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 and rival Alibaba were among ten private investors that were approved by the Chinese government last year to launch five private banks.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It available at Apple Stores starting today, with a retail price of $229. 95. Additional dimmer/remote combos sell for $59. 95.
when the startup was ready to talk about its financing. That no longer the case. During a recent visit to Thync beautiful offices (theye renovated an old opera hall),
At its $299 launch price those who buy Starbucks or the like every day might have found that use case making some monetary sense,
Longer term, Martin expects that the company data around emergencies will allow it to offer a predictive analytics platform that might be of interest to Wall street investment funds and insurance companies.
the startup has raised not previously venture capital, but has subsisted instead on dollars won from startup competitions,
which will release a new card reader designed to allow small businesses to take Apple Pay payments as well as credit card chip payments,
so merchants can accept all forms of payment. Merchants can now register to receive the new Square Reader,
#Rhombus Lets Businesses Accept Payments By Text Since millennials don use credit cards, cash, or even beads and shells, the only way to get them to pay for anything is through their smartphone.
The system lets them confirm payment and it automatically debited from their account. Rhombus was created by Edwin Elodimuor and Taiwo Oyeniyi
Oyeniyi has a Masters in Computer science and Elodimuor one in Economics. The system is live
We quickly saw interest from regular businesses that wanted a better way to accept payments.
primarily when picking up your protein cupcake, reducing the total payment friction sounds like a great thing c
Smart Vision Labs. The company has raised just $6. 1 million in its first major round of institutional funding from a group of investors led by Techstars Ventures.
Other investors in the round included Heritage Group Connectivity Capital, and Red sea Ventures. Smart Vision device, the SVONE, is based on initial research that Zhou
National Vision Inc.,one of the largest eyecare chains in the country is seed a investor and a partner with the company,
and Smart Vision is already generating revenue selling its devices. he money is really going to be used to scale out our operating team
The potential size of the market was enough for Techstars to lead the investment round in Smart Vision a first for the firm latest $!
50 million early stage investment fund. his is the first one where we are the sole lead,
Remember there was a time machine in those movies, too, companies with money to burn; Il be impressed
#Name Your Price On Shopping App Compelation Browse products. Name your price. If the merchant accepts your bid,
you automatically buy it. This is how Compelation is flipping the concept of ecommerce and giving consumers the power.
Normally, a merchant sets a sale price, and a buyer simply accepts or rejects it.
That fast, but leads to tons of missed opportunities and a fundamental lack of transparency.
while scoring data on price sensitivity for businesses. And with a preset demand curve, merchants can choose exactly how much revenue they want to earn
or products they want to sell if theye willing to drop the price low enough. Compelation ios app beta is normally invite-only,
but it opening signups for the next 24 hours to let Techcrunch readers give it a try. Here how it works.
You then browse reams of products that each show their typical retail price. But that not what you pay.
from people only willing to pay $25 to those willing to buy for just a few bucks cheaper than the retail price.
and ruthless economists out there, the real fun is in buying gift cards through Compelation.
This type of asynchronous, buyer-priced shopping couldn happen before the rise of ecommerce, but it holds a ton of advantages over traditional discounting.
%they may be throwing away money because some of those buyers would have purchased happily with just a 10%discount.
was it ever worth the original price? That why merchants despise the typical discount platform that gives them exposure in return for price cuts.
But Compelation lets businesses see a demand curve of how many people will pay what price before they ever start selling,
If they need to hit a revenue target, they can go down the curve and sell to each buyer at the maximum price theye willing to pay until they reach their goal.
Plus they can learn what the optimal price for selling elsewhere like on their site or in retail stores.
Other attempts at name-your-price ecommerce typically don aggregate demand, so merchants have to deal with offers one by one,
which doesn scale. Compelation offers merchants a dashboard where they can track demand and sell to everyone at a certain price point
or above in one fell swoop. realized group selling was completely brokencompelation cofounder Dave Gudai tells me. his one-sizes-fits-all discount wasn working.
