Recent Posts

Most Used Categories

Category: Featured

Ranked: The 20 Most Air-Polluted Cities on Earth

by Selin Oğuz
This post is by Selin Oğuz from Visual Capitalist

Subscribe to the Elements free mailing list for more like this

 

Ranked: The 20 Most Air-Polluted Cities on Earth

Ranked: The 20 Most Air-Polluted Cities on Earth

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on real assets and resource megatrends each week.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), almost the entire global population (99%) breathes air that exceeds WHO air quality limits.

In the above map, we use 2022 average PM2.5 concentrations from IQAir’s World Air Quality Report to visualize the most air-polluted major cities in the world.

World’s Air Pollution Hot Spots

As one of the standard air quality indicators used by the WHO, the PM2.5 concentration refers to the quantity of fine particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less in a given volume of air.

Fine particulate matter that is this small can penetrate the lungs when inhaled and enter the bloodstream, affecting all major organs.

Based on annual average PM2.5 concentrations (μg/m³) in 2022, here are the most polluted cities in the world.

RankCity2022 average PM2.5 concentration (μg/m³)
1🇵🇰 Lahore, Pakistan97.4
2🇨🇳 Hotan, China94.3
3🇮🇳 Bhiwadi, India92.7
4🇮🇳 Delhi, India92.6
5🇵🇰 Peshawar, Pakistan91.8
6🇮🇳 Darbhanga, India90.3
7🇮🇳 Asopur, India90.2
8🇹🇩 N'Djamena, Chad89.7
9🇮🇳 New Delhi, India89.1
10🇮🇳 Patna, India88.9
11🇮🇳 Ghaziabad, India88.6
12🇮🇳 Dharuhera, India87.8
13🇮🇶 Baghdad, Iraq86.7
14🇮🇳 Chapra, India85.9
15🇮🇳 Muzaffarnagar, India85.5
16🇵🇰 Faisalabad, Pakistan84.5
17🇮🇳 Greater Noida, India (Read more...)

Nvidia Joins the Trillion Dollar Club

by Dorothy Neufeld
This post is by Dorothy Neufeld from Visual Capitalist

Chart showing Nvidia surpassing the $1 trillion market cap milestone becoming the eighth company to join that club

Nvidia Joins the Trillion Dollar Club

Chipmaker Nvidia is now worth nearly as much as Amazon.

America’s largest semiconductor company has vaulted past the $1 trillion market capitalization mark, a milestone reached by just a handful of companies including Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. While many of these are household names, Nvidia has only recently gained widespread attention amid the AI boom.

The above graphic compares Nvidia to the seven companies that have reached the trillion dollar club.

Riding the AI Wave

Nvidia’s market cap has more than doubled in 2023 to over $1 trillion.

The company designs semiconductor chips that are made of silicon slices that contain specific patterns. Just like you flip an electrical switch by turning on a light at home, these chips have billions of switches that process complex information simultaneously.

Today, they are integral to many AI functions—from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to image generation. Here’s how Nvidia stands up against companies that have achieved the trillion dollar milestone:

Joined ClubMarket Cap
in trillions		Peak Market Cap
in trillions
AppleAug 2018$2.78$2.94
MicrosoftApr 2019$2.47$2.58
AramcoDec 2019$2.06$2.45
AlphabetJul 2020$1.58$1.98
AmazonApr 2020$1.25$1.88
MetaJun 2021$0.68$1.07
TeslaOct 2021$0.63$1.23
NvidiaMay 2023$1.02$1.02

Note: Market caps as of May 30th, 2023

After posting record sales, the company added $184 billion to its market value in one day. Only two other companies have exceeded this number: Amazon ($191 billion), and (Read more...)

