My Four Half Cents

Behind every news headline is often an under appreciated or overlooked detail. Here, that detail is the story. David Montalvo is a business journalist currently at CNBC. He received his master's of arts from CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and lives in Brooklyn.

[fourhalfcents-blog]

Isaac Newton, I Hardly Knew Ye

He lived to an old age and died a virgin. My time with one of the world’s greatest minds ended rather abruptly somewhere between New York City and El Paso, Texas.

It was a peculiar place to end with Isaac Newton, traveling high above the ground in a technological beast that seemed to defy the laws of gravity he had discovered centuries earlier. What would the man who was inspired by a falling apple think of a hunk of metal floating in the sky? He is, after all, the one who originated the concept of a satellite, that if you launch an object from just the right speed at some point above the earth it will fall forever. The satellite, Newton discovered, will always fall at the same rate towards Earth due to gravity, and the Earth’s surface will continue to curve below it at a constant rate.

In my case, the plane is neither falling straight down like an apple from a tree nor falling forever like a satellite.

My guess is that he would say little and immediately turn his attention to finding a mathematical explanation. But, if he did have something to say, I wouldn’t be allowed near him to hear it anyway.

Isaac Newton preferred to work and spend his time alone, I learned, even as his discoveries brought him fame. This wasn’t because he was shy, but rather the very opposite. His ego was as “colossal as his intellect,” it’s been written. It didn’t help that Newton, a deeply religious man, thought he was specifically tapped by God to translate His creation and universe by blessing him with incredible mathematical talents. The spelling of his name in Latin, after all, is an anagram for Jeova Sanctus Unus, or “Jehovah, the Holy One.” And Newton knew this. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that, while he may have been well respected, he had little friends and made a conscientious effort to avoid sexual connections.

"The way to chastity is not to struggle with incontinent thoughts,” he is said to have written, “but to avert ye thoughts by some employment, or by reading, or meditating on other thing.”

Newton didn’t care much for the arts and culture either, not for operas or sculptures, or for music or fashion. He was an intellectual stereotype who often forgot to eat, worked long hours, appeared disheveled, all because he was too consumed by his equations to even notice his hunger or appearance. But this lifestyle clearly served him well. In his early 20s Newton was turning out mathematical discoveries every couple of months, including some work in physics. Over the course of a mere 18 months, Newton proved the binomial theorem, found the method of tangents, direct method of fluxions, theory of colors, and the inverse method of fluxions. And then, quite naturally, he began pondering Earth’s gravity force on the moon. In other words, he had discovered “a great chunk of calculus” and the “nature of light,” historians write. Newton was just 23 years old, and still had at least 60 years of life left.

The boy genius, however, was not a lone genius. Newton was a part of the major mathematical and scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

His intellectual archrival at the time was a man whose character was opposite Newton’s. Gottfried Wilhelm von Liebniz sought the limelight and the company of women, and he reveled in the ostentatious manner and appearance that went with it. He loved publicizing his own mathematical discoveries so much that, on occasion, he was caught at parties claiming a few that didn’t belong to him. Oops!

But never mind that. Liebniz was a genius, often coincidentally working on problems that Newton was also working on. When the two discovered this, it inevitably led to fierce rivalry: who discovered this first, who published that first? In public, the two were cordial and, at times, straight up liars, professing their utmost respect for each other. But in behind closed doors, they were out to destroy each other.

Newton became the kind of person his contemporaries would not debate on any intellectual matter, whereas Liebniz, it’s been written, was someone “all-too-human” who incited quarrel and ridicule, as Voltaire did in Candide. And, in the end, Newton’s body found a home at Westminster Abbey, and Liebniz’s in an unmarked grave.

But there is reason for Newton, whose name, works and discoveries live on today, to not inspire envy.

“For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood,” English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley wrote. “As a monster he was superb.” I was fortunate enough meet the monster side of this supreme intellect in a book I discovered called The Clockwork Universe, by Edward Dolnick.

Oh, and apparently, that whole apple thing may not have actually happened. At least, it didn’t happen in the way characterized by popular culture.

