#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.
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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.
For example credit history can be measured through a user history of credit card and utility payments through Alipay.
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.
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,
What more, it half the price of the $100, 000 installed version. The company always had a cloud version on its road map,
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.
#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
Itl still require an international payment method for now, as well as Internet access (which still isn ubiquitous in the U s),
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.
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
or even disable online payment if you don need it for now. You can disable everything but the ATM feature.
Number26 already makes money from Mastercard cut on every transaction it transparent for the user.
#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.
The majority of that money comes from an Indiegogo campaign that went 3860 percent over the original goal of $50000.
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.
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.
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
And Driverup, a lending platform for automotive financing, announced a $50 million Series A last week from Emerald Development Managers
see the risk and the interest rates, and make the loans they want to on an a la carte basis,
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,
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,
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,
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
#Paypal Credit Expansion Now Lets Merchants Set Terms Including Option For Interest-Free Payments Last July, Paypal rebranded its Bill
as a part of the company efforts to bring its credit products ore to the center of Paypal.
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.
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.
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
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