"If you've visited a crypto company's website recently, you've probably visited a URL ending in .xyz instead of its cheugier counterpart, .com," writes Anita Ramaswamy via TechCrunch. "From fintech Block, formerly known as Square, to venture firm Paradigm, to blockchain startups like Mirror, .xyz has become the go-to URL ending for many web3 companies. But what does it mean, and why has it caught on in the web3 space?" An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: .xyz, released to the public in 2014, first surged in popularity one year later when Google parent Alphabet decided to use it for their rebranded website. The internet behemoth had run into an increasingly widespread problem -- the .com URLs for their brand were already taken, with BMW's fleet management division using alphabet.com and American Broadcasting Corporation at abc.com. So Alphabet decided to open up shop at abc.xyz, which presented an "unlimited branding opportunity" for its "futuristic company," Daniel Negari, .xyz's 36-year-old founder and CEO, told TechCrunch in an email. Now, .xyz may be one of the top five top-level domains (TLDs) in the world by traffic, according to the company's own DNS data.

.xyz was created to "provide users around the world competition and choice when it comes to their domain name," and is "the first truly generic domain extension with no inherent meaning," according to Negari. While .com was meant for commercial use, .net for networks and .org for organizations, Negari envisioned .xyz as the TLD choice for users who felt they did not fit neatly into one of these categories or wanted to stand out. "I firmly believe the market has adopted our mantra of 'for every website everywhere,'" Negari said. "Our mantra of openness and inclusion for everyone and everything has bled through into a community of creative thinkers that has embraced .xyz as their domain." Negari is an active crypto investor with "numerous" investments in the space, including Gemini, MoonPay and BlockFi, he said. Because of his interest in crypto, he reached out to Ethereum Name Service (ENS) creator Nick Johnson to pitch him a collaboration. "That historic collaboration allowed early adopters to use a .xyz domain as their wallet address," Negari said.

ENS allows users to create a universal nickname for all their crypto addresses, providing a searchable database to make crypto wallets and transactions, which otherwise reside on a variety of different platforms, more easily accessible. Users can now create profiles to share their social media handles or other personal information in ENS using its native .eth domain or on a .xyz domain. .xyz has continued to find ways to collaborate with ENS and work with the crypto community. It announced this week that it launched its "eth.xyz" service, allowing users to search individual ENS profiles simply by adding ".xyz" to the end of their .eth name rather than having to go to the ENS database to look them up, Negari said. By allowing cryptocurrency holders to buy domains in their preferred names using Ethereum, ENS has creatively monetized users' desire to leverage the internet as an identity-building tool. Although .xyz domains are managed by ICANN, "several parties are now working to develop a decentralized alternative to this system to underpin web3," the report adds. ".xyz's strategy to align itself proactively with web3 companies could present a host of new monetization opportunities based on identity and ownership in a decentralized web as this generation of internet users stakes new claims on domains."

It's also worth noting that these .xyz domains "tend to be more affordable compared to their alternatives."

For a sector historically known for its fast-forward pace of innovation, consumer technology sure did a lot of backpedaling this year. From a report: The Nasdaq CTA Internet Index is in the red this year compared with a return of more than 27% for the S&P 500. Cathie Wood's famed ARK Innovation ETF, more than 30% of which was invested in information technology as of Sept. 30, has seen its net asset value decline 21% this year, underperforming the S&P by nearly 49 percentage points. She isn't alone. If you invested in enough tech stocks this year, you probably got burned by a few of them.

Select lowlights include fitness-equipment company Peloton Interactive, down nearly 75% this year; social-commerce company Poshmark, down almost 82%; and education-tech company Chegg, down 66%. At certain points, the number of names blowing up simultaneously was dizzying: Chegg, Peloton, Zillow Group and Vimeo all took nosedives around their most-recent earnings reports, collectively erasing some $26.3 billion in market value in a single week last month. A big part of the problem was the huge run logged in stay-at-home stocks in the latter half of last year. Many of tech's 2020 darlings became duds simply by virtue of the fact that they appreciated too much too quickly. In the end, the numbers couldn't keep pace.

