Alternative investments

It is not really the volume of synthetic diamond production that is alarming the industry, but rather the possibility that synthetic diamonds are being traded undisclosed…

Ferrari remains the world’s strongest automotive brand and is among the top 10 strongest brands across any industry, according to valuation and strategy consultancy Brand Finance.

The Maranello-based company has extended its brand strength advantage over second-placed Porsche. Its brand value is also up, increasing 40% to $6.15 billion. Toyota remains the most valuable auto brand, with a value of $46.3 billion

Ferrari’s brand strength has improved by three points this year to 92, leading to an upgrading of its brand rating to the maximum AAA+ designation. Porsche is the second most powerful auto brand with a score of 86. Coming in second is Porsche with a score of 86, while Volkswagen and Seat tie for third place scores of 84.9. Following those four automakers are BMW (84.5), Renault (84.2), Ford (83.8), Toyota (83.1), Rolls-Royce (83.0) and Lamborghini (82.3).

Amazon may have a new option for how it plans to deliver your packages by drone with parachutes. The potential plans are outlined in a new US Patent and Trademark office patent spotted by CNN.

The patent describes a way to reliably eject a payload from a drone in midflight. Usually, such a drop would see the package descend along a parabolic arc, caused by the forward motion of the aircraft-but that might not jive too well with the neighbors. Instead, Amazon’s idea is to apply a force as the package leaves the drone to have it descend vertically.

Drug company Merck said Tuesday it stopped a clinical trial of an experimental Alzheimer’s drug because it wasn’t helping patients, the latest setback in the pharmaceutical industry’s quest to find a better treatment for the brain disorder.

An outside committee monitoring the study of more than 2,000 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s concluded there was "virtually no chance of finding a positive clinical effect" of the drug, verubecestat, Merck said. The study, which was due to be completed around midyear, was testing whether verubecestat slowed declines in patients’ cognition and daily functioning compared with a placebo.

After the economic, financial and especially political turbulence that saw new actors on the international scenario and characterised the year 2016, the diamond market still gives reassuring signs.

FinTech leader NetGuardians and the School of Engineering and Management Vaud (HEIG-VD) have teamed to create a “made in Switzerland” research team focused on AI and machine learning; the project aims to use AI to take fraud detection “to the next level”. The project is being supported by the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI).

Bringing together leading-edge industry and academic strengths, the collaboration will further develop NetGuardians’ current real-time fraud detection technologies that use machine learning for superior analytics across all channels and banking systems. NetGuardians will work with the Institute for Information and Communication Technologies (IICT), an interdisciplinary applied research institute for real-world IT challenges, based at the technology-focused university HEIG-VD.

Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment arm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, has invested $493,000 into an experiment giving people in Kenya free money.

The Omidyar Network is hoping the study will help advance the debate around basic income from broad theoretical terms to more practical considerations.

Universal basic income (UBI) is the notion that a government should guarantee every citizen a yearly sum of money, no strings attached. The thinking is that such a program would relieve economic stress as automation technology severely reduces the demand for labor.

Swiss watch exports registered one of its shallowest falls of last year in December, yet marking a decline for the whole of 2016, figures from the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry showed Thursday.

Watch exports declined 4.6% year-on-year in December to CHF 1.7 billion. Exports for the whole year tumbled 9.9 percent to CHF 19.4 billion. The annual decline is the worst performance since exports fell 22 percent in 2009 in the wake of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the subprime mortgage crisis.