And during harvesting, he takes the laptop to a bank or some other place with Internet service to upload the data to Harvestmark.
Inside the two-pound mechanical organ is an intricate system of sensors and microprocessors that monitors the body s internal changes and alters the flow of blood as needed.
The Carmat artificial heart is expected to cost about 140,000 to 180,000 Euros (or $191, 000 to $246, 000.
when creating a web site for ecommerce could easily require a million dollar investment. Now you can create a web site for almost nothing
Callassistant s Bills pointed out#that a nationwide debt-settlement company is being sued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau#for deceptive telemarketing calls made by an old-school telemarketing company.##
They re now paying $300 per month on a loan for the panels, plus the $250 electric bill.##
and the District of columbia##lets households with renewable energy earn bill credits for surplus power delivered to the grid.
because customers with net metering bill credits don t pay their fair share of transmission and distribution charges.
It could be as small as a two-inch square on top of a conventional credit card reader,
##There s nothing stopping this technology from be squeezed into something as small as a credit card, or being embedded in clothing or other discrete wearable devices like fitness sensors, wristwatches#or even temporary tattoos.
or the banks would be paralysed, ##Lieutenant general Benny Gantz told a security conference in October. Around the same time, the Israeli security services reportedly thwarted a cyber attack
##But##on-orbit fabrication with Spiderfab,##a TUI presentation#promises,##will enable NASA to accomplish ten times more science per dollar.##
and financial institutions to offer 100,000 driversreduced monthly car payments, in an effort get more Uber drivers on the road.##
and means better access to cheaper credit than otherwise available on the open market.####Uber started out as an on-demand service for black town cars
homeowners receive a credit for the solar electricity they send to the grid that is used to pay for the power they use
In Arizona, that credit is calculated at retail rates and APS argued that penalized homeowners who don t go solar as the utility will be forced to raise their rates to pay for the transmission system
APS and its supporters spent hundreds of thousands of dollar on an advertising campaign but yesterday the ACC rejected the utility s request,
What if you could carry a single credit card device in your wallet that would digitally store up to eight credit, debit, membership,
It looks like a normal credit card at first glance, but Coin is much smarter than your average piece of plastic.
which is about the normal expiration date for credit/debit cards anyway. There are tons of questions to still be answered about Coin,
such as Lenovo,##said a person familiar with technology purchases at one of#China s four big state-owned banks.##
In August, the#National Development and Reform Commission,#China s top economic planning body, published a statement setting cybersecurity standards for financial institutions, cloud computing and big data, information system secrecy
so they don t have to leave 200-pound Hugo behind. Meeker admits the idea is a stretch,
a large group of entrepreneurs is calling for a#$500 million fund from the World bank#for these small-scale projects.
who already have a somewhat similar venture, Organovo, to their credit. This June#Businessweek#did a fairly comprehensive story on the company.
Yet, with online banking and email, can one really be forgotten if they wish to stay current?
By integrating a basket of public Iot semiconductor companies (highlighted by Goldman sachs; note: Making S-E-N-s-E of the next mega-trend) with Google Trends data containing the phraseiot,
Further highlighting the early-cycle Iot thesis, Goldman sachs describes it well in their Internet of things Volume 2 note:
This trend is likely to continue as brand name mutual fund managers, as well as hedge funds, blur the lines of public and private markets.
The number of competitors for Iot investable dollars just grew exponentially, and as such, getting ahead of the pack just became ever more important.
It s also worth noting that these professions generate about $3. 5 billion dollars in annual income,
but the Southern European countries struggling with debt, like Spain. Spain is expected to build 3, 010 kilometers of new HSR by 2022 (1, 308 kilometers currently under construction and 1,
and their loans may be discharged. The problems in the for-profit college sector are wider than Corinthian.
The CFPB s allegations include predatory lending and misleading students about their job prospects. ITT has filed a motion to dismiss this lawsuit.
#Banking with startups a growing trend Majority of the people in the U s. could bebanking with startups in the next three to five years.
banks. However, while critical to our economy, banks are generally inefficient, have fixed high costs and don t exactly elicit happy thoughts from the average consumer.