Wouldn the store make more money that way even with a reduced margin? Compelation could let buyers
and previous investors pushed it through clinical trials. Opternative Test Photolee tells me the trials were wild successand that regulators have deemed Opternative online test tatistically equivalent to the refractive exams done in the doctor office.
And as the world shifts toward the information and knowledge economy, the value increases. Making accurate vision more accessible just took one bright eyedea.
With productivity of its huge elite workforce translating into billions in earned or lost revenue for Google,
#Subway Teams Up With Paypal On Mobile payments Ordering your food or beverages by smartphone and then paying for it via an app is quickly becoming the new normal.
Starbucks already allows for this across thousands of its stores in the U s. Meanwhile, Burger king and Firehouse Subs announced integrations with Mastercard Masterpass digital payment solution just this week,
Subway and Paypal are working together to turn on Paypal Onetouch mobile checkout experience in an updated Subway app that work across the chain 27,000 U s. locations by the end of the year.
Subway had launched actually quietly a mobile payment solution in its app last fall, but only began discussing the details more publicly this May as it needed time to train staff
however though that will change later this year as Subway begins to advertise its mobile ordering and payments app for ios and Android.
a company Paypal acquired this March for $280 million. A white-label digital wallet maker, Paydiant was known best for being the payments startup behind the mobile wallet from the merchant-owned network MCX,
led by Walmart, and whose members included Target, CVS, Rite aid, Best Buy and others. With MCX, the group of retailers had been developing its own alternative to Apple Pay with Currentc.
Now that Paydiant is a Paypal company, it moving to integrate Paypal Onetouch mobile checkout into the Subway application as another checkout option, alongside the app support for Apple Pay and Android Pay.
The benefit to using Paypal Onetouch is that it works across all apps where Paypal is installed.
This means end users only have to sign in one time in a supported app and then can skip logging in to Paypal the next time they check out in that same app or any other one.
For Subway the company believes that this sort of simplified approach to payments makes sense for its own customer base,
which also embraces a igital lifestyle. he Paypal customer base is very complimentary to the customer base that would frequent Subway restaurants,
explains Ken Moy, Director of Global Payments and Emerging Commerce at Subway. o bringing together the convenience of
what Paypal will enable us to further do with our mobile app is very much in sync with
what wee trying to do which is make it as simple as possible and as convenient for customers to buy sandwiches from us,
Moy wouldn speak to the traction the mobile payments solution within the current build of the Subway app has seen to date,
Plus, Subway believes that the integration of the Paypal support will increase this usage even further,
For Paypal, however, its work with Subway is just the beginning of what the company indicates will be a series of announcements about Paydiant-built apps turning on Paypal checkout. ubway will be the most prominent initial launch partner for all that, notes Chris Gardner, cofounder of Paydiant.
But while Paypal purchase of Paydiant is helping it get a foothold in a number of mobile apps,
it will still have to compete with the other forms of payment, including Apple Pay and Android Pay,
that the businesses themselves will want to support. t the end of the day, many of customers will provide the ability to pay through multiple wayst not
Subway expects its Paypal-powered app to arrive before the end of the year a
Covered Additionally, the country notes that Silicon valley investor and Golden state warriors part-owner Chamath Palihapitya, helped their cause greatly by getting involved.
when China economy was still growing at more than 10 percent a year, it was unclear
says Valerie Karplus, a professor of global economics at MIT Sloan School of management, and director of the Tsinghua-MIT China Energy and Climate Project.
But economic growth has slowed (it was 7. 7 percent in 2012 and in turn so has growth in demand for energy.
And equally important how do you make money from doing so? In addressing the first question Pettigrew notes that successful MMA development starts with the right mindset.
The key to answering the question about generating revenue lies in defining the value proposition early
Examples include pay-peruse analytics risk-sharing reimbursement and patient self-payment. She recommends defining the MMA s targeted value proposition and business model up front.#
And equally important how do you make money from doing so? In addressing the first question Pettigrew notes that successful MMA development starts with the right mindset.