Ms. Wood, at least, is sticking with the strategy that failed her this year. She said in a Bloomberg interview earlier this month that she expects it to yield "a compound annual rate of return of roughly 40% over the next five years," emphasizing, "That's a quadrupling." But investors shouldn't expect all of this year's dips to lead to easy dunks next year. Zillow, for example, is down over 50% in the year to date, and while its future without iBuying looks to be a much more steadily profitable business, the online real-estate company is still worth more than twice as much today as it was in early 2019, when it went big into the automated home-flipping business. If the tech sector has to earn its gains next year, many of its stocks still face an uphill battle.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Climate change, the rapid growth of "stablecoins" and financial innovations that led to frenzied trading of GameStop shares early this year are threats to the U.S. financial system that merit closer scrutiny, a Treasury Department-led regulatory panel said on Friday. In its annual report, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) added that while the U.S. economy has improved since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, risks to the financial system are higher than prior to the health crisis, with the outlook for global growth still uncertain.

The report marked the first time the body, which was created in the wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis to spot looming threats, has flagged climate change as a major risk, reflecting President Joe Biden's push to address rising global temperatures. The FSOC, which comprises the Treasury and other financial regulators, said the physical risks posed by more frequent severe weather events and government policies transitioning away from carbon-heavy industry could dent asset values and weaken institutions, it wrote, echoing an October FSOC paper. "If these changes occur in a disorderly way owing to substantial delays in action or abrupt changes in policy, their impact is likely to be more sudden and disruptive," the FSOC said.

Similarly, the body reiterated concerns flagged in November that stablecoins, a fast-growing type of digital asset pegged to traditional currencies, could become a threat if widely adopted. While that market is currently only worth about $127 billion, its market value has ballooned more than 500% over the past 12 months and may be vulnerable to runs if investors lose confidence in the asset class's reliability, the FSOC said. The body also noted a surge of volatility earlier this year sparked by retail investors, who coordinated on social media and used zero-commission trading apps to fuel sharp rises in a handful of stocks, including videogame maker GameStop. The episode suggested financial innovations and social media are changing market participation, raising the risk of sudden asset price movements unrelated to fundamental news. That "could represent a vulnerability if they lead to cascading impacts by causing asset liquidations or putting stress on financial institutions," the FSOC wrote.

An underwater hockey league connected the founders of the Solana blockchain to investors who bought the Solana token. The 4,300-fold increase in the price of the blockchain's tokens explains why more VC funds want to hold these assets. The Information: When Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko tried to raise money in 2018 to develop his idea for a faster blockchain for financial transactions, bitcoin prices were diving and investors were leery of blockchain startups. Then the former Qualcomm engineer convinced a friend he met playing underwater hockey to become an early investor. And that swim buddy went on to introduce Yakovenko, 41, to two other backers. Later that year, the five co-founders of Solana Labs sold 79.25 million tokens for pennies each to help the startup develop the Solana blockchain. Some of the early token buyers, including Multicoin Capital, 500 Startups and a founder of Race Capital, have reaped huge gains from these first sales, in some cases generating $1 billion in returns. The spike in tokens like Solana, which are worth about 4,300 times their initial sales price, explain why traditional venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are shaking up their legal structures to hold more digital assets. This is how Solana's first backers got in on one of the biggests scores in crypto investments.

The Solana token, which confers ownership rights to the Solana blockchain, is now the world's fifth most valuable, with a market capitalization of about $50 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. Altogether, Solana Labs has sold 307 million SOL tokens, which have helped power the 78-employee startup's growth and the blockchain's development in lieu of equity financing. Solana token prices have jumped as the blockchain proved it can handle transactions faster than standard financial institutions. It also outperforms Ethereum, an older blockchain technology underpinning decentralized finance, or DeFi, a peer-to-peer system where financial transactions are completed without an intermediary. The Solana blockchain can already complete 65,000 transactions per second compared to 1,700 for credit card processor Visa and just 15 for Ethereum. An Ethereum upgrade expected for next year aims to bump that rate to 100,000 transactions, but that transition has been delayed for almost two years.

The Bank of England has said that bitcoin could be "worthless" and people investing in the digital currency should be prepared to lose everything. The Guardian reports: In a warning over the potential risks for investors, the central bank questioned whether there was any inherent worth in the most prominent digital currency, which has soared in value this year to close to $50,000 a piece. The deputy governor, Sir Jon Cunliffe, said the Bank had to be ready for risks linked to the rise of the crypto asset following rapid growth in its popularity. "Their price can vary quite considerably and [bitcoins] could theoretically or practically drop to zero," he told the BBC.