It s for these reasons, among others, that the biggest opportunities in the financial world revolve around the disintermediation of these banks and core financial services.##
##Given this backdrop, it s not hard to imagine that a majority of the people in the U s. could bebanking with startups, in one form or another, in the next three to five years.
but the pace and volume of business taken away from banks by startups in the last few years have been significant
Disintermediation of Consumer credit For starters, we have to look no further for evidence of the inefficiency of our banking system than during our most recent recession.
and it was practically impossible to get a loan, even for prime borrowers. Interest rates were low,
with consumers receiving 0. 25 percent on a savings account and prime borrowers paying upwards of 18#percent annual percentage rate.
The credit crisis showed the tech industry that one of the biggest areas of opportunity for startups was in re-imagining consumer lending.
People were looking to alternative forms of lending for answers and thanks to the problems above,
interest in solutions like peer-to-peer lending were on the rise. Not surprisingly a cohort of companies emerged to take advantage of these trends, beginning with Prosper,
which was followed soon by Lending Club and a litany of others. At the core of this emerging market was the desire to take banks out of the equation
and connect investors directly with those in need of capital. In other words, disintermediation. Furthermore, investors looking for options in a down economy wanted stability, transparency, shorter duration and less credit risk,
while maintaining solid returns. Compared to traditional options like high-yield bonds, peer-to-peer lending had appeal.
Today, companies like Prosper and Lending Club continue to thrive. Prosper has#raised$145 million to date from a host of investors
including Sequoia and DFJ, and projects that it will hit $2 billion in loans originated this year.
Lending Club had issued $4 billion in loans by the end of March 2014, and became cashflow positive in 2012.
Of course, it wasn t an easy road for either company. Both had to survive significant regulatory scrutiny and approval by the SEC,
and investors were understandably wary of newer lending models, like peer-to-peer. As a result, it took Lending Club five years to issue $1 billion in loans (2007-2012),
but once it passed regulatory scrutiny and both consumers and investors alike came around, these companies grew quickly.
By the end of the first quarter, Lending Club had reached $4 billion, and part of the reason that both it and Prosper have continued to see steady growth is made that they peace with taking their time and built measured growth into their DNA.
In Lending Club s case, it took time to set the table to register with the SEC,
earn real trust with consumers and lenders, and achieve growth while avoiding sub-prime borrowers.
The other factor that has led to Lending Club s success and plays into the theme of disintermediation we ve been seeing over the last five years is that it has looked to differentiate itself from traditional lenders
(and other startups) by adopting a model that has been used by many other successful tech companies, like#ebay#and#Amazon, for example.
but Lending Club and Prosper s key differentiator is that they are marketplaces. Most other lenders aren t. They have to borrow money
either by going after warehouse lines of credit or they loan out equity capital. Lending Club and Prosper,
however, connect buyers and sellers through peer-to-peer lending marketplaces.##And as a result, and this is key,
it doesn t have the same balance sheet risk as other traditional lenders might have. Mobile and the Disintermediation of Bill Pay, Processing & More Of course, the opportunities for disruption at the hands of disintermediation extend beyond lending.
The smartphone and increasing mobility of our world is changing the game. The consumerization of the enterprise and thebyod (bring your own device) trend within businesses mean that phones
and tablets are entrenched becoming features within the corporate and consumer worlds. Companies like Intuit, ebay/Paypal,
and the reach of the new mobile phone network to edge into territory that has traditionally been controlled by banks.#
While banks have owned traditionally the small business space platforms like Square, Intuit and Paypal and even Amazon and Groupon are playing thedisintermediator
and are putting credit card processing in the hands of SMBS (small and medium businesses) and consumers.
and grow by assuming roles traditionally reserved for banks. Check is one of these businesses trying to do anend-around on banks by giving consumers the ability to aggregate
and manage all of their critical banking information and bills in one place on their smartphones.
Rather than consumers being forced to go to their banks websites, their utility company s website and so on,
it put all of these services in one place. And again, the first generation of financial technology companies (and banks) have taken notice,
and one doesn t have to look far for examples:##BBVA acquired Simple#in February for $117 million;#
#Braintree acquired Venmo#in 2012 for $26. 2 million;##Paypal acquired Braintree#last September for $800 million;
Disintermediation of the Second Tier With a loss of faith in the banking system, mobility on the rise and SMBS beginning to take back some control,
we ve also begun to see an increasing number of people not only turning away from traditional banks,
Just as Lending Club and Prosper took advantage of the limited access to banking capital that begin during the Credit crisis, marketplaces like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Venmo, Crowdtilt,
Disintermediation is also beginning to seep into otherolder financial services markets, like wealth advisory. Not unlike banks, wealth advisory is an inefficient cottage industry that traditionally comes loaded with fees and a total lack of transparency.
