Today’s Solutions: May 18, 2024

Worklife

Learn about how you can achieve a better work-life balance, and check out the latest news about the world of work, including advancements on ideas like the four-day work week and universal basic income.

How blockchain applications wi

How blockchain applications will move beyond finance

To understand the transformation that’s being brought about by blockchain technology, it’s useful to start with its largest implementation to date: bitcoin. In the fall of 2014 my colleague Catherine Tucker and I conducted a large-scale experiment at MIT, in which 4,494 undergraduate Read More...

Five years on equity crowdfund

Five years on equity crowdfunding has become the new normal

How Crowdfunding Took On Private Equity And Won was the headline on Forbes following the latest edition of The Deal, Beauhurst’s recent report on equity investments in private UK companies. Yet, when I recently took part in a World Economic Forum roundtable on financial innovation, the host Read More...

Apple’s new campus parti

Apple's new campus partially built with green bonds

A year after Apple issued the largest green bond by any U.S. corporation, the tech giant is providing a closer peek at the projects the $1.5 billion issue has helped fund so far. Its first Green Bond Impact Report (PDF), which highlights the projects funded in the 2016 fiscal year, shows that Apple Read More...

A brief history of blockchain

A brief history of blockchain

Many of the technologies we now take for granted were quiet revolutions in their time. Just think about how much smartphones have changed the way we live and work. It used to be that when people were out of the office, they were gone, because a telephone was tied to a place, not to a person. Now we Read More...

Somalia set to print banknotes

Somalia set to print banknotes for the first time in 25 years

After decades of turmoil, the east-African country of Somalia is finding itself in a relatively stable position. Successful elections brought in a new government, and now the country has plans to resume printing banknotes after many years of being buoyed by donors and other world organizations. Read More...

Raising the steaks: the Seattl

Raising the steaks: the Seattle startup crowdfunding sustainable beef

If crowdsourcing makes you think of fundraising campaigns for smartwatches and wine coolers rather than sustainable food, you’re not alone. But a new Seattle-based startup called Crowd Cow is hoping to change that. Crowd Cow works like most crowdfunding campaigns. Every few days, the company Read More...

AI hedge fund creates a new cu

AI hedge fund creates a new currency to make Wall Street work like open source

Wall Street is a competition, a Darwinian battle for the almighty dollar. Gordon Gekko said that greed is good, that it captures “the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” A hedge fund hunts for an edge and then maniacally guards it, locking down its trading data and barring its traders Read More...

For the first time since 2007,

For the first time since 2007, every EU economy is growing at the same time

Economically speaking, the European Union is performing better than it has in a long while. For the first time since 2007, all 28 of the union’s member economies are growing at the same time, on an annual basis. Unemployment is also at its lowest point across the region since 2009, and the GDP Read More...

Massive universal basic income

Massive universal basic income trial set to rollout in Kenya

Despite trials in the 1960s and 1970s in the US, Canada, and India, we still don’t know if universal basic income reduces poverty while enhancing quality of life. In the coming years we may find out as a universal basic income program is set to begin in Kenya. The program, called GiveDirectly, Read More...

Want to help fight legal battl

Want to help fight legal battles? There’s a crowdfunding site for that

When online crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe debuted, people hoping to invent and sell a better bottle opener, those in need of help with medical bills and all sorts of personal would-be fundraisers talked about the concept in grand, world-changing ways. This, they said, was a Read More...