Blockchain Consultants

Blockchain Transformations Done Here

apple inc

Germanys COVID-19 contacts tracing app to link to labs for test result notification

by

A German research institute that’s involved in developing a COVID-19 contacts tracing app with the backing of the national government has released some new details about the work, which suggests the app is being designed as more of a “one-stop shop” to manage coronavirus impacts at an individual level, rather than having a sole function of alerting users to potential infection risk.

Work on the German app began at the start of March, per the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft institute, with initial funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Federal Ministry of Health funding a feasibility study.

In a PDF published today, the research organization reveals the government-backed app will include functionality for health authorities to directly notify users about a COVID-19 test result if they’ve opted in to get results this way.

It says the system must ensure only people who test positive for the virus make their measurement data available to avoid incorrect data being input. For the purposes of “this validation process,” it envisages “a digital connection to the existing diagnostic laboratories is implemented in the technical implementation.”

“App users can thus voluntarily activate this notification function and thus be informed more quickly and directly about their test results,” it writes in the press release (which we’ve translated from German with Google Translate) — arguing that such direct digital notification of tests results will mean that no “valuable time” is lost to curb the spread of the virus.

Governments across Europe are scrambling to get Bluetooth-powered contacts tracing apps off the ground, with apps also in the works from a number of other countries, including the U.K. and France, despite ongoing questions over the efficacy of digital contacts tracing versus such an infectious virus.

The great hope is that digital tools will offer a route out of economically crippling population lockdowns by providing a way to automate at least some contacts tracing — based on widespread smartphone penetration and the use of Bluetooth-powered device proximity as a proxy for coronavirus exposure.

Preventing a new wave of infections as lockdown restrictions are lifted is the near-term goal. Although — in line with Europe’s rights frameworks — use of contacts tracing apps looks set to be voluntary across most of the region, with governments wary about being seen to impose “health surveillance” on citizens, as has essentially happened in China.

However if contacts tracing apps end up larded with features that are deep linking into national health systems, that raises questions about how optional their use will really be.

An earlier proposal by a German consortium of medical device manufacturers, laboratories, clinics, clinical data management systems and blockchain solution providers — proposing a blockchain-based Digital Corona Health Certificate, which was touted as being able to generate “verifiable, certified test results that can be fed into any tracing app” to cut down on false positives — claimed to have backing from the City of Cologne’s public health department, as one example of potential function creep.

In March, Der Spiegel also reported on a large-scale study being coordinated by the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Braunschweig, to examine antibody levels to try to determine immunity across the population. Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI) was reportedly involved in that study — and has been a key operator in the national contacts tracing push.

Both RKI and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft institute are also involved in parallel German-led pan-EU standardization efforts for COVID-19 contacts tracing apps (called PEPP-PT) that’s been the leading voice for apps to centralize proximity data with governments/health authorities, rather than storing it on users’ device and performing risk processing locally.

As we reported earlier, PEPP-PT and its government backers appear to be squaring up for a battle with Apple over iOS restrictions on Bluetooth.

PEPP-PT bases its claim of being a “privacy-preserving” standard on not backing protocols or apps that use location data or mobile phone numbers — with only arbitrary (but pseudonymized) proximity IDs shared for the purpose of tracking close encounters between devices and potential coronavirus infections.

It has claimed it’s agnostic between centralization of proximity data versus decentralization, though so far the only protocol it’s publicly committed to is a centralized one.

Yet, at the same time, regional privacy experts, the EU parliament and even the European Commission have urged national governments to practice data minimization and decentralized when it comes to COVID-19 contacts tracing in order to boost citizen trust by shrinking associated privacy risks.

If apps are voluntary, citizens’ trust must be earned not assumed, is the key argument. Without substantial uptake the utility of digital contacts tracing seems doubtful.

Apple and Google have also come down on the decentralized side of this debate — outting a joint effort last week for an API and later opt-in system-wide contacts tracing. The first version of their API is slated to be in developers’ hands next week.

Meanwhile, a coalition of nearly 300 academics signed an open letter at the start of this week warning that centralized systems risked surveillance creep — voicing support for decentralized protocols, such as DP-3T: Another contact tracing protocol that’s being developed by a separate European coalition which has been highly critical of PEPP-PT.

And while PEPP-PT claimed recently to have seven governments signed up to its approach, and 40 more in the pipeline, at least two of the claimed EU supporters (Switzerland and Spain) had actually said they will use a decentralized approach.