Companies like Wealthfront, Betterment, Sigfig, Futureadvisor and more are looking to help consumers minimize fees
we ve begun to see disintermediation arrive in complementary financial services to the second tier, if you will.
we re seeing new potential for companies to provide the next generation of those payment rail systems the kind for which people have relied traditionally on from banks.
Digital currencies like bitcoin have the potential to drive down transaction fees in a big way. Say, for example, you sell electronics
but with a distributed, decentralized digital currency, international borders and monetary systems decrease in importance and relevance.
and a digital currency of record could become the micropayment system for the web, allowing publications, for example,
It opens up a whole new set of monetization options and alternatives to the traditional paywall.
Of course, while the prospect of a digital currency becoming a sort of free rails for moving money is exciting,
But the world of digital currency remains an exciting area of opportunity. Other areas that are prime for disruption by startups include underwriting
From the rise of peer-to-peer lending models, mobile wallets, digital investment advisory, to the bitcoin revolution, today s digital disintermediation comes in many forms##all of
which challenge banks to innovate. To those startups that aim to fundamentally change the way we transact for the better,
Imagine what could happen with millions of dollars of R&d refinement, and much better printers and software.
and an API into the audit log for developers, who will be able to build special-purpose apps for industries where compliance is critical, like banking.
costing literally trillions of dollars and employing hundreds of millions of people. Brought on by development of auto-drive vehicles,
Once limited to silvery#images#on credit cards, holography#made a splash#last year when University of Illinois computer scientists showed off an immersive holograph room, CAVE2, that projected images on an array of LED screens.
#The Phinergy aluminum-air battery at 100 kilograms (220 pounds) weight contained enough on board energy to allow the vehicle to travel up to 3, 000 kilometers (over 1, 860 miles.
Weighing about 15 pounds, Mr. He ulti-functional suitcaseis powered by a lithium battery and can reportedly go as fast as 12 miles per hour.
#Financial services ripe for disruptive innovation Technology is having a profound impact on so many sectors, creating opportunities,
oftware is eating the worldand financial services are no exception. The market is ripe for disruption, with incumbent banks, insurance,
payments and investment management companies no longer able to bamboozle consumers with jargon, hidden costs and arcane language.
New online financial lending communities, from Lending Club and Ondeck in the US to Zopa and Funding Circle in the UK, are sprouting up as traditional banksare less willing to take risk
Simple provides mobile-first banking with no need to visit a branch, no hidden fees and great customer service.
Transferwise is shaking up the sleepy world of sending money overseas through high street banks. They are helping consumers all around the world exchange money with each other safely and transparently, through their peer to peer model.
Customers send more than a million pounds euros from Manchester to Spain or pounds from Stockholm to the UK through Transferwise every day.
and peer-to-peer lending are creating great opportunities for people to turn dreams into reality. Indiegogo, a company Ie invested in recently,
Financial services are ripe for disruption by a new breed of entrepreneurs. What kind of innovation would you like to see next?
Finally, the startup will ask for your bank information to transfer the money. But even though this sounds like a cumbersome process, 90 to 95 percent of it is automated.
and added that many parents in the past paid for college by refinancing mortgages, an alternative no longer available to many families.
and allows students to receive credit for as many competencies and courses as they can master each term.
According to THECB website, students arriving ith no prior college credits should be able to complete the degree program in three years at a total cost of $13, 000 to $15, 000.
while those entering with 0 credit hours and no credentialcan complete the degree n one year for $4,
students and their parents have taken on historic student-loan debt. Total student-loan debt has risen to $1. 2 trillion,
for the first time ever exceeding total national credit-card debt. In the past, the debate over the college tuition and debt crisis has produced calls to action on two fronts
both fiscally unsustainable: First, federal taxpayers have been asked to pay more through subsidizing student loans so that students can borrow more to pay inflated tuitions.
