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Chipmaker AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) has unveiled a range of innovative AI solutions spanning from data centers to personal computers. The AMD Instinct MI300 Series features data center AI accelerators, while the ROCm 6 open software stack introduces new features supporting Large Language Models (LLMs). Additionally, the Ryzen 8040 Series processors come equipped with Ryzen AI capabilities.
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Venture Capital: RV Marketplace RVshare Lands $100M Round As Virus Boosts Bookings
RVshare is a marketplace that matches up trippers looking to hire an RV with owners wanting to earn something from their vehicle by letting it out. It announced Wednesday a fundraising of $100+ million led by KKR. Existing investor Tritium Partners also participated in the round.
Digital Assets: “An Ocean Of $250T In Assets Will Move To The Bitcoin Pond”
In a webcast with Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough last week, Saylor described the bitcoin network as “a thing of beauty and extraordinary value,” and “the first network in the world that can pull monetary energy.”
FinTech: PrimaryBid Snags $50M
London-based PrimaryBid allows retail investors to digitally access share offerings on the same terms as institutions on its internet-based investment platform. It partners with the London Stock Exchange to cater to retail investors, which it says “is an important constituency in any capital raising activity.” The company announced Monday its close of a $50 million Series B investment round.
Alternative Investments/ESG: ESG Investments Are Now Mainstream And Core Portfolio Elements
Adrian Lowcock is head of personal investing at Willis Owen. He notes that ESG’s decisive outperformance during the last one, three, and five years shows the investing approach is here to stay.
Lowcock points to the 94.6% return from the MSCI ACWI ESG leaders index over five years compared to the 91.3% return from the MSCI ACWI index, as validation of his opinion.
Digital Assets: JPMorgan Issues Bullish Bitcoin Analysis
JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) analysts issued a note on Friday that said millennials’ preference for cryptocurrency over gold could lend a bullish tailwind to bitcoin in the coming years. Millennials would constitute an important segment of the investment fraternity and that could tip the scales in favor of BTC versus the yellow metal.
Venture Capital: Yale Endowment’s Legendary Boss Swensen Moves To Change “Mostly White, Mostly Male”
David Swensen stands tall in the field of management of endowment funds at universities. He joined the Yale Investments Office at the age of 31. The fund was then worth $1 billion. Today, Swensen runs $31.2 billion for Yale, second only to Harvard’s corpus of $40 billion. On October 2, Swensen wrote to the investment management firms that handled Yale’s prodigious endowment fund.
FinTech: ZestMoney Launches Buy-Now-Pay-Later Offers For Apple Products In India
Lizzie Chapman, CEO and Co-Founder at ZestMoney, said in a LinkedIn post that her company had partnered with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) to “drive affordability in India.” Though premium products, such as those from Apple had so far remained out of reach for India’s price-sensitive consumers, that would change now, Chapman wrote.
Artificial Intelligence: How AI Watches For Pirates On The High Seas
A maritime anti-piracy system from a Singaporean engineering company uses AI to deliver fully automated piracy alerts to ocean-going vessels, particularly in pirate-infested waters such as near Somalia and the South China Seas.
Alternative Investments/Real Estate: Housing Market Demand Is “Insane”
Speaking to CNBC on Power Lunch, Glenn Kelman, CEO of real estate brokerage Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN), said he expected the current boom conditions in the housing market to last well into next year. He attributed the high demand to affluent professionals looking for remote homes as well as low interest rates. Also, he thinks some sellers will put their properties on the market only after the presidential election.
Digital Assets: Paul Tudor Jones Says Bitcoin Rally In Its “First Innings”
Paul Tudor Jones made a splash in May when he disclosed a bitcoin investment and called the cryptocurrency the fastest horse in the race against inflation. On Thursday, he was on CNBC’s Squawk Box, and this time, he said bitcoin was similar to an investment in a tech startup.
FinTech: Across The Pond, Property Finance Fintechs Report Record Business
LendInvest, a leading property finance platform that offers short-term, development and buy-to-let mortgages to intermediaries, landlords, and developers across the UK reported a record quarter in Q3 for property bridge loan applications. EstateGuru, a crowdfunding marketplace for property-backed loans, reported record loan volumes during August and September.
Venture Capital: SpaceX Is “Mission Control” For Space Economy; Long-Term Value $100B
Analysts at Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) on Thursday doubled their estimated value of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s startup focused on launch rockets, satellite broadband, and (in the future) point-to-point space travel. Significant events since the last evaluation in July led the analysts to revise their long term estimate to $100 billion.