Ranked: The World’s Top 25 Websites in 2023

by Nick Routley
This post is by Nick Routley from Visual Capitalist

Data visualization showing the top 25 websites in the world in 2023 – including OpenAI and Bing

The World’s Top 25 Websites in 2023

In the vast realm of the internet, a handful of websites have emerged as global giants. Mainstays like YouTube and Facebook capture billions of users and shape our online experiences. But occasionally, new waves of innovation can shake up this list, which is exactly what’s happening now with generative AI.

Using data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb, we delve into the top 25 websites based on their most recent traffic numbers.

Ranking Internet Heavyweights

In 2023, web properties owned by Alphabet and Facebook dominate the top 25 list as they have for many years now. In fact, when Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are combined, they make up three-quarters of the top 25 list’s total traffic.

Here’s the complete top 25 websites list as of April 2023:

RankWebsiteMonthly Traffic (billions)Category
1google.com83.9Search Engines
2youtube.com32.7Streaming & Online TV
3facebook.com16.8Social Media Networks
4twitter.com6.4Social Media Networks
5instagram.com6.3Social Media Networks
6baidu.com4.7Search Engines
7wikipedia.org4.5Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
8yandex.ru3.3Search Engines
9yahoo.com3.2News & Media Publishers
10xvideos.com2.9Adult
11whatsapp.com2.8Social Media Networks
12pornhub.com2.6Adult
13xnxx.com2.3Adult
14amazon.com2.2Marketplace
15tiktok.com2Social Media Networks
16live.com2Email
17openai.com1.8Technology - Other
18reddit.com1.7Social Media Networks
19docomo.ne.jp1.6Telecommunications
20linkedin.com1.6Social Media Networks
(Read more...)

Charting the Rise of America’s Debt Ceiling

by Dorothy Neufeld
This post is by Dorothy Neufeld from Visual Capitalist

Charting the Rise in America's Debt Ceiling

Can I share this graphic?
Yes. Visualizations are free to share and post in their original form across the web—even for publishers. Please link back to this page and attribute Visual Capitalist.
When do I need a license?
Licenses are required for some commercial uses, translations, or layout modifications. You can even whitelabel our visualizations. Explore your options.
Interested in this piece?
Click here to license this visualization.

Charting the Rise of America’s Debt Ceiling

Every few years the debt ceiling standoff puts the credit of the U.S. at risk.

In January, the $31.4 trillion debt limit—the amount of debt the U.S. government can hold—was reached. That means U.S. cash reserves could be exhausted by June 1 according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Should Republicans and Democrats fail to act, the U.S. could default on its debt, causing harmful effects across the financial system.

The above graphic shows the sharp rise in the debt ceiling in recent years, pulling data from various sources including the World Bank, U.S. Department of Treasury, and Congressional Research Service.

Familiar Territory

Raising the debt ceiling is nothing new. Since 1960, it’s been raised 78 times.

In the 2023 version of the debate, Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is asking for cuts in government spending. However, President Joe Biden argues that the debt ceiling should be increased without any strings attached. Adding to this, the sharp uptick in interest rates have been a clear reminder that rising (Read more...)

Visualizing the Assets and Liabilities of U.S. Banks

by Niccolo Conte
This post is by Niccolo Conte from Visual Capitalist

Subscribe to the Elements free mailing list for more like this

Voronoi diagram of the assets and liabilities of U.S. banks

Understanding the Assets and Liabilities of U.S. Banks

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on real assets and resource megatrends each week.

The U.S. banking sector has more than 4,000 FDIC-insured banks that play a crucial role in the country’s economy by securely storing deposits and providing credit in the form of loans.

This infographic visualizes all of the deposits, loans, and other assets and liabilities that make up the collective balance sheet of U.S banks using data from the Federal Reserve.

With the spotlight on the banking sector after the collapses of Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic bank, understanding the assets and liabilities that make up banks’ balance sheets can give insight in how they operate and why they sometimes fail.

Assets: The Building Blocks of Banks’ Business

Assets are the foundation of a bank’s operations, serving as a base to provide loans and credit while also generating income.

