Itl still require an international payment method for now, as well as Internet access (which still isn ubiquitous in the U s),
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
and Las vegas. There a new vanguard creating the future of the U s. manufacturing economy. Companies like Makerbot, Techshop and Kickstarter are playing a large part in fixing the breakdown between historical industrialized employment and manufacturing models,
Part of this interrogation into the industrial manufacturers of tomorrow needs to involve looking at assumptions about financing and the actual mechanics of manufacturing.
Henry ford led the second Industrial revolution in the 20th century with large assembly-line factories being built on a mass economy of scale.
Its hallmark is that of a flat and distributed economy, a level playing field where local enterprise can compete with global conglomerates.
However, Mark Zuckerberg recently commented on the censorship issue in a public Q&a saying one more country doesn add much extra ad money or growth.
#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
and lets you pay anywhere in the world without any foreign transaction fee. There is no hidden or additional charge.
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
#Teachmate365 A Platform For Special Needs Educators Launches With $3m In Funding Organizing special needs education is complicated often
Teachmate365 announced today that it has picked up $3 million in Series A funding from private investors
even though venture capital investment in technology aimed at students in kindergarten through high school jumped 32 percent to $642 million last year almost none of that went toward tools for special education.
and the Sony Playstation Network last month have claimed credit for an attack on Malaysia Airlineswebsite.
The majority of that money comes from an Indiegogo campaign that went 3860 percent over the original goal of $50000.
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.
However Gil says the price will be going up in a week and that the carry on luggage item will eventually reach $400. see this as eventually becoming a lifestyle brand like Goprohe tells me. amsonite is a $4 billion company.
or Samsonite so the price will reflect that. luesmart now employs eight people including the five founders.
but says he doesn need more money for current operations thanks to the money from YC and the Indiegogo campaign.
and services this week and Paypal also added its name to the list yesterday. Other tech companies have included Valve cutting off Steam services in the country.
And even if Google did decide to circumvent U s. laws (which it is not) it wouldn be able to collect money for services
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
but search maps and Gmail will not be affected. The Russian agency ITAR-TASS reports that Google will be ending Google Play services both paid and free in the region from February 1 as they fall under the restrictions on the import
or technology to the Crimea region of Ukraine Other areas covered in the order include investments and immigration.
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.
which they characterize as giant leap compared to previous reportsthe U s. Department of energy contributed funding to the research.
While Google has made various wind energy investments over the last few years this is Amazon first (or at least the first one it is publicly talking about) s
Today the startup is disclosing that it raised £1. 5 million in a new round of funding led by Scottish-based angel group London & Scottish Investment Partners (LSIP), with additional funding from the Scottish
Investment bank (SIB) and Old College Capital, the venture investment arm of the University of Edinburgh.
Meanwhile, today funding will be used to support the evelopment and roll-outof Purelifi product roadmap, as well as for various marketing initiatives.
but today it announced PDF plans to put money into games and software by buying 2. 98 percent of Kingsoft for HK$527 million ($68 million).
The investment is notable because it is a sign of Xiaomi intention to increase its focus on software and services.
Its deals to date have circled around hardware including a $200 million investment in appliance maker Midea
and a funding round for wearables startup Misfit but with the Kingsoft deal Xiaomi may well be laying the ground for a dedicated games service security features and other mobile services for its customers.
but Hugo Barra the company VP of international did tell Techcrunch last week that it is in the market for investments
The Xiaomi investment in Kingsoft is expected to be completed at the end of January. The company bought its shares from internet giant Tencent
The backstory lies in a classic case of using economics as a diplomatic lever. Apple move is in response to an Executive Order signed by U s. President Barack Obama on December 19
Among the various activities that are prohibited now are new investment in the region by a U s. person;
or technology to the Crimea region of Ukraine Other areas covered in the order include investments and immigration.
The company at one point last month closed its online store as the value of the Ruble plunged.
It then reopened it several days later with prices up by 35 %(which is huge
with investors including YC and some undisclosed U s. angels. Given it taking revenue, it not in a position where it needs to raise more funding at this point
but the cofounders speculate that if they convert all the interest they are seeing into paying customers they may look to bring on additional investors to help scale to meet demand.