The Bank's financial policy committee, set up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to monitor risks, said on Monday there was little direct threat to the stability of the UK financial system from crypto assets. However, it warned that, at the current rapid pace of growth, such assets could become more interconnected with traditional financial services and were likely to pose a number of risks. Publishing its regular health check on the financial system, the Bank said major institutions should take a cautious approach to adopting crypto assets and that it would pay close attention to developments in the market. "Enhanced regulatory and law enforcement frameworks, both domestically and at a global level, are needed to influence developments in these fast-growing markets in order to manage risks, encourage sustainable innovation and maintain broader trust and integrity in the financial system," it said. In a separate blogpost published on its website on Tuesday, a member of the Bank's staff said bitcoin failed to fulfill many of the features required of a currency and that it risked being inherently volatile.

Thomas Belsham, who works in the Bank's stakeholder and media engagement division, wrote: "The problem is that, unlike traditional forms of money, Bitcoin isn't used to price things other than itself. As Bitcoiners themselves are fond of saying, 'one Bitcoin = one Bitcoin'. But a tautology does not a currency make." He said scarcity of the crypto asset -- which is limited to 21m bitcoin -- is among the key reasons for its attraction for investors, but this feature embedded into its design "may even, ultimately, render Bitcoin worthless." About 19m bitcoin is currently in circulation, with new coins added when "miners" validate changes to the blockchain ledger underpinning the cryptocurrency. While the ultimate number of bitcoin in circulation is not expected to be reached until February 2140, it would become harder to sustain this system over time, Belsham said. "Simple game theory tells us that a process of backward induction should, really, at some point, induce the smart money to get out. And were that to happen, investors really should be prepared to lose everything. Eventually."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Apple is on the verge of yet another major milestone. The iPhone maker is close to topping a market value of more than $3 trillion -- the first publicly traded company ever to be worth that much. Shares of Apple were up about 1% in premarket trading Monday to around $181.75. The stock needs to hit $182.85 for Apple to surpass the $3 trillion mark. Apple's market value first crossed the $1 trillion threshold in August 2018 and passed $2 trillion in August 2020. [...] But before long, Apple may have some company in the $3 trillion club. Microsoft is now worth about $2.6 trillion and Google owner Alphabet's market value is right around $2 trillion. Still giant but further behind are Amazon, which has a market cap of $1.7 trillion, and Elon Musk's Tesla, worth $1 trillion.

Adobe unveiled its first comprehensive package of design software for non-professionals on Monday, taking direct aim at a booming market that has turned Australian start-up Canva into one of the world's most valuable private tech companies. From a report: The service includes versions of widely used professional design tools such as the Photoshop picture editor, Illustrator graphics tool and video-editing service Premiere, behind a simpler interface that analysts said bore a striking resemblance to Canva. The move follows a leap in the valuation of companies that have extended the market for design software with tools aimed at non-expert users. Canva's fundraising round in September valued it at $40bn, more than double what it was judged to be worth five months before. Figma, which makes software for product designers and more general business users, saw its value rise fivefold in little more than a year to $10bn. Adobe's move is partly defensive, since it could face disruption as Canva's simple tool moves deeper into the business world, said Liz Miller, an analyst at advisory firm Constellation Research. Adobe's new service, called Creative Cloud Express, is likely to appeal to many people in small or medium-sized businesses who might have been thought of before as customers for Adobe's more expensive software, but who are happy to use simpler design tools with fewer features, she said. [...] A basic version of the new service would be available free of charge through app stores and its own website, Adobe said, with a premium version priced at $9.99 a month. [Editor's note: the aforementioned link may be paywalled; alternative source]

Interviews and internal Apple documents provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the company made concessions to Beijing and won key legal exemptions. CEO Tim Cook personally lobbied officials over threats that would have hobbled its devices and services. His interventions paved the way for Apple's unparalleled success in the country. The Information: Apple's iPhone recently became the top-selling smartphone in China, its second-biggest market after the U.S., for the first time in six years. But the company owes much of that success to CEO Tim Cook, who laid the foundation years ago by secretly signing an agreement, estimated to be worth more than $275 billion, with Chinese officials promising Apple would do its part to develop China's economy and technological prowess through investments, business deals and worker training. Cook forged the five-year agreement, which hasn't been previously reported, during the first of a series of in-person visits he made to the country in 2016 to quash a sudden burst of regulatory actions against Apple's business, according to internal Apple documents viewed by The Information. Before the meetings, Apple executives were scrambling to salvage the company's relationship with Chinese officials, who believed the company wasn't contributing enough to the local economy, the documents show. Amid the government crackdown and the bad publicity that accompanied it, iPhone sales plummeted.

