TheVerge.com : Instagram gets more

Instagram gets more #interesting
The social network now lets you follow hashtags

he glass facade of the SuperMoon Bakery (#newforkcity, #eatingnyc) has a pleasing symmetry to it. Two black rectangles sit on either side of a square, a neon smiley face suspended upside down in the center. Inside, a few small cylinders of pink marble serve as tables, but seating for customers is limited. Most of the shop is dedicated to a massive counter, along which the day’s selection of colorful, decorative pastries are carefully spaced (#foodgasm, #dessertporn). Behind the counter are rows of tightly packed boxes, stacked to shoulder height, and coated in a reflective silver that produces a rainbow sheen (#iridescent, #myunicornlife).
The croissants and donuts on offer are quite tasty, but for many customers, that isn’t the main attraction. For the steady stream of tourists and bloggers who stopped in while I was there, the shop is first and foremost a visual treat, offering itself up as a backdrop for user’s to craft a winning Instagram post. The content of your photo is important, but as any serious Instagrammer knows, the hashtags you attach are equally important (#postitfortheaesthetic). Someone may have just a few dozen followers, but by grouping their post through hashtags, they can get their images in front of thousands, even millions of potential viewers, all of whom tune in each day for hashtags about food, fashion, and sparkly colors.

Up until now, there were two ways to interact with a hashtag. You could click through a hashtag on a post, or you could search for a specific tag in the Explore section of the app. Today, Instagram is introducing a new way to interact with hashtags. You can now “follow” a hashtag the same way you would follow an account. Instagram’s algorithms will then pick and choose some of the highlights from that collection and surface them in your main feed. It’s a fundamental change to one of the largest social media platforms in the world, elevating your interest in adorable dogs or expensive automobiles to equal status with your friends and family.
I’ve been testing out the feature for the last two weeks, and I find myself spending more time with Instagram as a result. I have always avoided the Explore tab. It felt like a random mishmash of posts personalized for me and generic viral content optimized to be popular. Take a recent experience I had with the “videos you might like” channel: it started with a highlight from a UFC fight, perfect for me, before segueing to a clip of random teens slapping each other at a party, Beyoncé accepting an award, a volcano erupting against the night sky, and a strange-looking fence post that turns out to be a well-camouflaged bird, shared by an account named “ifyouhigh.” It was as discordant as flipping through channels on your cable box.
By contrast, the posts injected into my main feed based on the hashtags I chose to follow (#modernart, #bjj, #ancient) felt carefully curated. There is a lot of variety, even within those categories, but you can train the algorithm on what you do and don’t like. Engage with the post by leaving a heart or a comment, and Instagram will assume you want more. Click the menu button on the top right of the post, and you can downvote the offending image by asking Instagram not to show you similar content for that hashtag again. After a few days of this, the art in my feed, both martial and modern, felt fine-tuned to my taste.
Matthew Ogle, product manager at Instagram, photographed at SuperMoon Bakery.
The man at the helm of this new product is Matthew Ogle (#brutalism, #chinatownnyc, #goatsofinstagram) a British-Canadian who cut his teeth working at music services like Last.fm and Spotify. He was the product manager most directly responsible for Discover Weekly, which serves up a personalized playlist to each of Spotify’s 140 million listeners every Monday. That product elegantly combined human curation with machine learning, delivering recommendations that felt intimate across a massive audience. Ogle’s goal now is to do the same for the interest communities and visual culture of Instagram, which is rapidly approaching 1 billion monthly active users.
Hashtags and playlists share a number of sensibilities. People use them to collect media under broad umbrellas, making it easier for others to find jazz or rock tracks, or fitness or travel photographs. But they also use them to invent subgenres and forge new tribes. That makes them the perfect fuel for machine learning systems that rely on data labeled by humans.
SuperMoon Bakery, New York.
“Discover Weekly wasn’t about teaching an algorithm to understand and then recommend music. We taught an algorithm to look at what the community was already doing with this building block, the playlist, and to take the best of what the community was doing and extend it in a new direction,” says Ogle. “Hashtags are kind of the same way. You have something that is working organically on the platform, how do we add just enough additional structure so that more people can participate.”
Right now, exploring your interests on Instagram requires active work on your part. You can manually search a hashtag each day, or ask around for recommendations of good accounts to follow. You can scroll through Explore, which is guessing about what you want to see based on accounts you follow and posts you engage with. But you can’t give the Explore page any instructions about what exactly you want to see more of. “My job was to find ways to take the friction out of that process, to bring discovery and community-led goodness to where people already are,” says Ogle. “Hashtags have some really nice properties, because they are already this bottom-up, community-led aggregation.”
Of course, hashtags have some properties that make them tricky to work with as well. “Hashtags can have multiple valid meanings,” says Ogle. I might be interested in #barracuda because I like to fish, while you might follow the tag for images of the classic American muscle car. “There’s also a rich tradition of using hashtags for jokes, sarcasm, and memes. That is something we don’t want to disrupt,” he notes. Ideally, you and I can follow #cougar for very different reasons and both come away with a satisfying experience.