The coalition has also been losing support from a number of key research institutions which had initially backed its push for a “privacy-preserving” standard, as controversy around its intent and lack of transparency has grown.

Nonetheless, the two biggest EU economies, Germany and France, appear to be digging in behind a push to centralize proximity data — putting Apple in their sights.

Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the French government is pressurizing Apple to remove Bluetooth restrictions for its COVID-19 contacts tracing app which also relies on a “trusted authority” running a central server (we’ve covered the French ROBERT protocol in detail here).

It’s possible Germany and France are sticking to their centralized guns because of wider plans to pack more into these contacts tracing apps than simply Bluetooth-powered alerts — as suggested by the Fraunhofer document.

Access to data is another likely motivator.

“Only if research can access sufficiently valid data it is possible to create forecasts that are the basis for planning further steps against are the spread of the virus,” the institute goes on. (Though, as we’ve written before, the DP-3T decentralized protocol sets out a path for users to opt in to share proximity data for research purposes.)

Another strand that’s evident from the Fraunhofer PDF is sovereignty.

“Overall, the approach is based on the conviction that the state healthcare system must have sovereignty over which criteria, risk calculations, recommendations for action and feedback are in one such system,” it writes, adding: “In order to achieve the greatest possible usability on end devices on the market, technical cooperation with the targeted operating system providers, Google and Apple, is necessary.”

Apple and Google did not respond to requests for comment on whether they will be making any changes to their API as a result of French and German pressure.

Fraunhofer further notes that “full compatibility” between the German app and the centralized one being developed by French research institutes Inria and Inserm was achieved in the “past few weeks” — underlining that the two nations are leading this particular contacts tracing push.

In related news this week, Europe’s Data Protection Board (EDPB) put out guidance for developers of contacts tracing apps, which stressed an EU legal principle related to processing personal data that’s known as purpose limitation — warning that apps need to have purposes “specific enough to exclude further processing for purposes unrelated to the management of the COVID-19 health crisis (e.g., commercial or law enforcement purposes)”.

Which sounds a bit like the regulator drawing a line in the sand to warn states that might be tempted to turn contacts tracing apps into coronavirus immunity passports.

The EDPB also urged that “careful consideration” be given to data minimisation and data protection by design and by default — two other key legal principles baked into Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, albeit with some flex during a public health emergency.

However the regulatory body took a pragmatic view on the centralization vs decentralization debate — saying both approaches are “viable” in a contacts tracing context, with the key caveat that “adequate security measures” must be in place.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/23/germanys-covid-19-contacts-tracing-app-to-link-to-labs-for-test-result-notification/

Apple Added Another Digit

by

You know what’s cool? A trillion dollars.

I don’t have anything interesting to say about the fact that Apple Inc.’s equity market capitalization reached a trillion dollars yesterday, but both Bloomberg and the New York Times have interactive online features about what numbers you could add to get to a trillion, and Bloomberg’s even includes some numbers you could multiply or subtract to get to a trillion, so perhaps I should list some numbers you could divide to get a trillion? Like, if you had a mole of  dollars, and you divided those dollars evenly among all of the stars in our galaxy, each star would have about as many dollars as Apple’s market cap. Or if you expressed Warren Buffett’s net worth in Mexican pesos, that would be approximately Apple’s market cap expressed in pounds sterling. Or if you had a googol of dollars and you divided them by the number of atoms in the universe, you’d have about enough dollars to give an Apple market cap to each person on earth. And then we’d all be rich.

What does it mean that Apple is worth a trillion dollars? I think there are two possibilities:

  1. The consensus expected future cash flows to Apple shareholders have a present value of $1 trillion; or
  2. Other.

You should not completely neglect “other.” There is something self-referential about corporate valuations, and I do not think it is ridiculous to believe some version of the idea that a company is worth a trillion dollars because it is worth a trillion dollars, and not because shareholders have a rational model of the expected future cash flows and those flows happen to add up to a trillion dollars. 

But the more conventional explanation is that people are willing to buy Apple shares at a $1 trillion valuation because they expect Apple to give shareholders back more than $1 trillion in the future. (Really, a present value of more than $1 trillion in the future, which means roughly $1 trillion very soon or much more than $1 trillion much later.) That is, not to belabor it too much, a lot of money. Usually when a company is worth $X, that can mean that it is currently generating lots of cash and paying it out to shareholders and that cash is expected to add up to about $X, that it is currently generating no cash at all and investing shareholder money in long-term projects, but that if all goes well and those projects pay off then it will in some distant future be able to pay out, like, $3X to shareholders. But as X gets really really really really big, then getting hypothetically even bigger in the future recedes as an explanation, and actually paying out cash in the present becomes more likely to dominate. 

