Year: 2018

By the time you hear about a research project online or in the news it’s probably already gone through countless iterations and changes. Until Morressier, however, that early stage research was done separately by researchers who barely interacted with each other.

Morressier is a service for early stage research. This means it allows researchers to “raise the profile of their conference posters, presentations and abstracts and showcase their work from the very beginning.” Because most early stage research appears at conferences few of us ever see, by making projects more visible at those conferences we all get better research.

“We focus exclusively on the findings from the earliest stage of the research process, content that was traditionally restricted to halls of universities and conferences,” said co-founder Sami Benchekroun. “By bringing this content online and making it accessible, scientists can avoid repeating their peers’ mistakes and easily build on each other’s findings.”

“We help scientists showcase and gain attribution for their previously hidden early-stage research via individual DOIs. On the basis of our content we can showcase signals and trends in science at a far earlier stage than our competitors,” he said.

The service is live now and has raised over $6 million with help from Redalpine and Cherry Ventures.

“After witnessing the vital exchange happening at academic conferences around the world firsthand, the cofounders were inspired to launch Morressier to digitize the traditionally offline research from these events and ensure the conversation continues year-round. Our aim is to help scientists make progress faster by making previously hidden early-stage research discoverable and accessible,” said Benchekroun.

I spoke to the founder at Disrupt Berlin this year. You can check out the video below.

Price f(x), a startup that offers cloud-based pricing software, has raised €25 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is European B2B technology growth investor Digital + Partners, and consulting firm Bain & Company. Prague-based Credo Ventures and London-based Talis Capital, which both backed Price f(x) at Series A, have also participated in this new round.

Founded in 2011, Munich-based Price f(x) provides a modular SaaS solution for price optimisation management (PO&M) and configure-price-quote (CPQ) for enterprises of any size.

Pricing optimisation software typically helps companies accurately define the price of goods across a vast and constantly changing spectrum of data and variables. This can include things like customer survey data and segments, competitor data, operating costs, inventories, and historic prices and sales.

CPQ software aggregates these variables, thus enabling companies to configure products or services in the most optimal way (i.e. bundling, up-sells, etc.), and price them according to costs, competition and local economic factors.

This end result is that is that it can drastically speed up and improve the accuracy of the quoting process to give customers the best price possible in accordance with all of the above factors.

Price f(x) says it currently serves over 80 global, blue-chip B2B and B2C customers across a variety of industries, including Robert Bosch, SchneiderElectric, Owens- Illinois, Iron Mountain and Sonoco. The company has also developed a strong partner ecosystem with leading global technology, consulting and integration providers, including new backer Bain & Company, and SAP.

Notably, Price f(x) is in the midst of litigation with U.S. competitor Vendavo over a number of patent disputes. In December 2017, Vendavo launched a lawsuit against Price f(x), which the German company refutes. And earlier this week, Price f(x) filed petitions for “Covered Business Method (“CBM”) Review” of four Vendavo patents, and says it will imminently file a fifth, which together will cover challenges to all of the patent claims that Vendavo has asserted in litigation between the two parties.

“Price f(x) has become the leading SaaS pricing solution provider on the market through its customer centric approach and by offering a feature rich, highly flexible pricing tool that is also risk free and fast to implement,” says Marcin Cichon, CEO and co-Founder of Price f(x), in a statement. “Our success is based on the continued satisfaction and loyalty of our customers. This new funding will allow us to help even more businesses to thrive by further expanding our existing platform capabilities and also introducing a new product offering for the SME market segment”.

“For most companies, pricing is the single most effective lever to boost earnings,” says Ron Kermisch, Bain & Company’s global pricing leader. “Yet many companies leave money on the table because they do not set the best price or ensure customers actually pay the price they have determined. Bain & Company sees investing in Price f(x) as a great opportunity to help Price f(x) to become the de-facto standard in pricing and with that to be also the best-of-breed competitive weapon for Bain’s clients, to stay at the cutting edge of pricing”.

