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When Qadium CEO Tim Junio walks into a sales meeting, he employs an unusual tactic.

"We tell the prospect something they don't know about themselves," Junio told Business Insider.

It's not a new-age spiritual thing. Qadium is in the business of scanning the public internet to make sure its customers' devices aren't outside of their corporate firewalls, leaving those customers vulnerable to attack. After all, in 2016, attackers used insecure printers, DVRs, and other appliances to essentially take numerous major websites, including Amazon, Netflix and Twitter, offline.

So potential security problems are things that most CEOs want to know about. But when it comes to sales, figuring out how to talk about such issues is also a matter of reading the room, Junio said.

If you point out that a CEO's favorite Android tablet is a risk, you could embarrass her; if you find that programmers have been operating a contraband server for months, you risk embarrassing the same security team you're hoping will buy your service.

"It is definitely awkward, depending on the audience," he said.

Qadium and Junio may be in for a lot more awkward conversations, thanks to a new boost in funding that will allow it to expand its sales team. The company, which counts Capital One and CVS among its mostly big-business customers, announced Thursday that it's raised $40 million in a new round of financing that was led by IVP. That brings its total funding to $65 million. 

The road Junio traveled to becoming the head of a fast-growing security startup began at the CIA before taking him to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Here's how Qadium emerged from that journey — and where the company will go next.

'We didn't know what the destiny was going to be'

Junio started his career at the CIA, working on assessing computer systems for the risk of cyberattack.

His research in that field led him to DARPA, an agency of the US Department of Defense that's famous for helping create the precursor to the internet. At DARPA, Junio met Matt Kraning, a Stanford graduate student who was consulting with the agency on his own cyber-defense research. 

The two hit it off, given their shared interests. They soon they had so many ideas around cybersecurity that they would have to leave DARPA to explore them all. And so in 2012, they formed Qadium. Initially, they lacked a business plan, because they formed the organization as a vehicle for experimentation and trying new technologies.

Qadium's technology scans the open internet and finds devices that are potentially exposed. Qadium

"We founded the company for [research and development]," Junio said. "We didn't know what the destiny was going to be."

Qadium thrived for years, taking in $10 million in DARPA grants and winning deals with government agencies. It didn't have product per se; instead, the agencies called Qadium in to apply its research to real-world problems.

By 2015, Junio and Kraning looked back and realized that, over time, they had done the "foundational development" for a commercial product. And so, the modern Qadium was born. 

'How right we were'

Qadium's service, which it calls Expander, scans the public internet on behalf of its customers, looking for exposed devices. The startup promises to alert customers about rogue, unprotected gadgets within an hour of finding them by sending push notifications to their IT departments.

Expander relies on a few different methods to pick a specific customer's device out of the billions of gadgets connected to the internet, Junio said. Sometimes, it relies on a sophisticated algorithm that looks for the characteristics of devices associated with particular customers' networks. Other times, the service can find devices through much simpler techniques, such as taking note when an iPhone uses a customer's company name in its network description, he said. 

Qadium is betting that IT departments want to know precisely which devices they they do (and don't) have on the internet, regardless of how those gadgets are detected. While many startups initially target smaller companies, Qadium is pitching its service at larger corporations, with an average deal price in the six figures, Junio said.

So far, that focus looks like it was a smart bet. The company is gaining traction among many of the Fortune 500, he said.

Indeed, Junio said, Qadium has been surprised by "how right we were and how quickly."

With its new funding, Qadium plans to expand from 60 employees to 80 by the end of the year. Many of its new hires will be in sales and marketing.

Those new employees will be welcome additions, Junio said, because he, Kraning, and other executives have been doing the sales pitches themselves. That's despite the fact that they have "no experience in enterprise sales and marketing."

