Adobe, AIG, Akamai, AOL, Appnexus, AT&T, BSA, ebay, Electronic arts, Expedia, Facebook, GE, Goldman sachs, Google, Groupon, IAC, IBM, Lockheed martin, Massmutual, Microsoft
Girls Who Code adds COVERGIRL, Mastercard, and Samsung to its list of foundation partners as well.
Transparency Leads to Trust Each year, GMI Ratings releases a list of the 100 Most Trustworthy Companies, inspired by the abuses that led to the financial collapse.
the companies on this list are keeping shareholders informed, leading to less investor uncertainty and, in most cases, solid stock prices.
What might surprise you (or might not) is that technology is cited as one of today most fraudulent industries along with pharmaceuticals.
This means that the opportunity is ripe to distinguish your tech startup from closed-up competitors by employing a model of radical openness with investors and clients.
Investors in companies like IFTTT (which stands for If-This-Then-That) are also placing huge bets that the future lies in interconnection and open interaction among a multitude of platforms and devices.
This brilliant, long-game strategy landed the company a $30 million investment in August of this year.
bitcoin for traditional currency; at home 3d printing for manufacturing; and right now in Hong kong, Firechat, which is enabling protesters to circumvent Internet service providers.
The largest data providers have served as arbitrary gatekeepers for the world commercial real estate listings by asking brokers and agencies for info on their available spaces,
But now that there are large companies with large bankrolls that are capable of funding their own studios,
#Update Lending Club IPO Shows The Profit Potential For Financial Technology Investments Lending Club $5. 4 billion initial public offering on the New york stock exchange is more than just the largest IPO
which the world deals with money. his is not some narrow addressable market, it trillions of dollars and represent billions of dollars of opportunity,
says Matt Harris, a managing director with Bain Capital Ventures who specializes in backing financial services technology companies.
The most immediate winners are Lending Club investors among them Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Bay Partners, Foundation Capital, Union square Ventures,
and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Norwest Venture Partners is the largest holder with 50.8 million shares,
Equityzen has a breakdown of how much investors from each round stand to gain on their participation in each of the rounds here.
an investor in several financial technology companies including Lending Club, the soon-to-list Ondeck Capital, Motif Investing, and Lendinghome.
Moldow, whose lengthy white paper mapped the potential of marketplace lending, says that these companies are the vanguard of a larger host of companies that will remake finance. here are equity fundraising
and investment banking underwriting services that eventually will be transformed, but are still the old boy club, says Moldow.
Waiting In The Wings Beyond Ondeck a slew of online credit businesses are waiting in the wings with aspirations to take their own bow on the IPO stage
and their own twist on the lending business that was pioneered in the U s. by Lending Club and its earliest direct competitor, Prosper.
Companies like Social Finance are pitching student lending services; Funding Circle, Ondeck, Swift Capital, CAN Capital,
and others are appealing to small business borrowers; and Avantcredit, Lendup, Earnest all want to lend to different types of consumers.
Some startups are pursuing even more specialized types of loans, with Lendinghome and Assetavenue targeting home buyers with mortgage loans,
and Applepie Capital looking to lend to would-be restaurant franchisors. e see the lending club IPO as a bellwether for a major structural shift in the way that consumers
and small businesses get access to credit, says Funding Circle cofounder Sam Hodges. t one step in what will be a multiple step shift in companies like ours coming to scale
and changing the ways that parts of the market work. Shaky Beginnings The success of the lending business wasn always so certain.
As the financial crisis loomed in 2008 the U s. Securities and exchange commission took a hard look at both Lending Club
and Prosper and both businesses were forced to shut down while regulators assessed how they be overseen and by which watchdog.
Some investors point to the different approaches Prosper and Lending Club took to addressing regulatorsconcerns as one reason why Lending Club was able to take the pole position against its rival,
which had actually been the first peer-to-peer lender to launch in the U s. market. The two companies have approached always peer-to-peer lending somewhat differently.
Lending Club curated its borrowers and lenders from the outset while Prosper had a much more freewheeling,
pure marketplace approach to its business, investors said. And both companies stumbled in the face of regulatory scrutiny.
Lending Club was nearly out of money when investors like Salil Deshpande from Bay Partners (and now with Bain Capital) came in to revive the business in 2008.
Here how chief executive officer Renaud Laplanche described the situation on his own Linkedin page, alil invested in Lending Club as a Series A in 2008.
We were in the middle of the financial crisis and were awaiting for the clearance from the SEC to launch our program to investors.
Exit Music In the following years attention and capital turned to payments companies like Braintree (acquired by Paypal), Stripe or Square as the hope for fintech biggest home runs.