The G-Shock is so nerdy that it’s become cool and this latest model, the GMWB5000GD-9, is no exception. Based on the original G-Shock models, this decidedly unsmart (but not dumb) watch features solar charging, atomic timekeeping, and a simple Bluetooth connection to your phone. Plus now it comes in gold or silver toned metal, a decided departure for the decades-old brand.

This wild redesign takes cues from a solid-gold prototype designed by Casio’s Ibe Kikuo. That blinged out watch, which could hit the market but will be as expensive as an entire Casio display case, is a bit much. However, these two steel models are quite exciting and very luxe.

“Inspired by the first G-SHOCK model, DW5000C, this upgraded original boasts a modern, lustrous, color way while maintaining a vintage aesthetic,” writes Casio. “The watch also incorporates one of the first and most iconic G-SHOCK case designs, featuring a vintage, square shape case, and bezel with a brick pattern on the face and gorgeous gold color accent.”

At $550 this is a bit pricey for an entry-level quartz watch but rest assured it will find a foothold in the fashion world as “dorky” becomes even more synonymous with “cat-walk ready.”

The Wing, the owner of several co-working spaces and social clubs designed for women, has garnered the support of Sequoia Capital in its latest funding round.

The startup has announced a $75 million Series C led by the storied venture capital firm, with support from Airbnb and Upfront Ventures, as well as existing investors NEA and WeWork.

Headquartered in New York, The Wing was founded by Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan in 2015. To date, the pair have raised $117.5 million, including a $32 million Series B in November 2017 led by WeWork, a co-working giant presumably interested in an eventual acquisition of its female-friendly counterpart.

A spokesperson for The Wing declined to disclose its valuation.

The Wing has 6,000 members across locations in New York, Washington, DC and San Francisco — where it first opened its doors just two months ago. The company has additional spots slated to open in West Hollywood, Chicago, Boston, London, Toronto and Paris in 2019. Memberships at the workspaces, which are complete with feminist imagery, conference rooms, a cafe, library, lactation room, beauty room, showers and more, are $215 apiece.

The Wing’s staff is majority female and its spaces are designed by female architects. It’s not surprising the investors behind its latest fundraise are mostly women, too.

As part of the Series C funding, Sequoia partner Jess Lee and Upfront partner Kara Nortman have joined The Wing’s board of directors. Lee, in a statement, said the funding would assist The Wing in bringing its physical community of career-oriented women into the digital realm.

Earlier this year, the company launched a mobile application for its members to stay connected with each other and to RSVP to Wing events.

“This investment will enable us to further The Wing’s mission and scale to new heights both offline and online,” Gelman, The Wing’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.

“The Wing’s mission is the advancement of women through community, and we could not be more excited to partner with such a powerful community of women who lead their fields in tech, Hollywood, policy, and sports. This round is proof positive that women can be on both sides of the table.”

Also participating in the financing are actress Kerry Washington, producer Katie McGrath, former White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, and two of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense co-founders Robbie Kaplan and Hilary Rosen. U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team players Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Meghan Klingenberg and Becky Sauerbrunn also provided capital to The Wing.

Airbnb, for its part, has not previously invested in The Wing and is not an active investor in startups. It’s unclear what sort of partnership may be brewing between the home-sharing “unicorn” and the feminist co-working space. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said he was “incredibly inspired” by The Wing and was “thrilled to support them.”

Flux, the London fintech that has built a technology platform for banks and merchants to power itemised digital receipts and a lot more, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by VC firm e.ventures (which has previously backed the likes of Farfetch, Sonos and Groupon), with participation from existing investors PROfounders, and Anthemis.

Founded in 2016 by former early employees at Revolut, Flux bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app. Off the back of this, it can also power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics via aggregated and anonymised data on consumer behaviour, such as which products are selling best in unique baskets.

On the banking side, Flux is currently available through Barclays (via Barclays Launchpad), challenger bank Starling, and for a small alpha group of Monzo customers. Once banking customers link their account to the service, Flux delivers digital receipts (and where available rewards and loyalty) for transactions at Flux retailer partners.

To that end, merchant partnerships include Costa Coffee, EAT, pod and itsu. Flux also recently announced that Pure is joining the service.

“Our mission has always been to liberate the world’s receipt data because by doing this we can enrich trillions of experiences globally,” Flux co-founder and CEO Matty Cusden-Ross tells me.

