Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category

This app can help you find Bay Area COVID vaccine appointments in real time. Heres how it works – San Francisco Chronicle

Mukesh Aggarwal created a free channel on an app that helps Bay Area residents find available coronavirus vaccine appointments out of his own frustration and struggle to find an appointment for his parents.

He said it was difficult to track all the various sites run by a myriad of government agencies, pharmacies and health providers for an appointment, especially when they are snapped up so quickly.

And with vaccine eligibility opening up to Californians 50 and older on Thursday and everyone 16 and older on April 15, demand is expected to soar. Officials are saying it could take weeks for supply to catch up.

If Im having a hard time, people who are not tech savvy will have an even harder time, said Aggarwal, a software engineer at Intuit and a Fremont resident.

He created the Marut Bot app that scans websites to find available appointments hourly at most public and private providers, except Kaiser. The app then alerts people in the BayAreaVaccineNotification channel on the Telegram chat app.

A screenshot of the BayAreaVaccineNotification channel on the Telegram chat app.

The channel had about 200 people a month ago. As of Wednesday, there were more than 10,300 subscribers.

The app scrapes more than 100 vaccine sites for appointments within driving distance in the Bay Area. People dont even know that theres so many providers around them, Aggarwal said.

Many Bay Area residents have driven far distances or lined up at vaccination sites at 2 a.m. to search for available appointments, he said.

Mukesh Aggarwal, a software engineer from Fremont, created a free channel on an app that helps Bay Area residents find available coronavirus vaccine appointments.

Aggarwal said he was working on partnering with other developers to expand their reach, possibly outside the Bay Area. Demand seems high, given the frustrations expressed by thousands in the Facebook group Bay Area Vaccine Hunters, who post about their attempts to snare appointments.

It will be unrealistic to expect that people will be checking [provider websites] frequently, said Aggarwal, who is a member of the group.

Providers should find a way to push the information to them, he said.

Aggarwal said he does not expect anything in return for his efforts, but wants people to pay it forward and help at least one underpriveleged or non-tech-savvy person get a vaccine appointment.

Heres how to sign up for the BayAreaVaccineNotification channel if you have an iPhone or Android (more detailed instructions can be found here):

Install the Telegram app on your phone.

Sign up for an account by entering your phone number and first and last name.

On your phones browser, go to https://t.me/bayareavaccinenotification or click on that link. You may also search for Bayareavaccinenotification in the search bar.

Click view in Telegram, which will take you back to the app and click join.

If you need help booking an appointment or have questions about the process, you can join the Bay Area Vaccine Hunters Facebook group, where users share tips.

Jessica Flores is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @jesssmflores

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This app can help you find Bay Area COVID vaccine appointments in real time. Heres how it works - San Francisco Chronicle

Biden Administration Working on ‘Vaccine Passport’ Initiative – HealthDay News

MONDAY, March 29, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard for a "vaccine passport" that could be used as the country tries to reopen in the coming months.

The effort has gained steam following President Biden's pledge that the nation will begin to return to normal this summer and with a growing number of companies saying they will require proof of vaccination before reopening for business, the Washington Post reported.

The administration's initiative has been driven largely by arms of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity. The White House this month took on a bigger role in coordinating government agencies involved in the work, with a goal of announcing updates in the coming days, one official told the newspaper.

The initiative has required that officials coordinate across dozens of agencies and a variety of experts. The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass, the Post reported. Americans without smartphone access should be able to print out the passports, developers have said.

U.S. officials face numerous challenges, including data privacy and health-care equity. They want to make sure all Americans will be able to get credentials that prove they have been vaccinated, but also want to set up systems that are not easily hacked and design passports that cannot be counterfeited, the Post reported.

There are already 17 initiatives underway identified by the Biden Administration to try to accomplish this, the Post reported. Those initiatives include a World Health Organization-led effort and a digital pass devised by IBM that is being tested in New York state.

One of the teams working on vaccine passports is the Vaccination Credential Initiative, a coalition trying to standardize how data in vaccination records is tracked.

"The busboy, the janitor, the waiter that works at a restaurant, wants to be surrounded by employees that are going back to work safely and wants to have the patrons ideally be safe as well," Brian Anderson, a physician at Mitre, a nonprofit that runs federally funded research centers, who is helping lead the initiative, told the Post.

