Tech

In late May, Amazon engineer Mike Roberts unveiled Stockstream – an experiment in letting viewers of his Twitch livestream play the stock market with $US50,000 of his own money. Twitch is a live streaming video platform primarily used to stream video game play. It was acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014.

A month later, and the experiment is still going strong. Over the course of 2,125 trades, Stockstream players have voted to pick out a diversified portfolio that now includes a handful of shares in Ford, Costco, Apple, and GE, among many others.

MarketPlus went in search of the Swiss incubators for startups. Here is the first, Kickstart Accelerators, working in the field of FinTech, Food, Smart Cities, Robotics & Intelligent Systems, EdTech and Healthcare. Patricia Schlenter, Program Manager, explained us how it works.

«Kickstart Accelerator invites 50 startups from all over the world for 11 weeks to Switzerland where they are provided with coworking space, seed funding as well as direct access to leading corporate partners, investors and experts. Moreover, they get a chance to win up to 25`000 CHF of grants. Throughout the program, the startup founders join well-structured workshops and receive high-quality mentoring. Moreover, Kickstart Accelerator provides startups with the possibility of attaining a proof of concept with one of the corporate partners.

Microsoft is planning layoffs as it refocuses its sales force on making the software colossus a pivotal part of businesses relying on cloud computing, according to media reports.

While many reports forecast the changes would result in thousands of job cuts, Microsoft on Monday only confirmed to AFP that changes were on the way. "Microsoft is implementing changes to better serve our customers and partners," a Microsoft spokesperson told AFP.

Ransomware known as Petya seems to have re-emerged to affect computer systems across Europe, causing issues primarily in Ukraine, Russia, England and India, a Swiss government information technology agency said on Tuesday.

"There have been indications of late that Petya is in circulation again, exploiting the SMB (Server Message Block) vulnerability," the Swiss Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance (MELANI) said in an e-mail.
It said it had no information that Swiss companies had been impacted, but said it was following the situation. The Petya virus was blamed for disrupting systems in 2016.

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, in an interview to CNBC, said the rising technological advancements in artificial intelligence could lead to World War III. Speaking to the news channel, the billionaire Chinese business magnate said there is a need for the world leaders to educate people about the pain that the rapid rise in automation and artificial intelligence will bring.

“The first technology revolution caused World War I. The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution,” he said. “People are already unhappy because lot of machinery, artificial intelligence is killing lot of jobs,” he added.

Tesla has confirmed it’s in talks with the Chinese government to open a factory in the Shanghai region, as the company aims to fulfill a promise by its CEO Elon Musk to produce 500,000 cars a year by 2018.

“Tesla is deeply committed to the Chinese market, and we continue to evaluate potential manufacturing sites around the globe to serve the local markets,” the company said in an emailed statement.

An upgrade to a Swiss supercomputer has bumped the US Department of Energy’s Cray XK7 to number four on the list rating these machines. According to supercomputer ranking published on Monday, Switzerland’s 19.6 petaflop1 Piz Daint supercomputer ranked third in the world after Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe 2, two Chinese supercomputers.

The only other time the US fell out of the top three was in 1996. If there’s any consolation, U.S.-based systems secured five of the top ten spots on the TOP500 list.

To bar kids from being addicted to the smartphones, a group in the US state of Colorado has sought ban on sale of the device to those below the age of 13.

Tim Farnum, founder of the non-profit group Parents Against Underage Smartphones, or PAUS, is leading the charge on a proposed ballot initiative in Colorado that would be the first of its kind in the country, the USA Today reported on Monday. With around 80 percent of Americans now owning a device, the number of under 13s that have their own handset is also on the rise.