“The information on a receipt is used all the time in everyday life, from budgeting to loyalty to expensing but today these all require manual steps. We see a future in which all of these manual processes become seamless experiences, simplifying and enriching people’s lives. Our focus today is on establishing a standard, the Flux platform, to make this a reality within the U.K. before expanding to our first international market”.

Of course, Flux’s attempts to become a standard for the interchange of item level digital receipt data — and the proprietary platform that powers that standard — has always faced a chicken and egg problem: It needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks. Cracking this problem has clearly started to gather momentum, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by investors.

“We’ve transitioned from having to prove it’s possible to now scaling and that’s a great feeling,” says Cusden-Ross. “The aim for this round is to continue making Flux the gold standard for anything that touches receipt data, [ensuring] Flux remains super easy to use for everyone — consumers, banks and retailers. What this means is going fully live across some of the largest U.K. retail banks as well as ramping our up our live merchants”.

(Related, I understand that Flux has already begun integrating with one of the major U.K. supermarkets and an “international fast food chain,” amongst other unannounced partnerships.)

“Creating a real-time platform that handles massive data volumes is hard, but we’ve cracked it,” adds the Flux CEO. “We’re investing heavily in bringing on the best engineers to continue scaling in a big way. Having figured out the recipe for working with banks and retailers quickly, it’s now all about growing as fast as possible”.

Fitness and gaming have been two of the most popular categories of apps for years, and now a startup founded out of London that has combined the two in a unique way has picked up a big round of funding to capitalise on that. Zwift, an interactive platform for people to turn indoor cycling workouts into massive, multi-participant races, social rides, and immersive explorations of new domains, has raised $120 million — money that its co-founder and CEO, Eric Min, said will be used to expand to more training categories (it’s first steps outside of cycling have been into running), and to add esports tournaments.

The funding — led by Highland Europe, with Europe’s True (not to be confused with True Ventures), Causeway Media and Novator participating — comes on the heels of very rapid growth for Zwift.

The startup now has over 1 million registered accounts (it doesn’t disclose active users), up from a mere 200,000 two years ago, with users ranging from amateur cycling enthusiasts, people who cycle as part of fitness regimes, and professional athletes who use it to supplement IRL global training schedules.

“More one-third of the peloton in this year’s Tour de France” — despite all its controversies, still the gold standard for road races — “are users of Zwift,” Min told me. There are 200 Facebook groups built around Zwift communities, with people using them to organise rides and sometimes even to meet up in person afterwards at cafes, just as they might in actual outdoor rides. With customers in 100 countries, Min told me that there are on average 300 rides a day happening on Zwift.

The company isn’t disclosing its valuation, but Min said that the startup is “approaching unicorn status” on account of its growth and big ambitions and it appears to be more than $500 million with “a very small dilution” — a big jump on the $180 million Pitchbook estimated for its valuation in 2016 (it’s raised around $166 million to date).

Min believes that the upswing in e-sports could see the format getting ever-more mainstream acceptance. “Our goal is to bring Zwift to the Olympics,” he told me confidently.

Zwift is swiftly addressing two different shortcomings of two common home pastimes. One of the problems with exercising at home — and specifically training in cycling as a first effort — is that it might get a little boring, and one of the problems with playing too many video games is that they contribute to the tendency we have in our modern world to be too sedentary.

The service involves you providing your own bike, which you link up with a Zwift trainer (a rack-like piece of equipment that turns a bike into a stationary bike for indoor training), which in turn picks up your stats and adjusts tension and so on based on the course that you are riding. You cycle in front of a TV typically to have the immersive effect happening.

 

There are no plans at the moment for VR headsets or anything like that because so far they have proven to be too bulky to be usable in the physical environment of sometimes-gruelling cycling, Min said. And for now, you also don’t use spinners or other stationary cycling apparatuses because these can’t provide the right kind of ‘real-world’ riding feel, he said. But this might evolve as Zwift partners with more third parties (and with companies like Peloton a big hit with home fitness enthusiasts, you can see how that might evolve).

