To date Chatgrape has raised around 440000 Euros led in part by angel investors and in part by the The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG.
#Data From Alibaba E-commerce Sites Is Now Powering A Credit-Scoring Service Alibaba Group affiliate Ant Financial services has unveiled a new credit-scoring system that uses data from the e-commerce giant sites to gauge userscreditworthiness.
Dubbed Sesame Credit the new service is an example of how Alibaba reach in China goes far beyond online shopping.
Sesame Credit scoring system which is currently in beta looks at data gleaned from the 300 million registered shoppers
Sesame Credit then applies customer behavior analytics to figure out whether or not an applicant is eligible for a loan.
For example credit history can be measured through a user history of credit card and utility payments through Alipay.
Data used from shopping websites indicate how often a buyer or vendors follow through on transactions and the quality of their interactions with other users.
Ant Financial says that it will supplement data collected from Alibaba sites and Alipay with information from public agencies financial institutions and other merchants.
Sesame Credit users can check their scores which range from 350 to 950 points through Alipay Wallet a mobile wallet app
or shopping sites that accept Sesame Credit scores. The idea of using shopping transactions to measure creditworthiness may be off-putting to some consumers after all it like having your FICO score determined by your ebay feedback or Amazon rating.
But Ant Financial says that Sesame Credit can give more consumers in China access to financial resources like home loans
even if they don have a credit history. In a press statement Sesame Credit chief data scientist Yu Wujie said the service is targeted toward users who ay have obtained never bank loans
or applied for credit cards. However they might be active Internet users who shop online a lot e-pay their utility bills on time have a stable residential status
and have been using their mobile phone numbers for a long time. We will take these and other factors into consideration when assessing consumerscreditworthiness. esame Credit says it will protect user privacy by collecting an individual data only after they sign up for the service.
The credit-scoring system is an example of how the user data collected by Alibaba Group e-commerce business can be used to power other verticals.
In addition to financial services Alibaba hoard of data is used by its cloud computing subsidiary logistics and even health tech that organizes patient information for hospitals f
#Secret Media Makes Ad Blockers Useless To Display Those Sweet, Sweet Pre-Roll Video Ads Chances are installed that you an ad blocking extension to skip Youtube pre-roll video ads.
According to Debt. org, the average 15-minute doctor-office visit cost patients an average of $69 in 2011.
That was without a copay. Even with insurance and copays to help with costs, hauling yourself to the doctor is the last thing most people want to do when sick.
Other startups such as Scanadu offer similar digital tracking of your vitals. The Scanadu Scout is a device you put up to your forehead to measure temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen and respiratory rate.
since 2010 and boasts over 240 deployments including the three biggest credit card companies and two of the top three biggest banks,
The aim is to make smartphone theft ultimately as futile as stealing a credit card, whereby a user ancellingtheir hardware renders it ultimately useless.
#Apple Will Spend $848 Million Building A Massive Solar Farm In Monterey Tim cook dropped a bit of news in a conversation at the Goldman sachs Technology and Internet conference today:
and debit and credit cards become more available to Cuban citizens. With this move, Netflix becomes one of the first U s.-based companies to take advantage of the U s. government decision to relax trade restrictions that have been imposed on Cuba
#Number26 Could Be The Best Banking Experience In Europe When I first wrote about Number26
I said that it was designed a bank for the 21st century but all of this was on paper.
Old well-established banks should be ashamed that they can provide the same level of user experience.
As a reminder commercial banks in Europe Suck in the U s. you can show up and open an account in five minutes.
and you will leave with a temporary debit card. In Europe you need to make an appointment with a bank local branch bring documents fill a lot of forms
and listen to a customer representative trying to upsell you. You will waste a couple of hours.
Now I also have a French bank account with a so-called mobile-first bank (BNP PARIBAS-owned Hello Bank)
A few days later my debit card was ready to use and I could transfer money to my new bank account.
Number26 banking partner (Wirecard Bank) actually holds the money and holds a German banking license your money is safe.
But why would you need another bank account? For example when you use your Number26 Mastercard you will receive a push notification to make sure that the transaction was approved
and there is no fraudulent use. Everything is customizable you can disable these push notifications set limits
or even disable online payment if you don need it for now. You can disable everything but the ATM feature.