But those businesses all have potential (and actual) acquirers, while lending businesses almost as a rule, can only look to public markets for exits. here are no M&a acquirers of these lending companies.
Regulators will not let banks use equity to buy growth, says one investor familiar with the market. Also, the economics of lending make it a more profitable business then any of the other,
advisory services that could come to market. With loans there risk and a multiple that lenders make based on the risks they take,
whereas advisory services or transaction services are taking a percentage on the service they provide
or returns they generate for customers. So which businesses could be the next wave of financial technology companies to go public?
The financial advisory services companies like Wealthfront, which manages over $1 billion in assets, and Betterment,
which now has over 50,000 customers using its service and has a partnership with Fidelity,
are still too early. Bain Capital Harris has his money both literally and figuratively on business payments and transaction management companies. hese are companies that have very good enterprise facing products.
There again this wave of innovation in B2b payments and although there are a lot of M&a buyers,
there are a lot of CEOS in that category that are eager to go public. Bain Capital has backed Billtrust
but there are other companies like Payoneer, and Chrome River Technologies that are gaining traction. ee at the front lip of something big that happening,
says Harris. ublic markets are going to show us that financial services companies led by lending are going to be hugely valuable.*
*An earlier version of this post misrepresented the Equityzen infographic reporting returns for each round as returns from specific investors r
#Convoy! The Fueloyal Is A Smart Fuel Cap For Truckers Breaker breaker 10-4 good buddy.
We got Fueloyal on your tail coming up off the exit. This robotic fuel cap essentially keeps track of the fuel poured into your vehicle independently of the truck itself
and lets fleet owners ensure they no one is stealing the fuel poured into their 18-wheelers.
Called the icap 1000, the system fits into your Class-A truck gashole and tracks the gallons poured.
The system is tamper-proof and sends the data back to your home office via Wi-fi. It is powered self
With load prices going down and fuel prices going up it important to control costs, said Hristov. The product is being built now
or down Workflow is cheap enough that anyone who bounces around between apps for complex tasks should consider investing in it s
has announced today the close of a $9. 6 million Series A financing round with participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Firstmark Capital and Andy Palmer among others.
Kinsa s new funding will go toward growth with plans to hire engineers and marketing employees to help build out the product and the brand.#
with buyers using bank transfers to overcome payments issues, the postal service/meeting in person tapped for delivery,
to provide a central point for managing communications, payment, stock, etc. There plenty of demand:
The round is provided by Inspire Ventures and existing investor Galaxy Ventures. It will be used to expand the company sales and marketing teams,
Now its sole revenue source is a cut of paid-for value added services offered by partners, such as payments and logistics.
Cofounder Prathan opthananart explained that the company will take a revenue hit from its pricing change,
but it was deemed necessary to grow its market share in an increasingly competitive space. hailand social commerce scene was very quiet two years ago
although he did admit that expansion will require a further round of funding e
#Microsoft Begins Accepting Bitcoin For Windows Windows phone And Xbox Purchases If you want further proof that Microsoft is going through a transformative phase,
you may be interested to hear that the company has jumped on the bitcoin wagon. The Redmond-based tech giant is now accepting bitcoins for buying games
and other digital content on its Windows, Windows phone and Xbox platforms, as the folks at Coindesk noticed today.
Members of Reddit bitcoin subred noted that Microsoft appears to be working with payments firm Bitpay to make this happen.
Neither Microsoft nor Bitpay have announced formally the partnership or details but the former does have a series of instructions related to bitcoin payments within its illing helppages.
Wee contacted both companies for further information, but did not hear back at the time of writing.
It described its adoption of Bitcoin as being bout giving people options and helping them do more on their devices and in the cloud.
Customers can use bitcoin to load money into a Microsoft wallet or to create digital gift cards,
but direct payments with the cryptocurrency are supported not at this time. Finally, bitcoin payments appear to be limited to customers in the U s.,according to feedback from Reddit members d
#Sidecar Follows The Competition Starts Charging A $1##Ridesafe##Fee Last year, Uber introduced a afe Ridesfee that added a $1 charge to uberx fares.
-A $1 million insurance policy on each ride (as personal auto insurance generally doesn cover commercial use)- Background checks-Regular vehicle records checks Sidecar is taking on Uber et al. with an interesting tactic:
Its prices will vary based on prices set by the driver, but the passenger gets to pick the driver based on the calculated trip price (or whatever other factor they care about,
like type of car or estimated time of arrival) before they get in the car. The new fee will automatically be tacked on to that trip price up front
which have an annual turnover exceeding#50/$63. 71 million and a balance sheet exceeding#43/$54. 78 million.