CNN profiles Magnus Carlsen, the world's best chess player — and the state of the chess community today: Interest in chess spiked at the beginning of the pandemic, and again in October 2020 after the release of the Netflix series, "The Queen's Gambit." In the first three weeks after its debut, sales of chess sets went up by 87% in the U.S. and sales of books about chess leaped 603%, according to marketing research company NPD Group. Not since the 1970s, when American legend Bobby Fischer burst onto the scene, has the game captured the attention of the world like this....

Carlsen tries hard to be indifferent toward anything at all during the press conference and interview. But he does have strong opinions on how the game should be changed to make sure it holds the attention of the current groundswell of interested players. "I've been somebody who's supported having quicker games in the world championship for a long time," he said. "I think for people who are not into chess at all, who don't know anything about the game, you're more naturally attracted to quicker games." World championship games can last hours and often end in ties because mistakes are so rare...

Carlsen's love of fast-paced chess isn't surprising, considering he is the current world champion in both "Rapid" and "Blitz" formats — games that generally last for 15 minutes or less. His tiebreak wins in previous championship games were both in the rapid format and there are numerous videos on YouTube where his quick thinking is showcased. Computers are now powerful enough to calculate billions of possible move combinations in seconds, ably deciding the best possible option. It makes preparation more exacting and less enjoyable, and Carlsen thinks quicker games would help solve that...

Carlsen could rightly be considered the greatest chess player ever. He has been the world champion for eight years and holds the longest unbeaten run in history. He only trails Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov in weeks spent as the highest rated player.
But the New York Times points out that Carlsen has done something none of his chess-playing predecessors have ever done. "He has leveraged his fame to become one of the chess world's leading impresarios. In the process, he has amassed a small fortune." Carlsen has several private sponsorship agreements, including with Unibet, a sports betting site; Isklar, a Norwegian water company; and Simonsen Vogt Wiig, a Norwegian law firm. But the main vehicle for his business ventures is Play Magnus, a company that he co-founded in 2013, the year he became world champion. Initially designed as an app that allowed users to mimic Carlsen's playing style and strength at different ages, Play Magnus has expanded, mostly through acquisitions, to become a company with a dozen subsidiaries. It now includes an online playing site, multiple teaching and training platforms, and digital and book publishing arms.

According to Andreas Thome, Play Magnus's chief executive, the company has about 250 employees and about four million registered users of its products and proprietary learning programs. One year after it went public on the Euronext Growth Oslo stock exchange, Play Magnus now has a market capitalization of about $115 million. It is the only publicly traded chess company in the world.
Carlsen's personal stake in the company is worth nearly $9 million, the Times points out — even as Carlsen is now competing in the world chess championship for a $2.24 million prize, where "as much as 60% will go to the winner."

In the 14-game match, the first two games...all ended in a draw. "The result means there have now been 16 draws in a row in world championship games played at classical time controls," the Guardian pointed out, "dating back five years to game 11 of Carlsen's match against Sergey Karjakin in November 2016."

And then the third game, played Sunday....also ended in a draw.

Crypto.com's deal last week to replace Staples as the title sponsor of an iconic downtown Los Angeles sports center appears to have already paid for itself. From a report: The CRO token has surged more than 55% in the past seven days as of Monday and reached a record on Sunday, according to pricing from CoinGecko, and is now the 13th-biggest by market capitalization at about $18 billion. Its gains come as many other top cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether and Binance Coin, fall back. Two people familiar with the naming agreement said last week that it was worth $700 million over 20 years. The deal is a continuation of a trend by Crypto.com and others to gain name recognition and customers through pacts in sports, music and more.