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Wild Shelf Life

Dinosaurs roaming the halls. Exotic animals playing with extinct ones. Earlier versions of us suddenly springing back to life. Anyone in search of something that can fuel a wilder imagination than a night at the museum is pretty much on an impossible mission.

Or so I recently thought.

There is, I’ve discovered, something far more exciting about a world-class museum filled with bones, animal and artifacts than the imaginary one Hollywood presented in Night at the Museum. (In fact, this new discovery makes Hollywood’s version seem what was worthy of gentle mockery now open to malicious ridicule.) It’s a book I found on a recent trip to the American Museum of Natural History, hidden on a bottom shelf at the gift shop’s lower level, bound by a bland earth-tone cover that was easily overshadowed by the brightly colored ones with eye-grabbing images. In fact, the only reason this one grabbed my eye – let’s be honest – was because of the word dinosaur along the spine.

Published in in the mid-80s, Dinosaurs in the Attic, by Douglas Preston, tells the story of how the Museum came to be (and how it almost shuttered, thanks to corrupt politics in New York City) and of the wild journeys undertaken by some of the Museum’s explorers and collectors in order to build its incredible collections. I was transported back to the days before the Museum’s existance, when New York City almost put a Paleozoic museum in Central Park. I was thrust into a fierce scientific duel between feuding wealthy explorers over discoveries of the best dinosaur bones. I was even told of how politics in the paleontology community led to a brontosaurus display with the wrong skull – and remained that way until, at least, the book’s publishing. (The Museum tells me it has since corrected the display.) In a section about meteorites, I travelled to a murder scene in white-out conditions in the far northern reaches of Greenland. And in the section about gorillas, I got a chance to see a figure I’ve long seen on display come to life: the pensively postured chimpanzee Meshie. I also got to witness a diamond heist at the Museum, and the unbelievable role a dead battery played its security system.

The Museum’s secret adventures are numerous and their journeys outlast a night.

As a kid, I always wanted to be a paleontologist, so naturally one of my favorite stories from the book was about how the the brontosaurus ended up with the wrong head and was stuck with it for so many decades. The story plays out like a political drama, in which someone in position becomes blinded by pride and power. In this case, it was one of the Museum’s presidents, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a scientist so accomplished that he was labeled the “father of American paleontology.” The book, however, also describes him as “an egotist of the first rank – a man who could (and did) destroy scientific reputations of those who opposed him.” It was that ego that drove him to hastily add a skull to the headless brontosaurus that his paleontologist Walter Granger discovered in 1889 in Wyoming. Osborn wanted the first complete brontosaurus display. The need to be first came at the risk of needing to be right, with a correction seemingly nowhere in sight. Who would dare challenge Osborn and risk their reputation? In 1915, a scientist named Earl Douglass dared to suggest the skull, called Marsh’s skull, might be wrong. But it wasn’t until 1975, when Osborn was no longer a threat, that someone stepped up to officially challenge Marsh’s skull, which remained in place at the Museum until, at least, 1986, when the book was published. When I reached out to the Museum on this, I was merely told the old skull has been replaced, but was not told when the change happened.

This is a story I would never have known after all my visits, no matter how often I stopped by the brontosaurus or how long I spent staring up at it. I know it more intimately now.

Indeed, the collections on public display are no longer just lifeless objects. The book fills them with life by telling of their travels and adventures, their encounters with some of best early scientific minds, and the battles they have stirred. This applies not just to the animals but also the gems and minerals. And these stories only fuel the imagination to consider what other adventures are locked behind other collections and artifacts by this and all other museums.

This journey through the Dinosaurs in the Attic has made the monstrosity of a building on the Upper West Side stir – and brought its shelves to life.

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Apple Watch: Revolution Without The Evolution?

When companies don’t innovate – or don’t innovate quickly enough – they risk being replaced by one that’s typically younger, faster andcleverer. It’s a scene being played out in almost every industry thanks largelyto Silicon Valley: Tesla and big auto; Netflix and the television industry; Amazon and retail shops.

One of the most recent ones: Apple and watchmakers.