Anderson's team is aiming to release its free software standards in April, hoping developers will use them to help build digital vaccine records that allow people to show they have been inoculated. The Vaccination Credential Initiative includes the Mayo Clinic, Microsoft and more than 225 other organizations, the Post reported.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is participating in the WHO's effort to create "digital vaccination certificates," is preparing to play a role in determining which organizations will credential and issue the certificates, in addition to informing the public, CDC documents reviewed by the Post show.

Still, public health experts said the Biden administration needs to tread softly with vaccine passports.

"If it became a government mandate, it would go down a dark road very quickly," said Brian Castrucci, head of the de Beaumont Foundation, a public health group funding research into vaccine hesitancy. "It becomes a credential. It becomes a 'needing your papers,' if you will. That could be dangerous -- and it could turn off people."

"It has to be that everyone can get it, and it's their choice, as it were," said Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethics expert who advised Biden's transition team on the coronavirus. "The one thing I am concerned [about] is that some people won't be able to get vaccinated for a variety of reasons."

Biden sets new goal of 200 million shots by 100th day in office

President Joe Biden said Thursday that the country will put 200 million coronavirus vaccine doses into the arms of Americans by his 100th day in office, doubling the goal he first set when he was inaugurated.

"We will, by my 100th day in office, have administered 200 million shots in people's arms," Mr. Biden said, announcing his new goal at the start of his first news conference. "That's right 200 million shots in 100 days. I know it's ambitious, twice our original goal, but no other country in the world has even come close."

The goal appears attainable: As of Monday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that over 143 million shots had been administered, and that 15.5 percent of the American population was fully vaccinated.

The United States is averaging about 2.5 million vaccine doses a day. If that pace continues, about half of the nation's population will be at least partly vaccinated by mid-May, The New York Times said.

Vaccine makers are now hitting their stride, and Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have promised enough doses to inoculate all 260 million adult Americans by May. In June, the first vaccine producers, Pfizer and Moderna, are expected to deliver another 100 million doses enough to vaccinate 50 million more people, The New York Times reported.

Officials say the nation will soon reach a point where the supply of vaccine outpaces demand. At that point, the biggest challenge will be convincing still skeptical Americans to get the shots, and deciding what to do with a growing stockpile, the Times reported.

Vaccine hesitancy is particularly prominent among minorities and Republicans, the Times said.

Earlier Thursday, White House officials said the administration would spend $10 billion on congressionally-appropriated money to expand access to COVID-19 vaccines and build vaccine confidence in the hardest-hit and highest-risk communities.

AstraZeneca lowers efficacy rate of its COVID vaccine

Following a sharp rebuke from an independent oversight board over potentially misleading information on the effectiveness of its coronavirus vaccine, AstraZeneca released new data last Wednesday that showed the vaccine is slightly less effective than the company had claimed two days earlier.

After saying that the vaccine was 79 percent effective last Monday, the company said Wednesday that the vaccine was 76 percent effective at preventing COVID-19.

"The [latest] primary analysis is consistent with our previously released interim analysis, and confirms that our COVID-19 vaccine is highly effective in adults, including those aged 65 years and over," Mene Pangalos, executive vice president of BioPharmaceuticals R&D at AstraZeneca, said in a company news release. "We look forward to filing our regulatory submission for Emergency Use Authorization in the U.S. and preparing for the rollout of millions of doses across America."

The latest results do strengthen the case for the vaccine's efficacy, but they may not restore AstraZeneca's credibility with U.S. health officials, theTimes said.

When it released its interim trial results on Monday, AstraZeneca ignored dozens of recently confirmed COVID-19 cases that had cropped up in trial volunteers before mid-February, the Times reported.

In a letter to the company and federal health officials later that day, the independent board that was overseeing the clinical trial issued a highly unusual reprimand to AstraZeneca for appearing to cherry-pick data to make its vaccine appear more effective, the Times reported.

"Decisions like this are what erode public trust in the scientific process," the oversight board's letter said. The members of the monitoring board wrote that their statistical modeling had found that the vaccine might have a lower efficacy rate -- between 69 and 74 percent -- if the COVID-19 cases in question were included in the analysis, the Times reported.

