Mediaboss Marketing

I once witnessed a macabre execution early 2000s. It was a quotidian day in Onitsha except for a sudden alarm jarring everyone grinding away in the days humdrum. Thief! Thief! Swiftly, commuters, traders and idlers became vigilantes. They encircled a young man and bludgeoned him until he was lifeless. No questions asked. No trial. No justice but jungle injustice.

There is a SARS in some Nigerians; reservoirs of cynicism, misanthropy and bigotry. These ones see other people through the bifocals of their own vile existence. Just like SARS, the notorious but disbanded police unit, profiles young Nigerians with tattoo branding and dreadlocks, this category of Nigerians reduces every individual to an offender. You are guilty without charges, convicted and summarily sentenced by the self-appointed rogue jury!

That predilection for exacting jungle (in)justice on alleged offenders in the streets is very much the same on Nigerias social media platforms where you expect to find refined people above the stratum of agberos. It is all the same in the streets and on social media district. Nigerian Twitter, in particular, is a toxic locale defiant to order and devoid of joy. There is that proclivity for gotcha gotcha. It is always about dragging this person or that person. I must say, very angry creatures take residence there.

It may be fun and games until you are a victim of this ferocious social media mob. I recall when Segun Adeniyi, senior journalist and author, was a casualty of this ruthless horde over a book he wrote. He was tyrannised until he apologised and withdrew copies of the book. There have been many other victims but some felt so overwhelmed that they took an exit from humanity.

I recall the story of Ariyo Olanrewaju Taiwo a man who suffered depression in 2017. He expressed suicidal thoughts on Facebook but was bullied and taunted. He committed suicide afterwards. Social media, which ordinarily should be a crucible for ideas, conviviality, networking, and seminal exchanges, has become a belvedere where some people exhibit their hate, bigotry, insecurities, and prejudices with disinhibition.

A few days ago, Japheth Omojuwa, the digital media entrepreneur, was the whipping boy of these internet infestations. They clobbered, scratched and gored him with pitchforks and daggers, even throwing dynamites into the mix. Much of their grouse with the gentleman was the side he chose to support in the 2015 election. They seized a moment to creep out of their crevices and forgotten neck of the woods to extract a toll. I have never seen such virulence and turpitude on social media before.

I have been a casualty of this brood of calumniators myself. I am unfazed by the trolling on social media. I have developed impermeability to praises and curses on social media. I am comatose to what happens there. But somehow, these maligners find my mobile phone number and keep me under siege for hours and days with a fusillade of attacks and curses. This bothers me because it is an intrusion of my personal space. I wake up at 4am deleting hate messages.

We are a nation of extremists. A violent people. When you stray from the single narrative promoted by some compromised persons, you become an enemy pencilled down for demolition. Is this not a tyranny of opinion? How did we become so vile, unfeeling, and sadistic? The beauty of intellection is in the variety and robustness of opinions. Why must everyone submit to a lone account even if it is falsehood? Why should everyone hold the same opinion?

What is happening on Nigerian social media is akin to the Dark Ages where people were hanged for having contrary opinions. And the Dark Ages was a blot on humanity because knowledge was forbidden. We are in an era of intellectual darkness in Nigeria where all opinions must be unitary and must conform to certain ethnic and religious prejudices.

Some of the loudest voices accusing others of extremism are themselves extremists, who ambush and savage contrary opinions. It must be their way or the Milky Way to assaults and threats.

How did we become so pugnacious that we will tear anyone and anything that does not agree with us?

I think we need to be having conversations on ways of mitigating the perils of this Frankenstein technology. Opinions on social media can be bought and ammunitioned against anyone. We cannot discount the veritable place of social media but the evolving trend of sponsored prejudiced opinions is leading to a dictatorship of narratives.

We are all potential victims of mob (in)justice. The mob runs Nigerias social media. You either fall in line with the governing narrative or risk violence. This mob rule has to end. Fredrick Nwabufo, fredricknwabufo@yahoo.com

Like Loading...

The rest is here:
Social Media and Mob Justice - THISDAY Newspapers

Facebook can be a monopolist over a cluster of noncompeting products that do not fit the standard economic definition of a market. The key is to identify situations in which clustering non-substitute products itself creates market power.

In late 2020, the Federal Trade Commission brought an antitrust suit accusing Facebook of monopolization. Every antitrust case claiming an unlawful monopoly must identify a market that the defendant is monopolizing. Past defendants often produced a single, readily identifiable product such as aluminum ingot, cellophane, or Intel-based computer operating systems. Often, parties dispute the boundaries of these markets. For example, should the cellophane market be broadened to include wax paper and tin foil? Or should the operating system market in Microsoft be broadened to include Apples operating system?

