aren’t many manufacturers which have the financial ability to fund a new plant,” explains Paul Lee, Deloitte’s global head of research for the technology, media and telecommunications industry. “Intel is investing $20 billion on a new semiconductor plant but there aren’t many entities who can do that. It often has to be a combination of government subsidies and manufacturer investments.”



Even though the world has begun to open up, the aftereffects of the pandemic on the supply chain are noticeable. Limited shipping containers and flights have created a backlog that is putting massive pressure on component manufacturers.



“If anything, our expectations on shortages have exacerbated. We are less optimistic about supply increasing to meet with demand,” says Lee. “The pandemic has been very confusing because it’s been a lot longer and it has manifested in different ways than what most people expected.” Semiconductor chips are also not the only 



component in short supply. Even though there are many companies that supply LCD screens, there are only a few manufacturers. With the medical industry so invested in going paperless, an increased need for touch devices meant other hardware – like scanners, printers and low-end phones – couldn’t be produced.



“The market is dry from factories being closed during lockdowns and shortages in raw material. There was a huge backlog in supplying LCD screens to developing world markets which is only now normalizing,” explains Groenewald. “A lot of devices earmarked for normal market consumption ended up in the medical industry.” Manufacturers also have to consider other minerals which go into semiconductors such as lithium and copper.



“There are the rare earths which are required for mobile phones. Historically, it wasn’t viable to extract these elements from end-of-life devices but now because mining those minerals is challenging, smartphones are being designed to be recyclable,” says Lee. “It’s not just about how you assemble it, but also how you disassemble it so that you can reuse components within that.”



Despite supply chain issues, Deloitte predicts that the semiconductor industry will earn over $600 billion globally in 2022. Microchips may only be produced by a handful of manufacturers today, but they’re essential to almost every industry and the absence of just one could result in a device not getting made or sold.



“The long-term demand for semiconductors doesn’t go away. The long-term demand for devices doesn’t go away,” says Lee, “but the shape of the increase in that demand is going to be anomalous until, perhaps, 2024.”

the technician laying CPU in the motherboard socket

WHERE DID ALL THE CHIPS GO- And Where Does This Leave Africa?

Snap stock tumbled right over the cliff Monday evening, and the reason for the plummet makes it quite likely that Snap won’t be the last tech company to see its shares go so spectacularly&nbsp;splat&nbsp;over the next few months.



Less than three weeks after&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/04/21/snap-first-quarter-earnings/">issuing guidance</a>&nbsp;for the second quarter, Snap is now revising those figures, saying it expects both sales and profit to fall short of initial estimates. It blames the situation on a “macroeconomic environment [that] has deteriorated further and faster than anticipated,” the company says&nbsp;<a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001564408/000119312522157565/d516472d8k.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">in a new SEC filing</a>.



Investors, already shaken by weeks of decline in equities, rushed to dump the stock in after-hours trading. Snap fell more than 30% to around $15.80, a grim mark for the shares. At such a price, it means the company has given up nearly all the gains it won through the pandemic, a time when users turned to apps like Snapchat to pass the time, lifting the fortunes of companies like Snap and other competitors.



There are two narratives apparent in the stock’s Wile E. Coyote&nbsp;<a href="https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FGq_bjaI0NTo%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DGq_bjaI0NTo&amp;tbnid=YeRJ1zqf5_L0XM&amp;vet=12ahUKEwje6_2t7Pb3AhX_sHIEHe5gBBMQMygCegUIARDeAQ..i&amp;docid=OO_eMxI0slhHsM&amp;w=480&amp;h=360&amp;q=wile%20e%20coyote%20cliff&amp;client=safari&amp;ved=2ahUKEwje6_2t7Pb3AhX_sHIEHe5gBBMQMygCegUIARDeAQ" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">imitation</a>, and let’s talk about them separately. There’s the macro one, which is arguably the most important. Snap isn’t the only company relying on digital-advertising dollars to fill its bank accounts—far from it, of course. Everything from Alphabet to Meta does too. Snap’s warning about revenue and profit should be viewed for what it most obviously is: an indicator those companies will struggle in the second quarter, and we’ll get a look at just how bad it is for them when they report their second-quarter figures in July and August. That indicator alarm is glowing neon red after Snap’s statement, the same shade as, well, an illuminated exit sign.



Which is precisely the directional cue investors across technology took on Monday.&nbsp;Meta shares declined 7% in after hours, Alphabet’s by 3.6%, Pinterest’s by 11.9%. And, yikes, this will only make things all the more dire for Twitter, whose shares dropped 3.9%. The further Twitter stock slides, the hungrier Elon Musk will get to redo his price for the company. (If you have been living under a rock—and, my goodness, lucky you in some real sense—you may not know Musk&nbsp;<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjM5Zf68Pb3AhX0g4kEHa3ID84QFnoECA4QAQ&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fmattdurot%2F2022%2F04%2F14%2Felon-musks-proposed-twitter-takeover-has-already-cost-him-9-billion%2F&amp;usg=AOvVaw3GybSJwzfitXxgmaYYt9uS" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">offered $54.20 a share</a>&nbsp;for Twitter as recently as April 14. It trades for $36.45 right now.) In turn, if Twitter refuses to renegotiate, and Musk walks,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/05/20/how-the-sexual-misconduct-allegations-against-elon-musk-could-affect-his-twitter-deal/?sh=34fb857d1f8d">which totally remains a possibility</a>, Twitter will emerge out of takeover talks into a moderately to severely depressed market for ads with a share price that’s a fraction of what Musk said he’d pay. Such a scenario is what you might metaphorically call “out of the frying pan, into the bonfire.”



Even with a decreased appetite for ads among marketers, many Big Tech companies are going to do just fine—even if their shares take some hits in the next few months as they did on Monday and have over recent weeks. It’s easy enough to identify who falls into this category. These companies throw off lots of cash and sport fat profits. Those two elements provide plenty of cushion during bearish times and give those businesses the ability to go through the rubble if they want, to buy companies on the cheap and get first crack at talent.