Artificial Intelligence: Saudi Crown Prince Calls For AI To Tackle The “New Global Normal”
Saudi Arabia hosted a two-day Global AI Summit commencing Wednesday at Riyadh. In a speech on its opening day Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that 2020 presented the “perfect opportunity” to test the potential of artificial intelligence in the face of the unprecedented challenges from the Covid 19 pandemic.
Liquid Alternatives: Fidelity Canada Launches Three New Liquid Alt Mutual Funds
Fidelity Investments Canada, one of the country’s largest investment managers, announced on Tuesday the launch of its maiden offerings within a liquid alternatives suite for Canadian investors.
Digital Assets: Paypal Sends Bitcoin Into Orbit
PayPal will allow customers to shop at its 26 million merchants using crypto currencies from early 2021. Further, PayPal customers can now buy, sell and hold bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies using the company’s online wallets. The facility will be available to US account holders over the coming weeks.
FinTech: Visa’s Tap-To-Phone Transforms Android Smartphones Into POS Terminals
Visa (NYSE: V) said Wednesday that its innovative new Tap to Phone product was now live in more than 15 markets. After extensive piloting, Visa’s simple new mobile app is now ready to enable millions of small scale businesses to receive contactless payments using no other equipment except an Android smartphone.
Artificial Intelligence: Boston Dynamics’ ‘Spot’ Robot To Work On Construction Sites
Autonomous robots will now work on construction sites to collect data and perform repetitive tasks such as site scans, surveys, and tracking progress of work. On Tuesday, Trimble Construction (NASDAQ: TRMB) and Boston Dynamics announced their partnership to integrate Trimble’s construction data collection technologies with Boston Dynamics’ Spot robotic platform.
Venture Capital: T-Mobile Ventures Launches To Fund 5G Startups
T-Mobile Ventures is a venture capital fund floated by T-Mobile (NASDAQ: TMUS) to focus on early-to-mid stage startups using 5G technology for developing core technologies, products, and services around the areas of edge computing, future of work, security, and industrial IoT.
Liquid Alternatives: Watch Out For These “Potholes” (Goldman Sachs)
Theodore Enders, Global Head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) Strategic Advisory Solutions, says that investors are sometimes disillusioned with their investments in alternatives. However, on closer analysis, it turns out that poor implementation choices within portfolios are more often the problem rather than flawed strategies.
Digital Assets: Sovereign Wealth Funds The Unseen Gorilla In The Bitcoin Room
There has been a remarkable change in recent months in the perception of bitcoin as an investible asset. Large, listed companies have parked sizable chunks of their cash reserves in bitcoin to diversify out of the dollar and to preserve the purchasing power of the money. Institutions have invested heavily in Grayscale Investments’ various cryptocurrency trusts, with the firm receiving over $1 billion in inflows during the third quarter of 2020. As this is being written, bitcoin is trading well above the psychological resistance of $12,000. However, sovereign wealth funds have not yet joined the bitcoin party.
FinTech: Digitization And Fintechs Make Inroads Into Asia’s Retirement Funds
A report from Cerulli Associates shows that retirement funds in Asia are upping their game in a drive to become more transparent, streamline their administrative processes, and give fund members greater access to their accounts.
Venture Capital: Kalanick, of Uber Fame, Buys $130M of Real Estate For CloudKitchens Startup
You could call it providential timing, but Kalanick’s CloudKitchens startup received a huge boost from the Covid-19 pandemic. With restaurants out of business, or temporarily shuttered, shelter in place diners had no choice but to order food for home delivery. Ghost kitchens, which let out space for cooking to food-for-delivery businesses, particularly in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, suddenly witnessed a surge in business.
Artificial Intelligence: By 2070, Robotic Judges Will Analyze Body Language To Pin Guilt
AI specialist Terence Mauri believes that robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) will advance to a point where a robot judge could pass judgment with 99.9% accuracy using body language to detect signs of lying. 50 years from now, these robots will be fluent in every known language, show courtesy in the court, and deliver verdicts with near-total fairness and accuracy.
FinTech: Home Loans Get Quicker And Easier With Google’s Lending DocAI
Banks and mortgage brokers have to grapple with the hundreds of pages of paperwork for every home loan. Apart from being very time consuming, the highly manual process adds heavily to the cost of making the loan. Through its Document AI, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has already started to tackle some of the largest enterprise content problems plaguing the world. Lending DocAI is the first vertically specialized solution within Document AI and it addresses the mortgage industry.