Facebook has generated a different kind of dispute, however, which is that the grouping of products it offers is not a market at all. A fundamental proposition of economics since the nineteenth century is that markets are made up of close substitutes. Competition occurs inside a market because it defines the range of a customers choices. For example, we say that three gasoline stations in a two-block area are in the same market. Customers can choose among them, so they must compete for that customers business. A station fifty miles away is not in the same market if it is not a realistic option, nor is a grocer that is nearby but does not sell gasoline.

The FTC claims that Facebook monopolizes a market for personal social networking services. That includes services that are quite dissimilar, however. For example, Facebook offers general messaging, two-party chatting, posting of photographs and videos, discussion boards, a marketplace and digital advertising, and even a kind of dating platform. Facebook moved to dismiss the case by stating that the FTC has not alleged a plausible relevant market. A similar issue is likely to arise in the Google antitrust case, as well as a potential future case against Amazon. To date, the lawsuits against Apple have focused mainly on its control of app sales through its Appstore.

So what binds Facebooks diverse assembly of products into a market? Facebooks individual services are clearly not close substitutes for one another. Further, many firms offer individual services that compete with one of Facebooks services. For many of these, Facebook is not the biggest. For example, it is not the biggest messaging app, platform for hosting photos or videos, or even digital advertising platform. This is also true of Amazon, which has less-than-dominant market shares in most of the individual products that it sells, save ebooks.

How do you identify monopoly if a firms business involves a large number of non-competing services that do not satisfy the traditional economic definition of a single market? Courts have wrestled with this problem before by developing a theory of cluster markets, which I explore in a new paper. Banks, hospitals, retailers, and even patent portfolios operate in a variety of markets and have more power than they would if each of their individual products or services were treated separately. The key is to identify situations in which clustering non-substitute products itself creates market power.

Banks, hospitals, retailers, and even patent portfolios operate in a variety of markets and have more power than they would if each of their individual products or services were treated separately.

Market power is measured by comparing a firms price to its costs. A competitive firm is forced to charge a price close to its costs, but a firm with market power can profit by charging more. Two phenomena of clustering can increase market power. First, economies of scope, or joint costs, can make it cheaper for a firm to offer multiple products in combination. Second, combining individual products can increase the value that customers place on the overall product. While reducing costs or creating value are both good things, here we are not condemning a firm for that reason, but only inquiring whether clustering accounts for its power. Then we might want to pursue other harmful practices that market power enables.

As an example of joint costs, it is cheaper for Uber to add UberEats to its existing drivers and dispatch software than it is for a new firm to offer food delivery services separately. If that is true, then a firm that offered the two services together would have higher margins of price over cost than two different firms that offered the services separately. We can then speak of the cluster of Uber rides and UberEats as a market even though these two services do not compete with one another. That is, a customer typically wants one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Alternatively, a firm can increase consumer value by combining complements, which are products that customers value more highly when they are used together. For example, being able to exchange messages and post photos or videos on the same platform might be more valuable than exchanging messages on one platform and posting pictures on another. The combination would attract a larger number of users, and the result would be that the firm could increase its advertising sales or other revenue producing activity.

A finding of increased market power would require not merely that the combination reduces costs or increases value, but also that attaining this status is something that others could not readily duplicate. This is where another feature of platforms, network externalities, comes in. Facebooks value accrues from its large variety of services offered on the same platform, plus the fact that it has a very large installed base, which is something that users also independently value. That is, the value of being on Facebook increases as the number of other people on Facebook (2.7 billion active users as of April 2021) grows, and also as the variety of services that Facebook offers is larger.

These facts suggest two things: first, Facebook can be a monopolist over a cluster of noncompeting products that do not fit the standard economic definition of a market. Second, however, they suggest caution about remedies: antitrust law should not be used to destroy the value resulting from a profitable design. That makes breakups a perilous remedy and suggests alternatives such as compelled interoperability, injunctions against anticompetitive conduct, or more aggressive prohibitions of mergers.

Read more:
Identifying the Market In the Facebook Antitrust Case - ProMarket

TALLINN, Estonia, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mobile applications have become an integral part of today's phones that contain multimedia features such as text/audio/video chats, group chats, message notifications, status updates, and media sharing. The average smartphone user spends 82 percent of his/her time on email communication, social interaction, and entertainment. Smartphones are an integral part of lives in the 21st century, with more than 3.5 billion mobile phone users worldwide.