When Americans gather around the Thanksgiving table this week, the blistering rally in technology, electric vehicles and crypto-related stocks is likely to be a part of their conversations. From a report: There's a reason it will dominate the small talk: The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 is now worth almost half as much as the benchmark S&P 500 -- the highest ever -- and the megacap tech stocks alone represent a third of the S&P 500. Nvidia and Roblox's sprint stood out in a year when the rest of the big tech names jogged to new highs, defying several calls to sell the sector around last year's thanksgiving due to soaring valuations.

Chipmaker Nvidia has soared 148% as booming chip demand and a foray into the metaverse made it the best performer on the Nasdaq 100. Applied Materials and Advanced Micro Devices were other winners, each rising about 80% and outperforming many of the megacap tech stocks. Tesla soared to a $1 trillion market value as the electric-carmaker's shares doubled in value, driven by a sustained pickup in sales, even as part shortages were crippling the broader auto industry. EV fever was even more evident with Rivian Automotive, which doubled in value in less than two weeks after going public. Lucid Group was the sector's other hot name. Roblox's tripling of value from its March listing to Facebook's name change to Meta Platforms showed the metaverse was the next big thing in tech. The rush to the space was evident with the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, an exchange traded fund focused on the theme, surpassing $500 million in assets under management on Nov. 17, having doubled in just two weeks. From the digital world to digital money: Bitcoin briefly reclaiming $60,000 and a rally in smaller cryptocurrencies boosted a host of related stocks such as Marathon Digital Holdings, Riot Blockchain and MicroStrategy. Marathon Digital was among the top winners, with its stock jumping ten-fold.

"In a rock concert-like atmosphere, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced that his government will build an oceanside 'Bitcoin City' at the base of a volcano..." reports the Associated Press.

"A bond offering would happen in 2022 entirely in Bitcoin, Bukele said, wearing his signature backwards baseball cap. And 60 days after financing was ready, construction would begin." The city will be built near the Conchagua volcano to take advantage of geothermal energy to power both the city and Bitcoin mining — the energy-intensive solving of complex mathematical calculations day and night to verify currency transactions. The government is already running a pilot Bitcoin mining venture at another geothermal power plant beside the Tecapa volcano...

The government will provide land and infrastructure and work to attract investors. The only tax collected there will be the value-added tax, half of which will be used to pay the municipal bonds and the rest for municipal infrastructure and maintenance. Bukele said there would be no property, income or municipal taxes and the city would have zero carbon dioxide emissions.

"Invest here and earn all the money you want," Bukele told the cheering crowd in English at the closing of the Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference being held in El Salvador.
CNN adds some interesting details: Likening his plan to cities founded by Alexander the Great, Bukele said Bitcoin City would be circular, with an airport, residential and commercial areas, and feature a central plaza designed to look like a bitcoin symbol from the air. "If you want bitcoin to spread over the world, we should build some Alexandrias," said Bukele, a tech savvy 40-year-old who in September proclaimed himself "dictator" of El Salvador on Twitter in an apparent joke.

El Salvador plans to issue the initial bonds in 2022, Bukele said, suggesting it would be in 60 days time. Samson Mow, chief strategy officer of blockchain technology provider Blockstream, told the gathering the first 10-year issue, known as the "volcano bond", would be worth $1 billion, backed by bitcoin and carrying a coupon of 6.5% [the annual interest paid on a bond]. Half of the sum would go to buying bitcoin on the market, he said. Other bonds would follow. After a five year lock-up, El Salvador would start selling some of the bitcoin used to fund the bond to give investors an "additional coupon", Mow said, positing that the value of the cryptocurrency would continue to rise robustly.

"This is going to make El Salvador the financial center of the world," he said...

Once 10 such bonds were issued, $5 billion in bitcoin would be taken off the market for several years, Mow said. "And if you get 10 more countries to do these bonds, that's half of bitcoin's market cap right there." The "game theory" on the bonds gave first issuer El Salvador an advantage, Mow argued, saying: "If bitcoin at the five-year mark reaches $1 million, which I think it will, they will sell bitcoin in two quarters and recoup that $500 million."