Speaking of portly profits, you’ll find nothing of the kind at Snap, and here’s where we can get to our second narrative, the Snap-specific one. Snap is more likely to have a tough time of it as the markets continue to churn, more than, say, Meta, which also has an ads-challenged revenue model but also did $39.4 billion in profit last year. (In that time, Snap&nbsp;lost&nbsp;$488 million.) In addition to the broader economic trends, Snap is also contending with changes to Apple’s iPhone software that has forced Snap and other businesses to rethink their digital advertising business and had already led to a disruption in marketing budgets. (Apple is letting users stop apps from tracking them. Snap and its advertisers had counted on this data for targeted advertising.) This had already weighed heavily on Snap stock over the last few months. Just last fall, Snap shares were at record highs, over $80.



By being the one of the first companies to talk about a worse-than-expected second quarter, Snap hopes to get out in front of things and possibly save itself from an even sharper decline in its stock over the next few months. Or even more pain when its peers start fessing up to how bad it&#8217;s been for them. Wall Street and institutional investors do not like surprises during earnings season, and the early release of the figures tries to avoid such a fate.



“There is a lot to deal with in the macro environment today,” Chief Executive Evan Spiegel&nbsp;<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjkxOi06Pb3AhW9jIkEHZySAWMQFnoECAUQAQ&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fsnap-issues-profit-warning-on-deteriorating-macroeconomic-environment-11653341398&amp;usg=AOvVaw2Wu1106p1NFHJJjRHjhXqy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reportedly said</a>&nbsp;Monday at a JPMorgan Chase conference. How well Snap and the others navigate through those headwinds—and the clarity they give to Wall Street and other investors about their problems—will dictate who else goes over the edge and how long it’ll take Snap to climb back up.



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/"></a>By Abram Brown, Forbes Staff

Snap’s Reduced Profit Forecast Sends Stock Plummeting 30%. What Tech Giant Is Next?

BY TIANA CLINE



THE ANONYMOUS, unregulated nature of cryptocurrency – which for many is a selling point – is also what makes crypto oh-so-popular with hackers. It is estimated that in 2021, crypto scammers stole around $14 billion in cryptocurrency worldwide. And it’s not only newcomers who are getting blindsided, even those with the blockchain know-how have fallen prey to pyramid schemes, phishing attacks via email, social media (or even dating apps) and pseudo- coins.



“The concept with blockchain is that it gives decentralized capability to transfer or to manage assets. That is the difference between blockchain technology and what we are currently using today,” explains Oded Vanunu, the head of products vulnerability research at Check Point Software.



“With blockchain, everyone who wants to enter the network is equal – everyone owns the same database and every transaction is documented and approved by all parties. It’s secure, cryptographic and – in theory, unbreakable.”



But since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009, a lot has changed. There are now over 18,000 cryptocurrencies. Non- fungible tokens (or NFTs), which are built on blockchains and can be bought with crypto, have become far more than a way to collect digital art – businesses are using NFTs to create more transparent supply chains and San Marino, a small country in Europe, turned to the blockchain to digitize Covid-19 vaccine passports.



“We are now moving between the internet of information and into the internet of value,” says Vanunu, “but every website and application we are using is based on Web2. Web3 is based on the blockchain.”



In 2021, over $14 billion worth of cryptocurrency was hijacked from wallets. And according to Vanunu, this gap between Web2 and Web3 is where vulnerabilities come in. “We have many misconfiguration gaps on the security of combining Web2 and Web3. There 



is a lot of malicious activity to exploit applications using blockchain connectivity to get users’ wallet permissions and



this is just the beginning.”



<h2 id="h-fake-wallets-and-faux-coins">Fake wallets and faux coins?</h2>



Today, anyone can create a token coin and behind each is a smart contract – source code that says exactly how a coin will function. But because coins are so easy to set up, hackers are now creating fraudulent crypto tokens to misconfigure smart contracts and steal funds.



“These coins have some kind of malicious functionality. Smart contracts have very basic functionality but since it is software, cybercriminals can take it to the next level,” says Vanunu. “Behind each scam coin you’ll find marketing on social media and people don’t really understand what’s happening behind the scene. They’re buying coins based on fake news.”



When it comes to buying and selling cryptocurrencies, there is little to no due diligence. In many countries, cryptocurrencies remain unregulated. A digital token named Squid inspired by Squid Game, a popular South Korean Netflix series, stole $3.38 million from crypto investors



last year. KuCoin, a leading crypto exchange in Singapore, suffered a security breach to the value of over $281 million. “Anyone can create a crypto coin. Anyone can copy a malicious crypto coin and create a new one for scams,” adds Vanunu.



In order to buy digital currency on a trading platform you don’t technically need an electronic wallet – coins can be stored on a crypto exchange – but in order to move cryptocurrency around, a non-custodial wallet is a must-have. There are currently over 80 different types of cryptocurrency wallets available and hackers are taking advantage of this by setting up fake phishing wallet websites containing nefarious links. While there are increasingly complex methods of stealing cryptocurrency, phishing scams remain the most common. Phishing scams have been around since 1995 but what makes crypto phishing somewhat different is that there’s no undo button or customer service to call when things go wrong. This type of crypto hacking occurs when a hacker sends emails containing links in an attempt to bait the receiver into sharing their personal details – including their crypto wallet key info. Unlike a bank card with a pin, crypto wallets use public addresses and private keys which are mathematically linked to each other.



“The simplest way to get at people is to hack their wallets and to fool them into giving away that information. That’s really how the whole crypto-hacking thing works,” says Brian Pinnock, Mimecast’s Director of Sales Engineering for the Middle East and Africa. “Someone opens a phishing email and ends up downloading malware. And even if you type in a legitimate address, they may have hijacked your DNS and you’ll end up on a fake domain where they can steal your money or credentials.”



There are two main types of cryptocurrency wallets – hot and cold. Pinnock says that most people download hot wallets without realizing that they’re connected to the internet the whole time.