It was not clear why the oversight board's projection turned out to be lower than the figure in AstraZeneca's latest results. Those statistics could still change because there are still 14 possible COVID-19 cases that AstraZeneca officials have not yet classified as actual cases, according to the company's statement.

The dispute over AstraZeneca's U.S. trial results follows a safety scare in Europe that prompted more than a dozen countries to temporarily suspend use of the vaccine. European regulators said last week that a review had found the shot to be safe, after a small number of people who had been vaccinated developed blood clots and abnormal bleeding. The U.S. trial did not turn up any signs of such safety problems, the Times said.

A global scourge

By Monday, the U.S. coronavirus case count passed 30.2 million while the death toll neared 548,000, according to a Times tally. On Monday, the top five states for coronavirus infections were: California with over 3.6 million cases; Texas with nearly 2.8 million cases; Florida with over 2 million cases; New York with over 1.8 million cases; and Illinois with over 1.2 million cases.

Curbing the spread of the coronavirus in the rest of the world remains challenging.

In Brazil, the coronavirus case count was over 12.5 million by Monday, with more than 312,000 deaths, a Johns Hopkins University tally showed. India had over 12 million cases and nearly 162,000 deaths as of Monday, the Hopkins tally showed.

Worldwide, the number of reported infections passed 127.2 million on Monday, with nearly 2.8 million deaths recorded, according to the Hopkins tally.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the new coronavirus.

SOURCES: Washington Post; The New York Times

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Biden Administration Working on 'Vaccine Passport' Initiative - HealthDay News

3 Software Growth Stocks That Should Be on Your Watch List – The Motley Fool Canada

Growth stocks havent performed as expected this year. Rising interest rates and compressing valuations have dented high-flying stocks that delivered triple-digit returns last year. Value stocks, by comparison, have been doing much better in 2021.

However, long-term investors should look beyond these short-term gyrations. The current ongoing correction could create opportunities. Here are the top three software growth stocks that are starting to look attractive in the current market environment.

Topicus (TSXV:TOI) hasnt been a public company for too long, which is probably why its been overlooked by the market. The firm is a spin-off from enterprise software giant Constellation Software. Just like its parent, Topicus focuses on acquiring vertical market software providers.

Unlike its parent, this acquirer focuses on acquisition targets in Europe. Europes tech talent and software solutions tend to fly under the radar. Domestic investors are much more risk-averse and far less tech savvy, which translates to lower valuations for software companies.

Effectively, Topicus has plenty of attractive opportunities on the continent. That should help it grow a steady pace and deliver extraordinary returns for early shareholders. At the moment, the stock is trading at 15.8 times free cash flow, which is far lower than many of its rivals in the industry. Add this growth stock to your watch list.

Healthtech software firm WELL Health (TSX:WELL) went from being an obscure venture stock to one of the best performing tech stocks on the market over the past year. The company offers software solutions to manage medical records. However, its acquisitions over the past year have expanded its capabilities extensively.

WELL Health now has physical clinics across Canada, a virtual telehealth service, cybersecurity tools and a vast collection of medical software tools. Many of these platforms saw tremendous traction during the pandemic. Now, WELL has enough resources to accelerate its acquisition-driven growth strategy.

However, the stock has plunged along with the rest of the tech market. WELL stock is down 20% from its all-time high just a month ago. Its now trading at four times annualized recurring revenue estimates for 2021. In short, its an undervalued growth stock that deserves closer attention.

Kinaxis (TSX:KXS) is a surprising victim of the recent tech sell-off. Unlike other software companies, Kinaxis actually benefits from the economic reopening. It offers supply-chain software solutions for the worlds largest traders and logistics corporations.

As consumption and international trade explode in 2021, Kinaxis should see a growth spurt. However, the stock has declined 34% from August last year. Its now trading at a price-to-free cash flow ratio of 80. That ratio may seem high, but consider the fact that cash flows were suppressed throughout 2020. The economic rebound should help Kinaxis win more contracts and expand its bottom line.

Keep an eye on this growth stock.

Looking for another intense growth stock? Here's a pick.

This Tiny TSX Stock Could Be the Next Shopify

One little-known Canadian IPO has doubled in value in a matter of months, and renowned Canadian stock picker Iain Butler sees a potential millionaire-maker in waiting...Because he thinks this fast-growing company looks a lot like Shopify, a stock Iain officially recommended 3 years ago - before it skyrocketed by 1,211%!Iain and his team just published a detailed report on this tiny TSX stock. Find out how you can access the NEXT Shopify today!