China is accelerating plans to replace American and foreign technology, quietly empowering a secretive government-backed organization to vet and approve local suppliers in sensitive areas from cloud to semiconductors, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter said. From a report: Formed in 2016 to advise the government, the Information Technology Application Innovation Working Committee has now been entrusted by Beijing to help set industry standards and train personnel to operate trusted software. The quasi-government body will devise and execute the so-called "IT Application Innovation" plan, better known as Xinchuang in Chinese. It will choose from a basket of suppliers vetted under the plan to provide technology for sensitive sectors from banking to data centers storing government data, a market that could be worth $125 billion by 2025.

So far, 1,800 Chinese suppliers of PCs, chips, networking and software have been invited to join the committee, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information. The organization has so far certified hundreds of local companies this year as committee members, the fastest pace in years, one of the people said. The existence of the Xinchuang white-list, whose members and over-arching goals haven't been previously reported, is likely to inflame tensions just as Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping wrapped up their first face-to-face virtual summit. It gives Beijing more leverage to replace foreign tech firms in sensitive sectors and quickens a push to help local champions achieve tech self-sufficiency and overcome sanctions first imposed by the Trump administration in fields like networking and chips.

Citing the Korean automaker's "striking designs, interesting battery tech, and robust product pipeline," John Voelcker from The Drive makes the case for why Hyundai "could emerge among the companies that transition fastest to EVs." From the report: Its battery-electrics will come fast, entering the mass market on pace with those from GM and Ford. Hyundai's smart enough not to try to compete in full-size electric pickup trucks, still the last stronghold for the Detroit 2.5, not least because they're largely unsellable outside North America. The lackluster results for Nissan and Toyota after 20 years of building U.S.-style full-size pickups provide an object lesson. But Hyundai has aggressive plans for the rest of the light truck and passenger vehicle market.

Of course, every automaker worth its salt these days has a bold plan to launch a flotilla of electric vehicles over the next 5-10 years and is pouring billions of dollars into making it happen. What's slightly different here is that Hyundai has shown over the past decade it can notably improve its cars with each generation and break new ground as fast as any other maker, all while keeping prices relatively close to Earth. It was late to SUVs, but now it has a full lineup that leads its sales and offers good value for the money. With the playing field mostly leveled by a tectonic technological shift, expect Hyundai to do the same with electric vehicles, even as the global patchwork of emissions regulations and cultural divides means different markets will move at different speeds.

When the company launched vehicles with plugs in the U.S. in 2014, it didn't limit them to two vehicles (as GM did), but released half a dozen of them. They were BEVs with ranges from 100 to 230 miles, various plug-in hybrid models of sedan and now SUV, and more are coming. Hyundai also wants to play in the world of hydrogen vehicles, though it is wisely focusing on freight movement rather than personal-use vehicles. But that's a different story altogether. What matters now is understanding how Hyundai became a force to be reckoned with in this all-important, high-stakes battle.

Shiba Inu has entered into the top ten most valuable digital assets by market value, "hitting $40 billion and surpassing its cousin and inspiration, Dogecoin," reports Bloomberg. From the report: Shiba was up another 10% at midday on Monday and has doubled in value in the past week. Most of that gain came in a flurry of trading last Wednesday, when it gained a whopping 66%. Even with its recent meteoric rise -- it's up about 900% in the past month -- each Shiba coin costs just a tiny fraction of one cent. If you bought $1,000 worth of Shiba in late September, your 20 million coins would now be worth around $9,000.

Shiba's rise is similar to Dogecoin's ascent in the spring, when it caught fire and rose jumped from around 5 cents to 57 cents between April 7 and May 7. Like many other crypto currencies, Shiba is shrouded in mystery. According to its white paper -- or "Woof Paper," in this case -- the token was started in 2020 by an anonymous person or group named "Ryoshi." The paper, which describes how Shiba and its progeny works, is also peppered with soaring-but-vague platitudes about community, freedom, revolution and destroying traditional paradigms. A person with limited background knowledge of technology and blockchain vernacular would be hard pressed to decipher much of the technical wording in the white paper.