Apple, however, is not just challenging the Fitbits and Jawbones of the world, or midlevel watches. With watches costing as much as $17,000, Apple is also going after the luxury market, a space dominated by Swiss watchmakers. One would think the Swiss would scoff at Apple’s efforts to sell what some might call a “smartphone extension” for that price when consumers can, instead, fork out for the fine dials and craftsmanship of Swiss-made timepiece.  But, if such scoff was made, it didn’t last.

Today, TAG Heuer, a watch property by the luxury company LVMH, said it’s partnering with Google and Intel – the “two strongest giants in the technology” business is how TAG Heuer CEO described it to CNBC – to develop a smartwatch. While the idea of watching Apple and Google square off on high-end smartwatches makes for a great battle scene, I can help but wonder if there will even be a winner? With consumers, and marketers for that matter, still trying to figure out if even an entry-level smartwatch is something the masses want, could luxury smartwatches be doomed from the beginning?

"I still don't think Apple has answered the question: 'What is this thing for?’" said Henry Blodget, the founder and editor of Business Insider, on Squawk Alley, shortly after TAG Heuer’s announcement. Sure, there are some cutting edge health and fitness applications for the Apple Watch, but trying to sell the device on that pitch seems like trying to sell peas and carrots to kids on its nutritional profile when you know they just want candy. Does TAG Heuer and Android have something sweeter than Apple?

And, although many Apple experts expect the tech giant will sell several-million watches this year, they are less confident on whether those millions will be enough to constitute a success for Apple. Apple CEO Tim Cook, for his part, acknowledges this and recently addressed in an interview with Fast Company, saying, “I don’t think anything revolutionary that we have done was predicted to be a hit when released. It was only in retrospect that people could see its value. Maybe this will be received the same way.”

True, although one could argue some of those “revolutionary” products benefited from evolutionary perspective: iPods and iPads and iPhones were improvements on modern devices, rather than disrupting old ones. (It’s not like, for example, the iPod came right after the cassette. Consumers were adjusted with a Walkman, then CD, then the Internet, then the MP3 player, before Apple could evolve music players to an iPod.) I’m not so sure consumers have had the same opportunity with watches. They haven’t seen the watch evolve in quite the same way. And no one seems to know for certain what consumers want from devices on their wrists – which perhaps explains why marketers seem to have a hard time selling it. What’s the candy?

Furthermore, luxury watches have a history of being a kind of alternative investment, pieces that appreciate with time – the opposite of what happens with Apple products that seem to get refreshed every year. An op-ed on Nasdaq’s website argues that TAG Heuer going high-tech is (ironically!) a step backward. The strength of luxury watchmakers, the op-ed reads, “lies at least in part in the durability and longevity of their products. That, combined with some degree of rarity, make luxury watches an investment.” So, will a $17,000 Apple Watch, or any luxury smartwatch that still has you scratching your head, will appreciate when the next generation comes out? Apple consumers may have the stomach for device replacement, but TAG Heuer’s may not.

And, let’s not forget, Apple does have failures in its past.

There’s a mentality on Wall Street and among many tech watchers that Apple could really do no wrong – it has a strong ecosystem, sells devices like crazy, has beautiful designs – evident by its soaring shares and ginormous market cap. There’s good reason to think this way. But history also proves Apple is not perfect, as reminded by this Business Insider article, which does not include the recent iOS 8 crisis and the forced U2 album. Still, TAG Heuer has decided it will not wait and see if Apple successfully advances over enemy lines. The Swiss watchmaker has decided to fight. 

“It looks like an Apple Watch,” said TAG Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver, but, he added, “I prefer a little bit more sexy.”

And with that shot fired, time will tell who will win – if there can be a winner on the luxury smartwatch battlefield.

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Snapchat Kicking Ass

Snapchat is kicking some serious ass.

The messaging app is commanding top dollar from advertisers, is popular among America’s future on college campuses, is maturing into a media outlet through its new Discover feature with big news sites, including CNN (which did an interview with Sen. Rand Paul over Snapchat this week), Cosmopolitan, ESPN and National Geographic, and last week got into an original content series with Steven Spielberg’s daughter.

And then this happened.