Original author: Matt Weinberger

Original author: Dave Mosher

Original author: Graham Flanagan and Will Wei

Jeff Bezos and Amazon have once again shown their ability to wreak havoc on an entire industry. Reuters / Brendan McDermid

By announcing sweeping price cuts at Whole Foods, which it recently acquired, Amazon once again succeeded in wreaking havoc on the grocery industry. It's just the latest example of the company wiping out billions of dollars of competitors' market caps with a corporate announcement, and it's bound to happen again. Competitors' stock prices are looking more sensitive to Amazon's news than their own.

Amazon is once again sending shockwaves rippling through the retail industry.

The Jeff Bezos-led juggernaut announced on Thursday that it would start cutting prices at Whole Foods, the organic grocer it acquired for $13.7 billion in mid-June. The pricing overhaul will begin on Monday, it said, the same day the deal is expected to close.

The news had a quick and devastating effect on the share prices of competing grocers. Kroger dropped as much as 8.3%, while Sprouts Farmers Market slipped 6.6% and Target lost 4.2%. Walmart, which sells the most groceries in the US, fell more than 2%.

The widespread weakness in the grocery industry highlights an interesting wrinkle that's developed: Companies in Amazon's crosshairs are moving more on what the retail giant is doing than on their news and fundamentals.

Take Sprouts, for example. It fell just 1.7% after its second-quarter earnings report — a piece of news that had to do with its operations. Walmart found itself in a similar situation when it announced results last week, falling 1.6%, even after giving a lukewarm third-quarter forecast.

Markets Insider

The collateral damage among grocers is just the latest example of Amazon imposing its will on an entire industry with a simple corporate announcement, leaving billions of dollars of erased market value in its wake. And there's nothing to suggest this dynamic will slow down anytime soon. Retailers are being forced into a new reality where the specter of Amazon lurks at every turn.

It first happened to the grocery industry right after the Whole Foods deal, with the group losing 8% over the following week. Sporting-goods retailers felt similar pain around the same time amid speculation that the sneaker and apparel giant Nike would start selling products on Amazon.

In the end, Amazon added $18 billion in market cap in a week while its competitors lost a total of $31 billion — an almost $50 billion gap.

Only time will tell which industry will be the next to feel Amazon's wrath. It's possible that competing grocers will feel the pain multiple more times before it's all said and done. Or it could be another area entirely.

And that's the scary part: Any section of the retail universe could be next.

Original author: Business Insider

Original author: Erin Brodwin and Anaele Pelisson

Members of the Trash Kan Marchink Band perform as approximately 70,000 people from all over the world gather for the 30th annual Burning Man arts and music festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, U.S. August 29, 2016.Jim Urquhart/ReutersThis year's Burning Man — the wild, weeklong, annual festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert — will start on August 27.

Tens of thousands of people are expected to venture to the desert and follow a 31-year tradition of creating a temporary city, making art, throwing nonstop parties, and burning "the man" (a 100-foot flammable structure that resembles a stick figure). 

Another essential part of Burning Man is the costumes, which usually include some combination of unicorn horns, goggles, Mylar spacesuits, and glow-in-the-dark gear. Burning Man's fashion has changed since its founding in 1986, when just 35 people attended.

From t-shirts to spandex bodysuits, take a look at the evolution of the festival's fashion below.

Original author: Leanna Garfield

Snapchat is offering discounts and incentives to help brands recut their videos into the vertical format.The incentives appear to be targeted at small brands and businesses, which in addition to having smaller media budgets, generally have proportionally smaller production budgets as well.

Snap is hoping to recut its way to revenue growth.

The platform is offering discounts and incentives for creative services, specifically helping brands recut horizontal ads into its signature vertical format, multiple ad agency executives told Business Insider. The incentives were made available for advertisers running Snap Ads, its video ads, in the second and third quarter.

According to one ad agency executive, Snap is offering to reimburse the recut cost up to the greater of $1,500 or 1% of the overall budget where the spend is over $40,000.  

"Basically, they are providing incentives in an effort to eliminate the friction between horizontal ad assets and its vertical format, recutting them so that they can run on Snap," the executive said. 