PC pioneer Michael Dell is set to cap his climb back to the top of the computing world on Monday with one of the largest corporate spin-offs. Dell Technologies will shed its 81 percent stake in publicly traded VMware, creating an independent software company with a stock market value of nearly $64 billion. Dell's remaining hardware operations have an implied value of $33 billion, based on its latest share price. From a report: The transaction, first disclosed in April, completes an eight-year saga in which the Texan entrepreneur turned his $3.8 billion interest in an out-of-favor PC maker into a personal stake in a broader data center hardware and software empire worth $40 billion. Beginning with the buyout of his PC company, Dell went on to devour server and storage company EMC for $67 billion before taking the group public again in 2018. Along the way, he fought heated battles with dissident shareholders over claims that he bought Dell on the cheap and used complex financial engineering in the EMC deal to short-change investors. Silver Lake, the Silicon Valley private equity group that helped mastermind the dealmaking, will be left with stakes in Dell and VMware worth $11 billion.

The game formerly known as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds accounts for 97% of the revenue of its maker Krafton. Given that the Seoul-based company is valued at almost $20 billion, we have a rough estimate for how much this single game is worth, according to the stock market. A good chunk of that value is in the potential that title holds for expansion. From a report: Krafton has staked its future on making PUBG -- no longer an abbreviation but a brand for a wider intellectual property franchise -- into a big fantasy universe spanning different games and entertainment genres. The first big test of this strategy is PUBG: New State, the mobile sequel that moves the battle royale action to 2051 and adds more advanced weaponry, vehicles and graphics. It arrives on Nov. 11. I haven't played it to be able to tell you how good it will be, but I would be hugely surprised if it turns into anything other than another money printer for Krafton.

The reason for my confidence is simple: The company isn't straying too far from what made the original 2017 game a hit and is mostly changing the cosmetics atop the underlying physics and gameplay. This approach has proven highly successful in the mobile arena. The smartphone game is launching in more than 200 countries and in 17 different languages and has already had more than 50 million preregistrations. Another essential element for mobile success that Krafton taps into is making the game free to play. The vast majority of smartphone app store revenue comes from games, which seems counterintuitive considering that most of those games demand no upfront payment. The real money, however, is in enticing players to make microtransactions within the game, such as personalizing your character with "skins" or buying a pet or better weapons. This is such a big deal that Epic Games took Apple and Alphabet's Google to court over the split of who gets to profit from those addictive little in-game buys in PUBG rival Fortnite.

"Ali Ghodsi was happily researching AI at Berkeley when he helped invent a revolutionary bit of code — and he wanted to give it away for free," remembers Forbes India. "But few would take it unless he charged for it.

"Now his startup is worth $28 billion, and the career academic is a billionaire with a reputation as one of the best CEOs in the Valley." (Literally. VC Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz calls him the best CEO in Andreessen Horowitz's portfolio of hundreds of companies.) Inside a 13th-floor boardroom in downtown San Francisco, the atmosphere was tense. It was November 2015, and Databricks, a two-year-old software company started by a group of seven Berkeley researchers, was long on buzz but short on revenue. The directors awkwardly broached subjects that had been rehashed time and again. The startup had been trying to raise funds for five months, but venture capitalists were keeping it at arm's length, wary of its paltry sales. Seeing no other option, NEA partner Pete Sonsini, an existing investor, raised his hand to save the company with an emergency $30 million injection...

Many of the original founders, Ghodsi in particular, were so engrossed with their academic work that they were reluctant to start a company — or charge for their technology, a best-of-breed piece of future-predicting code called Spark, at all. But when the researchers offered it to companies as an open-source tool, they were told it wasn't "enterprise ready". In other words, Databricks needed to commercialise. "We were a bunch of Berkeley hippies, and we just wanted to change the world," Ghodsi says. "We would tell them, 'Just take the software for free', and they would say 'No, we have to give you $1 million'."

Databricks' cutting-edge software uses artificial intelligence to fuse costly data warehouses (structured data used for analytics) with data lakes (cheap, raw data repositories) to create what it has coined data "lakehouses" (no space between the words, in the finest geekspeak tradition). Users feed in their data and the AI makes predictions about the future. John Deere, for example, installs sensors in its farm equipment to measure things like engine temperature and hours of use. Databricks uses this raw data to predict when a tractor is likely to break down. Ecommerce companies use the software to suggest changes to their websites that boost sales. It's used to detect malicious actors — both on stock exchanges and on social networks.

Ghodsi says Databricks is ready to go public soon. It's on track to near $1 billion in revenue next year, Sonsini notes. Down the line, $100 billion is not out of the question, Ghodsi says — and even that could be a conservative figure. It's simple math: Enterprise AI is already a trillion-dollar market, and it's certain to grow much larger. If the category leader grabs just 10 percent of the market, Ghodsi says, that's revenues of "many, many hundred billions."
Later in the article Ghodsi offers this succinct summary of the market they entered.