And so in fact Apple has in the past few years initiated a dividend and a share buyback program, and has paid out a total of about $280 billion to shareholders. On the other hand there are few signs that investors treat it as a huge growth opportunity:

Comparatively speaking, its earnings don’t get anywhere near the respect of its megacap brethren. At $56 billion, profits in the past year are double the next biggest earner in the Nasdaq 100 Index. But its price-earnings ratio trails 70 percent of the gauge’s members.

Put it this way. If Apple’s income was treated with the same generosity bestowed on companies like Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc., its value would be closer to two trillion than just one.

The reasons it isn’t are well known. Apple’s bread and butter is hardware, unlike Google and Microsoft. And while nothing to sneeze at, its profit growth is running at about half the rate of Amazon. Creeping pressure on margins has raised concern about how booming future profits will be.

And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Shira Ovide notes that Apple’s profit margins are shrinking as it spends more money on research and development. In some ways this is the opposite of the intuitive popular story of Apple, which is that it used its brilliance to invent superior products that it could sell at huge margins. I mean, that story is true: It did do that. (Cheaply: “Steve Jobs once said that ‘innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have,’” Ovide notes.) But at some point, once you have invented the iPhone, you can simultaneously make a lot of money selling iPhones, and spend a lot of money trying to invent the next iPhone, and invent the next iPhone.

In 1997, Michael Dell famously said that Apple should “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Apple’s market cap was about $2.8 billion at the time, and it closed at about $1,001.7 billion yesterday, so that strategy would have left about $999 billion on the table and is high on the list of worst financial ideas of all time. But in the long run it, or something like it, is the right idea for almost all companies. You take money from shareholders, you use it to make some things, you sell the things, you make a profit, you reinvest the profit in making new things, you repeat for as long as that makes sense, and eventually you either run out of things to make, or—if things go very very well indeed—you have more profits than you can possibly invest in making those things. In the very long run, the way to reward the shareholders for giving you money in the first place is to (1) make as much money as possible with their money and then (2) give most of it back to them. The difficulty is in the details, and the timing. You want to return money to shareholders you’ve invented the iPhone, not 20 years . 

CBS.

I wrote yesterday morning that “sexual-harassment diligence is on its way to becoming a routine part of M&A due diligence.” And then yesterday afternoon CBS Corp. had its earnings call, led by Chief Executive Officer Les Moonves, days after a giant New Yorker story by Ronan Farrow about allegations of sexual misconduct against Moonves. And, somewhat embarrassingly, nobody asked about those allegations. The word “elephant” is popular. “The elephant in the room went unmentioned,” is the first sentence of this Wall Street Journal article. “Not one analyst asked Moonves or the rest of the management team to address the elephant on the call,” wrote my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tara Lachapelle. “CBS Ignores Ronan Farrow-Shaped Elephant in the Room on Earnings Call,” wrote Bess Levin. The Journal notes:

On Twitter, reporters and other observers mocked what they said was the cowardice ofthe analysts for failing to ask about the scandal.

One analyst, Rich Greenfield of BTIG Research, said on Twitter, “Shame on the CBS analysts who were allowed to ask questions and failed to use the opportunity.”

I don’t know. Presumably the analysts didn’t ask because they didn’t think they’d get a useful answer, which was a reasonable assumption given that (1) Moonves was the one running the call and (2) CBS began the call by saying those questions would be off limits. The function of a stock analyst is not primarily journalistic. If a reporter asks a public figure a question that he doesn’t want to answer, and he sputters and refuses to answer, then that has value: The public has learned something, even without an actual answer to the question. The comfortable have been afflicted. If an analyst asks a company a question that it doesn’t want to answer, and the company doesn’t answer, then he’s wasted a question; there’s no field in his financial model for “angry CEO sputtering.” And in any case the analyst’s job is as much about maintaining access to management—to update his own models and also to help his clients get access—as it is about asking penetrating questions. Losing favor with management, getting your questions answered, seems like a strictly negative outcome. 

This is not to say that the sexual misconduct scandal is irrelevant to the financial model! Quite the opposite: In general, if a scandal might bring down a long-serving powerful CEO, that is going to be material to a company’s results, but it’s particularly important here because Moonves and CBS’s board are  fighting a very strange battle against CBS’s controlling shareholder. Anything that weakens Moonves’s position—whether it’s financial results, legal arguments in that fight, or an a personal scandal—matters in that fight, and might affect CBS’s future. It’s just that asking Moonves about it, in public, on an earnings call, is probably not the way to find out. 