Another media agency executive at a holding company said that Snapchat had offered to cut assets for the agency’s clients if the clients were unwilling to do campaigns on Snapchat "because they didn’t have any vertical video." But no formal dollar amount or spend threshold had been communicated, according to the executive.

A Snapchat creative partner confirmed that Snapchat "is more than happy to make ads for brands above a certain threshold for free," adding that it either does that by tapping into its ad design team or through a third party vendor like itself. "All brands have to do is provide whatever media they have, whether that’s creative from a TV spot, a raw clip or a YouTube videos."

Snapchat declined to comment for the story. 

This is not the first time that Snapchat, or even its competitors like Instagram and Facebook, have offered such incentives. Incentive programs are a regular product and sales strategy for platforms, with the idea being to get brands to try new formats out and hopefully get them to spend more eventually. When an auto brand wanted to test video ads on Instagram Stories and created an ad that needed to be resized, for instance, Instagram absorbed the additional cost of editing for the brand.

But in Snapchat’s case, the incentives come as it is looking to boost its ad revenue, on the heels of its dismal performance in its second quarterly earnings as a public company earlier this month.

"The objective is to get brands who may be on the fence to move quickly and spend more," said the executive with the financial services client. "They are trying to eliminate any friction they can so advertisers can try it out and feel more confident."

Specifically, the incentives appear to be targeted at small brands and businesses. Facebook has seen tremendous growth in its ad revenue coming from small businesses and Snapchat seems to be taking a page out of its playbook. It has earnestly tried to appeal to smaller brands and businesses in recent months.

Snapchat has introduced a self-serve ad buying platform as well as a new creative tool called Snapchat Publisher, for example, which lets advertisers of all sizes create full screen video ads in less than two minutes. So once Snapchat gets new advertisers on board to try advertising on it through these incentives, it can then easily point them in the direction of the self-serve and creative publisher tools. 

"This is aimed at growing buying on Snapchat by small business advertisers, because in addition to having smaller media budgets, they generally have proportionally smaller production budgets," said Kieley Taylor, head of paid social at WPP’s GroupM. "This incentive appears built to entice trials of Snapchat with better suited ads without incurring additional non-working costs."

It also encourages broader adoption of the vertical video format. Snapchat has pioneered the vertical video format, and the new Publisher tool makes it even easier for marketers to adopt it. But advertisers have not exactly jumped at the format.

"This makes sense as a way to get new advertisers over the stumbling block of vertical video," said Noah Mallin, head of media agency MEC’s content arm, Wavemaker. "The issue of format laziness still persists for some advertisers."

To be sure, not all agency executives interviewed for this story have received the offers. MEC’s Mallin said that the agency hadn’t received any such offers, "probably because we have a fair number of clients on the platform already." GroupM’s Taylor added that she hadn’t "heard that specifically floated." This is also because Snap has several partnership deals with agencies at the holding company level.

"We have a large-scale partnership deal with Snap that includes custom pricing, so they often don't share information about the promotions they are running with other advertisers," Noah King, VP and group director of social media at Socialyse, told Business Insider. "For large agencies and holding companies, the pricing, support and ad offerings are not the same as the public offering to small and medium businesses who are buying self-serve."

Original author: Business Insider

Canadian startups are seeing huge increases in the number of US-based applications. AP Photo/Matt Slocum

For many tech workers, northern California isn't quite north enough.

According to a new qualitative survey of 43 high-growth Canadian startups, Donald Trump's election victory last November sparked a surge of immigration to Toronto among US-based engineers and tech entrepreneurs.

"These companies have been preparing for this opportunity for awhile," Karen Greve Young, vice president of partnerships at the Canadian company MaRS, which helps launch startups and compiled the new data, told Business Insider.

As Toronto's tech presence has grown over the last several years, so too has the Canadian government's desire to recruit talent from all over the world, Greve Young said. Most recently, in July, the government amended its Express Entry program of skilled worker visas to fast-track people (and their spouses) coming to work in Canada.