To help solve this problem, any image that appears in your main feed because you follow a hashtag will have a prominent button above it, allowing you to easily tell the service that you don’t want to see more images like this. It won’t unfollow the tag, but it will help to train the system on what aspects of a certain tag appeal to you. The hashtag #dirtykids is used by parents who want to highlight cute photos of their messy toddler. It’s also used by a community of young, homeless adults who ride the rails across the US. “So one of the ways through all that is, over time, personalize the rankings of things we might show you, versus someone else, for the same hashtag,” says Ogle.
Mike Krieger, Instagram co-founder, photographed outside of Gramercy Park, New York.
From the very beginning, Instagram’s users were finding ways to hack the service so they could organize around interests and communities. “You build a product with few constraints and people will surprise you with the weird stuff they do,” said Mike Krieger, Instagram’s co-founder (#nowspinning, #bermesemountaindog, #fromwhereistand).
Let’s say you wanted to run a contest for photography buffs in San Francisco. “There were no hashtags, so people would create a second account, maybe BestPhotosSF, and then ask people to @ mention that account. Then they would refresh in a frenzy and write down all the submissions. It was this early interest in clustering or organization that went beyond the account level,” explains Krieger. The company quickly embraced the behavior, debuting hashtags in January 2011 so users could organize posts around events, places, or topics.
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Krieger is now the company’s chief technical officer. We met up recently at the Gramercy Park Hotel (#nyc, #rosebar, #gramercyparkhotel), where he was staying while attending the engineering team’s annual offsite. As an expat, Krieger has always taken a keen interest in the way communities formed on Instagram, and the way users leveraged the service to connect across borders and cultures. “Forums have been around the internet forever, since the BBS days, but they emerged on Instagram in the craziest way,” says Krieger. “Small groups of people who had gotten to know one another would announce a hashtag, and then at some predetermined time, they would all start posting with that tag and in the comment section having forum threads.”
From the very beginning, Instagram’s app had a “Popular Page.” This was a collection of posts from around the service that had garnered the most likes and comments. It was something for users to dip into once they had caught up on their feed, but it wasn’t personalized at all. In June 2012, the Popular tab was combined with the search bar, and renamed as Explore. For the first time, users could dig deeper into certain hashtags and accounts, but by default it still surfaced the posts with the most engagement on a global scale — an approach that meant Explore was usually dominated by posts from celebrities and extremely broad topics.
In 2014, Krieger and his team began to personalize the experience. Along with trending items, Explore now showed you posts that had been liked by people you followed. What your social graph found appealing, the theory went, might also be appealing to you. In 2015, they augmented the explore feed to show you trending hashtags and places, and last year Explore began showing you video channels based on accounts you follow and hashtags you interact with.
Dan Toffey leads Instagram’s Community Lab.
Dan Toffey (#hikingwithdogs, #linework, #woodturning) was Instagram’s 12th employee and fourth community manager. At the time, that role encompassed everything non-technical, from writing blog posts to handling support tickets to moderating comments. Today, he runs Instagram’s Community Lab, a group of social scientists that use machine learning to explore and catalog the many niche communities that have found a home on Instagram.
Lots of broad hashtags, like #food and #fashion, are among the most popular in countries around the world. Part of Toffey’s work is figuring out what’s unique about the different markets where Instagram exists, and finding ways to highlight and support local communities. Hashtags show, for example, that Germany over-indexes for humor, horses, and video gaming, while Japan favors hairstyles, colors, and simplicity.
“When a follow happens on the platform, two things are happening: the follower is getting a more diverse experience, and the creator has a new fan who is discovering what they have to offer,” says Toffey. “Our hope is that through thoughtful categorization and cataloging of these communities, when combined with things like hashtags, we can improve discovery, and make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for, or what you didn’t know you were looking for.”
Of course, turning hashtags into a more prominent part of the Instagram experience is going to make them a more attractive target for spammers, marketers, and attention-hungry influencers. There is already an entire cottage industry built around tips and tricks for getting yourself featured on Instagram’s explore page, and an ever-evolving cheat sheet of hashtags that users can include if they want a better chance at having their post go viral.
“Instagram has been one of the most vital tools for DEFY, building our brand and reaching new customers,” said Chris Tag, a former creative director at an advertising agency in Chicago who left marketing in 2008 to start his own apparel company. “IG is honestly one of the life-bloods of our brand.”
The company uses hashtags like #handcrafted, #madeintheusa, and #military to find new customers. The process is “akin to how back in the day door-to-door salesman would literally go and seek and new customers by knocking on doors. Some would slam the door in their faces, others were open to what they were about and embraced their brand,” says Tag. “But this is even better, as it's an opt-in community.”
Hashtags that begin as marketing sometimes take on a life of their own. Herschel Supply Co. began using #welltraveled as part of a campaign. The descriptor took off, and now has been used in over 1.5 million posts. Social media specialists like HootSuite advise their clients on how many hashtags to use — five is better than nine — and how to attach yourself to popular tags without looking like a spammer.
Informal cliques known as “boost groups” have emerged, allowing users to trade likes and comments with one another to try. The goal is to push certain posts to the top of a trending hashtag, ensuring they will be seen by a large audience. “I definitely saw a change within a month. I saw a significant change,” said one boost group member, who asked to remain anonymous. “My attitude around social media changed. It was necessary to be seen, to make a profit.”