Due to its characteristics, the use of mobile applications exceeds the use of social networking websites, with the most prominent applications being WhatsApp (with over a billion users), WeChat (with more than 900 million Chinese users), Facebook Messenger (over 1.3 billion users) and Viber (with 800 million registered users and 260 million active users).

However, it seems that today no communications and financial operations are private and safe anymore. Practically any mobile messaging application transfers our most private messages to the servers of the companies that operate them, where our text messages, photographs, audio, and video recordings and feed are processed, mined, and analyzed by advanced algorithms that have only one aim profiting the company at the expense of our most private moments, and more generally our lives.

Once we click the "record" or the "send" buttons, the contents are not within our control. Company employees can view and read them. AI can process them to offer us advertisements literally in every online channel, and data about us can be sold to other parties. Further, governments worldwide eavesdrop on our most private conversations as a part of the terms that allow mobile messaging companies to operate within their borders, and messaging in oppressive regimes can cost a person's freedom.

Mobile payments, money transfers, and shopping are not excluded from these types of privacy violations in most countries worldwide. Financial institutes are successfully hacked, and data are distributed online or sold through the Darknet. Uploading lists of credit card details and other payment methods to the Internet has become a norm. Banks are required to disclose any data on customers and transactions to/from their accounts should any government agency desire to receive them.

This description is not taken from a science fiction book. This is the reality in which we live, communicate and operate unsafely and with no privacy rights concerning our interpersonal communications and financial transfers.

Sappchat is a game-changer in the use of mobile apps. In Sappchat, we aspire to return to each individual worldwide the control over personal safety and privacy and, most importantly, the control over YOUR life.

Sappchat offers a complete, safe, and private ecosystem for your mobile communications and operations. Sappchat fully implements Blockchain technology and its bullet-proof encryption to ensure the complete privacy of users. Sappchat operates on the Sappchain a Blockchain decentralized and community-based platform, where all communications and financial transactions do not take place on a central hub but instead on a network operated by the community of its users and supporters.

Our mobile instant messaging includes end-to-end encryption of your text messages, photos, audio, and video communications. With Sappchat, no one (including us!) except you and the persons you call can eavesdrop and listen to your conversations. They remain completely safe and private between you and the receiver.

Sappchat also provides an easy and seamless solution for payments and financial transfers. As an integral part of our application, we offer a mobile decentralized exchange (mDEX). You convert any amount of our $APP token into any other cryptocurrency, make payments or transfer it to any other Sappchat user at a minimal cost and almost immediately, regardless of your and the other user's locations. At any time, recipients of the $APP token can convert it into another cryptocurrency of their choice or leave it in their wallets. Payments, in-border and cross-border transfers, and currency exchange have never been so easy!

Sappchat operates a DeFi that lets you profit from your cryptocurrency holdings 24/7. Once you approve it, the application connects the cryptocurrency balance in your wallet to borrowers to provide them with the necessary liquidity. In return, you will receive interest and principal payments for the amount borrowed. This way, your cryptocurrency assets can generate for you passive income at all times.

In addition to the communication and financial solutions, Sappchat also operates an online shop to acquire and sell NFTs. This service is fully integrated with our payment and cryptocurrency solutions, thereby providing you a complete platform for crypto s-commerce.

Sappchat provides a complete and comprehensive ecosystem that fulfills your needs from your mobile. Join today Sappchat's $APP Token Sale to make your communication, financial and personal exchanges better, safer, and completely private!

App token is the utility token for powering products and services within the Sappchat ecosystem.

To know more, visit their website at sappchat.com, twitter at https://twitter.com/SAPP_CHAT and join their telegram at https://t.me/joinchat/Tt5_WmcXtYrTdnJy

More:
SappChat: Providing Safe Communications and Financial Operations on the Blockchain - GlobeNewswire

Join Transform 2021 this July 12-16. Register for the AI event of the year.

When it comes to grappling with the future of quantum computing, enterprises are scrambling to figure just how seriously they should take this new computing architecture. Many executives are trapped between the anxiety of missing the next wave of innovation and the fear of being played for suckers by people overhyping quantums revolutionary potential.

Thats why the approach to quantum by pharmaceutical giant Merck offers a clear-eyed roadmap for other enterprises to follow. The company is taking a cautious but informed approach that includes setting up an internal working group and partnering with quantum startup Seeqc to monitor developments while keeping an open mind.

According to Philipp Harbach, a theoretical chemist who is head of Mercks In Silico Research group, a big part of the challenge remains trying to keep expectations of executives reasonable even as startup funding to quantum soars and the hype continues to mount.

