Risk Rewarded Blog

It has become a cliché. If your business is not scarfing up new technology, it’s being devoured by it. Given the choice, companies are choosing to eat. With more than $3.6 trillion in deals announced, Reuters reports 2016 was the third largest on record for mergers and acquisitions. This sets up logical winners. And...

It’s mind bending. Scientists believe it is now possible to wind back the biological clock. Aging would not only stop. It would reverse.In mid-December, researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California published a ground breaking study in the medical journal, Cell. Using genetic modification, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte,...

Artificial intelligence is a killer application. The very idea of technology learning at an exponential rate boggles the mind. Software developers are giddy to unleash its potential. Society should brace for impact. We used to laugh at AI software. Remember the DARPA robots supposedly coded to walk-up stairs or turn doorknobs? Or...

The car business is about to take us all on a wild ride. Autonomous vehicles will challenge industry business models. Electric propulsion will challenge the global economy. This month, Toyota joined Daimler, Volkswagen, General Motors (GM) and Ford (F) in making a major longer-term commitment to electric vehicles. Big automakers...

What do Big Data, cutting edge supercomputers and sunny days have in common? If you answered Renaissance Technologies’ Medallion hedge fund, give yourself a gold star.Gold stars are more than a namesake at Medallion. The Bloomberg article “Inside a Money Making Machine Like No Other” tells the story of the secretive New York hedge...

After the global financial crisis in 2009, Marc Andreessen was a fount of optimism. The pioneering web engineer and venture capitalist is still optimistic, but not for the reasons you may think.Recently Andreessen sat down with The Verge for a far flung interview. His prescient 2011 Wall Street Journal essay; “Software is Eating the World,”...

All over the globe, the working class is rising up against the forces of industrial globalization. Nationalism will bring back good-paying jobs, say the populists. Or so the theory goes. Yet reality intervenes. In late November, General Electric (GE) bought a scheduling-software company called ServiceMax for $915 million. It was the ...

A new space race is afoot. Soon thousands of small satellites will circle the Earth. They will deliver broadband Internet and vast amounts of valuable data. Last month SpaceX, notified the Federal Communications Commission of its plan to deploy 4,425 satellites 750 miles above the Earth. The immediate goal is for the Volkswagen-sized spacecraft...