A boost group didn’t require a huge number of members to be effective, but they had to be targeted. “It was in vain if you didn’t use any hashtags or keywords, because those brought you to the attention of specific communities and rankings,” the boost group member told The Verge. “Every day there would be sharing of insights around what hashtags were trending and worth trying to leverage.” With around a dozen members, this group was able to get their posts to the top of hashtags that had hundreds of thousands, even millions, of posts.
Instagram is quick to acknowledge the challenge. “The fundamental tension there is, you build a product with a surface that gets popular, it’s a high target for spam,” says Krieger. “We will look at signals on both the posting side and the consumption side. Since we know the tap-through rate, the follow-through rate, the scroll-through rate, we can start saying, ‘this was a bad insertion,’ and down-ranking it.”
“On any platform, and especially one of our size, those dynamics are always at play. Something that we’re very firm on is that the safety and health of our community is top priority,” said Ogle. “All that being said, one of the cool things about following hashtags is, for the first time, it gives each hashtag an inbuilt audience, that has a stake in what they’re seeing.”
Instagram has earned a reputation as the “nice” social network, a place that hasn’t been marred by election meddling, hate speech, or child exploitation. User growth on the service is still accelerating, so why rock the boat? The overarching goal, left unspoken, is to have people spend more time the service, and to have them engage more deeply. And as Instagram’s growth has increased, the company has grown more aggressive, not less, about experimenting with new features.

“The way we always looked at this was, at the core of Instagram are your friends and the people you love. The service without that would be in a lot of trouble,” says Krieger. “But we’re not just that. We have the next ring out from that, which is interest accounts and aggregators. The next ring out is accounts you might encounter in passing on Explore. Can we capture this existing behavior, and make it better?”
There is a business logic to this as well. While advertising won’t be connected to the hashtags you follow when the product launches today, marketers will undoubtedly want to target consumers based on the interests they are passionate enough to bring into their main feed. “I think it could make sense down the line,” says Krieger. “Relevancy is the number one thing we think about with advertising. I can imagine incorporating the signal, either implicitly or explicitly, in a way that is clear.”
Photo by James Bareham / The Verge
Instagram knows it’s taking a risk by injecting interests into the main feed, because it’s tried this tweak before. “We experimented with putting the best of Explore into your main feed, but it never felt personal enough,” says Krieger. Adding the ability to follow hashtags, “is a big step change,” he adds, but the company is betting that its systems are now smart enough not to disappoint you.
With the recent launch of Direct, it appears that Instagram may want to carve out a separate experience for messaging, leaving the main app to focus on consumption. “It’s not the kind of app that’s going to have an overflow hamburger menu with 50 options,” says Kriger. “We have a feed, the feed is a user-curated view into the world of Instagram.”

Discover Weekly turned casual listeners into Spotify superusers, and Instagram is hoping that hashtags might hold the same appeal for its users. “Explore is quite honestly one of the reasons I left Spotify and came here. It’s arguably the largest social discovery platform in the world,” said Ogle. Hundreds of millions of people use Explore every day. “To me that’s a strong signal that Instagram is already good at this, and if we lean into it we can do more.”
Today’s update will be a big change to how Instagram works, but Ogle is just getting warmed up. “For me it’s not a silver bullet,” he said, as we munched on our decorative pastries under the pink glow of SuperMoon’s neon sign. “It’s a first step that next year we can layer all kinds of cool stuff on top of, with hashtags as our atomic unit for interest on Instagram.”

WWD : Rimowa CEO Alexandre Arnault Looks to Rewrite Luxury Retail’s Rules

Rimowa CEO Alexandre Arnault Looks to Rewrite Luxury Retail’s Rules
The head of Rimowa has taken very quick, deliberate steps to turn the German travel brand into an innovator.

LOS ANGELES — Alexandre Arnault is aiming to recharge and perhaps redefine what it means to operate a luxury brand at retail these days.

Arnault, whose father is LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton chairman and chief executive Bernard Arnault, rose to cochief executive of Rimowa last year after it was announced the upscale German luggage maker had sold a majority stake to the French conglomerate. The deal made Rimowa the first German maison to enter the LVMH portfolio and ushered in a new direction of sorts with Arnault now helming the business — which counts 150 stores, 13 of which are in the U.S. — and evolving a brand founded in 1898 for the digital age.

Arnault, in town for the opening of the company’s first pop-up concept shop, said the store aims to be a new take on retail. The space is located on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills just steps away from its existing store sandwiched between Dior’s men’s and women’s boutiques.

“Indeed it is the first time that we’ve actually done a pop-up and the thinking behind it was really to do something fun, new and exciting compared to what we have in our retail network, which is sometimes a bit clinical and white,” Arnault said. “We used new materials that we never had before like wood, concrete, foam and we basically made two parts in the store.”