Today, Madonna, the master of reinvention, directed her 19 million fans on Facebook, 2.8 million followers on Instagram and 550 thousand tweeps to Snapchat for the world premiere of her first music video from her new album Rebel Heart, Living for Love. But she didn't simply direct them all to Snapchat, she also gave detailed instructions to the new Discover feature, which was just launched last week. Boom! It’s hard to imagine that Madonna had this way of releasing her first music video planned back in December, when she was rushing to push her album out after hackers prematurely released a few tracks. Whether it’s in spite of or because of the hack that allured Madonna to the ephemeral social media service, it’s a big win for Snapchat.

So, should Twitter and Facebook be nervous?

No, not everything Madonna touches turns to gold. (Swept Away, anyone?) But that’s not the point. It’s not what she wins out of this. It’s what Snapchat wins, which is global recognition and legitimacy that it can be taken seriously as a media forum. We’ve all seen those world premiere videos on MTV or after some TV event (ABC’s 20/20 premiered Britney Spears’ Womanizer after a broadcast back in 2008). Madonna could have done that, perhaps, after her performance at the Grammys this weekend. But she didn’t. She also didn’t post a video online somewhere, to later share on Facebook or Twitter. She didn’t even tease the video with small clips on Vine or Instagram, which she regularly used to tease her new album. No. She opted to wrangle her fans across a variety of social media platforms and herded them toward Snapchat.

“Snapchat is the anti-Twitter,” BTIG media tech analyst Rich Greenfield recently wrote in a research note. “Snapchat’s Discover is squarely focused on easy-to-consume, easy-to-use, curated content – picking the best content that the mass market millennial will be interested in.” 

Indeed, Snapchat didn’t just dump the music video somewhere deep within its app or jumbled in a feed that would, perhaps, be too complicated for existing or new users to find. It turned it into a type of Snapchat Story, that is, multiple snaps that were one tap away on the Discover page: There’s one snap that introduces and plays the video, another two that are behind the scenes, and a final one with Madonna, telling viewers with a wink and a smile, “Thanks for watching my new video on Snapchat. And I’ll see you at the Grammys.”

If Snapchat’s Discover is taking on Twitter, this Story feature is taking on Facebook.

Story is “the new version of the Facebook Wall,” wrote Greenfield, and it’s helping make Snapchat a place where advertisers want to go in order to reach that desirable younger demographic. For years now, experts have been saying that Snapchat is “grabbing” Facebook’s teenagers. And recent studies find a majority of college students are using it every day. (This could explain why Snapchat got into Snapcash, a payments service that lets users send money to friends who, for example, spotted beer and pizza for those late-night studies. But the peer payment service is also one that would seem to have been a natural extension for Facebook. Missed opportunity?)

O.K. So a younger audience is perhaps a win for Madonna, but deciding to release on Snapchat is not without its risks. There’s always a chance that her older fans, perhaps on Facebook, won’t partake in the world premiere. Or perhaps the publicity won’t have as wide a reach. Beyoncé faced similar risks when she decided to drop, unannounced, her album on iTunes. But its safe to say that, when you’re as big as either of them, everything you touch turns into huge publicity.

And that’s the good news for Snapchat today. Madonna took it from teenville to mass territory, and showing that someone of her caliber is willing to do businesses with it.

“Many think of [Snapchat] as a tool primarily for sharing inappropriate, graphic content,” wrote Greenfield in a research note last quarter, before the launch of Discover. “What they are missing is just how far Snapchat has evolved.” Indeed, it’s time to start paying closer attention to Snapchat. 

Madonna has. 

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English Champagne Is Served

Move over Champagne, France. There's a new champagne in town and its not French. It's English.

It may come as a surprise to absolutely no one that Her Majesty the Queen, the reigning personification of a culture hell-bent on tradition, prefers her champagne from its original source in France, specifically a bottle of Pol Roger, I learned on a recent trip to the English countryside. The sparkling wine producer is a Royal Warrant holder, which means it supplies to the households of Her Majesty and is allowed to mark its goods with a special seal that conveys to consumers, “Hey, I’m good enough for the Queen!” A friend had brought over a bottle to ring in the New Year. As an American and an outsider to this marketing ploy, I found myself rather excited to sip on something the Queen could also possibly be enjoying at that exact moment. But what was more interesting was the other bottle of sparkling wine, which was introduced to me as “English champagne.” It was a 2008 bottle of Classic Cuvée by Chapel Down, a wine producer from southeast England, not France. While Chapel Down today is not listed as a Royal Warrant holder, it is said that its goods were served at the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William. (One can only image the Queen must have enjoyed – or graciously endured since she’s not stocking her households with it – a glass of the bubbly English grapes.)

