Rishi Taparia - Issue #93
This week we look at further consolidation in the acquiring space (Global Payments doesn’t want to be left out!), the scary new capabilities of fake video creation, children striking for climate, Leonardo da Vinci’s genius and more. Enjoy!
Commerce and Fintech
Global Payments is nearing an agreement to acquire Total System Services for roughly $20 billion in latest fintech deal
The consolidation continues in financial services. First fiserv bought First Data in a $22bn megadeal. Then FIS went out and bought Worldpay for $34bn. Now, Global is talking about buying TSYS, but both companies are being very hush hush about it. More to come here for sure!
Square Quietly Launches Program For CBD Cannabis Company Credit Card Processing
Cannabis is big business. Legal, or illegal, is now a state by state question. The challenge for businesses now selling CBD has been infrastructure, the lack of banking and payments capabilities being the largest. Now, in a major reversal payment processor Square is now accepting some CBD businesses as clients in light of the changing legal status of the cannabis-derived compound.
First Data’s Volume Growth Slowed in the First Quarter, but Brick-and-Mortar Topped E-Commerce
First Data reported slower than expected transaction volume in Q1, driven largely by “the five-week government shutdown, and a barrage of winter storms.” The more interesting point to note: the growth of brick and mortar spending compared to e-commerce. According to the company, “same-store volume at physical merchants grew 2.4% while e-commerce increased only 2.1%. Even though e-commerce has consistently outpaced the growth at brick-and-mortar stores, it too has had a steady decline in growth over the last five quarters.”
Technology
It's Getting Way Too Easy to Create Fake Videos of People's Faces
Deepfakes continue to get better and better. Samsung researchers developed an algorithm that only needs one source image to create fake videos. By using as little as a single photo it is possible to create talking head videos by “[training] the program to identify what they call "landmark” features of the faces: eyes, mouth shapes, the length and shape of a nose bridge.“ This creates a ‘new face’ but one that is close enough such that in the 'scroll through the feed’ world we consume content in, it gets harder to notice. And the tech is only going to get better.
The researchers write in the paper that they recognize the applications for realistic face-avatars in video conferencing, gaming, and special effects—but the uncanny valley often holds us back from fully embracing widespread use of face-avatars of real people. They hope that this work changes that, with its low source requirements and "perfect” realism.
With fake videos already making their rounds, like this one of Nancy Pelosi that spread through social channels this week that had been slowed down to make her speech seem slurred and garbled, this challenges faced with this technology are only going to magnify, and there doesn’t seem to be a tech solution to this problem.
Mona Lisa coming to life
Amazon Is Working on a Device That Can Read Human Emotions
Amazon knows your inner most cravings. Now they want to know what you’re feeling. The ecommerce/retail/technology giant is developing a voice-activated wearable device that can recognize human emotions. Billed as a health and wellness product, “the technology could help the company gain insights for potential health products or be used to better target advertising or product recommendations.”
In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc
Reporting by the Times investigating the big problem with cyberweapons: theft. American cities are being hijacked with a cyberweapon developed by the N.S.A (you may have heard of WannaCry, North Korea’s co-opted version of the tool). The US has already done billions of dollars in damage overseas with the tool. The N.S.A. has been silent.
Climate and Energy
'They'll give me a detention but it'll be worth it' – a climate scientist interviews his climate striking daughter
In a likely unprecedented act of defiance from a group of children this size, hundreds of thousands of children around the world walked out on school this week to protest their respective government’s lack of action of climate change. Inspired by Inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s weekly protests, strikes took place on every continent. In this piece, a 25 year climate scientist, Mark Maslin, interviews to his 13-year old daughter about why she’s going to climate strike.
Impossible Foods debuts meatless sausage at Little Caesars
Sausage pizza anyone? Plant-based burger maker Impossible Foods is debuting its second product — meatless sausage crumbles — on Little Caesars pizza. The ‘pizza pizza’ chain will start testing the topping in 58 locations with an eye toward nationwide expansion. With land use and grazing being a meaningful contributor to climate change, the continued success of companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat is showing climate positive products can be quite lucrative.
Climate Change and the New Age of Extinction
A report issued last week by the IPBES (the UN backed body that researches the planet’s biodiversity, similar to what the IPCC does for climate change) offered some grim findings: we’re killing the planet. The extinction rate of species globally is accelerating, with over 1,000,000 species threatened with extinction. As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in this piece on the report, the reality is that “Americans have, by now, grown inured to “last of” stories, which appear with the unsurprising regularity of seasonal dessert recipes.” Unlike strawberry cobbler, the extinction of ecosystems will do more than impact your summer beach body goals.
Random Tidbits
Why Leonardo da Vinci’s brilliance endures, 500 years after his death
Leonardo da Vinci was a genius. His biography by Isaacson is a book I recommend getting in physical copy - you must see his genius to believe it. This piece in the National Geographic magazine is a terrific look at his history, and how his creativity and foresight in science, engineering, and the arts continue to surprise and amaze today.
Stan Lee Keynote at the 2017 Graduation Ceremony
Stan Lee gave the keynote address for the 2017 UCLA Extension Certificate Graduation Ceremony. In it he talked about how Spiderman came into being (and almost didn’t).
“If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out it. Now that doesn’t mean that every wild notion you come up with is going to be genius…but you can only do your best work if you’re doing what you want to do, and if you’re doing it the way you think it should be done.”
A Room Without Books Is Just Very Sad
Tag your shelf! Hotels, restaurants, shops and yachts stock up on beautiful and lamentably inexpensive treasures.
Quote I’m thinking about: “We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.” — Louis L'Amour