One space is an installation drawing inspiration from airport luggage carousels, while the other is more of a lounge area. The assortment includes the company’s luggage and accessories in addition to juices made in conjunction with Juice Served Here, Kaweco pens manufactured in Heidelberg, travel-friendly beauty products from Austria-based cosmetics brand Susanne Kaufmann, exclusive stickers from Los Angeles creative studio Commonwealth Projects and T-shirts from German brand Merz b. Schwanen. Art from London illustrator Charlotte Ager and photographer KangHee Kim decorate the space.

If the Beverly Hills pop-up is successful it could pave the way for additional temporary shops throughout the world, Arnault said.

“We want to try out this design and how it fits. If it works well, I’m definitely excited to roll it out to other places, even though my vision for the brand is different from other luxury brands,” he said. “I’d much rather have a few different [retail] concepts for the brand.”

That end speaks to what Arnault said is at the core of Rimowa’s retail strategy, which is that every store looks and feels different depending on the market. Short-term spurts of the brand via temporary shops would play an important part in that plan.

“It’s [pop-ups] key because if I look at myself and I also look at people from my own generation, I feel like going into stores is only interesting when there’s something new to discover,” he said. “I feel like especially in America, the retail sector is struggling because people don’t get excited by stores anymore, whereas retail outlets that do very well are the ones that are able to offer a different, shared experience depending on where they go. Obviously, a lot of brands from our group [at LVMH] do well from a brick-and-mortar stance. Say, for example, Fendi. They offer a different experience at their Design District store in Miami than here on Rodeo and I think that’s why consumers stay excited. Then again, I also think e-commerce is key and, coming back to Rimowa, especially for us, unless you need the suitcase right now because you’re traveling, it’s sometimes problematic to leave the store with such a big item.”

Rimowa also sees online as a key growth driver and plans to launch U.S. e-commerce next year, the executive said.

Elsewhere in the business, brick-and-mortar next year will be ruled by two main objectives: retrofitting some stores, such as Beverly Hills, to make them more in line with the brand and being opportunistic about store locations in key retail cities.

“I don’t want us to have any rules as to where we go because I think our brand is unique enough that we fit in many different neighborhoods,” Arnault said saying the brand is just as comfortable in Beverly Hills as it could be on, for example, the funkier Melrose Avenue.


Rimowa also continues its evolution on the digital front. The company released an electronic tag last year that sends a travelers’ boarding passes to their suitcase, allowing them to bypass the bag-check lines or the need to speak with an agent at the airport for a paper tag.

Digital is important to the future of the company for three key reasons, Arnault said. Those include distribution to customers who perhaps don’t have access to the existing retail network, communication via more targeted avenues than what print has typically allowed and technology.

“Technology I think could be the most exciting for our product at Rimowa because technology is a way to enhance the experience of consumers. It’s obvious to see how it could be extremely valuable within a Rimowa suitcase,” noted Arnault, who said he couldn’t get into the details on future innovation. “We’re going to evolve more and more toward technology in the products not to become an over-technical suitcase, but to use technology to enhance the consumer experience.”

TechCrunch : To fix SoundCloud, it must become the anti-Spotify

To fix SoundCloud, it must become the anti-Spotify

tartups die by suicide, not competition. It wasn’t that anyone was stealing SoundCloud’s underground rappers, bedroom remixers and garage bands. SoundCloud stumbled because it neglected these hardcore loyalists as it wrongly strove to usurp Spotify as the streaming home of music’s superstars.

But four months ago, after laying off 40 percent of its staff, SoundCloud scored a do-or-die investment of $169.5 million that saved the company and brought in a new CEO. Now the question is whether SoundCloud can get back in the groove. I sounded the alarm about SoundCloud’s mishandled headcount cuts, misguided direction and morale problems, so it feels important to lend some suggestions alongside the criticism.

SoundCloud has something no one else does: the world’s biggest archive of user-uploaded music and audio — around 120 million tracks. And so that must be the center of the service.

It once was, but rather than doubling down on independent creators, helping them monetize with ads and commerce and selling subscriptions to enhanced ad-free access, SoundCloud wasted years chasing the major record labels in hopes of building a Spotify competitor full of the most popular music. Finally in mid-2016 it launched the $9.99 SoundCloud Go+ subscription with ad-free access to mainstream music and indie stuff, but it was already years behind Spotify and Apple Music.

In the meantime, the distraction led to extraordinarily slow progress on scaling up advertising, both in terms of the volume of ads on the sites and the independent artists who could get a revenue share. Ads weren’t a big part of SoundCloud, so many users don’t feel it’s worth paying to get rid of them. Creators strayed to YouTube and Patreon, investing their attention and driving their audience to where they could earn money. And spurious take-downs of creators’ music that they already paid SoundCloud to host further burned the company’s cred with its core constituents.