Like Chapel Down, wine producers in other cooler regions like Oregon and Washington are breaking tradition and increasingly making their way into restaurants and kitchens as rising global temperatures impact harvests.

"Climate change over the next few decades is of particular relevance for the wine industry," said one of the co-authors of a 2011 Stanford study, which assumes average global temperatures will rise by just two degrees Fahrenheit over the next three decades. Wake up Napa Valley because the study found California wine will get screwed, while Oregon's stands to benefit from warmer weather.

But we don't have to wait until 2040 to see if the study bears fruit.

A federal study released this year found growing demand and export for wine from Washington State, whose crop value grew more than 19% in 2013, according to an agricultural publication.  It also happens that that year, Washington and Oregon wines ranked in the Top 10 of Wine Spectator’s annual list, placing them alongside French, Italian and Napa Valley wines.

Is this already the effects of climate change, or was it just an isolated case of favorable weather?

In either case, the playing field is being disrupted. But if it's the former, there is one grape in particular that experts are closely watching. Like the polar ice caps, the wine industry has a polar bear of its own, according to a recent article in Slate on global warming that was written in partnership with New America and the University of Arizona. The polar bear of wines, it turns out, is the pinot noir, which is found to have the “narrowest agreeable temperature range of the top 15 most planted varietals.” These fussy pinot noir grapes, the article argues, will move further north to areas like New York’s Finger Lakes, Washington State and it’s Canadian neighbor, British Columbia.

Back over in Europe, just as California grapes face stiffening competition from states to the north, so are France and Italy, famed wine producers, from England and Wales.

Chapel Down, the English wine producer from southeast England and Lady Catherine Middleton’s choice for her royal nuptials, recently reported record harvest for 2013, according to the Financial Times. As Chapel Down’s chief executive Frazen Thompson described it, “We got all the right weather at the right time enabling us to have a sensational harvest in terms of quality and quantity.”

And, if the Stanford study is correct and can be extrapolated to Europe, Chapel could be the new Champagne and become the new tradition at celebrations by 2040. Or, perhaps, sooner. One newspaper headline across the pond this year already bragged: Britain is beating France at its own game with soaring exports of bubbly. In that story, the British Environmental Secretary reports that “exports of English and Welsh wine are on course to break a £100 million barrier this year, two-thirds of it in sparkling wine, as our confident producers take on the Australians, French and Italians at what was their own game.”

So, perhaps “English champagne” is less of a paradox and more of a promise, a trend in such early stages that its embrace by the young royal couple surprised even some British tabloids.

Could the Queen, who is not one to be trendy, soon come around?

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That Ugly Christmas Sweater Is So Hot... Now

They’re tacky. They’re obnoxious. And it doesn’t seem like ugly Christmas sweaters are going away anytime soon.

What seems to have begun as innocently as merely poor textile designs of the mid-twentieth century has evolved into a deliberate assault on fashion. And there are signs that the ugly Christmas sweater and Halloweenification of the holidays is only getting worse.

And by worse, I mean better.

“People want to walk into a holiday party and get an immediate reaction by standing out uniquely from other sweaters,” Meri Barnes, an executive at Ugly Christmas Sweater Kit, which sells do-it-yourself kits that included a bulky sweater, glue, sewing needle and thread, stencils and a bunch of ornaments to get you started, told me. Last year, it sold about 35,000 of these kits, and expects to sell more than 10 times that this year, approximately 400,000 kits.

Yes, the ugly Christmas sweater environment has gotten so competitive that people are no longer satisfied with dad’s hand-me-down or the ready-to-wear ones already out there. People now need to create their own Christmas catastrophes.

