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Aggregators and trust

TL;DR:

  • The ability to match demand and supply (allowing for mutual discoverability) thanks to their ownership of demand is only one of the two advantages of aggregators, the other being the ability to allow counterparts who do not know each other to transact with each other.
  • In the markets where the supply of aggregators operate, centralization was caused by the demand using popularity of suppliers as a proxy for their trustworthiness.
  • As a consequence of the fact that aggregators can provide the otherwise missing trust element between a customer and a product or service provider who do not know each other, and thus popularity becomes a negligible factor in the users’ choice of a provider, the distribution of profits in markets in which the supply of aggregators operate flattens over time, whereas the market at the above layer (the aggregators’) centralizes.
  • The importance of the trust element opens up the possibility of a new threat to aggregators: whereas their self-reinforcing dominant position on the match-making side is hard to be disrupted, this isn’t true for their position on the trust-enablers one. In particular, the share of their profits that come from replacing costs to act in trust-less environments is open for disruption from any new entrant with an innovative trust-minimization technology, such as dry technologies.
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The London Stock Exchange is one of the best-performing financial stocks since the Brexit vote

https://qz.com/1571049/london-stock-exchange-group-is-best-performing-big-financial-stock-since-brexit-vote/

Britain’s decision to leave the EU risks damaging the UK economy, especially its vital financial sector. But surprisingly, one of the best-performing European financial stocks since the Brexit referendum in June 2016 is a pillar of the UK’s financial sector: the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).

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How to start a company with your best friend (and survive to tell about it)

https://qz.com/work/1567915/how-to-start-a-business-with-a-friend-tips-for-co-founders/

Ten years ago, I started a business with my best friend. Naturally, I was told by many people that co-founding a company with a close friend was a bad idea.

The truth is that many companies start among friends. Former Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman (now at the University of Southern California) studied 10,000 tech startups and learned that 40% of founders were friends before they went into business. His research, summarized in his book The Founder’s Dilemmas, also revealed that when founders are friends, it increases the likelihood of startup failure—and each friend on the founding team increases the likelihood of founder turnover by almost 30%.

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How could China develop so many high-value software (Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Ant Financial) and Hardware (Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo, DJI) companies creating lots of high paying Jobs while India can’t?

https://qr.ae/TUfLDv

Um you mean like Tata and Reliance?

It turns out that India is better at creating outsourcing enterprise IT companies than China is.

There are things that India is better at, and stuff that China is better at. China turns out to have gotten into hardware because of Indian laws on manufacturing that killed the industry there. As far as “pure software” I’d say that India is better than China, but the Chinese companies exist to fill a niche. In the case of Tencent and Baidu, it was because Chinese internet laws meant that Western companies couldn’t enter. Ant Financial was because you had a pre-existing P2P loan system that went onto the internet,

If you ask why did X happen, you’ll find lots of random events that happen to just put something in place X.

Also just like people have crazy and outdated ideas about China. People have crazy and outdated ideas about India.

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Bacteria for piglets and Chinese infants spur Li Ka-shing’s gut instinct to put his money behind this US biomedical firm

https://www.scmp.com/business/article/2181301/bacteria-piglets-and-chinese-infants-spur-li-ka-shings-gut-instinct-put-his

  • Infants increasingly lack beneficial gut bacteria due to Caesareans, formula feeding, antibiotics
  • Piglets have a hard start in life, and trial will get under way in China to see if product can toughen them up

A company backed by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing has reintroduced a missing beneficial gut bacteria to more than 10,000 American babies. Now it is eyeing China’s babies – and piglets. This Week in Asia Get updates direct to your inbox E-mail * By registering you agree to our T&Cs & Privacy Policy

Evolve BioSystems, a California probiotics products developer, is in talks with Zhejiang University to conduct clinical trials on more than 4,000 pigs this year in the province to improve stock survival rates and cure gut diseases in piglets, said chief executive Timothy Brown.

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Why Are All Apple Products Photographed at 9:41 a.m.? An Apple Insider Reveals the Answer

It’s something we can all learn from.

I hadn’t noticed it myself. Maybe you hadn’t either. But every single Apple product in every promotional photo is set to 9:41 a.m. MacBook, iPad, iPhone, it really doesn’t matter. With one big exception (which we’ll get to), for every Apple product in the world, it was exactly 9:41 a.m. at the time of its photo shoot.

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《新加坡调解公约》明年8月在我国签署

https://www.zaobao.com.sg/realtime/singapore/story20181221-917629?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1545363227

（早报讯）联合国框架下首个以新加坡命名的公约《新加坡调解公约》（Singapore Convention on Mediation）已在联合国大会通过。公约将促成国际商业和解协议的执行，从而促进国际商业发展和跨境贸易。

《新加坡调解公约》明年8月7日将在我国签署。

我国律政部发文告指出，第73届于美国纽约举行的联合国大会今天（美国时间20日）已通过决议，采纳联合国国际和解协议的公约，并以新加坡命名。这是联合国框架第一个以新加坡命名的公约。大会也决定，签署仪式明年8月在新加坡举行。

新加坡驻纽约联合国常任代表也在联合国大会发表声明，肯定联合国国际贸易法委员会（UNCITRAL）在调解方面的工作，并感谢联合国支持公约签署仪式在我国举行。

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De Beers is fighting ‘fake’ diamonds from China, but who’s the real fake?

Source : https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/2174827/de-beers-fighting-fake-diamonds-china-whos-real-fake

Yonden Lhatoo rubbishes the ‘natural’ diamond market as a rip-off, built on lies about the worth of stones that are now being mass-produced in laboratories to offer much cheaper and better alternatives

So the mighty diamond market manipulator and monopolist De Beers is worried about its bottom line being eroded by manufactured stones being mass-produced in China.

After spending decades trying to suppress and ostracise the synthetic diamond industry, it did a complete U-turn and jumped on the bandwagon this year, although marketing its own lab-grown stones as a more “casual” alternative for “birthdays and fun”, rather than for weightier occasions.

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Middle Kingdom meets Magic Kingdom

Source: https://www.economist.com/business/2010/08/26/middle-kingdom-meets-magic-kingdom

A Western media company offers a product the Chinese can’t resist: education

Welcome, future mouseketeer

ON A Tuesday at 6pm, children begin arriving at a bland commercial building just as the office workers are leaving. A small storefront leads to an English-language school run by Disney. It is not much of an entrance, squashed between a dusty drugstore and a fast-food joint. This being China, many passers-by assume it is a fake. But word is spreading through the pushy-parent network: this is the real thing.

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