Luckily, SoundCloud has now booted its former management team, replacing Alex Ljung with former Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor. That gives SoundCloud an opportunity to realign its strategy with the creators who made it unique in the first place. Here’s what we think it needs to do:
Don’t fight Spotify head on
SoundCloud will never be the No. 1 pop music streaming platform, and it needs to accept that. It got started on subscriptions too late and doesn’t have the industry buy-in the way Spotify does from taking the labels on as investors, nor the recommendation data Spotify got from acquiring Echo Nest, nor the massive device install base or war chest to leverage like Apple Music, nor massive ad-supported audience like 1 billion-user YouTube.
So instead of trying to compete with the big dogs directly, SoundCloud should invade from downstream. Rather than marketing its $10 SoundCloud Go+ subscription to casual music fans, it should concentrate on locking in hardcore listeners who love its indie stuff via its free tier or $5 SoundCloud Go subscription just for user-generated content. Then it should upsell them to the $10 plan by touting the convenience of listening to everything in one place, rather than paying $10 a month just for mainstream music elsewhere. The $5 plan should be the focus, and the $10 plan should be the bonus.

Protect the legal grey area of music
SoundCloud buddied up to the major labels at the expense of the DJs who fueled its ascent. The legal grey area of unofficial remixes and DJ sets are what made SoundCloud indispensable, but are also what got criminalized and sometimes booted off the platform after its label deals. SoundCloud needs to figure out how to settle the copyright payouts on this kind of content so it can stay up on the platform. Whether that means developing its own rights disbursement technology, partnering with a provider of this payout distribution tech like Dubset or outright acquiring it, SoundCloud must be a safe home for this content you can’t find anywhere else. Otherwise, SoundCloud isn’t special.
Become the musician fan club platform
Everyone knows streaming music platforms only pay out a fraction of a cent per listen. That can add up to millions a year if you’re Taylor Swift, but often isn’t enough to support the livelihood of smaller niche artists. But no matter how big or small, almost every artist has a percentage of listeners who are die-hard fans, willing to pay far more than they’d earn a creator in streaming royalties or ad-revenue share.
That’s why artists of all types have turned to subscription patronage platforms like Patreon, where you don’t need millions of fans, just a few thousand paying a buck a month. YouTube, Apple Music and even Spotify have failed to go deep in assisting artists with direct commerce. YouTube is testing Patreon-esque Sponsorships, and Spotify offers some tiny merchandise and concert ticket options on artist profiles.
BYRON BAY, AUSTRALIA – MARCH 27: Fans react to The Wailers performing live onstage at the 2016 Byron Bay Bluesfest on March 27, 2016 in Byron Bay, Australia. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
But SoundCloud has a massive opportunity here because it knows its artists can’t sustain themselves on royalties, and the type of listeners on SoundCloud are serious music aficionados. SoundCloud should provide bold options for artists to sell merch and tickets and teach them how to use data to create goods their fans want to buy.
That also means pushing artists toward new revenue streams like offering exclusive experiences. Help artists sell phone calls, meet-and-greets, signed memorabilia, webcam footage of studio sessions, exclusive video streams and more. And finally, provide a channel for artists to communicate directly with their top listeners in more intimate ways than email blasts and Twitter broadcasts.
SoundCloud should be the modern fan club. In an era where you don’t “own” music anymore, the app’s audience of early adopting hipsters might be eager to show their allegiance to their favorite artists with their wallets, not just their ears. And that’s good for everyone.
Let Spotify and Apple Music be the impersonal place for superstars who don’t care about you. SoundCloud could give listeners a deeper experience, artists a bigger paycheck and itself a lucrative corner of the otherwise overcrowded music space. So, Kerry, what are you gonna do?

FT : Australian central bank mulls electronic banknotes

Australian central bank mulls electronic banknotes
RBA studies blockchain technology but dismisses bitcoin fever as ‘speculative mania’

Australia’s central bank is exploring creating electronic banknotes using the technology underpinning bitcoin, as major central banks around the world race to bring cash into the digital age.

Philip Lowe, governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, said the bank was analysing the benefits and drawbacks of issuing an electronic form of the Australian dollar — the “eAUD” — alongside traditional banknotes.

Speaking at the Australian Payment Summit on Wednesday, Mr Lowe said: “It is possible that the RBA might, in time, issue a new form of digital money. . .perhaps using distributed ledger technology.”

He added that although the RBA has “no immediate plans” to issue digital dollars, the central bank is continuing to look at the pros and cons.

The central bank also is exploring a new digital dollar settlement system based on the use of distributed ledger technology, or blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin.

Digital dollars could take the form of a “token” that is issued and stored in consumers’ digital wallets, which can then be used for payments in a similar way to physical bank notes.


he development comes as the value of bitcoin has soared over the past several weeks, reaching a record high of $17,428.42 on Tuesday after starting the year at $1,000. The surge has fuelled concerns the cryptocurrency is forming a bubble.

Central banks, commercial banks and other financial institutions are exploring how to use private distributed ledgers to make financial transactions cheaper, more transparent, and less vulnerable to fraud.

Banks and settlement systems currently use central electronic ledgers to track money transfers. But these systems often rely on manual input and are open to hacking. Distributed ledger records transactions through a network of computers rather than a single central party.