This will be my first year participating in this fashion faux pas and, after perusing the sweaters at Target and Party City, decided to go with a kit. While the creative process of coming up with something tacky yet very much today – I incorporated the Internet sensation shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Frozen’s lovable Olaf and the ubiquitous mustache – I had a few close calls with the needle and, on more than one occasion, accidentally sewed the front and back panels of the sweater together. But in the end, after the sweat and needle pricks, I was left with something that felt a bit like a piece of art, if not a masterpiece.

But if it wasn’t, apparently there’s always eBay. 

Between the DIY kits and the subjectivity of what exactly makes an ugly Christmas sweater an ugly Christmas sweater, determining the market size seems a daunting task not yet taken up broadly, in my quick research. But some niche consumer market research firms, like Terapeak, which focuses on eBay, found that the annual market for ugly Christmas sweaters on the e-commerce site is about $1 million – and growing. The figure doesn’t even include other ugly accessories like socks and boxers, or even one of the latest crazes, the ugly Christmas suit, like those made by Shinesty. (The suits are sold out, but they’re taking orders for next year!)

The sweater, however, has also become so mainstream since the days Colin Firth wore the red-nosed reindeer jumper in Bridget Jones’ Diary that it now has its own day, the second Friday of December, thanks to a group of college kids from San Diego State University.

The story goes that National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day (NUCSD) grew out of an ugly Christmas sweater party thrown by those students back in 2008. “And once we graduated, we started promoting NUCSD as more of a day and less of an isolated party,” one of those students, Wesley Flippo, told me. “The trend really exploded in 2011,” he said, and NUCSD has seen tons of web traffic since then, estimating almost 10 million visits this year. NUCSD further estimates that I may be in the company of 5 million others who will be wearing an ugly sweater this Friday. “It’s definitely an estimate but we think it’s a close approximation,” said Flippo, who got to the number based on web traffic, corporation participation and other market data. Barnes, from the Ugly Christmas Sweater Kit, also said she has seen a “big jump” in web traffic. “It happens to be a huge time for the DIY trend and the ugly sweater trend which has obviously played a huge part in the success of our kits,” Barnes added.

Still, perhaps, surprising to no one, not everyone is feeling the holiday spirit over it.

A recent article in Men’s Journal made its position on the matter quite clear with the headline “Why You Should Just Say No to Ugly Christmas Sweaters.” The article calls it a “tired trend” and argues that there is “no reason anybody should ever wear ugly Christmas sweaters.” But, despite the opposition, the article does concede, if reluctantly, that “somehow the gaudy holiday industry is thriving like never before.” And Men’s Journal might have a change of heart if it knew Wesley Flippo and his college buddies behind NUCSD have partnered with Save the Children to help raise funds, one ugly sweater at a time.

“We just want to bring light to the holidays and do something fun,” Flippo said.

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How A PayPal Brain Wants to Beat Big Banks

No cash? No credit? No problem. All that time spent on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn could finally start to pay off.

There are now banking startups than can search through your social media data to determine a new kind of credit score that can be used to make loans. If the idea sounds scary, you’re not alone. It’s one the Wall Street Journal explored earlier this year, highlighting regulatory concerns of lenders using such data.

You’re also probably not a millennial.

At least, that’s what one of the founders of PayPal, Max Levchin, suggested to CNBC when he was interviewed about his startup, Affirm, which uses social media data to make small loans to consumers in an instant. Millennials, with their little credit history but who “are very excited about putting themselves out there online,” said Levchin, “are misrepresented by FICO score and the credit bureau data.” This, he said, makes them his prime customer.

FICO, after all, is all about the money.

Scores are determined by a combination of payment history, the amount owed, length of credit history, new credit and the types of credit used, and more than 90% of lending decisions are made using FICO scores, according to Fair Isaac Corporation. Levchin, however, believes Affirm’s “propriety underwriting technology” can do better. “We look at everything – everything we can honestly and legally get our hands on,” he said, including FICO scores.

For its part, FICO has expressed interest in the use of social media data. A senior specialist there told the Wall Street Journal that such data “could be predictive and we’re looking into it, but it isn’t yet.”