“Everyone makes the assumption that crypto is completely anonymous but it’s very trackable in the right circumstances,” adds Pinnock. “We put all of our information online and



hackers weaponize it – that’s why these scams work so well. Even if you’re conservative with what you share on social media, there’s been a huge number of well-publicized data breaches.”



As businesses move online and into the cloud, cybercriminals follow.



Some high-profile scams include a Brazilian pyramid scheme which saw Kenya Bitcoin investors losing millions. Similarly, an alleged cryptocurrency pyramid scheme in Uganda saw its two directors charged with fraud.



“Why do we go digital?” asks Pinnock, “because it allows us to scale up very quickly. We can do much more than we could in an analogue world. The cloud takes away the hassle of running these things ourselves. That’s exactly what cybercriminals did. Phishing gives them scale and anonymity. The benefits of being online have helped cybercriminals as much as they’ve helped us. That’s the reality.”



According to Gartner, by 2024, at least 20% of large enterprises will use digital currencies for payment, store of value or collateral. Cryptocurrency is transforming the concept of money as well as disrupting financial networks and business models and as its adoption skyrockets, it will be critical for potential investors to take note of the scams that have already happened as well as the influx of new ones.



“If you want to invest in cryptocurrency, go for coins with very big liquidity – coins that thousands of users are already invested in. Usually, scammer coins don’t have a large liquidity. In other words, there is not much money inside,” advises Vanunu. “Secondly, use two wallets. One will be a core wallet where all your assets sit, the second will contain a small amount of money and this is the wallet that will be connected to various marketplaces and to the Web2 infrastructure, so if you do get exploited, a hacker will only have access to the minimum amounts.”

Internet crime concept. Hacker working on a code on dark digital background with digital interface around.

Hacking The BLOCKCHAIN: High Volatile And High-Risk – just how safe is the world of cryptocurrency?

NFTs were the biggest breakthrough in technology last year, its founding inextricable from the art world. Proponents point to a future where art is democratized, funds secure and royalties continuous. Detractors believe NFTs are a scam, and point to fraudulent activity and the exclusivity of highly-priced sales. A look at some of the African players in this space.



CRYPTOAPES, CRYPTOKITTIES, Beeple – according to Collins Dictionary, NFT was the word of the year for 2021. The popularity of non-fungible tokens exploded during the course of last year, with celebrities such as Eminem and Melania Trump having jumped on the bandwagon, the total market cap was estimated to be in excess of $40 billion according to data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis Inc.



The founding of NFTs is inextricable from the art world; almost a decade ago, the first NFT was minted. New York- based digital artist Kevin McCoy created Quantum, a pixelated, radiating octagon, was minted on the Namecoin blockchain. The artwork was sold by major arthouse Sotheby’s through their Natively Digital online auction, and fetched just over $1.4 million last year.



Competitor Christie’s sold over $150 million worth of NFT artwork during the last year, Everydays – The First 5000 Days by artist Beeple being sold for a record- breaking $69 million, positioning him amongst the “top three most valuable living artists”, said the auction house. We examine the history, possibilities, and some of the African players in the NFT space.



<h2 id="h-the-good-the-bad-and-the-intangible">THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE INTANGIBLE</h2>



Proponents of the NFT boom in the art world point to its democratic potential; almost anyone can mint an NFT, and since this minting is performed through what is termed the smart contract – which governs transferability and ownership – these tokens have strong implications for authenticity verification and ongoing royalty payments, which has had some in the art world optimistic, even if they are not sure of the technicalities of how it all works.



“I’m clueless but excited,” says Koos Groenewald, one half of Jana + Koos, an art and design duo who participated in online art fair Latitudes’ first NFT offering late last year. “It’s like an internal combustion engine. You don’t need to understand how internal combustion works in order to benefit from it.”



Latitudes, which originally began as a successful, physical art fair aimed at promoting a platform where artists, galleries and independents could come together on an equal playing field, has faced challenges common to many in the art space 



since 2019. With the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, the physical art world was disrupted. Like many in the industry, Latitudes made the move online.



“We launched [Latitudes] in July 2020 with around 350 artists. Now we are closer to 900 and growing nicely and quickly – we’re basically a third party marketplace with galleries, artists, curators&#8230; as long



as you have good art to sell you can bring it on to the platform,” says Roberta Coci, the co-founder who partnered with South African NFT experts and social marketplace Momint for the implementation of their first NFT-based art offering.



Anna Ogutogullari, founder of the newly-launched QkweQkwe.io, agrees with this optimistic outlook; a virtual marketplace where African artists can sell to a global audience, allowing the purchase of NFT- based art for the first time with the launch of their group show Multiplixation earlier this year. Unlike Latitudes, which was forced to adapt to the shifts in market during the Covid-19 pandemic, QkweQkwe is of the belief that NFTs provide a unique opportunity to decentralize control of the contemporary art world, but both platforms agree on the benefits to artists themselves.



“If you look at the contemporary African art market, you’re looking at about $15 billion,” says Ogutogullari. “It’s very interesting because there’s a lot of interest into the NFTs and digital space, but there’s not at the moment a lot of African players&#8230; If you look at what’s happened in Sotheby’s, in the last auction where the majority of the work was actually African, and that is the type of change that we want to see in the future African art market, where Africans are supporting Africans.”



Artists from QkweQkwe’s stable are similarly excited about the possibilities of both African representation, and continued royalties, but acknowledge the risks with entering such a new field with their work.



“I don’t have too many high expectations,” says Zamani Ngubane, a participating artist whose work focuses on local portraiture. “That’s how I always approach new ventures – but I’m here to learn and open my mind to the world of NFTs.”



However, it’s worth noting that there are many proponent skeptics of the value of NFTs to the art world, and this criticism rests on concerns regarding historical and current issues of money laundering through art, as well as the abundance of scams already being run through the NFT space.



Indeed, the NFT art world is evidently susceptible to many of the same perils that proponents claim it should mitigate; on many of the most popular NFT marketplaces, hundreds of artists have suffered from identity fraud, as well as simply having NFTs sold linking to their work without permission, with Twitter user @NFTtheft cataloguing many such incidents.