"It turns out that if you dust off the neural network algorithms from the '70s, but you use way more data than ever before and modern hardware, the results start becoming superhuman."

Somewhere on Yahoo, one writer asks "Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?" There was a time when comic books were sold at newsstands alongside mainstream publications, according to Forbes, but that changed in the early 1980s when periodical comics all but disappeared from newsstands. From then on, the vast majority of comic books were sold through independently owned retail comic shops.
But GamesRadar+ notes a boom started in the 1990s — when comic books became an investment: Long story short, folks outside of regular comic book readers discovered that, in some cases, key comic book issues (such as those that debuted popular characters or titles) could be worth significant amounts of money on the secondary market, leading to some fans buying dozens of copies of a single issue in the hopes of someday capitalizing on their monetary value...

Someone should've explained supply and demand — the bubble burst because when everyone is buying and meticulously preserving a million copies of a comic book, there is no rarity to drive up the value to the level of less well-preserved comic books from earlier eras.
Their article also points out that this era saw the dawn of lucrative "variant covers". But the '90s also saw a rebellion of top Marvel artists who left to found Image comics, "the first major third-party publisher to challenge Marvel and DC's reign over the industry in years," which led to "a rise in independent and creator-owned comic books, both large and small, and helped the rising tide of indie publishers gain a solid foothold as an overall industry presence." (Presumably this "rising tide" would also include publishers of manga and anime-derived titles.)

So where are we now? The article on Yahoo notes the vast popularity of comic book movies, and also argues that "The billion-dollar comic business continues to boom." According to Publisher's Weekly, sales of comic books and graphic novels topped $1.28 billion in 2020, an all-time high. It's no fluke. With a few exceptions — sales fell a little in 2017, for example — comic book sales have been rising consistently for decades.
But who's actually reading comic books? Is it teenagers? Nostalgic adults? Investing collectors? People who saw the movies first? (If you're 12 years old, are you going to read some comic book, or watch The Avengers?)

Comic books now also have to compete with incredibly immersive videogames, virtual reality, and a gazillion cellphone apps — not to mention social media, and even online fan fiction. So I'd be interested to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. It seems like we'd be a reasonably good cross section of geek culture — but can we solve the riddle of the state of the comic book industry today?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?

"Long before the pandemic, software business GitLab operated fully remotely, building its developer tools without any physical office..." remembers Forbes.

"The company went public on Thursday on Nasdaq under the ticker 'GTLB.' Priced at $77, shares of GitLab closed their first day of trading at $103.89, up 35%, giving GitLab a market cap of nearly $15 billion." In an interview, CEO Sid Sijbrandij (pronounced "see brandy") said that going public would help GitLab to remain a well-resourced, long-standing steward of the open-source project on top of which its business software is built. "This had to happen sometime," Sijbrandij says. "We knew we were ready, the markets were ready, so why not take the step today?" At its closing price on Thursday, GitLab's IPO has made Sijbrandij a new tech billionaire, with an equity stake valued at $2.3 billion; in addition, he also sold about $150 million worth of Gitlab shares as part of the company's offering.

With revenue of $58 million in its previous quarter, up 69% year over year, on losses of $40 million, GitLab fits the mold of a classic high-growth, unprofitable business-to-business software provider — cloud players that have in recent years proven popular, and able to command high multiples, with Wall Street. While its losses have narrowed recently, GitLab still generates about $1.50 in new business for each $1 spent by customers previously on its tools, putting it in elite company in the category...

The company was the first-ever on Nasdaq to livestream its entire IPO day, with about 18,000 people stopping by over the course of the broadcast, it says.... Sijbrandij also became known as one of remote work's leading evangelists, advocating a no-hybrid, radically transparent office culture he says is fairer and more productive. That purist view remains a hiring advantage, he tells Forbes now; it also helps explain the livestream, part marketing opportunity and part way to include GitLab employees and advocates across the globe. "It's always behind closed doors," Sijbrandij says of the IPO festivities and listing process. Originally from the Netherlands, Sijbrandij added his parents were two of the viewers. "It was awesome to share it with the world."