Unlike America's H1-B visa program, which is designed for high-skilled workers and only permits spouses to live — but not work — in the US (and which President Trump has threatened to reduce), Express Entry has become yet another signal Canada wants to be known for a thriving tech scene. ]

MaRS' study asked 43 local startups what kind of interest they've seen from both American and international workers over the last year. Out of that, 18 startups said there were noticeable and surprising upticks in US-based applications, while the remainder either saw no change or didn't keep track of that information. Greve Young believes the numbers could be artificially low.

"I think the others may not have happened to be hiring at that exact moment," she said. "Right now, artificial intelligence is absolutely on fire in Toronto, so we have a lot of companies that will be particularly relevant to these international audiences."

Toronto has become a hub for innovation over the last several years. Wikimedia Commons

Natasha Flora, director of operations at the software company Figure 1, said people were preparing for a Canadian move even before Trump won in November.

"Before the election, one of our New York employees half-jokingly asked if he could work in the Toronto office if Donald Trump won," Flora told Business Insider. "More recently, one tenured professor in the US approached us about joining Figure 1 in some capacity and leaving behind a secure and highly coveted job simply because she desperately wanted to get her and her children out of the country."

Between January 1 of 2016 and 2017, Figure 1 saw its US-based applications for senior-level roles double. Other companies saw similar jumps. Cyclica, a biotechnology company, saw its US-based applications for development roles increase from 35% in 2016 to 85% in 2017. Prior to last year, chatbot startup Zoom.ai had never had international interest; this year, 78% of software engineer applicants came from outside Canada. The greatest chunk, 31% of people, came from the US.

Trump's win isn't the only reason Canadian startups are seeing US talent trickle in, Greve Young said. Toronto and Vancouver are becoming powerhouses in the tech world. (They recently placed 9th and 14th, respectively, in Business Insider's ranking of the world's most high-tech cities.) 

"Toronto's star has been rising," she said. Trump's victory, Greve Young believes, convinced an entire swath of people who had been considering moving to Canada that the move was actually worth it. "We've seen an inflection point that was sparked by the politics, but we already had a massive increase here."

Silicon Valley may still be the capital of technology and innovation, but it's becoming less of a default for people looking to pursue tech stardom in North America.

"The best global tech talent wants to be where they anticipate the best global tech to be emerging," she said. "And you're also seeing indications that that might not be in the States right now."

Original author: Chris Weller

Picnik is bringing the first bottled, buttered coffee to stores. Picnik

• Picnik, a specialty coffee retailer based in Austin, Texas, is bringing a first-of-its-kind bottled, buttered coffee to market.

• Butter Coffee will roll out to nearly 400 Whole Foods stores nationwide in August.

• The drink taps into a Silicon Valley diet craze that has techies eating lots of fat.

"How do you take your coffee: with milk, sugar, or butter?"

You won't hear baristas asking that question in San Francisco coffee shops just yet — but a growing number of tech workers are drinking coffee with butter for a unique kind of jolt. They say the creamy blend gives them a boost in energy and productivity, among other perks.

Picnik, a specialty coffee retailer based in Austin, Texas, is capitalizing on the trend by introducing a bottled version of its "butter coffee" to Whole Foods stores nationwide, starting in August. The drink comes in three flavors: Mocha Latte, Cappuccino, and Dirty Chai.

In 2013, when Naomi Seifter, founder and CEO of Picnik, first started serving buttered coffee out of a shipping container she had converted into a coffee kiosk, she got a lot of questions.

Naomi Seifter, founder and CEO of Picnik. Picnik

"I had to stand behind the counter every day and say, 'I know this sounds scary and it seems super weird, but just give it a shot,'" Seifter told Business Insider.

For the first year, she gave free upgrades on black coffee so customers could try it. Back then, the coffee was blended with a Cadbury Egg-like truffle of butter. Over time, buttered coffee became a bestseller.

Seifter has since changed up the recipe to include whey protein, MCT oil (a high-fat concentrate derived from coconut oil), and grass-fed butter — no blender required.

"But how does it taste?"