“What the hell is this? So, founder of this site is offering me on some sort of NFT deal. He sent me this SS. He already made an account and posted my artworks there. WT*? I didn’t give any permission at all. He made an account with my name without even me knowing it,” tweeted Indonesian artist Yuditya Afandi. A user had created an account on the marketplace NFT Restake under their name, and listed Afandi’s artwork for sale.



Part of the prevalence of fraudulent activity can be ascribed to the emergence of a new medium on relatively nascent technology – with many not understanding how NFT-linked artwork functions, there will be more exploitation until people become more familiar with the platform. This only accounts for part of the problem though – the other two challenges are inherent to both the art world and aspects of the technology that NFTs are based on.



<h2>TO THE ARTIST, THE ART</h2>



Describing the art world as an “ideal playground for money laundering”, a 2020 report commissioned by the US Senate identified the art market as “the largest legal, unregulated market in the United States”, and are not required (in the US) to maintain anti-money- laundering financing controls.



High-ticket fine art items are often handled with extreme privacy, with pricing often being subjective or easily manipulated. Drug cartels and terrorist organizations count themselves amongst the simply wealthy that have had money laundering transactions through art purchases extensively documented in the media.



In some senses, NFT-tied artworks are able to offer the same advantages to fraudsters and money launderers, with added benefits; transactions occur primarily via cryptocurrency rather than fiat, which offers several novel ways to remain anonymous and obfuscate fund origins and destinations, as well as a lack of common understanding, allowing for grifters to run rampant.



When Christie’s announced their landmark auction of the NFT for Beeple’s Everydays – The First 5000 Days, Google Trends data indicated that searches for the term “NFT” multiplied 28 times in the three weeks leading up to the auction itself.



The media too was in a frenzy, fascinated by the new platform of digital art and the possibilities it offered.



The buyer of Everydays – The First 5000 Days, an initially anonymous bidder termed ‘MetaKovan’, later unmasked as cryptocurrency enthusiast Vignesh Sundaresan, paints himself as a patron of new technologies, an angel investor and proponent of free information. Sundaresan manages the Metapurse fund, which had previously purchased works of Beeple’s, bundled them together, and then sold fractional ownership of these works in the form of a proprietary crypto token – the B20 token, of which they retained a majority stake.



Interestingly, 2% of the tokens were given to Beeple himself.



Speculative interest on the token due to hype around the Christie’s sale drove the value of the B20 token up to 13x its price over a period of less than a month into the run-up of the Everydays – The First 5000 Days. Journalist Amy Castor provided an excellent analysis of the behavior behind this particular sale.



However, this is not a view held by all within the NFT-based art world. Many in the art-related NFT space acknowledge the challenges present both in the art industry historically, and in the early-adopter space that is NFT- based art.



QkweQkwe is combating this possibility through both strict legal agreements with their artists, as well as a strongly progressive approach to technology; namely, that unlike many platforms where an NFT simply serves as a record of ownership of the work, the platform ensures that the NFT is the artwork in question, what is termed an on-chain NFT artwork, a rarity in the space.



<h2>IF NFTS ARE LIKE AN INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE, SPECULATION WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING IS LIKE DRIVING WITHOUT BRAKES</h2>



In the simplest terms, an NFT is a representation of something unique – and in the case of NFT- linked digital artworks, the NFT is a way to indicate ownership, sale, proof of transaction history, all of which can be independently verified, but it isn’t the artwork itself.



Whether the artwork is the animated cartoon cat flying through space leaving a rainbow trail, or an ape in pastel colors with a gold chain and a peak cap – most NFT art exists off the blockchain, simply termed “off chain”.



For example, if you purchase an NFT, the proof of your ownership is largely secure from corruption and permanent, unless you decide to sell the NFT.



Here’s a metaphor.



You buy a painting which is kept in an art gallery, and the gallery updates its unchangeable ownership book listing your name as the owner – that’s the smart contract part of the NFT. Anyone can walk into the gallery and take a photograph of the painting, but it’s ownership is irrefutably yours, and anyone can check the gallery’s ledger to prove this.



What happens when the gallery burns down?



Off-chain NFT artworks are not stored on the blockchain, but usually on centralized servers with the company listing them for sale (such as the servers of the NFT marketplace OpenSea), or a slightly more secure decentralized protocol called InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), which functions similarly to torrent files. The NFT points to an address on either the company servers or IPFS which contains the artwork itself, the actual file, and if the company goes out of business you may find that your NFT points you to owning nothing at all.



“So @CheckMyNFT has been tracking NFTs created on Nifty, and apparently most of them are already broken,” tweeted @JontyWareing, referencing the fact that many artworks hosted on the Nifty marketplace have disappeared due to failures in their hosting.



There are attempts to neutralize these risks in NFT artworks, with on-chain solutions in the works. Innovative developers have also provided opensource checks which allow you to view how your digital assets are stored. However, it doesn’t seem that most artists or marketplaces are concerned with the permanence of the works purchased, or how they are stored.



<h2>DEMOCRATIZATION? NOT NECESSARILY</h2>



Proponents of NFTs point to the technology democratizing the production and ownership of art, with the promise of continuous royalties and the ability to bypass the gallery ecosystem being major selling points to many digital artists moving into the space. There is also the implicit promise of securing lucrative sales, and the popular coverage of high-profile and highly-priced works has encouraged this.



However, the data bears a different picture – recent research published in Nature indicates that the NFT space mirrors the traditional art world, with a mere 10% of buyers and sellers of NFTs accounting for 90% of transactions and value, indicating that large marketplaces and brokers such as OpenSea are playing a role similar to gallerists in the non-crypto world.



“[We] made a breakthrough in new sales formats and categories, NFTs in particular,” said Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti in a press statement, of the auction house’s most lucrative year in the last half- decade.



Sotheby’s too recorded similar successes – it’s notable that these major houses were both early adopters of NFTs and hybrid art, and that they recorded such high sales, which seem to contradict the narrative that NFTs are opening the art world up to more everyday artists.