A healthy asset portfolio with a mix of loans along with long-dated and short-dated securities is essential for a bank’s financial stability, especially since assets not marked to market may have a lower value than expected if liquidated early.

ℹ Mark-to-market means current market prices are being used to value an asset or liability on a balance sheet. If securities are not marked to market, their value could be different once liquidated.

As (Read more...)

Visualizing the Assets and Liabilities of U.S. Banks

by Niccolo Conte
This post is by Niccolo Conte from Visual Capitalist

Subscribe to the Elements free mailing list for more like this

Voronoi diagram of the assets and liabilities of U.S. banks

Understanding the Assets and Liabilities of U.S. Banks

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on real assets and resource megatrends each week.

The U.S. banking sector has more than 4,000 FDIC-insured banks that play a crucial role in the country’s economy by securely storing deposits and providing credit in the form of loans.

This infographic visualizes all of the deposits, loans, and other assets and liabilities that make up the collective balance sheet of U.S banks using data from the Federal Reserve.

With the spotlight on the banking sector after the collapses of Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic bank, understanding the assets and liabilities that make up banks’ balance sheets can give insight in how they operate and why they sometimes fail.

Assets: The Building Blocks of Banks’ Business

Assets are the foundation of a bank’s operations, serving as a base to provide loans and credit while also generating income.

A healthy asset portfolio with a mix of loans along with long-dated and short-dated securities is essential for a bank’s financial stability, especially since assets not marked to market may have a lower value than expected if liquidated early.

ℹ Mark-to-market means current market prices are being used to value an asset or liability on a balance sheet. If securities are not marked to market, their value could be different once liquidated.

As (Read more...)

[Seedcamp Firsts] How to set up a fully remote and distributed team. Lessons from Maze and Gitlab 

by Anamaria Iuga
This post is by Anamaria Iuga from Seedcamp

In a post-pandemic world, early-stage founders have multiple options for building their teams and choosing their ideal work mode(s). However, the decision between on-site, hybrid, and remote can be a complex one, involving multiple factors, such as access to talent, legislation, and people operations. 

While remote work became the default at the height of Covid-19, post-pandemic life has seen many organisations revert to old behaviours, pulling people back to offices and causing a fair deal of controversy in the process. 

April Hoffbauer, Vice President of People at Maze, Seedcamp-backed global and fully distributed startup Maze, still believes that remote and fully distributed offers an excellent opportunity for early-stage startups to tap into the global talent pool from day one.

Passionate about scaling thoughtfully and empowering great teams for long-term success, April is one of the rare people in the tech ecosystem who has been living and breathing all things remote since pre-pandemic life, and before words like hybrid working or fully remote were common language. Her experience as a Senior Manager Recruiting Operations and Insights at all remote tech unicorn, GitLab, where she supported and optimized the people team, equipped her with a set of best practices and tools to help build and scale fully-distributed teams. 

In her current role, April leads an agile people function focused on designing and implementing organizational development strategies that reinforce the company’s values, build a world-class culture, and enable greater effectiveness and scalability.

While remote requires a great deal of forethought and planning, (Read more...)

Mapped: The State of Democracy Around the World

by Avery Koop
This post is by Avery Koop from Visual Capitalist

map infographic showing the state of democracy around world in 2023

Mapped: The State of Democracy Around the World

Only 8% of the world’s population actually lives in a full, functioning democracy, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

Meanwhile, another 37% of people live in some type of “flawed democracy”, while 55% of the world does not live in democracy at all, based on the EIU’s latest Democracy Index Report.

Events such as the war in Ukraine and restrictive, long-lasting COVID-19 measures, have caused numerous declines to country democracy scores in recent years. Since the source report first began tracking scores in 2006, the global average has fallen from 5.52 to 5.29.