And reenable everything later. But one feature makes Number26 stand out from the competition opening and maintaining an account is free
Number26 already makes money from Mastercard cut on every transaction it transparent for the user.
The company doesn want to scam you like your existing bank. The Number26 app is native and well-designed.
I sure that many other European countries would love to have a seamless bank like Number26.
It just the beginning as there is no savings account for example. But so far Number26 has yet to disappoint me a
and the Sony Playstation Network last month have claimed credit for an attack on Malaysia Airlineswebsite.
He credits Pierucci for helping him hatch the idea for connected luggage. The two brought in three other founders to the team to help with the logistics it would take to combine both hardware and software.
since most international banks have stopped now payments into and out of the country. oogle prohibited from providing paid services in the Crimeaa source at Google told Lenta. ru. n addition Google cannot make payments to anyone in the Crimea.
It is now technically impossible as almost all international banks have ceased to make payments. ater the block will extend to apps via Google Play
and rewarded via social currency called pvotes. While giving users new ways to share the innovators behind Camoji have ushered also in a new way of discovering GIFS that are of most interest to those who use it.
Investment bank (SIB) and Old College Capital, the venture investment arm of the University of Edinburgh.
The company at one point last month closed its online store as the value of the Ruble plunged.
#Trillion-Dollar Alternative Lending Industry Is A VC Gold mine In a recovering economy where big banks are restricted by complex regulations,
startups and venture investors are gearing up for the next gold rush in the trillion-dollar marketplace lending industry.
With A t. Big IPOS for Lending Club and Ondeck (valued at $9 billion and $1. 3 billion, respectively) appear to have spurred a funding frenzy this year as venture investors dig for more pay dirt.
In the first two months of 2015, VCS committed $340 million in venture capital for lending tech startups
Peer-to-peer lenders Lending Club and Prosper set the stage for the lending marketplace boom, but the latest generation of lending tech is all about verticals.
Student loan marketplace Sofi $200 million monster round in January, led by Third Point, is the largest round tracked to date.
And Driverup, a lending platform for automotive financing, announced a $50 million Series A last week from Emerald Development Managers
and RRE Ventures. he reason these alternative lending platforms are coming up is that platform lending is simply more efficient for both the borrower and the lender,
says Stuart Ellman, managing partner at RRE. he borrower is able to find loans that they otherwise weren able to get either from the banking crisis
or from banks tightening up their lending process and lenders have the ability to do their diligence,
see the risk and the interest rates, and make the loans they want to on an a la carte basis,
Ellman says. The marketplace model has been proven, and now entrepreneurs are tweaking it to fit all industries.
Driverup is the first to bring marketplace tech to the $400 billion automotive lending market
which CEO Sam Ellis says has operated in a very traditional mode for the past 30 years. uto loans as an asset class different than real estate, gold, treasuries,
but the 2008 meltdown is still taking a toll on the lending market. Investors are concerned more than ever about where their money is going
says Dan Ciporin, partner at Canaan Partners and Lending Club board member. As alternative lending becomes more popular,
shifting capital to lending marketplaces gets especially tricky for institutional investors. Many firms have come to rely on enabling technologies to expedite the process. s soon as you start talking to operations or accounting teams,
000 loans is just terrifying none of their systems are set up to deal with loans that small,
launched last year to simplify online direct lending at scale, and currently powers seven investment platforms, including Lending Club, Prosper, and Ondeck.
Burton says there are 450 more currently on their wait list. his is an area that going to continue to see a lot of innovation and disruption for the next few years minimum,
and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both at the same time. his would work much like Groups
#Paypal Credit Expansion Now Lets Merchants Set Terms Including Option For Interest-Free Payments Last July, Paypal rebranded its Bill
Me Later service as aypal Credit, as a part of the company efforts to bring its credit products ore to the center of Paypal.
Today, as promised earlier, Paypal Credit is expanding its support for monthly payments with an option for retailers that allows them to decide on the number of months and interest rates that work best for their customers.
Retailers will also be able to choose to interest-free credit options for the first time for their customers shopping online.
The announcement is being made at the National Retail Federation conference on Monday, where Paypal also announced a newly added Business Consulting service.