Other central banks including the Bank of England already are in the process of trialling blockchain-like systems.

The attractions of the technology include the ability to make fast digital money transfers that do not carry the cost of handling cash, tracked securely by the network. However, Mr Lowe said a potential drawback is the lack of a central entity standing behind the liability.

“I don’t think anyone is proposing a switchover from physical to digital; there is going to be a long transition period. . . Over time we will see the gradual digitalisation of the currently cash-enabled economy,” said James Lloyd, Asia-Pacific fintech leader at EY. “I do think there’s an inevitability to it,” he added, noting that developing the technology is a comparatively simple compared to the challenges of regulations, laws and encouraging adoption.

The initiatives come as use of cash is on the decline in Australia, echoing trends elsewhere around the world, such as in the Nordics. The RBA cited its 2016 survey, showing cash accounted for 37 per cent of household transactions, down from 70 per cent in 2007.

Bitcoin has taken off across Asia, fuelling the recent frenzy for the cryptocurrency as investors in Japan buy in with leverage up to 15 times their cash deposit.

Mr Lowe said the current fascination with cryptocurrencies “feels more like a speculative mania than it has to do with their use as an efficient and convenient form of electronic payment”. He added that bitcoin “seems more likely to be attractive to those who want to make transactions in the black or illegal economy”.

FT : Overstock chief explores sale to fund blockchain venture

Overstock chief explores sale to fund blockchain venture
Patrick Byrne and Hernando de Soto see global property registry as key to tackling social problems

Patrick Byrne, the controversial entrepreneur who runs Overstock.com, is exploring options to sell the online retailer, whose stock has soared amid this year’s cryptocurrency mania, to fund an ambitious attempt to make a global property registry on blockchain.

Hernando de Soto, a well-known Peruvian economist who argues that formalising land rights is key to alleviating poverty, has joined forces with Mr Byrne in the latest attempt to leverage the distributed ledger technology to tackle social problems.

Mr de Soto and Mr Byrne, a long-term cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast who waged a campaign against short selling, have formed a non-profit venture called De Soto, Inc. that intends to gather local informal ownership records into a blockchain database. A pilot is expected early 2018.

“One of the possibilities is I sell the [Overstock] business and we have all the capital we need” to fund the new venture, Mr Byrne told the Financial Times on Tuesday, adding that he would cherry-pick a dozen of Overstock’s top talent to take over to De Soto by late January.

“I feel a great moral obligation to refocus my life around this,” he added.

To fund the scheme to which he says he has committed himself for five years, Mr Byrne says he is looking at options to sell Utah-based Overstock, which has some 2,000 employees and whose stock price has soared 219 per cent amid blockchain mania this year, giving it a market capitalisation of about $1.4bn.


Overstock comprises two companies — the retail business Overstock.com, which accepts both fiat and cryptocurrency payments and sells everything from discount furniture to watches; and Medici Ventures, which invests in blockchain technology companies.

Medici’s most closely watched bet is tZERO, a regulation compliant exchange geared towards initial coin offerings, which has been touted as Wall St meets blockchain. It will launch its own much-hyped initial coin offering to raise funds next week.

Mr Byrne, whose family owns 40 per cent of Overstock, said in its third-quarter earnings call in early November that he had hired Guggenheim Partners to look at three potential options to put Overstock on the block.

One option is selling Overstock’s retail business to a bricks and mortar company seeking a strong online presence, to avoid disruption by Amazon. “Really, since this summer there’s a mass freak-out in corporate America,” Mr Byrne observed.

The second is for the entire company to be bought by or take a large investment from a multibillion-dollar investment fund that does not “want to cede the earth to Amazon”. Mr Byrne claimed that one such fund had approached the company two months ago. He would not name the fund, but hinted that interest from Asia was especially strong.

The third option is to be bought out by a large private equity firm, which would allow Mr Byrne to step away from Overstock to pursue the De Soto project.

Mr de Soto, a recipient of the $500,000 Milton Friedman Prize from the Cato Institute, a conservative think-tank, was linked to a land registry blockchain project with the Republic of Georgia in April 2016. But he says that after the inauguration ceremony, he was not consulted further.

(Makor) Dior update: Bernard Arnault bought 50k shares (06 Dec and 08 Dec) a

Dior update: Bernard Arnault bought 50k shares (06 Dec and 08 Dec) and now has 95.9% of CDI

 

 

Jordan Ettedgui

 

7/8 Savile Row
London W1S 3PE
Direct: +44 207 290 57 77

Mobile: +33 6 30 69 27 36

http://www.makor-capital.com

 

 

This message has been sent by Makor Securities London Ltd, which is authorised and regulated by the FCA (625054).

This message is for professional clients and eligible counterparties only, not intended for "retail clients".  The information contained in this message is confidential and is for the exclusive use of the intended recipient. If you receive this message in error please inform us and delete all copies of it. The information is not intended as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any financial instrument. All comments and statements are to be considered the opinions of the author not the Company and are not intended to be relied upon. We cannot guarantee that this message or any attachments are virus free and accept no liability for any viruses or the consequences thereof.