Elsewhere, nobody asked about Carl Icahn’s activist position on the Cigna Corp. earnings call yesterday, either.

Oops.

The average annualized daily volatility of Bitcoin against the U.S. dollar, over the past year, is about 90 percent. That implies, loosely speaking, that about one day out of every 20, Bitcoin will move by more than about 11 percent against the dollar. In fact, Bitcoin has had daily moves of 10 percent or more on 22 days over the last 12 months, including 10 so far in 2018; seven of the 10 big moves in 2018 have been  10 percent or more.

OKEx is a Hong Kong-based exchange that lists Bitcoin futures and allows . Leverage of 20x means that for every $1 you put up as margin at the exchange, you can buy $20 worth of Bitcoin futures. If the price of Bitcoin goes up by 5 percent, then those futures will be worth $21, and you will make $1 on your $1 investment. If the price of Bitcoin goes down by 5 percent, then those futures will be worth $19, and you will lose your whole dollar. If the price of Bitcoin falls by 10 percent in a day, which, again, has happened on average this year, then those futures will be worth $18, and you will lose your whole dollar, and also there will be a dollar missing. Like, you were supposed to pay $2 to the person who sold you the futures, but you only put $1 into the exchange. Someone has to come up with the other dollar.

Anyway:

A massive wrong-way bet on Bitcoin left an unidentified futures trader unable to cover their losses, burning counterparties and threatening to dent confidence in one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency venues.

The long position in Bitcoin futures listed on OKEx, a Hong Kong-based exchange, had a notional value of about $416 million, according to an OKEx statement on Friday and data compiled by Bloomberg. While OKEx moved to liquidate the position on Tuesday, the exchange was unable to cover the trader’s shortfall as Bitcoin’s price slumped. Because OKEx has a “socialized clawback” policy for such instances, it will force futures traders with unrealized gains this week to give up about 18 percent of their profits.

“It’s a weird mechanism,” says a crypto trader who used to work at Morgan Stanley, in a significant understatement. OKEx “requires traders to pass a quiz on its rules before they can begin investing in futures,” which you can try here, and there is forced liquidation if you get too close to wiping out your margin, but … there are simpler and more effective ways to make sure that this doesn’t happen? Like Cboe and CME Group list Bitcoin futures contracts, and they require 40 percent and 43 percent maintenance margin, respectively. That’s leverage of a bit more than 2x. If Bitcoin prices fall by 40 percent in a day, then your margin will be wiped out and Cboe and CME will have a problem. But that never actually happens. The margin is set high enough that it’s not at too much risk of being wiped out in a day.

At OKEx … ????? The margin is set low enough that it’s at risk of being wiped out all the time, and when it is, they take money from everyone else on the exchange to make up for it. “It’s a weird mechanism”! I suppose the point is that if you want to gamble on Bitcoin, you want to gamble on Bitcoin, and just buying two Bitcoins for the price of one isn’t exciting enough for you; you want to lever up 20 times, while also gambling a bit that your winnings might be taken away from you. 

Or maybe not? Maybe the point of a Bitcoin futures exchange is to allow fun but not-too-serious gambling on Bitcoin. Having 20x leverage and socialized clawbacks is, in a certain light, a way to volatility, as experienced by your customers. If Bitcoin prices drop by more than 5 percent, then the people who were long only lose 5 percent, while the people who were short make more than 5 percent, but have to give up a chunk of it in “clawbacks.” Both wins and losses are trimmed a bit. It’s a way to bet on Bitcoin but not exactly mean it.

Elsewhere, “Korean Authorities Investigate Alleged Crypto Scam That Promised Investors Shipwreck Gold,” why not. When I read about financial scams I often think about the “Linda problem,” in which people hear a description of a woman named Linda (“single, outspoken and very bright”) and are asked if it is more probable that “Linda is a bank teller” or that “Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.” The former is strictly more probable, but people tend to choose the latter, because it has a story, a personality, a coherence; they are swayed not by bare facts and rational analysis but by wanting to create a vivid picture of who Linda is. Similarly, is it more likely that if you give someone money they will pay you back with gold from a Russian shipwreck, or that if you give someone money they will pay you back in gold from a Russian shipwreck ? If you’re into shipwrecks, and you’re into crypto, and you’re into getting your money stolen, then combining all three is somehow extra satisfying.