In terms of their next steps, as they graduate from the YC program, they are focusing on the newly launched Decisionos feature including getting it rolled out to more customers. e are flushing out the delivery mechanism of the Decisionos and launching it in a 30 hospital system,
hopefully soon, in all their emergency rooms. And then a few customers on the operating room side. And then our plan going forward is to mature that Decisionosand take the partners that we have today, many
a not-for-profit collective of hackers dedicated to making it harder for prying government eyes to get a hold of your information.
#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,
bonds and stocks historically have performed well and held up well through the recession, says Ellis. f youe a high net worth individual or some sort of investment fund,
you want options and you want attractive risk-adjusted returns. The economy may have recovered, 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 and how their investments will fare in another economic downturn. eople are learning that post-recession,
post-financial crisis, they want more data and more transparency about what theye investing in, and the marketplace platform allows investors to do their own analysis,
says Ellis. Driverup is just one of the venture-backed startups to apply the marketplace model to a specific vertical.
Companies like Realtymogul in the $2 trillion real estate industry and Noesis in the $18 billion commercial energy equipment market have seen rapid growth despite a narrow focus. nlike some industries,
where if youe starting to go after certain verticals maybe youe a little too niche, in this industry,
youe talking about massive markets that are still able to be disrupted, 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,
you realize that the thought of trying to track $100 million worth of $8, 000 loans is just terrifying none of their systems are set up to deal with loans that small,
explains Matt Burton, founder of Orchard. Orchard, a Canaan portfolio company 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,
if not the next 20 years, says Ciporin. oul see things start to happen around the ecosystem that being created,
and that what I think is really exciting that there is an ecosystem now and it getting to be very large. t
#Are Drones A Fad Or Here For good? Drones are seen no longer just as a tool of the military
at great expense. Companies like Precision Hawk are developing software and hardware that automatically measures the height of crops
but consider that most of the other apps offer tiers of pricing. By making this free Facebook could potentially drive a lot more users to its wider network.
Plus this would give Facebook another revenue stream beyond ads and app-related payments. How it will work Facebook wouldn show me a demo ahead of the launch
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
when they may have turned 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,
and omni-channel. 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 and Paypal settles with the customer. Additionally, Paypal announced a new set of Business Consulting services that will allow businesses to learn more about best practices like reducing cart abandonment, improving conversion,
or making international sales, for example. The consulting team had earlier been available only to select (read:
larger) Paypal merchants, where it says to have increased incremental revenues by the millions. Now it opening to all, no matter the merchant size.
The program had been in pilot testing for several months, and to date, Paypal has worked with hundreds of merchants.
Some of the new Paypal consulting services will be offered for free, while Paypal will charge for others,
like custom development, depending on the merchant needs. The company has yet to announce pricing, but notes in most cases there no charge e
#Sony's Just Released A Worthwhile Waterproof Phone Waterproof phones have been around for ages. But to be waterproof,
there are little flappy covers on the ports. Like the Microusb card port. And these covers always break off.
Always. But now there the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, an Android smartphone that waterproof without those annoying caps.
The microusb port is naked but, sadly, there is still a cover on the SD Card slot.
The rest of the phone is on par with other mid-range phones. There are 13mp/5mp cameras
and an octa-core 64-bit Snapdragon 615 powers the Lollipop device. Sony notes that the phone has a two-day battery life.
The M4 Aqua will have a starting price of 299 EUR and will be available in 80 countries,
Filkhedma A concierge for household services Baby Boons modern baby ecommerce Wallstreetchamber Which claims to have an algorithm for automated share investing.
Egyptinnovate. com, an ambitious project to support entrepreneurs and investors which launches this summer. At the Rise up Summit in October,
#Realtyshares Now Lets Investors Put Money Into Individual Real estate Markets About a year ago Realtyshares launched as a new way for investors to put small amounts of money into real estate projects kind of like a endingclub
for Real estate. Now the company is launching a way for them to focus on investing in specific markets around the U s. Realtyshares works to crowdfund available real estate investments allowing investors to put in as little as $5000 into single-family homes multifamily homes and even commercial
For developers looking for funding Realtyshares provides an easy way to quickly raise money for their projects.
It funds about 10 to 20 projects per month and it takes an average of just four days for each Realtyshares investment to be funded.