<h2>NFTs AS A HOT TOPIC: GOOD FOR THE PLANET?</h2>



Some digital artists have voiced detraction for NFTs or boycotted the medium entirely due to concerns about the effect on the earth’s climate. While NFTs are still in their infancy, and not responsible for the majority of transactions on the Ethereum network – where most transactions take place – the cryptocurrency itself relies on what is termed ‘proof of work’, similar to Bitcoin, where millions of computers solve complex mathematical problems in order to keep transactions secure.



Researchers and developers of Ethereum itself estimate the annual electricity consumption of the platform to be anywhere between 45TWh and 75TWh per year, comparable to the usage of the entire country of New Zealand.



Some galleries and artists participating in NFT sales have promised to spend a percentage of their profits investing in green technologies, attempting to offset the impact of their energy usage.



QkweQkwe are in support of Ethereum moving to a ‘proof of stake’ model, which would be less energy-intensive, as well as setting aside profits to CSR initiatives to counter the climate effects caused by their NFTs.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Screenshot-2022-05-12-at-23.36.56.png" alt="" class="wp-image-55077" width="541" height="486" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Screenshot-2022-05-12-at-23.36.56.png 794w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Screenshot-2022-05-12-at-23.36.56-300x270.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Screenshot-2022-05-12-at-23.36.56-768x691.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 541px) 100vw, 541px" /></figure></div>



However, not all consumers have supported the offset model, with some believing that this is but a panacea to a broader problem inherent to crypto-based platforms.



“ArtStation going into NFT and saying ‘but don’t worry! We’ll pay for carbon offsets’ is the equivalent of setting a house on fire. then placing a single potted plant on the burned property as “compensation”,” tweeted user BleachedRainbows, of an NFT sale event that was ultimately shut down due to concerns around its environmental impact.



The Ethereum network – and by extensions NFTs – have been planning to move to a ‘proof of stake’ model, whereby users would put up their coins as collateral instead of having to perform the electricity intensive ‘proof of work’, which would massively reduce the energy usage of the network.



However, this has been in the pipeline for some years without change, and many remain doubtful that it will be implemented. As the world becomes more aware of the peril of climate change, more and 



more digital artists are hesitant to work within a medium that might contribute to the damage of the planet.



Attitudes in the South African market are broadly positive – other than Latitudes and QkweQkwe.



Cape Town-based art gallery World Art also presented an NFT sale last year.



“This is a ground-breaking development in the art world. I am particularly thrilled that this mechanism guarantees artists royalties when their artworks are resold,” said gallery owner Charl Bezuidenhout. Museums, and even rhino-conservation efforts are moving into the space, with a tokenized pen-gun owned by South African anti-apartheid activist OR Tambo and a digital rhino horn going on sale.



<h2>METAVERSE – COLLINS DICTIONARY WORD OF 2022?</h2>



Facebook’s media rebrand to Meta late last year was no accident. The tech giant sees the metaverse as the future of the internet, and is aiming to lead the way in planting a flag in what Mark Zuckerberg believes will be greater immersion into a fully virtual world.



Meta is pumping millions of dollars into infrastructure and applications for a time where many people will be spending time fully immersed in a virtual world.



“The ‘metaverse’ is a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you,” is how Facebook defines this space.



While there is no exact consensus or definition as to what the metaverse will be, multitudes of tech conglomerates are exploring what this vision will look like, and the question arises – how will you own digital assets within the metaverse?



With none other than JP Morgan estimating that the metaverse represents a $1 trillion market, and participating in the launch of its own virtual Onyx Lounge in virtual reality 3D world Decentraland, alongside other major companies such as Nike, Samsung and Walmart.



Much of the reason why the public connection to the idea of the metaverse is so tenuous is just how early the adoption still is – normative, mainstream experience and acceptance is likely still years away, but pioneers are already staking their ground, with over $100 million being spent in a single week on digital real estate late last year.



And how is it that you own this digital land in the metaverse? Why, through NFTs.



At this early stage however, the possibilities are still quite limitless, with artwork, real-estate and digital products for one’s online avatars being first in line for application.



However, the possibilities at this stage are relatively endless; from location-based NFTs allowing access to real world spaces or dining experiences, DNA testing, real-world clothing and more.



Whatever the future of NFTs holds, it’s certain that the use cases are still at an early stage, and the art-world is trailblazing the adoption of a technology sure to change the face of digital interaction for decades to come.

Screenshot 2022-05-12 at 23.33.18

How The African Continent Is Taking A Deep Dive Into The Art World With NFTs

When Alon Rom took over as Hellopeter&#8217;s CEO in late 2014, South Africa&#8217;s customer advocacy platform was at somewhat of a crossroads. The founder had done phenomenally well establishing the platform and decided it was time to move on. As luck would have it, Alon was waiting in the wings, with inspired ideas of where it could go.&nbsp;



&#8220;When I heard that <a href="https://hubs.li/Q019WJ2P0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hellopeter</a> was up for sale, I was on holiday and planning to take an extended sabbatical from my entrepreneurial days. However, this news immediately piqued my interest because I knew how much it meant to Takealot and Mr Delivery from my days of working with them. Right there and then, I committed,&#8221; Alon says.&nbsp;&nbsp;



It was a short-lived sabbatical but the first step on a long journey toward changing a nation&#8217;s perception…&nbsp;



&#8220;I tend to take my moral code rather literally. After spending the majority of my career in traditional corporate spaces, I felt the need to be involved with something that actually moved the needle in terms of adding real value to South Africans—and here we are today.&#8221; — Alon Rom, CEO of Hellopeter.&nbsp;&nbsp;



<h3>The &#8216;Karen&#8217; Conundrum  </h3>



We have to remember that the Hellopeter brand was born in a time before social media. It might only take us seconds to jump online and get our issue resolved today. However, this was not the case back then. You would have to spend hours on hold waiting for a customer service team member to finally get to you. So, consumers were frustrated, and rightly so.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In came Hellopeter, a place where they could take their grievances and get the attention they deserved. So, of course, only negative experiences made their way to Hellopeter. However, times were changing.&nbsp;