Disclosure.

There is a popular belief that being a professional investor and trying to find out information about companies is, somehow, cheating. Like if you are a hedge-fund manager and you do lots of research and pay for proprietary data sources and go to private one-on-one meetings with corporate executives, then you have advantages that regular retail investors don’t have. There is no level playing field for the retail investors. It’s unfair.

But there is a contrary belief that is less popular but more entertaining, which is that actually the retail investors are cheating. After all, any random hobbyist can read a public company’s annual report and find out lots of detailed information about the company’s finances and strategy. And she didn’t need to put in any work to get that report; it was just made freely available to her online by Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure rules. By making all this good stuff available to just anyone off the street, those rules unfairly the value of professional investors’ skills and hard work. This makes high-skill professional investing less rewarding than it would otherwise be, reducing the differences in results between good and bad investors. And that reduces the incentives to become a good investor, which makes markets less efficient.

I mean, you don’t frequently see quite it expressed quite that way, but you can get pretty close. Here is “Is Silence Golden? Negative Effects of Mandatory Disclosure,” by Sudarshan Jayaraman and Joanna Wu of the University of Rochester:

Disclosure regulation is a cornerstone of modern securities markets. Its economic consequences have been extensively studied and heavily debated. A widely recognized benefit of mandatory disclosure is that it levels the playing field by publicly disclosing to everyone what is known only to sophisticated investors. This leveling reduces trading costs and consequently reduces the firm’s cost of capital.

In our recent paper, available here, we show that this reduced informational advantage of sophisticated investors is not unambiguously desirable. In particular, when sophisticated investors stop trading in a firm’s stock, there is a reduction in the ability of firm managers to glean decision-relevant information from the stock price. In other words, mandatory disclosure impedes the feedback effect of stock prices on managerial decisions, which in turn could harm investment efficiency. In documenting such an effect, we demonstrate that the economic consequences of mandatory disclosure are broader than often thought and, under certain conditions, mandatory disclosure can crowd out informed traders’ ability to acquire information, resulting in less managerial learning from the stock price. This in turn lowers the efficiency of the manager’s investment decisions.

Things happen.

MoviePass still exists. “Take money from venture capitalists, provide a below-market price for a popular service, and profit.” Wall Street Claims Success on Diversity— At Least With Interns. Uber Is Not Serious About Changing Its Toxic Culture. For Tesla’s Elon Musk, Twitter Is Sword Against Short Sellers. An inside look at how Trump’s infamous jobs day tweet roiled some government economists. Jeff Bezos, Style Icon. 6 Faces That Honestly I've Never Seen Leonardo DiCaprio Make Before. “What if the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries?”

    This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

    To contact the author of this story:
    Matt Levine at mlevine51@bloomberg.net

    To contact the editor responsible for this story:
    James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net

    Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-03/apple-added-another-digit

    Dont trust investors asking how youll exit to Apple, says Apple CEO

    by

    If you’re a budding entrepreneur and the VC you’re pitching switches gears and asks you about your exit strategy that’s your cue to get up and leave, says Apple CEO Tim Cook.

    Cook was speaking to an audience of students and would be entrepreneurs at the opening of the Foundry startup hub in Oxford, UK yesterday. During a Q&A session at the end of a hour long conversation an audience member asked Cook how entrepreneurs should handle investors who seem to be trying to steer them towards a quick exit to a tech giant like Apple or Google.

    “If you have a VC asking you that you should get up and walk out of the room,” said Cook, qualifying himself slightly by saying that at least is what he would do if he were in such a position.

    “You should not be attracted to that kind of money,” he added. “Because those people are not for growing your company and helping you — they’re for a quick buck and it’s not worth it.”

    In a long and at times deeply personal conversation, Cook discussed his personal background, work philosophy and sources of inspiration, including touching on his early years at Apple and his relationship with co-founder Steve Jobs.

    Another discussion point was how the current culture at Apple aims to encourage employees to challenge each others’ ideas. “I think you have to allow for different opinions — and not only allow but foster them,” said Cook, although he also said there’s a line to be drawn “if you don’t treat each other with dignity and respect — you need to leave”.

    “If you’re in a position where you’re deciding people’s future and you’re deciding in a biased way, you need to leave,” he added. “But I think we have to allow for disagreement.”

    He was also asked to share business advice on a range of topics including starting out building a career, leadership, and sustaining customer satisfaction at scale.