First, I tried the most plain flavor: Cappuccino. It only has one gram of sugar.

It tasted like watered down coffee. I preferred my regular iced coffee.

A few days later, I tried the Mocha Latte — the sweetest flavor thanks to a dose of organic maple syrup. It has 21 grams of sugar, which makes it off-limits for anyone watching their sugar intake. The drink tasted more like Nesquik chocolate milk than coffee, and I downed a bottle in minutes. It was delicious. But I don't know that it made me any more alert or focused.

Some people working in Silicon Valley take their coffee with butter as a way to inject more fat into their diet. A recent diet craze, known as the ketogenic diet, has techies cutting carbs and filling up on fat as a way to improve focus and avoid sugar crashes. Studies suggest a high-fat diet may also promote weight loss, dull hunger, and stave off age-related diseases.

Picnik's iteration of buttered coffee might be more indulgence than weight-loss secret.

The science behind buttered coffee is spotty, and it has drawn public skepticism from doctors. There are no studies showing this combination of ingredients is safe, and eating too much saturated fat could present risks for people with elevated cholesterol levels.

There's also no evidence that a pat of butter in your coffee achieves the same effect as a diet made up of 80% healthy fats. A bottle of Picnik's flavored, buttered coffee contains 21 grams of sugar, which is nearly a day's allowance of carbohydrates on the ketogenic diet.

Picnik's flavored drinks — Mocha Latte and Dirty Chai — contain organic maple syrup and have a whopping 21 grams of sugar. Picnik

But for some, that's all right. I tried the keto diet for two months last spring and fending off cravings was the hardest part. A sugary drink that packs in the benefits of fat might be a worthwhile "cheat."

Picnik isn't the first to tap the buttered coffee market. Dave Asprey, a cloud computing executive turned biohacking guru, has built a multimillion-dollar empire around his ideas — the most famous of which is Bulletproof Coffee.

Made with grass-fed butter and a proprietary "Brain Octane" oil, Bulletproof Coffee claims to give drinkers a "mental edge," satiate hunger for hours, and promote weight loss. The company, which sells the Bulletproof ingredients online, said it sold 48 million "cups of coffee" in 2016.

Picnik's Butter Coffee arrives in nearly 400 Whole Foods stores in August. It sells for $4.99.

Original author: Melia Robinson

AP / Ng Han Guan

Alibaba is up more than 90% in 2017, and it's been winning over some high-profile hedge fund managers The company's stock is still the most shorted in the world by a magnitude of two, and short sellers are refusing to throw in the towel despite losing billions of dollars

Alibaba has soared to stratospheric new heights this year, winning over plenty of new fans along the way. The legion of admirers now includes a handful of influential hedge fund managers as well as the lion's share of research analysts covering the company.

But as is usually the case with something wildly successful, the Chinese e-commerce giant has its fair share of haters. And those detractors have manifested as short sellers, betting billions on the downfall of Alibaba's shares.

The two factions represent the ongoing tug-of-war taking place under the surface of the stock, which has surged 93% in 2017. On one hand are those under the sway of Alibaba's fundamentals, which saw the company turn in 62% year-over-year earnings growth in the most recent period and expand revenue by 56%.

On the other are those who either remain unconvinced or simply think the shares have climbed too far, too quickly. These people would like nothing more than to see Alibaba come crashing down to earth, and they are putting up big money to bet on that outcome, incredible corporate growth be damned.

Alibaba has been on fire this year, surging more than 90%. Markets Insider

Let's break down the two groups further:

The Alibaba bull camp

Recent quarterly filings showed hedge fund managers to be increasingly looking for a piece of Alibaba action. That includes David Tepper's Appaloosa Management, which picked up roughly 3.7 million of the company's shares in the second quarter, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It also includes Daniel Loeb's Third Point, which bought 4.5 million shares during the period, a filing shows.

While those were the two biggest investments from high-profile funds, there were also others that got involved. Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Capital recently disclosed a stake of 710,200 shares, and Julian Robertson's Tiger Management said it bought 214,000 shares, according to SEC filings.