Second, state taxpayers have been asked to pay more in order to increase state subsidies for education. But today, with the $10, 000 degree, universities themselves are beginning to lower the tuition
and fees they charge students, parents, and taxpayers. Finally, the ground is beginning to shift.
Gamified mobile apps, all manner of e-books and classroom analytics tools are just a few of the business models attracting venture capital dollars in the $5. 4 billion K-12
A new education gold rush Judging by venture capital dollars and press write-ups, it might seem like higher education is ground zero for startup activity in the multibillion-dollar education technology industry.
and tens of millions of dollars intheir bid to translate increasingly expensive college courses into cheaper online formats.
Mounting student debt and constant tuition increases contribute to demand for higher education hacks, but reliable revenue streams have been hard to come by for ed tech entrepreneurs.
ost UAVS unmanned aerial vehicles are a few million dollars, says Wade Knudson, who heads the Zumwalt project forraytheon (RTN),
as if he doing some online banking. In an age of rampant hacking and password pilfering, you don have to be clinically paranoid to find something worrying in the prospect of a highly automated warship that can be controlled by anyone who has the right login information.
Santander, Spain The EU has provided#6m funding for experimental facilities and applications in the northern Spanish city of Santander, aimed at testing typical applications and services of a smart city.
The first phase of the three-year project finished last year and the city now has fibre networks and thousands of sensors on buildings,
and credit cards and its stock is monitored constantly. The machine sends out an email when it is running low on stock.
How the digital currency is changing everything Bitcoin Today, the single most prominent, and telling, feature of bitcoin is its massive controversy in the media.
or Western union apparently fail to meet the requirements to be discussed in virtually every central bank on the planet,
Bitcoin the currency As a currency, bitcoin is in many ways the antithesis of modern fiat currencies.
and all without being declared by any state or central bank aslegal tender. That simple fact astonishes many in academia,
who could never have guessed a currency could spontaneously form and organically grow within the modern free market.
Bitcoin is not the only example of a homogenousgood being adopted by a population as a currency,
History thus clearly shows that the idea of a currency deriving value primarily from thebacking of some central state is nonsense.
and both originated not as centrally issued currency that, as a result, magically had value,
However Bitcoin is not just a currency that promises to eventually end the trend of patchwork national currencies that exist for the almost sole purpose of allowing governments to endlessly fund their own deficit spending.
and cloud computing may one day surpass the valuation of multinational corporations like Western union, Visa, Facebook, Google,
the interactions of their two algorithms resulted in prices in the millions of dollars. Competing robot armies could destroy cities as their algorithms exponentially escalated,
and death over human beings. nce youe put in billions of dollars of investment, youe got to use these things,
#Millennials see financial institutions as irrelevant Scratch polled 10,000 millennials to find out which industry was most prime for disruption.
The results from the poll found that banks make up four of their top 10 most hated brands,
but millennials increasingly viewed these financial institutions as irrelevant. The three-year study From scratch, an in-house unit of Viacom that consults with brands,
found that a third of millennials believed theyl be able to live a bank-free existence in the future.
They have huge debt. Theye facing unprecedented underemployment. Theye been unaddressed relatively as a generation by banks.
All of a sudden, you see purchasing power by millennials growing to over $1. 3 trillion, Scratch executive vice president Ross Martin told Fast Company.
As a result, this digital-savvy cohort is looking to the tech sector to provide banking solutions.
Half of respondents said they were counting on startups to overhaul how banks work and three-quarters said they would be excited more in financial services provided by Google, Amazon, Apple, Paypal,
or Square than from their own banks. ee hearing so loud and clearly from our biggest audience that there a whole industry that not meeting their needs,
Martin said. e see such a big opportunity for banks here. i
#Spectrom: A device that allows desktop 3d printers to print in color for less than $100 Full color printing is generally a privilege limited to professional and high-end consumer 3d printers,
so the more casual user is stuck likely printing in one or two colors. But Cédric Kovacs-Johnson and Charles Haider, both chemical engineering undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, say they have come up with a solution:
Tesla is selling debt (convertible senior notes) to the tune of between $1. 6 billion to $1. 8 billion to fund part of the battery factory,
#Bitcoin is not only digital currency, it s Napster for finance Bitcoin will start its transformation from a mere currency into an entire open-source.