 

>>> What to look at today - 13th of December 2017 - The Last Jedi Day

Dow +0.49% S&P +0.15% NAsdaq -0.19% Russell -0.24% XBTA 17,630 -2.16%
US Market closed higher. Tuesday's session was, like Monday's, relatively quiet as investors continued to await the Fed's latest policy directive, which will cross the wires on Wednesday afternoon. The heavily-weighted financial sector climbed 1.0% on Tuesday, extending its December gain to 2.5%--which is more than four times the S&P 500's month-to-date gain of 0.6%. Within the group, Dow component Goldman Sachs (GS 257.68, +7.55) was among the strongest names (+3.0%), helping the Dow Jones Industrial Average outpace its peers. On the downside, the top-weighted technology sector (-0.3%) settled in negative territory, breaking a five-session winning streak. Chipmakers were particularly weak, evidenced by the 1.0% decrease in the PHLX Semiconductor Index, as was social media giantFacebook (FB 176.96, -2.08), which dropped 1.2%. US After Hours PAY and MDB -6% following earnings/guidance, WDC +3.3% on settlement news/guidance update. Most Asian stocks rose, led by banks and healthcare companies, before the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate decision. Japan stocks were the biggest decliners Wednesday as the Topix closed 0.2 percent lower as the yen strengthened after Democrat Doug Jones delivered a stunning upset defeat to Republican Roy Moore in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race.

Nikkei -0.47% Hang Seng +1.39% CSI +0.89% Shanghai +0.69% Shenzen +0.65%

Eur$ 1.1752 CNH 6.6228 CNY 6.6181 JPY 113.43 GBP 1.3327 CHF 0.9907 RUB 59.1997 WTI$ 57.53 +0.68%

S&P -0.07% EuroStoxx flattish FTSE -0.03%


Macro :
- Bitcoin Bears Can Soon Short Futures Through Interactive Brokers
- Druckenmiller Says He’s Had Worst Year Relative to Opportunities
- Utility Sector Outlook Leaves Stocks on ‘Wrong Side’ of Rotation
- A Third of Junk Issuers to Suffer Under Either Tax Plan: Moody’s
- Goldman Expects Russian Oil Sector Dividends to Rise 20% in 2018
- Trump Is Said to Consider Easing Nuclear Rules for Saudi Project
- Vanguard to Use Blockchain Technology for Index Data Updates
- Norway Oil Fund Should Stop Stock Picking, According to Study

Keep ane eye on :
- ADP FP : ADP Paris Airports Nov. Traffic Up 5.2% to 7.5M Passengers
- AIR FP : Airbus COO Bregier Is Said to Possibly Leave Next Year: Echos
- AIR FP : Airbus CEO Tom Enders Said Not to Renew Mandate: Le Figaro
- AB1 GY : Air Berlin Says Lufthansa Only Buyer for Niki as Grounding Looms
- ATC NA : Altice ’S SFR Drops Plan for French Fiber Without Aid: Echos
- NDA GY : Aurubis Full Year Dividend Per Share EU1.45
- SPR GY : Axel Springer Classifieds Sales to Top EU1b This Year: CEO
- BAS GY : BASF’s Force Majeure Positive for Huntsman, Wells Fargo Says
- CCBG BB : Belgium Wants Belfius to Maintain High Div. After IPO: L’Echo
- BLT LN : BHP’s Escondida Posts Highest Output Since June 2015: Cochilco
- COLR BB : Colruyt First Half Net Income 3.6% Above Estimates
- CBK GY : Commerzbank Top Pick at Lampe as German Banks’ ROE Recovers
- DB1 GY : Deutsche Boerse Lobbyist Fritton to Leave: Boersen-Zeitung
- DIE BB : D’Ieteren Sees FY Adj. Pretax Profit up by Low Single-Digits
- GSLP PL : Galp’s Matosinhos, Sines Refineries on Strike: Portuguese Union
- GLEN LN : Glencore Talking to Apple, Tesla, VW on Cobalt Contracts: CEO
- ITX GY : Inditex Nine Month Net Income EU2.34 Bln
- LLOY LN : Lloyd Fonds Board Starts Talks on Premature Exit Of CEO Teichert
- B4B GY : Metro Sees Operating Profit Up 10% as Sales Growth Increases
- POM FP : Plastic Omnium Targets EU10B Annual Revenue in 2021
- RATOB SS : Ratos CEO to Step Down Immediately; Jonas Wistrom Named New CEO
- RYA LN : Ryanair to ‘Face Down’ Irish Pilot Union’s Planned Strike
- SAN FP : Sanofi Sees ‘Multiple Milestones’ in Late-Stage Pipeline in ’18
- SEZ FP : Suez Targets More Than $3.1B in Industrial Water Rev by 2020
- SIKA SW : Sika Merges North, Latin America Regions Under Christoph Ganz
- SNH GY : PSG Chair Mouton Says He Expects Steinhoff to Sell Stake in Co.
- TEL NO : Telenor’s Head of Digital Businesses Gravrak Resigns
- TEVA IT : Former Chairman, CEO Yitzhak Peterburg Resigns From Teva Board
- TSLA US : Tesla Truck May Generate $2b-$3.5b Annual Revenue: Consumer Edge
- FP FP : Total to Remove Discount on Scrip Dividend, Cites Oil Above $60
- TUII LN : TUI Expects Double-Digit Earnings Growth Continuing Through 2020
- UL NA : Westfield Shares Jump Most on Record After Unibail-Rodamco Offer
- WDI GY : Wirecard Sees 2018 Ebitda of EU510m to EU535m