At the same time, Alibaba is enjoying near-unanimous bullishness from Wall Street research analysts. The company has 46 buy ratings, with just four holds and zero sell recommendations, according to Bloomberg data.

Those analysts are finding it difficult to say anything bad about the company, which just turned in an earnings report that beat across the board. In addition to its unstoppable-looking profit and sales expansion, Alibaba also grew revenue for its cloud-computing business by a whopping 96% year-over-year.

"We believe BABA is uniquely positioned, with large exposure to both e-commerce and advertising, as well as above-industry growth and above-average EBITDA margins," UBS analyst Ming Xu wrote in a recent client note. "We remain constructive long term based on expectations for strong revenue growth, sustainability of core margins and strong strategic positioning."

The Alibaba bear camp

While Alibaba is certainly feeling the love from many areas of the investment landscape, it's still the most shorted company in the world by a mile. Speculative bears are holding $22 billion of Alibaba stock short, hoping to profit from a share decline, according to data compiled by the financial analytics firm S3 Partners. That's well over double the position in Tesla, the second-most-shorted company worldwide.

Alibaba's soaring stock price has resulted in massive losses for these skeptics. They've taken a $9.8 billion bath in 2017, a loss that's more than twice that of the next-worst-performing short. In fact, they lost $2 billion last week as Alibaba climbed 10% on its blockbuster earnings report.

But short sellers are refusing to throw in the towel. As Alibaba has climbed at a consistent clip this year, those bearish traders have continued to double down.

So are they simply masochists, or do they have a good reason? Ihor Dusaniwsky, the managing director of predictive analytics at S3 Partners, thinks it's the latter.

He says these investors may be treating Alibaba as a proxy to hedge the whole stock market in Hong Kong and China. It's a tactic similar to one being used in the US market, which has seen traders short the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 as protection for the broader market.

"Short sellers are hoping that if there is stock market correction in Hong Kong/China, Alibaba will bear the brunt of the decline," Dusaniwsky wrote in a client note. "The short sellers that remain at this poker table are waiting to see if they will be riding down the river on a rowboat or a yacht."

If this is truly the main underlying reason for the continuous groundswell of Alibaba short selling, as opposed to outright bearishness on the stock, that would align better with the company's bullish fundamentals.

With that considered, it becomes more of a situation in which Alibaba is a target because of its relative size and success. Because when something reaches rarefied air, it's inevitable that haters are going to hate.

Original author: Business Insider

Business Insider/Antonio Villas-BoasMost people have a handful of go-to apps that never leave their home screen. 

For some, it's the clock app or a calculator for quick access. For others, weather and maps apps are must-haves. Still others prefer to keep their home screen a blank slate, putting all their apps on the second page. 

As part of its 2017 US Mobile App Report, comScore recently surveyed phone owners 18 and up about the apps they need to have on their home screens, whether by themselves or grouped with other apps in a folder.

For most people, Google's apps like Maps, Gmail, and YouTube took precedence, while others preferred keeping their social networking apps front and center. 

Here are the 10 apps most people keep on their home screen:

Original author: Avery Hartmans

Original author: Becky Peterson

Attendees and art installations are seen at the 2010 edition of AfrikaBurn, the South African version of the famous Burning Man, held annually in the Tankwa Karoo in South Africa.Jerome Delay/AP

Every year since 2007, a tent city has risen over a remote swath of desert outside Cape Town, South Africa. Thousands of people descend for the weeklong gathering, complete with crazy costumes, art installations, and all-night parties. The pop-up city disappears in seven days.

Sound familiar? It's Africa's version of the famous Burning Man festival.

Founded in 2007, AfrikaBurn is a regional event sanctioned by the organizers of Burning Man. It's similar to the annual counterculture gathering in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, but with more nudity and smaller crowds. Some have described the festival as what Burning Man was like 10 years ago, before it became a cultural phenomenon.

These photos give us a glimpse of what it's like to attend AfrikaBurn.