In short but not-so-simple terms, qualifying businesses are required to a) measure total energy consumption, accounting for 90 percent of usage across all buildings, transport and industrial activities;
With this considerable investment of time and money companies will likely be motivated to implement measures recommended in the audit which,
Though the U k. has been relatively slow to implement PC power-management technology, mostly due to tax incentives, perhaps by example,
According to the American Council for an Energy-efficient Economy, even China and India have fared better on the list than the U s as American energy regulations for power conservation have been particularly scarce in recent years.
create hundreds of thousands of jobs and save citizens billions of dollars a year by 2030.
has made already strategic investments in Youku Tudou as well as Baidu IQIYI, one of its main rivals.
#With $16m In Funding Helium Wants To Provide The Connective tissue For The Internet of things Over the next few years,
the company is announcing today that it has raised $16 million in funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Firstmark Capital, Digital Garage, Marc Benioff, SV Angel,
In addition to the funding, Helium has named former Qualcomm exec Rob Chandhok its president and COO. Hel also join the company board
and keep hundreds or thousands of dollars of advanced technology from cooking itself. The only time anyone talks about a computer fans is
Both companies are focused intensely on growing their market share inside of the corporate market#large companies have large dollars
#Insikt Introduces Lending As A Service For Brands The lending space couldn be hotter, with folks like Lending Club set to IPO,
One of these new competitors just raised $16 million to let brands become the lenders of the future,
The San francisco-based lender will provide software that allows brands to offer small loans to their consumers,
trusting Insikt to handle the meticulous details of actually providing the loans. These brands can range from retailers and merchants to actual banks
who are limited often to a small window of financing. All loans are put on Insikt balance sheet for the first few months of their existence,
powered by capital from Capital one and Atalaya Capital Management, among others. After each brand has its own portfolio,
the entirety of that brand investments will be pooled together and issued as bonds to investors. This allows them to diversify where their money is going,
while allowing consumers with low FICO scores (or no FICO score at all) to get an installment plan application at the Pos.
In other words Insikt is playing on both sides. The platform offers investors the opportunity to power loans for brands,
which will in turn have technology that provides customers a lending option at Pos. Revolution Ventures provided the capital for Insikt $16 million round of funding,
dedicated to power growth for the company, but big financial firms have provided also upwards of $70 million in debt into the company to juice its lending business u
#Amazon To Let Shoppers Bargain For Lower Prices With New##Make An Offer##Option Amazon,
pushing hard to pick up more business during the holiday season, wants you to make a deal.
Taking a page from the likes of ebay and Priceline, it is introducing a new dutch auction-style feature.
Users can now ake an Offeron a product, suggesting a lower price to the vendor than the one listed on Amazon.
Amazon is rolling this out across about 150,000 items initially one-off products ranging from sports
and entertainment collectibles to art and it says that the plan will be to extend this to undreds of thousands of itemsby 2015.
who can use this as a way of shifting items that may have more flexible pricing,
Importantly, this gives also buyers somewhat more transparency on pricing, and keeps the negotiation within Amazon walled garden rather than being taken offline,
Amazon says it was launched in response to requests from those merchants. he new ake an Offerexperience is a game-changer for Amazon customers looking for great prices on one-of-a-kind items,
nearly half of the respondents told us that the ability to negotiate prices with customers would be important to drive more sales on Amazon. ake an Offerdelivers that functionality
and makes customers feel confident they are getting an item they want at the lowest price possible.
and seeing the price creep up in the process, against a preset deadline where a virtual hammer will drop. ll negotiations are 1: 1 and private between individual customers and sellers,
The intention is to lower prices, and a customer negotiating with a seller will never pay more than the listed price.
Amazon says that sellers who want to offer an item under the ake an Offeroption add the feature
when they list the price. Prospective buyers who are interested in using the feature then send a price to the vendor
who then either accepts, rejects or counteroffers. If and when a price is agreed, a user will be able to add the item to his/her shopping cart,
at the negotiated price, to pay for it. The news comes at a time when Amazon is pushing ahead not just on holiday deals online
but also continuing to look at other ways of extending its sales platform. Recent developments have included adding private label home essentials, by way of Amazon Elements, restaurant takeout and delivery,
app space following Softbank $250 million investment in Grabtaxi and Uber latest Asia-focused $1. 2 billion raise.
which included participation from existing investors DST Global and Chinese internet giant Tencent. The company is not disclosing its valuation
but this new funding round which is one of the largest ever for a Chinese tech firm is a huge jump on its $100 million Series C round from January this year.