With the upgraded Paypal Credit feature, customers will be able to divide larger purchases into smaller ones allowing online shoppers to pay via Paypal
otherwise to their credit cards. The Paypal Credit offering that had been offered previously was if a customer spent $99,
they would have had no interest and no payments for six months. Paypal says it will still make that available to retailers
but this change allows for them to offer more flexible credit to their customers. The company said in July that it sees consumer spending go up 30%after a customer adopts a Paypal credit vehicle,
citing studies that have tracked usage of the older Bill Me Later service as well as the GE-issued Paypal credit card.
Paypal also said it was buying back the GE portfolio in 2016 as part of its strategy to increase
and expand its credit offerings something the company notes is key as it expands into the offline world,
The company later plans to expand Paypal Credit more directly to retail and point-of-sale but that for a future date.
For now, it about bringing more online consumers to Paypal Credit. With the new offering, merchants are paid immediately
#Tencent Launches China#s First Private Online Bank Tencent one of the top Internet companies in China launched the country first private online bank today.
Called Webank after Tencent popular messaging app Wechat the financial institution is the first one in China to be based on the Internet.
Tencent and rival Alibaba were among ten private investors that were approved by the Chinese government last year to launch five private banks.
The goal of the pilot program is to make credit more available to small businesses which are often at a disadvantage
when it comes to securing loans from state-owned banks despite being integral to China economic development.
while forcing traditional financial institutions to accelerate reforms. According to the Financial times Webank first loan (made when Li pressed a button) was 35000 RMB (about $5600) to a truck driver.
While Alibaba and Tencent already compete in e-commerce messaging and big data the financial sector is a relatively new battleground for the two companies.
Tencent first financial services product a fund called Licaitong was launched in January 2014 while Alibaba Baidu and electronics seller Suning Commerce Group also got government licenses to offer mutual funds loans and insurance.
The pilot program Tencent is taking part in is part of the Chinese government efforts to reduce the amount of control state-owned banks have on its economy and further its ongoing efforts at financial reform.
Companies seeking to launch private banking services in China hope to take advantage of waning confidence in the country state-owned banks
which have seen recently an increase in bad loans thanks to slowing economic growth
#Automatic Launches Its SDK, Turning The Car Into An App Platform Automatic, a startup whose sensor-and-software combo has been described as itbit for your car,
is today rolling out a software development kit and new hardware that turn your car into a platform for apps.
with the startup handling the required insurance and offering 24/7 road assistance cover in the event of a breakdown. ur insurance setup allows car owners to list their cars in less than a minute
and renters to instantly sign up, provide their information on our website and rent a car as soon as the car owner approves the request,
Bitcoin rise showed us how much demand there is for a globally accepted digital currency. However, all the things holding bitcoin backerchant acceptance, instant transactions (bitcoin takes about an hour),
This past March, Facebook rolled out free peer-to-peer payments and set the company down a path to becoming one of the world most powerful financial institutions.
In a recent report, The World bank concluded: orcing migrant workers to pay as much as $50 to send $200 is wrong,
While the company does incur charges from banks on the back end, Facebook says it will not pass these on to the consumer.
if Facebook will charge users a nominal fee on cross-border transfers and currency conversions,
ee not trying to make a profit out of payments. acebook is already well on its way to becoming a global financial institution.
Last summer, Financial times discovered that Facebook is close to receiving approval from the Central bank of Ireland to become an electronic money institution throughout Europe.
Long term, Facebook payments has the power to completely destroy Western union and Money Gram (good riddance) and massively benefit millions of people in the developing world with billions of dollars more freely flowing into those countries.
Facebook is in a position to control the lion share of remittances sent globally by offering below market-rate transfers and the best experience on mobile.
that possibility pales in comparison to the larger opportunity for Facebook offering a way for people who don use banks now to do e-commerce.
there are 2. 5 billion people globally who do not use formal banks or finance institutions.
The idea that we still need physical banks, plastic cards, and paper money fades away. It already starting to occur.
The effect that Facebook could have on the world as an electronic financial institution is nothing short of profound.
