Day: July 30, 2020

How a New Crowdfunding Model Offers Guaranteed Refunds and Protection

wayne July 30, 2020

Dynamic Coin Offerings (DYCOs) leverage blockchain technology to add accountability to teams.

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Entrepreneurs and investors often struggle with finding a happy medium that balances risk, reward and accountability. The problem is, company accountability is hard to track and is often a catalyst for investments gone bad. A study by Harvard found that angel investors reported that only 11 percent of their portfolio yielded a positive return. This means nine out of 10 angel investments typically end poorly, with investors not having any control over the day-to-day operations of what a company does and how it spends its money.

Thankfully, a new crowdfunding model has emerged and just experienced its first successful launch. Dynamic Coin Offerings (DYCOs) leverage blockchain technology to add accountability to teams by holding raised funds in third-party management and offering up to 80 percent refunds to early contributors if the price of a company’s token drops below the initial participation price. 

The first DYCO was managed by a Prague-based company called DAO Maker that managed the crowdfunding campaign, KYC,

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Data confirms England had highest COVID-19 death rate in Europe

wayne July 30, 2020

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Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google internal emails released by Congress

wayne July 30, 2020

Five and half hours of testimony with four of the most powerful CEOs in the world. Lots of shouting. The richest man on the planet forgot to unmute before speaking on a video call. 

What’d we learn during the Big Tech CEO hearing on Wednesday?

Next to nothing.

But luckily for us, even if much of the House Antitrust Subcommittee seemed distracted by online conspiracy theories and incoherent lines of questioning, it still did a lot of the good and dirty work over the last year, gathering over 1 million documents from Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google in its antitrust probe against the companies. These documents build a far better antitrust case against the four tech giants than anything the CEOs said during the hearing.

The trove of documents, released Wednesday night after the hearing ended, provide juicy details like how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted to buy Instagram at least in part to squash a rising competitive threat, and how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos negotiated a sweetheart deal with Apple to get Amazon’s Prime Video app on the Apple TV.

The Amazon-Apple deal was particularly interesting. The two companies had been at a stalemate

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U.S. GDP falls by a historic 32.9% as the pandemic ravages businesses and forces millions out of work

wayne July 30, 2020

The coronavirus outbreak has hit the U.S. economy harder and faster than any event in the history of modern economic records.

That grim point was made official on Thursday when the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that second quarter real GDP—from April to June—declined by 32.9% from the same period a year ago. It’s the largest single quarterly decline on record for data going back to 1947 and represents more than $1 trillion in economic output wiped out by the coronavirus pandemic. The figure comes in at three times worse than the previous record in 1958 when the economy saw a 10% quarterly drop.

No matter how you look at it, it’s a sum that’s likely to have huge implications in U.S. political circles with Election Day just over three months away.

That 32.9% decline follows a 5% decline in the first quarter, which only included the first few weeks of the pandemic.

The good news? Some economists believe the worst is over, and that the economy has already recovered some of the losses detailed in today’s report. Goldman Sachs projects third-quarter GDP will jump a record 25%, as the economy benefits from those states that were able …

The Big Tech hearing was a good day for democracy

wayne July 30, 2020

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.

Let’s talk first about video backgrounds. I liked Sundar Pichai’s the best by far. It was all smooth-credenza sleek, with a few for-show books and that funky chevron-patterned modern artwork on the wall. Jeff Bezos’s book case was nice. Mark Zuckerberg’s boring backdrop explained a man hellbent on domination, not a design aesthetic. Tim Cook’s almost equally boring choice was shocking only because Apple is easily more design-focused than Google, Amazon, or Facebook.

Oh, wait, you came here for analysis about the hearing, not its imagery.

I get that. Little surprised. I actually thought it was a good day for democracy, if not cordiality. Congressional investigators have shown they can dig up dirt on the behemoths that likely will be grist for more focused examiners at the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, and in Brussels. But if mergers are to be undone or giants are to be punished for abusing their concentrated power, then Congress will need to write new antitrust laws. (I’d vote for them passing comprehensive …