The U s. firm pledged to spend much of its new $1. 2 billion funding round on developing its position in Asia.
It seems likely that Kuaidi Dache is also in the market for more financing. That would put Uber well behind its top rivals in China,
Stewart Butterfield s Slack is currently the talk of Silicon valley after the young company raised an additional $120 million at a post-money valuation of $1. 12 billion.
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.
It s currently fundraising a larger seed round (with a number of VCS/co-investors already committed) based off the back of its technology
#Mesosphere Announces First Data center OS And $36m In Funding Mesosphere, the commercial entity built on top of the open source Apache Mesos project,
announced some major milestones today, starting with $36m in Series B funding along with the early release of
The round was led by new investor Khosla Ventures with additional funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, SV Angel and other unnamed investors.
The latest funding brings the total investment to date to $50m. Besides the funding though, the bigger news was the announcement of their first data center operating system (DCOS.
This is a new kind of operating system that operates on the scale of the entire data center, which means instead of controlling a single machine,
and check out using their phone instead of a cash register. In fact, the entire Tyson Corner Center mall is attempting to go online with a designated smartphone app, virtual concierge services,
and reduce both operating and capital expenses. Networking vendors have moved aggressively to support open-source orchestration, network controllers and even software-based appliances to drive higher levels of interoperability.
#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
and 37 million vendors that use Alibaba Group marketplaces including Taobao and Tmall. com as well as payment histories from Alipay an Ant Financial subsidiary and China largest online payments platform.
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.
so unblocking these ads could end up generating more revenue for Secret Media. Based in New york with a few engineers working from France,
the two cofounders invested $1 million of their own money from their previous venture. am absolutely sure that there is no credible alternative to online advertising,
Many publishers complain about revenue loss from ad blocking, but few companies are working on a solution.
the startup has a small amount of funding from friends and family, but will likely raise a seed round in the future.
and is working on a series of partnerships with major retail brands to sell the devices to consumers That could possibly save the American consumer a lot of time and money.
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.
The other thing to keep in mind about the kit is the price. The technology offers convenience
though prices are expected to go up to $149 next month. Whereas a basic stethoscope is about $5 to $25 on Amazon,
since 2010 and boasts over 240 deployments including the three biggest credit card companies and two of the top three biggest banks,
What more, it half the price of the $100, 000 installed version. The company always had a cloud version on its road map,
The aim is to make smartphone theft ultimately as futile as stealing a credit card, whereby a user ancellingtheir hardware renders it ultimately useless.
including factors like how difficult it is to recoup an investment on something theye taken.
no information about how much either side is investing, what sort of revenue shares will come out of the deal,
and whether it involves Bittorrent actually investing in Rapid Eye more directly. The idea behind Originals is that it will show first-run video content that it will sell through its Bundle ay gatemodel, for a period of between 30 and 60 days.
As background, Bundles is the distribution platform that Bittorrent has been slowly building up that lets creators sell content using a variety of different payment methods,
including partial payments, to nlockcertain parts of the content and advertising. Perhaps most notably, the model is disruptive in that it lets content creators keep 90 percent of the proceeds that their work makes through the platform.
#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:
#Rakuten To Put Its Bitnet Investment To Work And Accept Bitcoin Worldwide Rakuten, Japan largest online retail firm, has announced that it will soon accept bitcoin across its global marketplaces.
The company is putting its investment in Bitnet a startup that raised $14. 5 million last October to work with this development.
Bitnet, which was founded by ex-Visa execs and is rivaled by Coinbase and Bitpay, will initially be integrated into Rakuten U s. marketplace to allow customers to pay in BTC.
Next up, the new payment option will roll out in Germany and Austria with other international markets to follow.
Last year was a breakthrough year for bitcoin as a sea of established retailers, including Dell,
hopped onto the cryptocurrency to give customers an alternative avenue for payments. he integration with Bitnet platform will make Rakuten one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world to begin accepting bitcoin,
because it not only continues the momentum for bitcoin among retailers, but it could help position Bitnet as a credible alternative to the increasingly dominant duopoly that is Coinbase and Bitpay both
of which have raised significant venture funding, and own the most lucrative bitcoin retail partnerships. Coinbase is floated particularly well,
having raised $75 million in January in a round that featured several Wall street institutions, including The New york stock exchange.
Bitpay raised $30 million last summer in what was at the time the largest round ever for bitcoin startup.
Coinbase has nabbed since that accolade the U s. company has raised more than $100 million in investor money to date m
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