In all of its sports and sport ambitions, Zwift is bringing not just basic tension and gaming dynamics to the table: it’s using some interesting algorithms to help train its users, and figure out what might be the best logical step for them in terms of increasing or decreasing difficulty while measuring all other cycling stats. Min says this all starts with getting an accurate weight for each user.

Cycling accounts for 98 percent of the company’s business at the moment, and running is just taking off. For runners, people use running treadmills, and that is the template the company wants to follow, eventually including rowing machines, step machines, and more. Sometimes the locations are actual places like Innsbruck, pictured above. Sometimes they are make-believe terrains, like the fictional Pacific Island Watopia, below:

Min tells me he started Zwift out of London because that is where he lives, but much of the development has come out of southern California, since that is where there is a stronghold of gaming developers. Min himself is an expat from America (there are a lot of us here!), New York specifically, who previously had been a VP at JP Morgan and then founded a fintech company called Sakkonet Technology that’s still going strong, and he happens to be a cycling enthusiast going back to childhood.

“I wanted to do something different from fintech and the idea for Zwift was starting right at me,” he said. “I was a cyclist since I was a kid, painfully so. The worst thing you could do is ride your bike indoors because it was so boring. I used all the products I could but it wasn’t engaging enough, so we thought, what about taking the tech that out there for gaming, combining that with what you do in cycle training, and bring all that to a digital platform? Even if you could get 80 percent of the experience, that would be better than what was offered in the past.” 

Highland and the other investors are all strategic, in that they are already investing quite a bit in other fitness enterprises, which could in turn point to partnerships down the road. Highland’s in eGym and Huel; True backs the Ribble cycling brand; and Causeway invests in traditional sports and esports.

“Zwift is a fantastically innovative company and they are certainly leading the way in the indoor training space,” says Tony Zappala, Partner of Highland Europe in a statement. “It’s a highly scalable business and we’ve been impressed with how they have already managed to expand globally – already 70 percent of current subscribers are from outside the USA. Research points to an audience of 40 million competitive and enthusiast cyclists, and many of those lie in the traditional cycling nations of Central Europe, so in this market alone there is huge growth potential.”

 

 

As Facebook colonized the rest of the web with its functionality in hopes of fueling user growth, it built aggressive integrations with partners that are coming under newfound scrutiny through a deeply reported New York Times investigation. Some of what Facebook did was sloppy or unsettling, including forgetting to shut down APIs when it cancelled its Instant Personalization feature for other sites in 2014, and how it used contact syncing to power friend recommendations.

But other moves aren’t as bad as they sound. Facebook did provide Spotify and Netflix the ability to access users messages, but only so people could send friends songs or movies via Facebook messages without leaving those apps. And Facebook did let Yahoo and Blackberry access people’s News Feeds, but to let users browse those feeds within social hub features inside those apps. These partners could only access data when users logged in and connected their Facebook accounts, and were only approved to use this data to provide Facebook-related functionality. That means Spotify at least wasn’t supposed to be rifling through everyone’s messages to find out what bands they talk about so it could build better curation algorithms, and there’s no evidence yet that it did.

Thankfully Facebook has ditched most of these integrations, as the dominance of iOS and Android have allowed it to build fewer, more standardized, and better safeguarded access points to its data. And it’s battened down the hatches in some ways, forcing users to shortcut from Spotify into the real Facebook Messenger rather than giving third-parties any special access to offer Facebook Messaging themselves.

The most glaring allegation Facebook hasn’t adequately responded to yet is that it used data from Amazon, Yahoo, and Huawei to improve friend suggestions through People You May Know — perhaps its creepiest feature. The company needs to accept the loss of growth hacking trade secrets and become much more transparent about how it makes so uncannily accurate recommendations of who to friend request — as Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill has documented.

In some cases, Facebook has admitted to missteps, with its Director of Developer Platforms and Programs Konstantinos Papamiltiadis writing “we shouldn’t have left the APIs in place after we shut down instant personalization.”

In others, we’ll have decide where to draw the line between what was actually dangerous and what gives us the chills at first glance. You don’t ask permission from friends to read an email from them on a certain browser or device, so should you worry if they saw your Facebook status update on a Blackberry social hub feature instead of the traditional Facebook app? Well that depends on how the access is monitored and meted out.