Click here to discover how!

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium service or advisor. Were Motley! Questioning an investing thesis even one of our own helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer, so we sometimes publish articles that may not be in line with recommendations, rankings or other content.

Fool contributor Vishesh Raisinghani owns shares of WELL Health Technologies. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Constellation Software and Topicus.Com Inc. The Motley Fool recommends KINAXIS INC.

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3 Software Growth Stocks That Should Be on Your Watch List - The Motley Fool Canada

10+ can’t-miss Houston business and innovation events online in April – InnovationMap

This month, Houstonians have yet another good batch of online innovation events from Zoom panels to virtual conferences and you and your tech network need to know about them.

Here's a roundup of virtual events not to miss this month from workshops and webinars to summits and pitch parties.

Note: This post might be updated to add more events.

In Ioogo's free webinar, you will learn:

Plug and Play is pleased to co-host a signature Deep Dive with DCP Midstream. In this event, DCP Midstream and other industry leaders will review some decarbonization initiatives they have been leading along with industry opportunities in carbon capture, sequestration, and methane leak management. Leading startups with solutions in these areas will present.

The event is on Tuesday, April 6, at 9 am. It's free and can be accessed online. Click here to register.

The competition, entering its 21st year, gives collegiate entrepreneurs real-world experience to pitch their startups, enhance their business strategy and learn what it takes to launch a successful company. Hosted and organized by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurshipwhich is Rice University's internationally-recognized initiative devoted to the support of entrepreneurshipand Rice Business. Over 20 years it has grown from nine teams competing for $10,000 in prize money in 2001, to 42 teams from around the world competing for more than $1.5 million in cash and prizes. For the first time in competition history, the 2021 event will showcase 54 student-led startups.

The competition takes place April 6 to 9. Two events are open to the public the elevator pitches on Tuesday, April 6, at 4 pm and the final round on on Friday, April 9, at 9 am. It's free and can be accessed live on YouTube. Click here to learnmore.

The product life cycle is complex. From gathering consumer data, to crafting a vision, and the many steps around execution, launch, and satisfaction, a career in product management requires leaders and teams to wear many hats. So, what does it take to be a great product manager? And what should you expect in a product role? Learn the ins and outs of this career with our panel of PMs, who will share their perspectives from a variety of backgrounds and industries at this event hosted by Liu Idea Lab For Innovation And Entrepreneurship (Lilie).

The event is on Wednesday, April 7, from noon to 1 pm. It's free and can be accessed online. Click here to register.

Join Greentown Lab's webinar to understand how prioritizing diversity and inclusion can build a stronger, happier, and more successful startup team. Co-hosted by Aleria Research, this online event is geared toward helping companies, regardless of size and maturity, build stronger, more diverse, and ultimately more successful teams.

The event is on Thursday, April 8, from 11 am to noon. It's free and can be accessed online. Click here to register.

Capital Factory welcomes you to our 3rd Annual Black In Tech Summit. Attendees can look forward to a keynote chat from a serial entrepreneur or investor, insightful discussion sessions, a startup showcase pitch competition, Epic Office Hours, and panels on relevant topics facing the tech ecosystem.

The event is on Tuesday, April 13, from noon to 2:30 pm. It's free and can be accessed online. Click here to register.

Celebrate The Ion's Aerospace Innovation Accelerator's Cohort 1, hear from thought leaders on the importance of the Accelerator and the Hub and how both contribute to economic resilience and workforce development, and meet the startups and MBEs selected to participate in the first cohort of the Aerospace Innovation Accelerator.

The event is on Wednesday, April 21, at 1:30 pm. It's free and can be accessed online. Click here to register.

Welcome Greentown Labs to Houston attendees will be able to meet startups that are a part of the program, hear from energy and civic leaders, catch the latest Greentown partners, and watch the building's ribbon cutting.

The event is on Thursday, April 22, at 2 pm. It's free and can be accessed online. Click here to register.

Support student startups in our annual pitch challenge with a chance to win cash prizes. Join Liu Idea Lab For Innovation And Entrepreneurship virtually for the H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge Startup Competition. Rice-affiliated teams undergrads, grads, and MBAs - are competing for $65k in equity-free seed funding. Watch pitches, network with the Rice entrepreneurship community, and vote for your favorite idea. Attendance is open to Rice students, Rice alumni, and friends of Rice.