<h3>Journey from Complaints to Community   </h3>



Fast-forward to today, over seven years later, and Hellopeter is still a household name on many people&#8217;s lips. However, the narrative has started to change. South Africans still tell their stories, helping others make better-informed choices. However, with much effort in communicating to consumers the importance of sharing positive experiences, they&#8217;re not all doom and gloom.&nbsp;&nbsp;



South Africans have started reaching for the mouse (or now, their phone) to rave about the positive experiences they&#8217;ve had. They began praising businesses too.&nbsp;



Finally, people started seeing Hellopeter more like the online review platform it is and not the complaints platform it was perceived to be.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Of course, Hellopeter will forever remain a place consumers can turn to when they need to resolve service-related issues and get the attention they deserve. The brand did not pivot and lose sight of this. Instead, it evolved, with Alon building on the already-strong foundation.&nbsp;



<h3>The Birth of Hellopeter Business  </h3>



&#8220;My biggest frustration has been that most local businesses don&#8217;t yet fully understand just how much value they&#8217;re leaking by not taking their online consumer reputation seriously.&#8221; — Alon Rom, CEO of Hellopeter.&nbsp;



It can be very difficult to change perceptions about a brand—especially a well-known brand like Hellopeter. And even more so when it relates to other businesses&#8217; hard-earned reputations.&nbsp;&nbsp;



However, Alon was adamant about showing businesses that Hellopeter was not a name to make them shake in their boots. That Hellopeter is no ombudsman to fear. Instead, it was a tool that could unlock serious business growth.&nbsp;&nbsp;



He wanted to show businesses how they could attract more customers, grow a trusted online presence, build social proof, and become more discoverable on search engines like Google—all through the simple process of actively collecting and managing reviews.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Since then, many South African SME businesses have been waking up to the value Hellopeter can offer them. 



However, the reality is that<a href="https://hubs.li/Q019WJ3y0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> 54% </a>of businesses are still reportedly &#8216;scared&#8217; of online reviews. On the flip side, over<a href="https://hubs.li/Q019WJc40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> 75%</a> of cited businesses claim that taking their reputation management seriously correlated directly with increased sales and brand loyalty. 



&#8220;Every single sustainably successful business I&#8217;ve been a part of has had one thing in common —they embraced the customer&#8217;s success as their priority, and I saw Hellopeter as an opportunity to take that principle to the next level,” says Alon.&nbsp;&nbsp;



So, let&#8217;s forever put the ombudsman myth to bed. The truth is that Hellopeter does not intervene between the business and the customer. They simply provide a platform where the two can come together for a solution that suits both their needs.&nbsp;&nbsp;



<h3 id="h-a-tech-driven-approach">A Tech-Driven Approach  </h3>



Hellopeter has blossomed into a tech company dedicated to rolling out innovative features that make the review experience easier for customers and empower businesses to actively collect, manage and publish reviews. The core value for businesses is being able to showcase their sincerity and commitment to their customers.&nbsp;



Hellopeter&#8217;s AI-assisted technology makes the process seamless and vets customer reviews through a spam filter. Before, Hellopeter reviews were seen as a separate entity. However, with new advancements in technology, they&#8217;re now able to fully coexist with your other sources, such as Facebook and Google My Business, within a single platform.&nbsp;



Ease of access is a priority for Hellopeter. For example, they recently rolled out a couple of exciting features, like a WhatsApp Chatbot that makes collecting and writing a review as easy as messaging friends or family on your phone. They also announced their API integration, allowing businesses to collect and respond to reviews within their existing CRM or support system.&nbsp;&nbsp;



These exciting innovations are opening up our nation&#8217;s eyes to what Hellopeter used to be compared to where it&#8217;s heading. And it looks like the stars were aligned that day when Alon Rom signed on the dotted line. The future&#8217;s looking pretty bright for Hellopeter.&nbsp;&nbsp;



About Hellopeter Business&nbsp;



Any business can sign up for a free Hellopeter Business account on <a href="https://hubs.li/Q019WJbP0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">biz.hellopeter.com</a>. This unlocks all the basic features you need to actively collect and manage your online reputation.&nbsp;&nbsp;



However, if you wish to take it a step further to really leverage your reviews and to unlock business growth, they&#8217;ve got Brand Strategy and Customer Success teams who can guide you on your journey to leveraging your reviews as a stepping stone to increased revenue.&nbsp;



The Hellopeter Business portal unlocks access to features such as<a href="https://hubs.li/Q019WJdD0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> review invite technology</a>, from on-site to in-store, via SMS, in-mail, QR codes or even WhatsApp. They also offer <a href="https://hubs.li/Q019WJgr0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">review publishing technology</a> to show off social proof through social media ad designs to embed widgets into your website. You can also quickly and easily manage your online reputation using their <a href="https://hubs.li/Q019WJhM0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">review management technology</a> and understand the online analytics behind your business compared to competitors using their <a href="https://hubs.li/Q019WJj30" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">competitor data and insights technology</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Find out more on <a href="https://hubs.li/Q019WJl80" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">biz.hellopeter.com</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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How South Africa’s ‘Complaints Platform’ Became its #1 Online Review Platform for Customers and Businesses Alike

Newly valued at $2 billion, the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/lists/ai50/">AI 50</a> debutant originated as a chatbot for teenagers. Now, it has aspirations—and $100 million in fresh dry powder—to be the GitHub of machine learning.



When Hugging Face first announced itself to the world five years ago, it came in the form of an iPhone chatbot app for bored teenagers. It shared selfies of its computer-generated face, cracked jokes and gossiped about its crush on Siri. It hardly made any money.



The viral moment came in 2018—not among teens, but developers. The founders of Hugging Face had begun to share bits of the app’s underlying code online for free. Almost immediately, researchers from some of the biggest tech names in the business, including Google and Microsoft, began using it for AI applications. Today, the chatbot has long since disappeared from the App Store, but Hugging Face has become the central depot for ready-to-use machine-learning models, the starting point from which more than 10,000 organizations have created AI-powered tools for their businesses.



