Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Daily Archives: November 28, 2015

FastCompany on the Future of Facebook

Harry McCracken – FastCompany – Facebook is firing on all cylinders. Now Mark Zuckerberg is looking to the decade ahead, from AI to VR to drones.

“The Facebook of today—and tomorrow—is far more expansive than it was just a few years ago. It’s easy to forget that when the company filed to go public on February 1, 2012, it was just a single website and an app that the experts weren’t sure could ever be profitable. Now, “a billion and a half people use the main, core Facebook service, and that’s growing. But 900 million people use WhatsApp, and that’s an important part of the whole ecosystem now,” Zuckerberg says. “Four hundred million people use Instagram, 700 million people use Messen­ger, and 700 million people use Groups. Increasingly, we’re just going to go more and more in this direction.” To further grow these services and any others that Facebook develops or acquires, Zuckerberg is betting his company’s future on three major technology initiatives. One is developing advanced artificial intelligence that can help Facebook understand what matters to users. The second is virtual reality, in the form of Oculus VR, the groundbreaking company that Facebook acquired in March 2014 for $2 billion, which Zuckerberg believes will be the next major technology we use to interact with each other. And the third is bringing the Internet, including Facebook, of course, to the 4 billion–plus humans who aren’t yet connected, even if it requires flying a drone over a village and beaming data down via laser.”

Liquidity Management in Banking: What is the Role of Leverage?

Vo, Quynh Anh, Liquidity Management in Banking: What is the Role of Leverage? (October 2015). Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper No. 15-51. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2696126 “This paper examines potential impacts of banks’ leverage on their incentives to manage their liquidity. We analyse a model where banks control their liquidity risk by managing… Continue Reading

Patent Transactions in the Marketplace: Lessons from the USPTO Patent Assignment Dataset

Graham, Stuart J.H. and Marco, Alan C. and Myers, Amanda F., Patent Transactions in the Marketplace: Lessons from the USPTO Patent Assignment Dataset (November 1, 2015). Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business Research Paper No. 29. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2696147 “While records of the assignments (transactions) affecting US patents and patent applications have… Continue Reading

ODNI Announces Transition to New Telephone Metadata Program

News release: “Beginning Sunday, November 29, the government is prohibited from collecting telephone metadata records in bulk under Section 215, including of both U.S. and non-U.S. persons. And, while under the prior program NSA collected metadata in bulk and sought court approval for individual queries, the USA FREEDOM Act requires that the government must now… Continue Reading