>>> Europe : Brokers Upgrades & Downgrades - 13th of December 2017

>>> Up
* AMS Upgraded to Overweight at JPMorgan; PT 115 Francs
* Ashmore Upgraded to Neutral at JPMorgan; PT 3.95 Pounds
* Falck Renewables Raised to Buy at Kepler Cheuvreux
* NEX Group Upgraded to Overweight at JPMorgan; PT 6.65 Pounds
* Prima Industrie Raised to Outperform at MedioBanca; PT 39 Euros
* Safilo Upgraded to Neutral at MedioBanca; PT 4.75 Euros
* Tele2 Upgraded to Buy at Berenberg
* ThyssenKrupp Upgraded to Hold at Kepler Cheuvreux; PT 23 Euros
* Unibail-Rodamco Raised to Buy at Bank Degroof Petercam

>>> Down
* Berkeley Downgraded to Hold at Jefferies; PT 42.14 Pounds
* Britvic Downgraded to Sell at Shore Capital
* Brunello Cucinelli Downgraded to Underperform at Exane
* Colruyt Downgraded to Reduce at Kepler Cheuvreux; PT 39 Euros
* Dialog Semi Downgraded to Neutral at JPMorgan; PT 23 Euros
* Julius Baer Cut to Neutral at Goldman; Price Target 64.50 Francs
* Kinepolis Downgraded to Hold at Berenberg
* Ladbrokes Coral Downgraded to Neutral at Goldman
* Sports Direct Cut to Underperform at Jefferies; PT 2.90 Pounds
* Telenor Downgraded to Hold at Berenberg
* Telenor Cut to Equal-weight at Morgan Stanley; PT 195 Kroner
* VAT Downgraded to Neutral at JPMorgan; Price Target 150 Francs

>>> Initiation
* BAWAG Group Rated New Buy at Commerzbank; PT 54 Euros
* Beazley Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 5 Pounds
* Befesa Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 43.40 Euros
* Befesa Rated New Overweight at JPMorgan; PT 40.19 Euros
* Befesa Rated New Buy at Stifel; PT 40 Euros
* dormakaba Reinstated at Baader-Helvea With Hold; PT 1,000 Francs
* Hiscox Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 15.80 Pounds
* Lancashire Rated New Sell at Berenberg; PT 6 Pounds
* Micro Focus Reinstated at Goldman With Neutral; PT 26 Pounds
* Spectris Reinstated at Goldman With Buy; PT 29 Pounds
* Sports Direct Re-Rating at Odds With Fundamentals: Jefferies
* TI Fluid Systems Rated New Neutral at JPMorgan; PT 3 Pounds

>>> Call

>>> US After Hours Summary: PAY and MDB -6% following earnings/gui

After Hours Summary: PAY and MDB -6% following earnings/guidance, WDC +3.3% on settlement news/guidance update

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings: STRM +10.4%

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: WDC +3.3% (Western Digital and Toshiba reach global settlement and agree to extend JV terms for flash memory collaboration; WDC provides updated guidance), AGIO +3% (modestly rebounding), EIX +1% (Edison pops higher on reports that Skriball fire caused by illegal camp fire), MS +0.6% and STT +0.3% (indicated higher after being upgraded to Outperform at Keefe Bruyette after the close), JUNO +0.5% (presented updated data from the TRANSCEND study of JCAR017 (liso-cel) in patients with relapsed or refractory aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma at ASH Meeting), BOLD +0.5% (assumed with Overweight and $36 tgt at Piper Jaffray)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: CIVI -7.1% (light volume), PAY -6.3%, (also authorizes new $100 mln repurchase program), MDB -6%, ARWR -2.8%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: HMNY -16.7% (commences offering of its common stock and warrants), NAT -15.5% (announces public offering of $100 million of its common shares), RIOT -13.1% (pulling back in after hours), PTI -6.8% (commences 7 mln common stock offering), FATE -4.8% (announces proposed public offering of common stock), NTLA -3% (indicated lower on NVS block trade pricing), BRS -2.8% (intends to offer $125 million aggregate principal amount of convertible senior notes due 2023), SHLD -1.3% (light volum; announces incremental liquidity actions to enhance financial flexibility - extends $400 million 2018 term loan facility to 2019; continues to explore alternatives with respect to our debt maturities), NBLX -1.2% (Noble Midstream Partners and Greenfield Midstream enter into a definitive agreement to acquire Saddle Butte Rockies Midstream for $625 mln; commences an underwritten public offering of approx. 3.2 mln common units)