The festival draws over 13,000 people annually, making it the largest outpost of 130 regional Burning Man events around the world and the biggest arts festival in Africa.

Source: Africa News

By comparison, the original Burning Man festival in Nevada is attended by 70,000 people.

Original author: Melia Robinson

Original author: Rachel Gillett

Sean Gallup/Getty

When iOS 11 arrives in a matter of weeks, a long-predicted change will arrive with it: Apple will no longer support 32-bit apps. 

The change has been rumored for awhile now, ever since Apple introduced a 64-bit processor with the iPhone 5S in 2013 and started giving gentle warnings that developers should update their apps.

But as far back as January of this year, users started getting a message warning them that the 32-bit apps on their phone wouldn't work at all when iOS 11 became available. By June, Gizmodo noticed that some 32-bit apps had already disappeared from the App Store, but were still available to download if you had the direct link. 

The iPhone 5s has been around for nearly three years, and most well-known apps are compatible with 64-bit processors. So what does this change actually mean?

Well, it turns out that Apple may stop supporting nearly 200,000 apps come September. 

According to Oliver Yeh, cofounder of app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, there are 187,000 32-bit apps still on the App Store, which equates to about 8% all iPhone apps (Sensor Tower estimated in March that there are approximately 2.4 million apps on the App Store). 

Business Insider

While it's impossible to make a complete list of all the apps that will no longer be supported, both Sensor Tower and Business Insider have anecdotally noticed a handful of apps that appear to be 32-bit:

YouTube Capture, a video recording app that got 200,000 downloads last month, according to Sensor Tower iSpadez, a card game app Neo Nectaris, a military strategy game Infinity Blade, a role-playing fighting game

If you're noticing a pattern among the 32-bit apps, you're on to something: Sensor Tower found that of the remaining 32-bit apps on the App Store, most of them were games — 38,619 to be specific. Education, entertainment, and lifestyle apps followed. 

But if some of your favorite apps are only 32-bit compatible, they won't immediately disappear when iOS 11 becomes available. According to Sensor Tower, the apps will probably stay in the App Store for awhile and continue working on phones that haven't updated to the new OS. Eventually, though, Apple will probably delete the apps from the App Store altogether. 

Luckily, there's an easy way to check if you have any 32-bit apps on your phone: Go into your settings, open "General," tap on "About," then click on "Applications." That should show you which of your apps are 32-bit — if you don't have any 32-bit apps, nothing will happen when you click. 

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the coming changes. 

Original author: Avery Hartmans

Original author: Carrie Wittmer

Original author: Steve Kovach

Floyd Mayweather John Salangsang/AP

Floyd Mayweather Jr. can't seem to shake the cryptocurrency bug. 

The undefeated boxing champion took to Twitter Wednesday to promote another initial coin offering, the red-hot cryptocurrency-based fundraising method. 

In July, Mayweather promoted the ICO of Stox.com, a blockchain prediction company. This time, he is supporting Hubii Network, a media tech company.

According to a tweet, Mayweather is also looking to go by a new nickname: "Floyd Crypto Mayweather."

Hubii, a content distribution company with 50 million customers, is looking to raise $50 million through an Ethereum-based initial coin offering, according to a press representative for the firm. The ICO will not be open to US investors.

Initial coin offerings are a new funding vehicle using blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin. The market for so-called ICOs is exploding, with over $1.86 billion raised via the method since the beginning of the year, according to data from Autonomous NEXT, a financial technology analytics provider. The massive growth of the ICO market has many people in the space thinking it's a bubble, with many firms using the method as a way to raise vasts amount of money without offering an actual product.

To raise money through an ICO, a company issues a new digital currency that can either be spent within its ecosystem, a bit like Disneyland dollars, or used to power part of the business.

Recently they've come under the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission. As a result, more and more companies running ICOs have limited participation to non-US investors. But that hasn't stopped some American investors from getting in on the ICO action, according to Josh Olszewicz, a bitcoin insider and investor. 