The underlying question is whether we trust that Facebook and these other big tech companies actually abided by rules to oversee and not to overuse data. Facebook has done plenty wrong, and after repeatedly failing to be transparent or live up to its apologies, it doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. For that reason, I don’t want it giving any developer — even ones I normally trust like Spotify — access to sensitive data protected merely by their promise of good behavior despite financial incentives for misuse.

Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos tweeted that “allowing for 3rd party clients is the kind of pro-competition move we want to see from dominant platforms. For ex, making Gmail only accessible to Android and the Gmail app would be horrible. For the NY Times to try to scandalize this kind of integration is wrong.” But countered that by noting that “integrations that are sneaky or send secret data to servers controlled by others really is wrong.”

Even if Spotify and Netflix didn’t abuse the access Facebook provided, there’s always eventually a Cambridge Analytica. Tech companies have proven their word can’t necessarily be trusted. The best way to protect users is to properly lock down the platforms with ample vetting, limits, and oversight so there won’t be gray areas that require us to put our faith in the kindness of businesses.

Meet PixelMe, a new software-as-a-service startup that wants to help marketers retarget customers using an URL shortener. The company just raised a $1.3 million at a $4 million pre-money valuation — investors now own 22 percent of the company.

PixelMe is taking a Buffer approach by sharing many behind-the-scene details of the company’s journey. You can even download the pitch deck, the term sheet and the cap table after this round.

The team realized that many people have been using URL shortener to include tracking parameters (UTMs) to track which campaign is working. PixelMe is taking this concept one step further by letting users embed one or multiple retargeting pixels when you follow a PixelMe link.

It means that you can add tracking pixels from Adwords, Facebook or Twitter for instance and leverage that to display relevant ads on Facebook, Twitter or Google later.

If you run your own store or website, you might not see the point of that as you can include all the tracking pixels you want on your website (as long as you remain GDPR compliant). But PixelMe lets you retarget users even if you promote an Amazon page for instance.

And the company claims that it complies with GDPR and works with Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature in its pitch deck.

So far, PixelMe has attracted 10,000 users who have generated $130,000 in revenue. The company reached $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue after 12 months and without raising any money.

Serena Capital is leading the round with €880,000. Kima Ventures is investing €50,000. Thomas Rebaud, Christophe Chausson, Stan Massueras, Manuel Jaffrin, Edouard Dessain-Gelinet, Gregory Gazagne are all investing between €10,000 and €15,000.

SoftBank Corp’s initial public offering today started with a bang before trailing off into a whimper, with the stock falling 14.5 percent during its first day of trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The company is the mobile unit of conglomerate SoftBank Group, whose holdings also include Sprint and the $100 billion Vision Fund.

Shares of SoftBank Corp opened at 1,463 yen, below the 1,500 yen the company had set for its IPO price (instead of a range), and closed at 1,282 yen. It offered 160 million shares, or about a third of the total held by parent company SoftBank Group. Despite a bumpy first day of trading, SoftBank Corp raised a total of 2.65 trillion yen (about $23.5 billion), making it Japan’s largest ever IPO and placing it just behind Alibaba’s record-setting $25 billion debut on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 (SoftBank Group is one of Alibaba’s largest shareholders).

According to Bloomberg, 90 percent of the investors who bought SoftBank Corp shares at the 1,500 opening price were individuals, who the company had targeted in an unusual marketing campaign.

Factors that may have dampened investor enthusiasm about include a network outage earlier this month triggered by a shutdown of Ericsson equipment due to expired software certificates (O2 customers in Great Britain were also affected).

The outage underscored other concerns about SoftBank Corp’s telecommunications infrastructure. According to a Nikkei report published last week, the company has decided to stop using hardware from Huawei Technologies due to security concerns and replace them over the next several years with equipment by Ericsson and Nokia.

While the company says the hardware swap isn’t expected to cost a lot of money, it will also need to deal with more competition next year. SoftBank Corp’s rivals are currently NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, but Rakuten will launch cellular service in October 2019, making it Japan’s fourth mobile network operator.