It’s also perhaps a boon for Levchin’s startup that millennials seem less interested in getting credit cards. A recent Bankrate survey found that more than half of them (those between 18 and 29 years old) don’t even have one. One of the reasons for this, according to the survey, is that they may “fear” falling into debt and finding themselves unable to pay their bills. Levchin agrees. Not only are millennials “not excited” in carrying a balance on credit cards, he said, but a revolving credit account is “yesteryear’s problem.”

Enter Affirm.

The lending startup, which prompts users for four pieces of information to confirm identity and underwrite the loan, allows consumers to repay over 3, 6 or twelve months, with a rate that Levchin describes is “a little bit better – sometimes a lot better – than what their credit card would be if they had one.”

Levchin would not say exactly which of your activities on Facebook or Twitter would be considered or how they would impact your credit score, but a German startup called Kreditch said it looks at, among other things, whether a borrower’s “network on Facebook [is] just drinking buddies from a bar,” as well as which smartphone the borrower uses, according to the same Wall Street Journal story.

Critics of lenders mining for social media data to measure credit risk have pointed to one obvious point: people can lie. This, one credit expert wrote, can “game the system."

Levchin, on the other hand, indicated no such qualms, instead emphasized his faith in data to create a better system for consumers.

“This is not about trying to under-price or scare anybody in the big bank world,” the PayPal co-founder said, “but rather beat them by being honest with the customer."

And to do just that, he added, “there’s plenty of data.”

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Twitter Has A 'Super' Sister

She’s from New Jersey. He’s from Massachusetts. She went off to become a conceptual artist with exhibitions at MoMA. He greased up his gears at Google and eventually helped start Twitter. That the two are also separated by 30 years only adds to the idea that Barbara Kruger and Biz Stone live in what seems to be completely different universes.

That is, until now.

Last month, Stone’s social media whiz and Kruger’s artistic social activism may have found a common galaxy in a new mobile application called Super, a profoundly simple yet highly creative app that lets users superimpose their opinions on images and then immediately share them within the social network. And, yes, even within Twitter. The best Supers, as they are called, are those that perfectly match clever copy with an interesting image, and have the side-effect of lingering in the mind after they’ve been viewed. This demands a more sophisticated level of thought and communication than a tweet. No room for laziness, or it will show.

It may sound like more work than it's worth. But, in many ways, the higher bar is what makes creating and consuming Supers all the more satisfying.

“It’s just very fun, very bold, very artistic app that lets anyone kind of become an artist,” Stone told CNBC on my invitation to talk about Super, the second app under his new company Jelly Industries. “It’s kind of inspired by that artist Barbara Kruger.”

A stretch, perhaps, to call the app an art creator and its users, artists, but it is one of the most interesting new examples of art and technology since Pixar, which produced the very first feature-length computer-animated film Toy Story in 1995. Almost two decades later, the film’s director and chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar, John Lasseter, described the art-technology relationship as “art challenges technology, and technology inspires art.”

So, who is this artist challenging one of Twitter’s daddies?

She’s a former magazine designer at Condé Nast who found her artistry by defacing those very glamorous pages. She’s a “mass media artist,” the Smithsonian magazine once described her, whose work ranges from “overtly political” to “culturally acidic” and “challengingly metaphysical.” I’m no art snob so I’m not quite sure what any of those quotes mean (hence why they’re still in quotes). But I did find that Kruger would beg to differ – a little. “I never say I do political art. Nor do I do feminist art. I'm a woman who's a feminist, who makes art,” she told Interview magazine.

Like with the Super app, photography plays a fundamental role in Kruger’s creations. And Stone, with his social tech wisdom, has made that part easy.

The app lets users access photos from their smartphones, or use one of the images automatically suggested by the app, or even do a Google Image search of sorts. Just don’t expect Kruger's professional approval. “I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism – objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others,” she also told Interview. I did reach out to Kruger for a comment on Super and her thoughts on social media but she could not be reached.

On the plus side: Super is not out to be that serious… yet!

“The key is to start with fun and, you know, that’s really what we did, and that’s what we were doing when we started Twitter,” said Stone. “I’ve learned over the years that when something is fun, then people use it. And if a lot of people use it, it can become important.”