Bitcoin s valuation didn t just skyrocket in 2013, but its infrastructure, services, and adoption exploded as well,
and NBA team the Sacramento kings would accept the digital currency as payment.####Some still doubt#bitcoin s usefulness and durability,
but 2014 may leave skeptics even further behind developers and entrepreneurs are already hard at work building features on top of the Bitcoin protocol that will allow for the decentralized execution of financial services, from currency hedging to loans to stock
and record-keeping that has kept the bitcoin currency secure as its value ballooned well past $10 billion.
In the long term, peer-to-peer finance threatens to weaken banks and other financial agents just as peer-to-peer file sharing did the music industry
The Bitcoin protocol (crucially distinct from bitcoin, the currency it underlies) was built from the ground up to support far more complex transactions and relationships than simple value transfers.
with contracts enforced by digital locks interacting with the Bitcoin blockchain to manage real-world leases, mortgages, and purchase contracts.
That means loans without banks, contracts without lawyers, and stocks without brokers, executed and recorded across hundreds of servers at all corners of the earth.
while also subtracting conventional banking and brokerage fees. The most immediate function Middleton envisions for his system is for hedging bitcoin against existing national currencies.
With bitcoin s valuation still showing huge volatility Middleton claims the availability of distributed hedging will both ensure the value of bitcoin for individuals holding the asset
Given persistent skepticism, there should be plenty of takers to short bitcoin against the dollar.
Such hedging functions have particularly unique promise because of the extremely low transaction costs of peer-to-peer currency.
if a loan payment wasn made t on time. Mike Hearn, one of the main developers of the Bitcoin architecture alongside the mysterious Nakamoto, has said that any implementation of the concept is at least a decade away because of the need for hardware upgrades on physical goods. The functions that advocates say could be automated through the Bitcoin network
bitcoin s threat to existing financial institutions would still be substantial. But with a full array of commission-free financial services on the horizon, there is even more reason to take heed.
Middleton sounds a bit like an 18th-century pirate striking back against the Empire when he declares thatwhat
I m doing right now is a direct threat to fiat merchant banking. For him
excitement over value fluctuations in the bitcoin currency is missing the point: It s not a threat as people sit there
it is still difficult to exchange bitcoin for national currencies in a quick, reliable manner.
It s unclear how Middleton s automated dollar-bitcoin hedging will work without a lightning-quick and reliable dollar-bitcoin exchange platform.
Some financial institutions Zynis predicts, will be nimble enough to adapt. If I m an investment firm, do
So, all bankers and stockbrokers might not go the way of the coal miner, telephone operator, or record store clerk.
-and-trade scheme this amount of CO2 equates to 8-14 million British pounds ($13-23 million) per year in carbon credits the researchers estimated.
#German bank and EU offers funding to Chile mining power plant State owned German bank Kfw has said it is to advance a#100 million loan ($123 million),
The German bank announced an advancement of its loan in a statement today, the funding represents around 10%of the total investment that is estimated to be required for the power plant project.
Plastic-bodied ELFS weigh only 150 pounds achieve 1800 mpg (the company says) and can reach 20 mph with 15 miles of electric range
What more a single EZ-Charge card will give Leaf-ers access to stations run by Chargepoint Blink Carcharging Group NRG evgo and Aerovironment.
It 31 inches tall weighs less than 200 pounds and can be wall-mounted. Businesses and municipalities that partner with BMW will be able to buy the charger
BMW's fast charger weighs less than 200 pounds and can be mounted on the wall. Photo:
compared with multimillion-dollar missiles, Navy officials said.""At less than a dollar per shot, there's no question about the value Laws provides,
"Klunder said.""With affordability a serious concern for our defense budgets, this will more effectively manage resources to ensure our sailors
The military research agency launched the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program in 2006 with the goal of developing a prosthetic device"to repay some of the debt we owe to our service members"
The Launcherone rocket while still in the design and testing phase hopes to eventually deliver payloads from 250 pounds to 500 pounds into space for less than $10 million per flight.
everybody has a home theater that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars just a few years ago.
If there are data to back up these decisions it's based on an engineer traffic counts or an estimator dollar estimates.
You can put a dollar value on happiness and people have been doing it for years.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011