"There are ways to work around this by essentially setting up your Ethereum address in another country," he told Business Insider during a visit to New York.

Olszwicz said he has never tried to do this, but he says it's not that difficult of a process for someone with the expertise. 

Original author: Business Insider

Cersei Lannister is not pleased with these numbers. HBO

"Game of Thrones" has become a ratings Juggernaut since its premiere in 2011.

The penultimate, seventh season premiere of "Game of Thrones" broke the record for the most watched HBO season premiere of all time when it reached 26 million views across platforms and in delayed viewing, according to Variety. 

Curious to see how "Game of Thrones" ratings stack up against the season premieres of other popular HBO shows, Business Insider reached out to the audience measurement company Nielsen for answers.

It was impossible for Nielsen to provide the ratings information for every HBO season premiere, so instead a handful of some of the most critically acclaimed HBO shows were selected by Business Insider compare: "Game of Thrones," "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City," "True Blood," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "The Wire," "Six Feet Under," "The Leftovers," and "Girls."

The way TV is viewed has changed significantly since the introduction of DVR and streaming sites, and views from outside of linear TV have only just begun to be taken into account when calculating ratings. The data in our roundup only accounts for live views, as well as some time shifted (DVR) viewing within the same day. Data for season premieres aired prior to 2006 only factor in live views.

The results? When it comes to live television views for HBO season premieres, "Game of Thrones" doesn't come in first place, in fact it doesn't even come in second, or third — it comes in fifth place, at least when only looking at live views. Even though it's been 16 years since it aired, "The Sopranos" season three premiere raked in the most live views of any HBO season premiere. "The Sopranos" fourth season premiere follows in second place, and "Sex and the City"'s fourth season premiere comes in third place.

Anaele Pelisson/Business Insider

It should be noted that "The Sopranos' " season three premiere, and "Sex and the City's" season four and season one premieres were aired as two separate programs, but for the sake of brevity we combined the numbers.

The season premiere ratings for "The Wire," "The Leftovers," and "Girls" didn't make it onto the top 20 highest ranking HBO premiere list. The highest live views "Girls" received was for its third season premiere at 1.1 million, "The Leftovers"'s highest rated season premiere was its first with 1.7 million views, and "The Wire" had the most views for its second season premiere with 4.4 million views.

The season premiere that had the lowest season premiere, out of the shows selected was "Girls" — its fifth season pulled in a meager 489,000 views the night it aired.

Of course, there are a ton of series season premieres that were left out of this ranking, and streaming views from HBO Go and HBO Now are not accounted for — the inclusion of which would no doubt shake this chart up quite a bit. But based on the numbers, "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" commanded live audiences like no other.

Original author: Amanda Luz Henning Santiago

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Zopa CEO Jaidev Janardana. Zopa

LONDON — Peer-to-peer lender Zopa saw revenues leap 60% higher last year as losses narrowed.

The online lender's revenue rose from £20.6 million in 2015 to £33.2 million last year, accounts filed with Companies House this week show. At the same time, losses narrowed from £8.8 million to £5.8 million.

While Zopa still booked a loss for the year, the accounts confirm that the company became profitable on an operating basis in the fourth quarter of 2016, as previously announced by CEO Jaidev Janardana.

Peer-to-peer lenders, also known as marketplace lenders, are online platforms that let people invest in individuals or companies by lending money to them directly.

Zopa, founded in 2005, lets people lend to consumers and is credited with inventing the peer-to-peer concept. Loan origination rose by 30% to £689 million in 2016, accounts show.

Headcount rose by 69% to 188 due to investment in tech, operations, risk, legal, and compliance. Staffing costs rose from £7.4 million to £11.8 million.

Zopa says in its accounts that this investment in staff is necessary to "ensure the company is both viable and sustainable as it moves towards its next stage of growth." The company announced plans to launch a retail bank alongside its peer-to-peer lending operation last November.

Zopa raised £32 million to finance this expansion in June of this year.

Original author: Oscar Williams-Grut