Hugging Face announced Monday, in conjunction with its debut appearance on&nbsp;Forbes’&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/lists/ai50">AI 50</a>&nbsp;list, that it raised a $100 million round of venture financing, valuing the company at $2 billion. Top-tier venture capital firms Coatue and Sequoia won slots as new backers in the hotly contested Series C, joining A.Capital Ventures,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2020/07/01/lee-fixel-raises-1-billion-fund-addition/">Addition</a>&nbsp;Capital and lead investor Lux Capital as major stakeholders in the Brooklyn-based startup.



“Machine learning is becoming the new way to build technology, replacing software,” says Clément Delangue, cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face, which is named after the emoji that looks like a smiling face with jazz hands. “The old school of building technology was writing a million lines of code. Machine learning is starting to do that, but much better and much faster.”



Speaking from his home in Miami, where he moved during the pandemic (weather, not web3, he explains), Delangue, 33, says he believes that what GitHub is for software, Hugging Face has become for machine learning. That’s a confident comparison, considering the widespread popularity of GitHub, which is used by more than 70 million developers to share and collaborate on code and was last recorded making $300 million in revenue at the time of its $7.5 billion sale to Microsoft in 2018. Hugging Face, by contrast, generated less than $10 million last year, according to three people familiar with its finances. Delangue declines to comment on the number, but he and investors think that machine learning is already becoming the single most important technology of the 2020s, and that Hugging Face can eventually make billions in revenue with its own army of AI-minded developers.



“The companies you would assume are competitors on first blush—whether it’s Google or Amazon or Facebook—almost all of them are proponents,” says Lux Capital’s Brandon Reeves, who first invested in Hugging Face in 2019. “It really feels like this Switzerland-like piece of real estate in the ecosystem.”



“I don’t really see a world where machine learning becomes the default way to build technology and where Hugging Face is the No. 1 platform for this, and we don’t manage to generate several billion dollars in revenue.”Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue



Growing up in La Bassée, a small town of 6,000 in the north of France, Delangue recalls an idle childhood until he got his first computer at age 12. By 17, he’d become one of the top French merchants on eBay, selling ATVs and dirt bikes he imported from China and stockpiled in his father’s garden equipment shop. That prowess impressed eBay, which offered him an internship once he began college at ESCP Business School in Paris. Representing the company at an e-commerce trade show, Delangue was accosted by another attendee who trashed eBay’s recent acquisition of a barcode-scanning app—barcodes, the man said, would soon be obsolete because of advances in AI.



The man turned out to be a cofounder of Moodstocks, a startup making image-recognition software using machine learning. “With a very small team, they were managing to do stuff on par with what Google was doing with 100 times more people,” he says (years later, the company was acquired by Google). Impressed by the nimbleness of startups, Delangue never looked back. He declined eBay’s offer to extend his internship so that he could spend his free time at Moodstocks. After graduating in 2012, he turned down a job from Google to run his own startup. Delangue’s idea for a collaborative note-taking app didn’t go far, but in the tight-knit European startup scene he met Julien Chaumond, a fellow entrepreneur building a collaborative ebook reader. The pair riffed on their mutual interest in open technology and talked about starting a company together.



That time came in 2016, after both their companies had ground to a halt. A third cofounder was recruited in Thomas Wolf, a college friend of Chaumond’s who had gone on to receive a Ph.D. in physics and written research papers on machine learning. For the business idea, they settled on “open-domain conversational AI”—in other words, a chatbot that could understand any kind of conversation topic—because they felt it was the most difficult problem in technology they had the expertise to tackle at the time, Delangue says. “There’s this dream we all have to speak with an AI about everything, like you see in sci-fi.”



Hugging Face began as a personalized, Tamagotchi-like friend powered by a form of AI known as natural language processing (NLP). To train the chatbot’s natural language capabilities, the team also built an underlying library to house various machine-learning models—for example, one to detect the emotions behind a text message and another to be able to generate a coherent response—and the many datasets for understanding different kinds of conversational topics, like sports or classroom gossip. Harking back to the founders’ values for open collaboration, they released free pieces of the library as an open-source project on GitHub. The company participated in a bot-specific accelerator program run by the New York-based startup studio Betaworks and raised seed funding from venture capitalists as well as NBA star Kevin Durant. But two years in, their chatbot hadn’t made much money and was losing its hold on the attention spans of its young users.



Around the same time, researchers at Google and OpenAI announced the development of “transformers,” a new type of NLP model that demolished the reading comprehension abilities of both humans and the best AI incumbent at the time. By 2019, Google was powering its search results using this model. Hugging Face’s open-source library appeared at the perfect time for organizations that wanted to harness these NLP breakthroughs but didn’t have the same machinery as Google to build them from scratch. It became a near-instant hit as the machine-learning community converged around it as the central base for deploying transformer models. “We released things without thinking too much about it and the community blew up, as a surprise even to us,” Delangue says.



Reeves, the Lux investor, first met Delangue at a coffee shop in downtown San Francisco on a Friday near the end of 2019. Scared to miss out on a chance to invest, he offered a term sheet the following Monday at an $80 million valuation. “For 90% of the companies I’ve invested in, I’ve known them for many weeks or months or years,” he says. “I don’t think any have come over a weekend.” Since Delangue accepted Lux’s check, usage has continued to skyrocket. The developer community has built more than 100,000 machine learning models on Hugging Face, enabling others in turn to use those pretrained models for their own AI projects instead of having to build models from scratch. On GitHub, Hugging Face has accumulated “stars”—a vanity metric measuring the popularity of an open-source project—at a faster pace than the projects behind&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/06/24/confluent-shares-jump-25-in-ipo-making-co-founders-new-cloud-computing-billionaires/">Confluent</a>&nbsp;(annual revenue of $388 million),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2021/05/26/accidental-billionaires-databricks-ceo-ali-ghodsi-seven-berkeley-academics/">Databricks</a>&nbsp;(more than $800 million) and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/10/19/mongodbs-ipo-gives-new-york-tech-a-much-needed-win-as-shares-jump-25/">MongoDB</a>&nbsp;($874 million).