The event is on Thursday, April 22, at 6 pm. It's free and can be accessed online. Click here to register.

Today's energy companies are finding methane emissions/leaks big and small with an astounding range of technologies, Satellites, Fixed-wing Planes, Helicopters, Fixed Wing Drones, Quadcopters, Vehicles, and Handheld Devices/Sensors all drive emissions reductions, boost public relations, investor support and corporate ESG goals.

Which technologies and projects will add the most value and usher your energy operations into the next generation?

The event is on Thursday, April 29, at 10 am. It's free and can be accessed online. Click here to register.

Join General Assembly to explore sustainability and how business and tech impact the health of our planet. Hear from experts in clean energy, environmental entrepreneurship, corporate sustainability, and B Corporations who will share their insights into how the industry can impact the environment. In addition, walk away with actionable steps you can take to live and work more sustainably, network with other local professionals interested in ethical business practices, and gain insight into what actions different industries are really doing to be more sustainable.

The event is on Friday, April 30, at 11 am. It's free and can be accessed online. Click here to register.

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10+ can't-miss Houston business and innovation events online in April - InnovationMap

Reify Health and SubjectWell Launch Partnership to Boost Patient Recruitment for Clinical Trials – Yahoo Finance

Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- The promised end of the pandemic draws closer with every shot in the arm. So in the first three months of 2021, traders raced to position themselves for a post-Covid world by girding for super-charged growth and higher inflation.This reflation trade put Treasuries on course for their worst quarter since 1980, with the global bond plunge sending yields surging to pre-pandemic levels. These sharp moves spooked investors, who were already turning away from pandemic favorites, like tech companies, into value stocks poised to benefit from economic reopening. Market fever dreams played out in cryptocurrencies and newfangled ways to take companies public. And even as the U.S. dollar proved its resilience, traditional haven currencies were battered.At the same time, recovery measures of new U.S. President Joe Biden helped to flood money markets and, if he has his way, this will soon be followed by trillions of dollars in additional infrastructure spending. All the while, the Federal Reserve shows little inclination to rein in long-end yields.Generally reflation has been the dominant driver of global price action, said Simon Harvey, senior market analyst at Monex Europe, who revised his dollar outlook this week. What wrong-footed most people coming into 2021 is just how aggressive the U.S. outperformance was going to be.Here are some of this quarters most notable moves:Treasuries RoutWith the size of U.S. stimulus putting the nation on course for a swift economic rebound from the pandemic, its no surprise that U.S. Treasuries led the global rates selloff. Theyre on track to record their worst quarter since 1980, according to Bloomberg Barclays indexes. By comparison, the retreat seen in Europe and Asia was in line with quarterly declines seen in 2019 and 2020, respectively.Treasuries extended losses this week, fueled by Bidens plans to accelerate the vaccine campaign and rebuild infrastructure. The divergence between U.S. and European markets was borne out in the spread between benchmark Treasuries and bunds, which widened more than 50 basis points. That about matched the move seen in the final quarter of 2016, and a bigger jump hasnt been seen since 1993.Read More: Bond Rout Reignites as U.S. Stimulus Bets Overshadow Quarter-EndDominant DollarThe climb in U.S. yields relative to major peers helped to drive a surge in the dollar that ran counter to many expectations for 2021 as the currency turned from a prime haven at the height of market turmoil in March 2020 into a bet on U.S. economic supremacy.Traditional havens of the currency world -- the Japanese yen and Swiss franc -- bore the brunt of the selling, with each suffering their worst quarter in years.The importance of pandemic recovery was evident across currency markets. In a change from last years Brexit wrangling, the outlook for the British pound was all about the U.K.s vaccine drive, which far outpaced the European Unions effort, setting the euro up for its worst quarter since 2015.Brazils currency, which fell more than 7%, was among the poorest performers over the period as the country struggled to contain its mounting Covid crisis. Turkey was one of the few emerging markets whose currency did even worse. While much of that is the result of a shock decision to fire the central bank chief, that move came after the monetary authority raised its benchmark in response to global rate and foreign-exchange pressures.Read More: Dollar Reigns Supreme With Rate Gaps Too Big to Be IgnoredStock RotationsBillions are on the move as investors rotate away from previously high-flying areas and toward pockets of the market that stand