Furthermore, SoftBank Group also carries massive debt that totaled 18 trillion yen (about $160 billion) as of the end of September, more than six times the amount it earns on an operating basis. This means the Vision Fund is especially reliant on Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund, which contributed $48 billion, making it the fund’s largest investor.

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund, called the Public Investment Fund, is run by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been implicated by Turkish officials and the United State’s Central Intelligence Agency in the planning of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. Crown Prince bin Salman has denied involvement in the killing, but the situation still calls into question the future of Saudi Arabia’s involvement with SoftBank, especially since Crown Prince bin Salman said in October that Saudi Arabia plans to invest another $45 billion in the second Vision Fund.

As Facebook continues to grasp the severity of the situation in Myanmar, where the UN has concluded that its social network plays “determining role” in inciting genocide, the U.S. tech giant has completed a third sweep in recent months to remove bad actors from its platform.

Facebook said late Tuesday U.S. time that it has removed a total of 135 Facebook accounts, 425 Pages, 17 Groups and an additional 15 Instagram accounts with this latest piece of action.

Facebook has around 20 million users in Myanmar — that’s nearly all of the country’s internet users and nearly 40 percent of the population — and it gave some stats on the reach that it has now nullified:

• Approximately 2.5 million people followed at least one of these Facebook Pages
• Approximately 6,400 people belonged to at least one of these Facebook Groups
• Approximately 1,300 people followed at least one these Instagram accounts

This is Facebook third such cull in recent months. Its previous removals impacted some high-profile individuals as Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the military-owned Myawady television network were removed from the social network following “evidence [that they] committed or enabled serious human rights abuses in the country.”

What’s notable about this newest action is that the company said it took action because of “the behavior of these actors rather than on the type of content they were posting.”

We’re waiting for further confirmation on exactly what that means, but acting irrespective of posted content would represent an interesting change in its policing, and it could impact Facebook’s efforts in Myanmar — and other areas — going forward.

That’s promising but, unfortunately, it appears that Facebook is still reluctant to commit to opening a local office in Myanmar. That’s something that local civic groups on the ground in Myanmar — who have worked with Facebook to improve the situation — have called a key requirement for meaningful progress.

“How many companies have 20 million users in one country but don’t have a single employee, it’s absurd,” Jes Petersen — CEO of accelerator firm Phandeeyar, which is part of the advisory group — told TechCrunch last month. “An office would go a long way to building relationships with stakeholders.”

Facebook declined to comment on the possibility of a Myanmar-based office when we asked.

The company has pledged to increase the number of Burmese translators working on Myanmar-based content to 100 by the end of this year. It has said a number of times that it is working on AI-based solutions, too, but cracks still appear.

Equally, while reaching 100 translators means Facebook has more than doubled its Burmese-compliant content checking contingent, the figure is dwarfed by others. Myanmar’s army reportedly has 700 people working on its own Facebook strategy.

Sources familiar with the company’s thinking told TechCrunch that Facebook is concerned that “there would be real risks involved” if it were to open an office, “including the potential for increased government leverage on content and data requests as well as potential risks to Facebook’s employees.”

That response is backed, according to the sources, by the findings of a BSR report that was released last month.

If this is consistent with the company’s strategy then it is troubling because that doesn’t tell the whole truth of what is a very nuanced issue.

While it is correct that the report did mention the potential risks associated with an office — around both the safety of staff and potential for government pressure — the conclusion wasn’t that Facebook shouldn’t open the office. It was that there are “advantages and disadvantages” to it doing so.

So you could equally argue that it should open an office if you choose to focus the positive argument from the report.

More generally, it is certainly ironic that Facebook is (partially) citing insight from a report that it controversially released on the eve of the U.S. mid-term elections, a move that many took as an effort to bury the findings while the news cycle was focused on a key political moment.

While it may not get the same press attention as Russian-backed U.S. election meddling, the Facebook-Myanmar situation is a key one to watch in 2019. Facebook is the de facto internet in Southeast Asia and other emerging markets so its influence extends beyond anything people in Western markets can begin to imagine.