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"Brief" Encounter with Black Friday

The thong department saved me this Black Friday, a day when corporate bottom lines titillate American consumerism into one giant orgasm. And, it turns out, I wasn’t the only one.

  Shortly after the turkey-induced coma subsided and several drinks were had on Thanksgiving night with friends in lower Manhattan it was decided we would all hop on the subway and experience Black Friday in the heart of it all: Macy’s Herald Square. After all, only those out of their fucking minds would shop during the wee hours at, until recently, the world’s largest department store on that frenetic day, we thought. It would be the perfect outpost for many of us first-timers.

  Filled with giggles and credit cards, we set off on a half-crowded uptown 1 Train.

  At about 2:30 in the morning, despite the unwelcoming cold air along 34th Street, retail shops appeared to be as busy as though it were midday. In the lower level at Zara, men were flipping price tags around, lining up for changing rooms and creating messy piles out of garments they ultimately felt would simply not work. At Victoria’s Secret, where two women from our group were shopping, men, often appearing bored, could be seen hanging out by the exits, while women with large pink bags kept coming out.

  It was now almost 4 o’clock, and our next stop was across the street, behind a crowded sidewalk: Macy’s.

  I was practically holding my breath from the nerves. The more sensible people in my life who, by this hour were sleeping, had texted and told me to be careful. “Hope you survive,” one said. But to my pleasant surprise – and perhaps just the tiniest bit of disappointment – it was calm inside. There were no stampedes at this hour – at least, none that I witnessed. No one was trampled to death. And no fights broke out over the last size of something that no one probably needed. But there did seem to be a don’t-fuck-with-me temperament about the shoppers. People looked tired. Others smelled of alcohol. And some were hauling their loads of purchases like some kind of armor to muscle their ways through the crowds.

  Of the many levels of men’s shoes and clothing, there was only one department that was practically empty. It’s one that is facing an increasingly complicated question: boxers or briefs?

  Men’s underwear is now a $2.7 billion market, up 3% from a year ago, according to research firm NPD Group. More interestingly, preferences for the cut and style are changing, too. Those bulky, loose-fitting boxers are losing market-share to slim and skinny bottoms, a category of men’s underwear that has grown 11% over the past year.

  “Men now join women in caring about inner wear,” wrote the chief industry analyst of that report, Marshal Cohen, who also drew a parallel between this underwear trend and the comeback of the skinny jeans. (Full disclosure, I was wearing skinny corduroy pants at the time I was thumbing through the Emporio Armani briefs and thongs rack.)

Meanwhile, this article by The New York Times from 2004, well before skinny jeans went mainstream, believed the slim underwear trend began in the years after the first Calvin Klein ads, when men were transforming themselves into “objects of an erotic gaze.”

If true, it’s a transformation perhaps no less helped by the rise of the selfie – a word that wasn’t around a decade ago.

Nowadays, it’s become a rare event when a gym selfie doesn’t cross a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram feed, let alone what salacious things get shared on Snapchat, Tinder, Grindr and a bunch of other social networks. Could social media be driving this market? “After all that hard work and dieting, they’d be looking to show off,” the founder of the startup online men’s underwear store FashionGraphy recently said. “So, this is where selfies come into the picture.”

There you go.

Perhaps it’s not that more guys are suddenly becoming bodybuilders, professional athletes or porn stars that is causing this rise in the adoption of briefs, thongs and jockstraps. And the skinny jeans parallel feels incomplete. (We've seen skinny pants in fashion's past.) Perhaps the better parallel, therefore, is actually the rise of the smartphone boom and better mobile technology. Better built-in cameras in phones and tablets and a growing number of social media apps are are making it easier for guys to transform themselves into "objects of erotic gaze" in the form of selfies, and then share them with the world.

Indeed, men's skinny skivvies may actually have smartphones and social media to thank.

And, while it seems paradoxical that the skinny bottoms department at the world famous Macy’s in New York City was empty on one of the busiest days of the year at a time when the skinny bottoms market is booming, my shopping experience may explain why.

There were no Black Friday doorbuster deals on those items.