Longer term, Martin expects that the company data around emergencies will allow it to offer a predictive analytics platform that might be of interest to Wall street investment funds and insurance companies.
but has subsisted instead on dollars won from startup competitions, which currently amounts to around $500, 000.
which will release a new card reader designed to allow small businesses to take Apple Pay payments as well as credit card chip payments,
dip the chip on their credit card, or ask to swipe with the old dongle. e
Since millennials don use credit cards, cash, or even beads and shells, the only way to get them to pay for anything is through their smartphone.
two fintech gurus who worked at Navigant Consultin and Goldman sachs respectively. Oyeniyi has a Masters in Computer science and Elodimuor one in Economics.
and doctors get to put something in the palm of their hand that used to be a 40 pound machine,
To its credit, Lexus has the best-looking Hoverboard Ie seen, provided it does actually work, with nice bamboo surfaces and even a Lexus grille.
your credit card is charged and the item gets shipped to you. For example, you might find a $100 backpack on Compelation.
Unlike a some random retailer, Uber credits are sure to be useful to me, so I happily bid $20 for a $25 gift card
You calibrate your screen by measuring a credit card and sync your phone as a remote control for your computer over Wi-fi and an SMS confirmation.
Starbucks already allows for this across thousands of its stores in the U s. Meanwhile, Burger king and Firehouse Subs announced integrations with Mastercard Masterpass digital payment solution just this week,
Paydiant had built a number of other large business clients like Harris Teeter, Capital one, and yes Subway.
If you move a few thousand dollars here and there you can get much more marketing efficiency in terms of ROI.
while working for a financial services client his company discovered that men who had been looking at boats in April
or were acquired for pennies on the dollar. Investors lost more than $1 billion. The resulting backlash has made it difficult for any solar companies, regardless of their merits,
and got another half billion from the U s. government in the form of a loan to build a large factory to prove its technology.
#A Credit card Terminal That Takes Apps Last year Osama Bedier then the head of Google Wallet decided he was on the wrong side of the payments business.
Meanwhile the U s s major credit-card companies are mandating a shift to more secure credit cards that eschew the familiar magnetic strip for a chip that uses a unique string of numbers for each transaction (a standard known as EMV
which stands for Europay Mastercard and Visa for the card companies that first backed the technology.
The apex of the device houses a slot for dipping a credit card and there s a built-in receipt printer that will spit out paper from an opening below the customer touch screen.
The Poynt terminal weighs a little over a pound and contains a wireless modem and eight-hour rechargeable battery
This contributed to an 0. 5 percent increase in the amount of energy used per dollar of GDP,
or the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per million dollars of GDP, rise by 0. 2 percent,
But the technology also offers a cheap way to pick up just about anythingabric, bags of chips, 50-pound boxes of paper, single pieces of paper, mobile phones.
digital technologies inevitably mean you can generate billions of dollars from a low employment base. here used to be a ladder to get into the middle class,
and a multimillion-dollar media center complete with rows of new imacs and state-of-the-art video equipment.
Bob Emerson a prosthetist at A Step Ahead Prosthetics who helps connect patients to research projects in Herr's group says it's challenging to persuade insurers to pay for devices like Biom.
Instead, they ran into countless technical glitches, resistance from merchants, banks, and phone carriers, and consumer indifference.
Behind the scenes, a payment processor such as Visa recognizes an encrypted version of your credit card such as the one in an itunes account,
or other steps that can take much longer than swiping a credit card. Apple ability to create elegant
In a bid to force adoption of more secure credit cards that use a chip and a PIN number instead of a magnetic strip for payment authentication,
and others have alerted consumers that credit and debit cards aren very secure. Such lapses expose them to identity theft
and the annoyance of being forced to change credit-card numbers on file with dozens of merchants.
Although credit cards are used in Apple Pay it more secure because card numbers aren stored directly on the phone or on Apple servers.
which provides mobile wallet services to banks, retailers, and mobile operators. Improved security is even more important to banks
and retailers than it is to consumers, who have limited liability for fraudulent charges on stolen cards.
Apple Pay has signed already up the three big payment networksisa, Mastercard, and American Expresss well as banks handling 83 percent of credit card transactions in the U s,
. including Bank of america, Capital one, Chase, and Citibank. Better security seems to have made up for any reservations that banks may have about Apple role as a powerful new middleman on transactions
or the small cut of transaction revenues theyl be paying the company. Another potential bonus:
Apple Pay could help the card networks capture transactions currently completed with cash. For all that, Apple impact will be small at first.