We are not evangelists of quantum computers, Harbach said. But we are also not skeptics. We are just realistic. If you talk to academics, they tell you there is no commercial value. And if you talk to our management, they tell you in 3 years they want a product out of it. So, there are two worlds colliding that are not very compatible. I think thats typical for every hype cycle.

Mercks desire for the dream of quantum computing to become reality is understandable. The fundamental nature of its business biology and chemistry means the company has been building molecular or quantum level models for more than a century.

Part of the role of the In Silico Research group is to develop those models that can solve quantum problems using evolving technologies such as data analytics and AI and applying them to natural sciences to make experimental work less time-consuming.

But those models are always limited and imperfect because they are being calculated on non-quantum platforms that cant fully mimic the complexity of interactions. If someone can build a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer that operates at sufficient scale and cost, Merck could unlock a new generation of efficiencies and scientific breakthroughs.

The quantum computer will be another augmentation to a classical computer, Harbach said. It wont be a replacement, but an augmentation which will tackle some of these problems in a way that we cannot imagine. Hopefully, it will speed them up in a way that the efficacy of the methods we are employing will be boosted.

About 3 years ago, Merck decided it was time to start educating itself about the emerging quantum sector. The companys venture capital arm, M Ventures, began looking within the company for experts who could help it with due diligence as it began to assess quantum startups. That included mapping out the players and the whole value chain of quantum computing, according to Harbach.

That led to the formal creation of the Quantum Computing Task Force, which has roughly 50 members who try to communicate with quantum players large and small as well as peers among Mercks own competition.

We are basically an interest group trying to understand this topic, Harbach said. Thats why we have a quite good overview and understanding on timelines, player possibilities, and applications.

As part of that exploration, M Ventures eventually began investing in quantum-related startups. In April 2020, the venture fund announced a $5 million investment in Seeqc, a New York-based startup that bills itself as the Digital Quantum Computing company.

We thought that it might be good to have partners in the hardware part and in the software part, Harbach said. Seeqc will partner with us within Merck to really work on problems basically as a hardware partner.

Seeqc is developing a hybrid approach that it believes will make quantum computing useful sooner. The idea is to combine classical computing architectures with quantum computing. It does this through its system-on-a-chip design.

This technology was originally developed at Hypres, a semiconductor electronics developer which spun out Seeqc last year. The M Ventures funding for Seeqc followed a previous $6.8 million seed round. Seeqc raised a subsequent round of $22 million last September in a round led by EQT Ventures.

According to Seeqc CEO John Levy, the companys technology allows it to address some of the fundamental challenges facing quantum systems. Despite rapid advancements in recent years, quantum computers remain too unstable to deliver the high-performance computing needed to justify their costs.

Part of the reason for that is that qubits, the unit of quantum computing power, need to be kept at near-freezing temperatures to process. Scaling then becomes costly and difficult because a system operating with thousands of qubits would be immensely complex to manage, in part because of the massive heating issue.

Levy said Seeqc can address that problem by placing classic microchips over a qubit array to stabilize the environment at cryogenic temperatures while maintaining speed and reducing latency. The company uses a single-flux quantum technology that it has developed and that replaces the microwave pulses being used in other quantum systems. As a result, the company says its platform enables quantum computing at about 1/400 of the cost of current systems in development.

We have taken much of the complexity that youve seen in a quantum computer and weve removed almost all of that by building a set of chips that weve designed, Levy said.

Just as important is a philosophical approach Seeqc is taking. Its not building a general-purpose quantum computer. Instead, it plans to build application-specific ones that are tailored specifically to the problems a client is trying to solve. Because Seeqc has its own chip foundry, it can customize its chips to the needs of application developers as they create different algorithms, Levy said.

In that spirit, Mercks Quantum Computing Task Force is working closely with Seeqc to create viable quantum computers that can be used by its various businesses.

Their technology is a key technology to scale a quantum computer, which is actually much more important because it will make quantum computers bigger and cheaper, Harbach said. And this is, of course, essential for the whole market.

For all this activity, Harbachs view of quantums potential remains sober. He sees nothing on the market that will have any commercial impact, certainly not for Merck. At this point, many of the companys questions remain academic.

What we are basically interested in is how or will the quantum computer hardware ever be scalable to a level that it can tackle problems of realistic size to us, Harbach said. And the same question also goes to the software side. Will there ever be algorithms that can basically mimic these problems on a quantum computer efficiently so that they dont run into noise problems? We are not interested in simulating a molecule right now on a quantum computer. Everything we try to understand is about the timelines: What will be possible and when will it possible.