The Methodology

The EIU measures democracy by assessing 60 indicators across five key categories:

  1. Electoral process and pluralism
  2. Political culture
  3. Political participation
  4. Functioning of government
  5. Civil liberties

Each category has a rank of 0-10 based on how the indicators fared, and the overall democracy score is an average of each of the five categories. For example, here’s a look at the U.S.’ scoring out of 10 in each of the overall categories in 2022:

Electoral process and pluralismFunctioning of governmentPolitical participationPolitical cultureCivil liberties
9.176.438.896.258.53

🇺🇸 Total U.S. democracy score = 7.85 / 10

This score defines the U.S. as a flawed democracy and ranks it 30th overall in the world, down four spots from last year’s ranking. “Flawed” in this case simply means there are problems, ranging from poor political culture to governance issues, but flawed democracies are still considered to (Read more...)

Cerbos brings its open source permission management solution to the cloud with $7.5 million in seed funding

by Anamaria Iuga
This post is by Anamaria Iuga from Seedcamp

Authorization plays a key role in the continually shifting cybersecurity landscape. With more companies and organisations falling prey to cyberattacks and data breaches, permission management offers a viable solution to minimise the risks.

We are excited to announce our investment in Cerbos, a scalable, open-source authorisation layer for implementing roles and permissions.

Co-founded by experienced technologist and Seedcamp Expert in Residence Emre Baran, alongside Charith Ellawala (previously at Elastic, Qubit, and Ocado), Cerbos is on a mission to make authorization simpler to implement and manage. It enables teams to separate their authorization process from their core application code, making their authorization system more scalable, secure, and easier to change as the application evolves.

Emre Baran, co-founder and CEO at Cerbos emphasizes:

“Decoupling authorization makes life easier for both developers as well as product managers and security teams who create the requirements. Once implemented, the developers can focus on the rest of their job without having to deal with every change in access control logic.” 

With the help of the newly launched Cerbos Cloud, developers, and product teams can focus their efforts on building their core product and maxismising business value.

He adds:

“We are launching Cerbos Cloud today to take away the operational burden of managing, testing and deploying changes. Developers can now spend even more of their valuable time delivering great products instead of maintaining the infrastructure of the authorization layer.”

On why we backed Cerbos, our Managing Partner Reshma Sohoni comments:

“Cerbos’s open-source authorisation layer offers (Read more...)

Bonus Gift: Celebrating the Best of the VC+ Archive

by Michelle Takenaka

Image of VC+ archive on a mobile phone VC+ is our members program that gives you exclusive access to the weekly visual insights that leaders at Fortune 500 companies use to stay ahead.

Now, for the first time ever, we’ve opened up our VC+ Archive to unlock the hundreds of in-depth briefings and insights all in one place.

And if you join VC+ now you’ll also get a bonus gift ‘The Best of the VC+ Archive’. Hurry – only available for a limited time!

Sign Up Now
 

Need more information? Here’s what VC+ members can look forward to in April:

New to VC+ in April 2023

“Bonus Gift: The Best of the VC+ Archive”

NEW FEATURE: Uncover Our Must-See Content From the VC+ Archive

Promotional image of the bonus gift of the VC+ archive's best content

To celebrate the launch of our newly available online platform, we’ve scoured through all the past work to find the charts, reports, and data you need to know.

This will only be available to members for a limited time so don’t miss out! Sign up for VC+ by April 30th to receive the bonus gift in your inbox along with our other special features planned this month.

Coming Monday, May 1st, 2023 (Get VC+ to access)

”How AI Will Impact the Future of Work”

SPECIAL DISPATCH: Breaking Down AI’s Effect on the Labor Market

Promo image of a special dispatch about AI and the future of work featuring a humanoid robot surrounded by the ChatGPT logo, Midjourney logo, Bing logo, and Google Bard logo.

The continuous advancements of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Midjourney have resulted in a new era of AI content creation. While these models are currently complementing workers and bringing increases in efficiency, as they continue to (Read more...)