Moreover, some merchants and banks don want to cede relationships with customers and data about them to Apple, says Richard Crone, CEO of the payments advisory firm Crone Consulting.
A new device could reduce that waste cutting fuel consumption and carbon emissions by as much as 3 percent and saving companies millions of dollars.
Alnylam sees the potential for billions of dollars in revenue from liver-related diseases. Yet most diseases involve other tissues in the body.
#Datacoup Wants To buy Your Credit card and Facebook Data Datacoup one of the first companies to offer people money in exchange for their personal data has closed finished a trial of its service
Datacoup will pay up to $10 for access to your social network accounts credit card transaction records and other personal information and will gleaned sell insights from that data to companies looking for information on consumer behavior.
and financial institutions says Matt Hogan CEO of the startup. Whether an individual user gets the full $10 a month
Options include debit card and credit card transactions and data from Facebook Twitter and Linkedin. Datacoup won t provide raw data to companies.
For example a company might ask Datacoup to provide information on how often women in a certain age group mention coffee on Facebook on the same day they use their credit card in a coffee shop.
#Fingerprinting Infants Helps Track Vaccinations in Developing Countries Billions of dollars a year are spent vaccinating children in developing countries
The technology could be used in any health-care scenario where you have the potential for fraud such as insurance fraud says Jain.
what SAP s experts describe as a new currency based on knowledge not on geographical proximity.
The information it collects can help companies decide where to spend advertising dollars. Advertisers want better targeting
All of that behavior can be analyzed to help Ford figure out where to best spend its advertising dollars.
and IBM to invest in technologies from data-capturing smartphone apps to billion-dollar analytical systems.
The groups that control the most medical data today are insurance companies and care providers, and their data analysis is already beginning to change health care.
The stock market chose the same moment to pound cloud-software companies giving rise to reports that Box would postpone its public offering.
for example, may be mining Bitcoins worth tens of thousands of dollars a day for a Russian cybercrime gang.
Mining personal data is a billion-dollar business (see he Data Made Me Do it designed to elicit purchases, garner eyeballs,
#3-D Mammography Shown to Improve Detection of Invasive Breast cancer A new 3-D imaging technology that typically isn covered by health insurance allows radiologists to detect more cases of invasive breast cancer than traditional mammography,
and could therefore save trucking companies millions of dollars in fuel every year. The trucks were fitted with technology developed by a startup called Peloton Tech (elotonis The french word for platoon.
costing thousands of dollars. The cheaper haptic stylus is a descendant of a product called Phantom originally invented by an MIT startup called Sensable,
CEO and cofounder of Mojio. f I being offered an insurance discount because Geico looked at my data,
000 when many conventional robots cost several hundred thousand dollars. Another robot maker, the Danish company Universal Robots, offers small, more conventional-looking robot arms that are similarly cheap ($31, 000 each), simple,
or driving efficiencyr to generate data for insurance discounts. Apps tapping information from many cars could alert drivers to accidents;
a former Israeli intelligence officer now working in IT SECURITY for the Bank hapoalim Group, in Tel aviv. In this new context, nobody can say where the responsibilities of a company may end
Should a commercial bank be expected to expend resources to defend itself when its attacker is a country?
Chinese researchers have developed successfully the first automated teller machine (ATM) with facial recognition technology to reduce the risk of theft,
but the new machine, which combines high-speed banknote handling, improved counterfeit-bill recognition and facial recognition, was wholly Chinese.
Cash machines using fingerprint authentication have sprung up in countries like Chile and Colombia though these biometric ATMS have not found favour with some countries like the United states because of privacy concerns and its high cost.
The new ATMS are expected to connect with the country's banks and public security networks, which allows only guarantees that only cardholders to withdraw money,
Chinese researchers have developed successfully the first automated teller machine (ATM) with facial recognition technology to reduce the risk of theft,
but the new machine, which combines high-speed banknote handling, improved counterfeit-bill recognition and facial recognition, was wholly Chinese.
Cash machines using fingerprint authentication have sprung up in countries like Chile and Colombia though these biometric ATMS have not found favour with some countries like the United states because of privacy concerns and its high cost.
The new ATMS are expected to connect with the country's banks and public security networks, which allows only guarantees that only cardholders to withdraw money,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011