Monday 19 November 2018

More than a million people have made financial contributions to The Guardian, including 500,000 ongoing

"More than a million people worldwide have contributed to the Guardian in the last three years, with 500,000 paying to support the publication on an ongoing basis, according to Guardian News and Media’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.
She said the business model was showing a new way for journalism to “regain its relevance, meaning and trusted place in society”."

There are more than 10m apps ('mini programmes') on WeChat

"They may not be widely known outside of China, but Tencent’s mini program initiative to develop “apps” that live outside of app stores is bearing fruit after it clocked two notable landmarks: 200 million daily users and one million apps.
In recent years, Tencent’s WeChat  messaging app has blossomed into a universe of its own with myriad services that span from food delivery to getting loans. But the Chinese messaging app wants to lock users in for longer — and its mini program scheme appears to show promise.
Back in January 2017, Tencent introduced “mini programs,” which are essentially lightweight apps that run inside WeChat. When you need to hail a cab, for example, instead of downloading the standalone Didi Chuxing app, you can summon its mini program on WeChat in the blink of an eye.
WeChat now has over one million such mini programs, Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma said today at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China. (Third-party analytics firm Aladdin mentioned this milestone in a June report.) That makes its ecosystem half the size of the Apple App Store, which recorded 2.1 million apps in April."

Nearly 6m people in the UK are invisible to the financial system

"Almost 6m people in the UK are “invisible” to the financial system, causing them to be excluded from mainstream financial products and services, a new report has found.
Analysis of user data by Experian, a credit reference agency, revealed that 5.8m people in the UK have little or no financial information linked to them. These so-called “invisibles” can find themselves barred from the services that most people take for granted, or paying higher costs to access them.
Experian said it was not just those on the poorest incomes who were affected. “These people come from a variety of backgrounds — including families on average incomes, middle-aged adults with low incomes and pre-retirement households,” said James Jones, head of consumer affairs at Experian for the UK."
Source:  NewsCabal, 9th November 2018
(Story was originally in the FT)

eBay's algorithms can identify 40% of credit card fraud transactions

"eBay scientists have published a report which says that it’s new AI algorithm can identify 40% of credit card fraud transactions with high precision. A significant finding for a sector which solely relies on technology for fraud detection.
As always there are two sides of the coin for any entity or method. In fraud detection also, the techniques and tools can either focus on good actors or bad actors. Till now it has been the former. Where the truth is that majority of transactions conducted are by good actors. So it was imperative to study the behaviour of good actors, in fact much more important than those of bad actors.
Hence eBay, rather than focusing on the changing patterns employed by bad actors to circumvent protective barriers, they decided to instead analyses instances of good behaviour.
San Jose-based eBay scientists Utkarsh Porwal and Smruthi Mukund noted that patterns of good behaviour do not change with time. The data points that represent this form of conduct have consistent spatial arrangements. Porwal and Mukund suggested a clustering method for identifying outliers and to later formulate a score, which would determine consistency and in turn, good behaviour."

Singles Day generated over $30bn in sales

"Another year, another gross merchandise volume record for Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.
At the stroke of midnight, when the rolling counter stopped, 2018 GMV was RMB213.5 billion ($30.8 billion), 27% higher than last year’s RMB168.3 billion. As 11.11 wore on, milestones from the previous 10 years fell, one by one. Just after 4:00 p.m., it was a foregone conclusion that this year would be the biggest 11.11 ever – something Alibaba Group executives had promised heading into the shopping festival.
But as they took the stage to speak to media, while satisfied with the record GMV, abundantly clear was how proud they were that the digital ecosystem they’d crafted over the past several years performed as robustly as anyone could have hoped."
Source:  Alizila, 11th November 2018
Also - Apple was the best selling mobile phone brand