Although funding rounds for companies with similar stature were plentiful in 2021, the growth-stage venture capital market has since&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccaszkutak/2022/03/23/record-setting-venture-capital-market-shows-signs-of-a-slowdown/">slowed</a>&nbsp;to a near halt. Hugging Face’s latest financing then indicates a more rarified vote of investor confidence, but some in the data startup ecosystem have privately expressed curiosity about how Delangue can grow Hugging Face’s revenue enough to validate its hefty valuation. Delangue thinks that if enough free users get hooked on Hugging Face, the money will follow in time from some of the companies that employ the users. “Given how valuable machine learning is and how mainstream it’s becoming, usage is deferred revenue,” Delangue says. “I don’t really see a world where machine learning becomes the default way to build technology and where Hugging Face is the No. 1 platform for this, and we don’t manage to generate several billion dollars in revenue.”



Hugging Face only started to offer paid features last year and counts more than 1,000 companies as customers, according to Delangue, including Intel and his former stomping ground eBay. Pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Roche pay for enterprise-grade security features, while Bloomberg is paying to run machine learning for its real-time terminal through Hugging Face instead of having to build out its own infrastructure. Microsoft is not a customer, but prominently uses Hugging Face as the basis to train its Bing search engine to better understand natural language queries.



“They prioritized adoption over monetization, which I think was correct,” says Sequoia partner Pat Grady, one of the new investors. “They saw that transformer-based models working their way outside of NLP and saw a chance to be the GitHub not just for NLP, but for every domain of machine learning.” Indeed, over the course of the last year, Hugging Face has started to become a hub for machine learning models for a variety of uses, such as computer vision to train image recognition in self-driving cars and recommender systems to help pharmaceutical companies predict the effectiveness of new drug therapies.



If his assumptions of machine learning supremacy are wrong, Delangue says Hugging Face is close to breakeven and has all $40 million from its previous fundraise still in the bank to reorient. “One of my personal learnings as an entrepreneur is to not think too much strategically with a big business plan of ten years, but more to experiment and follow the validation of the community and what they’re telling you,” he says. If the vision pans out, Reeves thinks the prize could be a $50 billion or $100 billion market capitalization on the stock market. It’s no wonder that Delangue says he’s turned down multiple “meaningful acquisition offers” and won’t sell his business, like GitHub did to Microsoft.



“We want to be the first company to go public with an emoji, rather than a three-letter ticker,” he says with an emoji-like smile. “We have to start doing some lobbying to the Nasdaq to make sure it can happen.”



By Kenrick Cai, Forbes Staff

Screenshot 2022-05-10 at 10.02.49

The $2 Billion Emoji: Hugging Face Wants To Be Launchpad For A Machine Learning Revolution

The South African electric vehicle (EV) landscape is set to accelerate in 2022 with a slew of new models. But with all its power and load-shedding issues, is South Africa ready?



By Nafisa Akabor



THE SOUTH AFRICAN EV MARKET IS ON THE FAST lane. Audi launched its highly-anticipated electric e-tron range in Cape Town at the end of February, bringing six new additional models to the market.



Mercedes-Benz is slated to bring in at least five EQ models throughout the year, alongside multiple offerings from BMW i and Volvo. These new EV models will more than double the limited selection currently available from Jaguar, Mini, Porsche and BMW.



In addition to its new EVs, Audi is the first manufacturer to roll out high speed 150kW DC chargers that will yield a ±340km range from a 30-minute charge; and fast 80kW DC chargers that yields ±185km within 30 minutes. They will be strategically located at major highways along the N1, N2, N3 and N4. Prior to this, the maximum DC charge rate across SA was 60kW.



Volkswagen has indicated it will bring the ID.4 to SA in 2022 but only for research purposes to gain insights from its customer base. Steffen Knapp, Head of Volkswagen Passenger Cars, tells FORBES AFRICA it has taken a different strategy to its EV rollout in South Africa.



“Our approach is to get as many of our customers to experience EVs as possible before we sell them in the local market. Volkswagen would be selling a higher volume than the premium brands currently in the market; we need to ensure that our customers are ready for EVs,” says Knapp.



VW first brought in a fleet of e-Golfs in 2020 for testing between dealers, fleet and corporate customers, potential customers, and media. Knapp adds: “We believe this is an important step when it comes to changing beliefs surrounding EVs like range anxiety, cost of ownership, etc.” As such, VW cannot confirm exactly when it will launch its EVs in South Africa.



Also taking a similar approach is Toyota South Africa. At its annual State of the Motor Industry conference in February, the company indicated that it will be a while before it brings EVs to the local market due to lack of government incentives, cost, and South Africa&#8217;s unique problems. 



Chief scientist at Toyota, Dr Gill Pratt, opines there is a lot of coal-fired power generation in South Africa and there are also places where power reliability is not very high.



&#8220;In order to have a system that encourages the use of battery electric vehicles more, the power grid has to be reliable; it has to have the capacity in order to recharge all of those cars,” said Pratt at a press conference in Johannesburg.



He believes there are two different issues; one being average power for charging at night, and the other is the ability to provide power during peak hours for level super-fast chargers (150kW).



Winstone Jordaan, Managing Director at GridCars, says he understands the concerns for load-shedding, but it does not affect EV drivers as much as people believes it does.



“Unlike your home which is immobile, your car is not; so, if there is load-shedding in one area and you are in a situation where you have to charge at that specific time, you could simply drive to another area or charger where there is no load-shedding,” says Jordaan.



He adds that if you were charging at home overnight and load- shedding occurs, your EV would simply continue to charge when the load-shedding stops.



“If you are planning a long-distance journey and concerned about encountering load-shedding, you can plan around the load- shedding schedules.”



GridCars has partnerships with manufacturers such as Jaguar, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Mini and Audi to roll out its charging infrastructure to service the local market. Its ChargeStations.co.za portal will incorporate load-shedding schedules as well as the ability to check which chargers have generators or back-up batteries.

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