EIGHT years ago Facebook launched as an online social network connecting a small college community from a dorm room at Harvard University. Today the company has 845m active users across the globe and a wealth of data. One aspect of these data, which Facebook has shared with The Economist, shows a rough correlation between current global Facebook friendships and the old boundaries of once-mighty European empires.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., which generated the most trading revenue among Wall Street firms last year, had the highest trading and counterparty losses of the biggest U.S. banks under the Federal Reserve’s stress scenario.
JPMorgan had an estimated $27.7 billion in projected losses from mark-to-market changes, credit valuation adjustments and counterparty default losses, according to the Fed results released today. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) had an estimated $27.1 billion of such losses in the testing.
The future of urban farming is under construction in Sweden as agricultural design firm Plantagon works to bring a 12-year-old vision to life: The city of Linköping will soon be home to a 17-story "vertical greenhouse."
Back in 2011, I was asked to give my thoughts on what I thought would trend in mobile within between then and 2020.
One of my predictions was that: “Mobile money will shift economies on a large-scale and across borders.”
The New York Times reports that the cost of sequencing an individual genome will soon be less than $1,000. That’s not nothing, but given what most health care costs, it’s not much. And it means that an individual mandate — or something much like it — is inevitable.
The tax status of buyout executives is under scrutiny as politicians look beyond bankers
Credit and debit cards are ubiquitous, but they’re mostly pretty dumb. That’s about to change. Over 170 million people in the U.S. have credit cards, and the average card holder has 3.5 of them.
And those totals are not even counting debit cards, which are roughly 40% of the total market and growing. That’s a crap load of plastic! In spite of the promise of mobile payments, plastic cards are not going away any time soon.
The U.S. exported more gasoline, diesel and other fuels than it imported in 2011 for the first time since 1949, the Energy Department said today.
Shipments abroad of petroleum products exceeded imports by 439,000 barrels a day, the department said in the Petroleum Supply Monthly report. In 2010, daily net imports averaged 269,000 barrels.
U.S. refiners exported record amounts of gasoline, heating oil and diesel to meet higher global fuel demand while U.S. fuel consumption sank.
Local programmers and homegrown business models are helping to realize the vast promise of using phones to improve health care and save lives.
Erick Njenga, a 21-year-old college senior wrapping up his business IT degree at Nairobi's Strathmore University, has a gap-toothed grin and a scraggly goatee. A mild-mannered son of auditors, he didn't say much as we tucked into a lunch of grilled steak, rice, and fruit juice at an outdoor café amid the din of the city's awful traffic. But his code had done the talking.
Co-ops offer democratic alternative to shareholder-owned businesses.
The United Nations has designated 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives, providing a great opportunity to raise the profile of an important organizational tool for spreading human rights and equality worldwide. Membership in co-operative businesses has grown to 1 billion people across 96 countries, according to new research published by the Worldwatch Institute for its Vital Signs Online publication.
Value is the only commonality in an increasingly complex, challenging and interdependent world.
Laurance Allen: Editor + Publisher