That compares to weeks or months for more traditional funding sources. In the past year the company had amassed about $300 million in real estate property value through more than 200 different properties across 59 different cities and 17 states.
According to founder and CEO Nav Athwal average return on investment has ranged from between 8 percent and 29 percent depending on the type of project funded.
Athwal says most investors that have joined the platform so far have been IT professionals who are looking for new investment opportunities.
and real estate sectors where it sees opportunities for investment. Those markets are Seattle Dallas Austin Miami
and Chicago where the company hopes to more efficiently connect borrowers and investors. Those market-specific products will enable developers to find funding from local investors who have an interest in development in their cities.
And investors get the benefit of profiting from better yields in markets that have not yet been overdeveloped.
Realyshares has raised $1. 9 million in funding led by General Catalyst with other investors that include E*Trade COO Greg Framke and president of Gold bullion International Savneet Singh t
#Uber Latest Experiment Is Uber Cargo A Logistics Service In Hong kong Uber is talked often about for its potential to develop into a global logistics service,
Prices are based on the distance of the trip and also time taken, Uber explained. Why Hong kong?
and both have raised significant amounts of funding from investors. Lalamove also known as Easyvan raised $10 million just this week,
and scored a $10 million investment from Chinese social network Renren in 2014. Lalamove and Gogovan are based both in Hong kong,
Lalamove is already present in six cities across China and Southeast asia and, with new money in its coffers
Uber confirmed that its latest $1. 2 billion financing round will go towards expanding its presence in Asia.
and add Baidu as a strategic investor in China Uber Cargo is another reminder that new Uber initiatives can
and turn off your unit to conserve energy and save money. The unit itself is even monitoring temperature and humidity locally,
#Square Cash Integrates Touch ID To Send Money Using Your Fingerprint Square Cash Square Venmo competitor that lets you use the app to transfer money to other people has added a new feature to its ios app that some might say is long overdue:
users can now authenticate money transfers using the Touch ID feature in later versions of the iphone (5s
Apple has been making a lot of use of the Touch ID feature as a security authentication layer on its phone for things like unlocking the device authenticating app payments and so on
and Apple itself has used the Touch ID for its own payment ambitions speaks to how Square which reportedly shelved plans last year for an IPO has perhaps been needing to rethink
but money transferring apps are generally have been some of the more popular payment services on smartphones.
Prior to today updates to Square Cash had other updates including the ability to send money via Bluetooth and email
#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.
letting you do things like feed the exact mileage from a particular drive into Concur to expense a work trip
is that car owners can make money on their car inactivity while providing car renters with a more convenient option. here is a growing tendency in our society,
The car owner then determines the rental price describes the car and uploads photos of the vehicle.
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,
money. 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),
and securityare actively being created by the world social network. 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.
Last year foreign workers sent $583 billion to individuals in their home countries, also known as remittances. Remittances are one of the largest financial inflows to the developing world.
In some countries remittances are responsible for as much as 30 percent of GDP. However sending money is expensive.
The market is controlled by two companiesestern Union and Moneygramwhich hold a duopoly over the global industry.
but fees of up to 29 percent are still being charged on money transfers between some countries.
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.
This would allow users the ability to store money with the social network, transfer money to others,
or buy items online. 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.
It couldn come at a better time for the social network, which desperately needs the rest of the world to sign up
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.
Their economies are almost entirely cash-based and suffer from the chicken-and-egg problem:
there is no incentive for merchants to accept electronic payments. With nothing to sustain a system of electronic money,
the cycle continues. But, the world is changing. In the next five years, nearly every person on the planet will have access to the Internet.
The idea that we still need physical banks, plastic cards, and paper money fades away. It already starting to occur.
Wechat users sent over 1 billion ed envelopesfilled with e-money to other users. It easy to imagine a world where workers in developing countries are paid through Facebook via peer-to-peer payments,
store their money on Facebook, purchase local goods through transfers, and have the ability to pay for items using Facebook.
The effect that Facebook could have on the world as an electronic financial institution is nothing short of profound.
So why would Facebook facilitate millions of transfers and online purchases for next to nothing?
For one, it puts them closer to attaining the holy grail of datahow users spend their money.
the question presents itselfow will the new economies of the future operate? Will they still cling to the coins
Facebook has an incredible opportunity in front of itselfo use technology to change the way the world thinks about money.
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