Harbach has watched the rise in quantum startup funding and various milestone announcements but remains dubious of many of these claims.

They are creating a new market where theres not even the technology ready for it, Harbach said. You have to stay realistic. Theres a lot of money at the moment from governments and VCs. Theres a lot of boost from consultancies because they try to sell the consultancy. And if you talk to experts, its the other way around. They tell you not before 15 years.

The questions Merck asks internally are split into 2 fundamental categories: When will there be a quantum computer that can be more efficient at processing its current quantum models? And when will there be a quantum computer that is so powerful that it opens up new problems and new solutions that the company cannot even imagine today?

Quantum will be a thing, definitely, Harbach said. The only question is when, and Im really, really sure it wont be in the next two years. I wouldnt even say three years. There will be a quantum winter. Winter is coming.

See the original post:
How Merck works with Seeqc to cut through quantum computing hype - VentureBeat

GCHQ Director, Jeremy Fleming, said on Friday 23 April that the UK needs to prioritize advances in quantum computing if the country wants to prosper and remain secure.

Hes right. The vast amounts of data protected by RSA encryption is under threat of theft and forgery should quantum computing live up to promise.

While such peril remains years away at least, companies and governments worldwide are getting to grips with quantum computing, as the technology leaves the realm of physics laboratories and into the inboxes of presidents and prime ministers.

Classical computers, such as those in our phones, laptops, and even the worlds most powerful supercomputers, conduct computations with ones and zeros binary digits, or bits.

When presented with sufficiently complex problems, classical computers begin to struggle.

Consider this number:

25195908475657893494027183240048398571429282126204032027777137836043662020707595556264018525880784406918290641249515082189298559149176184502808489120072844992687392807287776735971418347270261896375014971824691165077613379859095700097330459748808428401797429100642458691817195118746121515172654632282216869987549182422433637259085141865462043576798423387184774447920739934236584823824281198163815010674810451660377306056201619676256133844143603833904414952634432190114657544454178424020924616515723350778707749817125772467962926386356373289912154831438167899885040445364023527381951378636564391212010397122822120720357

If we were to ask a classical, general-purpose computer which two prime numbers multiply together make this 617-digit number? it would have to essentially guess at each possible combination. Using this method, most estimates suggest it would take around 300 trillion years to crack much longer than the age of the universe. There are ways to speed this up, but this form of encryption is extremely difficult to crack classically.

This is vital for protecting important data and is the kind of problem that underpins RSA encryption which is used to protect vast amounts of data on the internet.

A quantum computer, on the other hand, could figure out the answer in seconds.

While researchers agree that you would need around a few thousand qubits to conduct such a calculation (were only around the 100-qubit mark right now), it is not beyond the realms of possibility for such a feat to be achieved this decade.

With vast use cases, ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to weather forecasting, quantum computings potential encryption-cracking capabilities should put the technology firmly on the priority list for world leaders and security chiefs.

In the Vincent Briscoe Lecture, Fleming made frequent mention of quantum computing.

He highlighted that a small percentage of technologies must be truly sovereign to retain the UKs strategic technical advantage, and quantum computing is no doubt a core part of this. The elements of cryptographic technology that are a part of these technologies was no doubt an allusion to quantum computing. The country, or corporation, that possess the first full-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer will be the biggest threat to cryptography the world has ever seen.

Fleming will undoubtably be aware of Chinas quantum supremacy announcement in December 2020, in which a team at the University of Science and Technology of China performed a calculation with a photonic quantum computer 100 trillion times the speed of classical supercomputers.

While photonic devices are so far unprogrammable, in that each can only perform one specific calculation, the progress in China is a wake-up call for Western powers to get to grips with the technology.

The UK is among the leaders in the West, in both spending and academic prowess, but Chinas $15bn of investments into quantum technologies dwarfs the rest of the pack President Biden will no doubt be keeping a close eye on developments in this nascent industry.

Quantum computing is no doubt going to develop significantly as a theme over the coming years, as recent developments indicate. Governments and corporations alike must now take steps to engage, or risk falling behind.

Integer factorization is just one of the applications of quantum computing, in what is becoming a rich ecosystem of research and development. GlobalDatas quantum computing value chain sets out the segments of this growing industry.Related Report Download the full report from GlobalData's Report StoreGet the Report

Latest report from Visit GlobalData Store

See the rest here:
GCHQ boss is right to be keeping his eye on quantum computing - Verdict