    “Most people if you set up a focus group will tell you small changes to the existing thing,” he said discussing his approach to balancing product design and customer satisfaction. “And so if you want to go from the stagecoach to the car somebody’s not likely to come up with the car. If you want to go from the Sony Walkman to the iPod someone’s not likely to come up with the iPod.

    “But the thing that you have to do is, your focus group is yourself — you should make products that you want to use. And not just want to use but you love. And you can bet that if you love it there are many other people out there that are going to love it too. And so that fundamental thing drives Apple.

    “In addition to that — because we do make mistakes on some things that we ship — and so you always want to stay close to your customers and listen to them and be very accessible to them,” he said, adding: “One of the key reasons we have retail stores is to touch our customers and hear from them.”

    Cook said he gets up early because he likes to spend his first hour going through customer emails — “because I want to know what they’re saying, I want to know what they’re feeling”.

    For people in the audience thinking of setting up a startup, Cook also had this to say: “Recruit the friends of yours who are not like you. If you’re in engineering make sure you get someone in liberal arts. If you’re from the UK make sure you get someone from the Middle East or from China… or wherever.

    “Find people that are different from you, where the common thread is they want to change the world and they want to change the world by creating the product or service that you also want. If you can find that collection of people… that is the kernel of a successful company.”

    Responding to a question about how to figure out when you should stick at a product or piece of work which appears to be failing and when to scrap everything and start again, Cook pointed to Apple’s failed Cube desktop as an example of an instance when, even with a lot of time and effort invested, the company had made a quick decision to kill off a product.

    “It was a very important product for us, we put a lot of love into it, we put enormous engineering into it… It was a spectacular failure commercially — from the first day, almost,” he said. “And within three months we withdrew it. We had to look at ourselves in the mirror and say we missed this one.

    “I think it’s important to be able to do that — something that you were so passionate about — and this was another thing that Steve [Jobs] taught me actually… you’ve got to be willing to look yourself in the mirror and say I was wrong, it’s not right.

    “I see so many people when they commit themselves to something their pride would not allow them to say this just doesn’t work…  Failure is a common thing. It’s like the common cold.”

    “Steve of everyone I’ve known in life could be the most avid proponent of some position and within minutes or days if new information came up you would think he’d never, ever thought that,” he added. “He was a pro at this. And at first I thought ‘oh he really flip flops!’ and then all of a sudden I saw the beauty in it.

    “Because he wasn’t getting stuck — like so many other people do when they say I’ve got to keep going on, my pride. So be intellectually honest — and have the courage to change.”

    I can see uses for it everywhere. I can see uses for it in education, in consumer, in entertainment, in sports. I can see it in every business that I know anything about.

    Cook was also asked for his thoughts on the most exciting emerging technologies, with an audience member listing blockchain, AI, hyperloop and quantum computing as possible examples. Cook picked a different one: Augmented reality.

    “I’m incredibly excited about AR, one that you didn’t mention,” he said, naming the tech that Apple is making a big bet on via a supportive framework in its latest mobile OS. “Because I can see uses for it everywhere. I can see uses for it in education, in consumer, in entertainment, in sports. I can see it in every business that I know anything about. I see it is wide, it’s horizontal in nature.

    “I also like the fact that it doesn’t isolate. I don’t like our products being used a lot. I like our products amplifying us. And I think AR can help amplify the human connection. I’ve never been a fan of VR like that because I think it does the opposite. There are clearly some cool niche-y kinda of things for VR. But it’s not profound in my view. AR is profound.”

    “We will look back on this moment, or the moment we announced ARKit earlier this year, and this will be one of those things in history, I think. It’ll take some time, it doesn’t happen overnight but this is big and it’s good for humanity,” he added.

    A final question raised monopolies and how dominant elements in markets might be blocking entrepreneurs — and what could be done to help?

    “I’m not a big fan of regulation but when there’s any move at all towards that side I think that regulation is necessary,” said Cook.

    “For us we have low marketshare, we’re about the best, not the most. But I think it’s essential that competitive markets exist. And where it doesn’t I think that is a prime role for government to step in and not only protect the consumer but also protect society at large because sometimes it can be more than about the price somebody pays for something. Sometimes that can be the least issue.”

    “You’re asking a huge question that’s obviously on a lot of people’s minds right now, me included,” he added. “The regulators have to decide where in that spectrum are different companies. Each company’s in a different position so each one has to be looked at individually, instead of as a group.”

    Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/12/dont-trust-investors-asking-how-youll-exit-to-apple-says-apple-ceo/