Victoria's Blog

Hollywood has long been a mysterious place where literary writers can sometimes make a little extra money—sure, there’s the nice paycheck when their own work gets optioned, but as it turns out, movies actually need writers too! And sometimes literary writers are pretty darn good at writing movies (though sometimes, as you will see, they are not). After discovering this week that Aldous Huxley had written the screenplays for early film adaptations of  Pride and Prejudice  and  Jane Eyre , I got interested in what other literary texts (besides their own) literary writers had ushered towards the big screen. Here are some of my findings. Aldous Huxley , most famous for his literature of dystopias and drug trips, wrote the screenplays for the first film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1940) and, with John Houseman and director Robert Stevenson, an early adaptation of Jane Eyre (1943). Not only that, but he might have been the screenwriter for Alice in Wonderland...

Popular crypto wallet service MyEtherWallet has just launched a limited beta version of its first companion mobile app, which we wrote about earlier this week . If you’re a big MyEtherWallet user or just curious about crypto, you’ll want to get hold of the app. Since it’s in beta, you’ll need to head  here  and follow the instructions to email the company to request access. A full launch for iOS and Android is expected in August. The MEW Connect app allows users to log into the service without typing their private key, just like hardware solutions such as Ledger or Trezor. That’s important because inputting sensitive information like a private key can lead to an account being compromised in the event of a phishing attack. At least two major incidents have happened this year , so the threat is very real. Unlike Ledger or Trezor, though, MEW Connect is free which could help encourage more people to adopt better security practices since MyEtherWallet.com is a much-traf...

Facebook’s share price fell over 20 percent in after-hours trading today after the company announced its slowest-ever user growth rate and a scary warning that its revenue growth would rapidly decelerate. Before today’s brutal Q2 earnings, Facebook’s share price closed today at $217.50, but fell to around $172 after the earnings call. That’s a market cap drop of roughly $123 billion. In two hours, Facebook lost more value than most startups and even public companies are ever worth. Here’s the full story on Facebook’s disastrous Q2 2018 earnings : So why did Facebook’s share price sink like a stone? There are five big reasons: Slowest-Ever User Growth Rate – Facebook’s monthly user count grew just 1.54, compared to 3.14 last quarter. Daily active users grew even slower at 1.44 percent, compared to 3.42 percent last quarter. For reference, 2.18 percent was its previous slowest DAU growth rate back in Q4 2017. Suddenly hitting this wall could limit Facebook’s total user count over th...

It’s still quite hard to buy physical goods using bitcoins or ethers. Coinbase plans to (partially) solve that issue with a new partnership with WeGift . Coinbase customers in Europe and Australia can now convert their tokens on their Coinbase account into digital gift cards for popular stores. For instance, you’ll be able to buy gift cards for Uber, Tesco, Google Play, Marks and Spencer and more. The feature is now live in the U.K., Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands and Australia. While WeGift promises gift cards for dozens of merchants, most of them are restricted to customers based in the U.K. If you live in another country, you’ll only get a handful of options. For instance, in France you can only buy gift cards for Décathlon, Bloom & Wild, Global Hotel Card and Ticketmaster. Coinbase says that it will adding be more retailers in the coming months. In some cases, WeGift offers you the fiat equivalent of your cryptocurrencies as well as a tiny bonus. For instance, you get ...

In a pretty substantial move into trying to own the entire AI stack, Google today announced that it will be rolling out a version of its Tensor Processing Unit — a custom chip optimized for its machine learning framework TensorFlow — optimized for inference in edge devices. That’s a bit of a word salad to unpack, but here’s the end result: Google is looking to have a complete suite of customized hardware for developers looking to build products around machine learning, such as image or speech recognition, that it owns from the device all the way through to the server. Google will have the cloud TPU (the third version of which will soon roll out) to handle training models for various machine learning-driven tasks, and then run the inference from that model on a specialized chip that runs a lighter version of TensorFlow that doesn’t consume as much power. Google is exploiting an opportunity to split the process of inference and machine training into two different sets of hardware and d...

Market research firm GlobalWebIndex , which provides consumer insight data for marketing purposes for customers including Google, Spotify, WPP, IPG and Omnicom Group, has closed a $40 million Series A round. The funding is its first VC raise, almost a decade after the business was founded. The investment comes  from  New York-based growth fund  Stripes Group , along with a number of other unnamed data, software and consumer technology companies. GWI says it will be used to accelerate product development and for international expansion, including in the U.S. and Asia.  The company is based in London but has recently opened offices in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as having technology hubs in locations across Europe. With the new funding it says it’s planning to open more international offices across the Americas and Asia Pacific to support a client base which spans more than 80 countries.     But why take VC now? “After nine years wi...

Because cryptocurrency have been so insanely volatile — owing to challenges involved in valuing them, the fact that most institutional investors are still sitting on the sidelines, and various other reasons — it’s hard to know when or why to sell. Enter crypto-asset backed loans, a small but growing number of which are beginning to spring up to lend money to cryptocurrency holders who don’t want to offload their holdings but also don’t necessarily want so much of their assets tied up in cryptocurrencies. Among these is Lendingblock , a London-based startup that enables holders of crypto assets to lend them out and accrue interest on their holdings, while giving borrowers access to the assets. Other outfits — and we aren’t vouching for these so much as letting you know they exist — include  CoinLoan , a 1.5-year-old outfit in Estonia that is itself trying to raise money through an initial coin offering;  Nexo , a Switzerland-based platform powered by a Bulgarian consume...