to benefit from a brightening economic outlook. In that environment, tech stocks -- 2020s undisputed winners -- have lagged, while smaller companies have outperformed. The Russell 2000 index of smaller firms outperformed the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 for the second-straight quarter, beating it by about 10 percentage points. Value stocks, too, stepped into the limelight, with the Russell 1000 value index beating its growth counterpart by roughly the same amount.We would expect that rotation to continue, said Adam Phillips, managing director of portfolio strategy at EP Wealth Advisors. Moving forward, its going to be more about the recovery plays, and thats not a story thats going away.But the rise in rates rattled more speculative corners of the market as investors started to question lofty valuations. Sentiment soured, for instance, on special purpose acquisition companies, a group that came to symbolize risky behavior in equities. An index tracking SPACs is down roughly 21% since its mid-February peak. Meme-stock mania also cooled: An index tracking companies including GameStop Corp. and Naked Brand Group Ltd. is down about 28% since its recent January high, data compiled by Bloomberg show.Youre seeing corrective phases in those previously hot areas, but its happening through a process of rotation, so the money is just going to other parts of the market, Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, said by phone. There was so much hype and so much appreciation that, yes, I think its natural and healthy to see rollovers in those areas.Volatility EverywhereBut while benchmark stock indexes glide along, the subsurface churn has been extremely violent. A model from Bank of America that plots how much value is being created and destroyed each day in individual stocks shows that 2021 has generated more turbulence than virtually any other year. The volatility -- which is prevalent among small-cap stocks as well -- is just being masked because up-and-down moves in different companies over days and weeks have tended to offset each other.Read more: Blowups and Rotations Making This Market Just as Brutal as 2020Meanwhile, turbulence in the $21 trillion Treasury market has been on the rise. The ICE BofA MOVE Index, a gauge of U.S. bond volatility, has been grinding higher. The measure currently clocks in at 67, higher than its one-year average of 52 and well above Septembers low of 37.Commodities SupercycleRaw materials from copper to oil have started the year off strong, with investors flocking to commodities as a popular pandemic recovery trade and to hedge against inflation.The 23-member Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index in February reached the highest in almost eight years before easing this month, and still remains on track to notch a gain this quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. even went as far as to flag the start of a new commodities supercycle. An upcoming energy transition could constrain oil supplies, while at the same time boosting demand for metals required in renewables infrastructure, JPMorgan analysts said in a report last month.Bond SalesInvestors in credit benefited from a narrowing in spreads to pre-pandemic levels, but that did little to offset the negative impact from the broader rise in rates -- the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Corporate Bond Indexs 5% drop has it on course for its worst quarterly return since 2008.Emerging-market bond spreads drifted wider, but the shift wasnt enough to throw bond sales off track. The gap between emerging-market hard currency debt and Treasuries rose seven basis points in the quarter, according to a JPMorgan Chase & Co. index, compared with a 335-basis point jump the same period last year.That said, cracks have recently started to show on issuance front. Indonesia shrank the size of a debt offering, Russia canceled a bond sale and South African debt saw lower demand than usual.Read More: The Sweet Spot Is Behind Us: Bond Rout Hits Deals Around WorldBitcoin BoomCryptocurrencies have had a marvelous 2021 so far. Bitcoin, the worlds largest digital asset, has doubled since the start of the year, gaining 104% in its second-best quarterly performance since June 2019. Much of its momentum has been driven by wider institutional acceptance, with more mainstream firms taking a greater interest in crypto assets. At the same time, applications for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds also trickled in, with Fidelity Investments the latest firm to join the list of crypto-ETF hopefuls.Meanwhile, fans, including Tesla Inc.s Elon Musk, have argued the coin can be a great store of value -- Bitcoin gained after the electric-vehicle maker said that it put more than $1 billion into the coin.Still, others worry its run up too far, too fast and could be losing its shine as speculation grows that retail investors are becoming less involved in the market. Bitcoin hit a record of $61,742 in mid-March and is roughly 4% off its highs.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.

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Reify Health and SubjectWell Launch Partnership to Boost Patient Recruitment for Clinical Trials - Yahoo Finance