The key to answering the question about generating revenue lies in defining the value proposition early
Examples include pay-peruse analytics risk-sharing reimbursement and patient self-payment. She recommends defining the MMA s targeted value proposition and business model up front.#
#Driving Marketing Results with Big data For marketers trying to maximize their return on investment predictive analytics based on big data is an exciting new tool.
and combine it with their knowledge of television radio billboard and print campaigns to tailor marketing messages and ultimately improve return on investment (ROI).
and a pricing structure that aligns advertising performance to actual conversions (rather than clicks or impressions) to avoid fraud David Perez Convertro s chief marketing officer wrote in a recent blog post.
and planned to use the money for fun before remembering or being reminded that they should be funding their retirement accounts.
will use AOPTIX technology in New jersey to shave nanoseconds off the time it takes data to travel between the computers of Nasdaq Stock market and the New york stock exchange e
Last week Aquion announced $34. 6 million in funding to help it scale up production. The batteries cost about as much as lead-acid ones
a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois. Semprius has raised $45 million from investors including Siemens,
Its current investors say theyl contribute, and for now theye loaning the company money to keep it in business,
but they won do so forever. The company needs a new investor soon. Otherwise it could go under.
Semprius predicament has become a familiar one for solar startups. Founded in 2005 Semprius was part of a wave of venture capital investments a couple of years later that funded hundreds of new solar companies (see lta Devices:
Finding a Solar Solution. It one of only a few of those companies still standing. Many of the others failed
Investors lost more than $1 billion. The resulting backlash has made it difficult for any solar companies, regardless of their merits,
to get the investments they need to prove their technology. n 2007, venture capitalists were throwing money at solar companies.
All you have to have is solar in your name. Or at least start with the letter S, says Scott Burroughs, Semprius chief technology officer. ow it the exact opposite
he says. nstead of throwing money at companies, theye not even considering one if it associated with solar.
but because investors have been scared off? Magic Stamp Semprius is not actually asking for that much money.
In the heyday of the solar technology bubble, the ill-fated startup Solyndra raised about $1 billion from venture capitalists
completely changing the economics of using small solar cells. Small cells have many advantages; because they require little material,
Huge investments in conventional silicon solar power, especially in China had lowered costs of production but also flooded the market with cheap solar panels.
So Semprius continues its search for a new investor to scale up its technology. It has leads in sunny places,
At least one potential investor in China is interested, says Burroughs. iven all the stuff that happened in the solar industry over the last two to three years,
our investors have every reason to head for the hills, says Semprius CEO Joseph Carr. ut our customers
That convinces our current investors that if we can get through this valley of darkness, there an opportunity at the end.
Those investors are hopeful that a strategic investor can be signed soon. Theye been keeping the company funded
while it raises more money ot because wee into giving charitable gifts, says Semprius investor Clinton Bybee,
a venture capitalist at ARCH Venture Partners. e believe this could be very big. e
#Google's Secretive Deepmind Startup Unveils a Neural Turing Machine""One of the great challenges of neuroscience is to understand the short-term working memory in the human brain.
It is clearly worth the cover price. Once you have read and understood the first sentence your brain stores those seven chunks in a way that is available as a single chunk in the next sentence.
#A Credit card Terminal That Takes Apps Last year Osama Bedier then the head of Google Wallet decided he was on the wrong side of the payments business.
which will soon be widespread as well as digital payments and can run apps for things like customer loyalty programs and sales analytics.
Google s digital payment app Google Wallet offers consumers a number of payment-related features including a quick way to pay at stores by tapping a phone that contains a near-field
Bedier a former Paypal executive who came to Google in 2011 saw an opportunity to switch his focus from the gadgets we can use to make payments to the ones used to handle the transactions:
credit-card terminals and cash registers. No matter how great the value proposition you can t force people to install new technology
The Poynt device Bedier says is meant to accept all kinds of payments that may become increasingly popular in the coming years.
It accepts payments via NFC (used by services such as Google Wallet and Apple s new Apple Pay) and QR code.
and showed a few different payment options. Merchants could use the screen for ads or store specials when not taking payments Bedier says.
Bedier had a colleague come and make a purchase using Apple Pay on an iphone:
It will come with three apps including a cash register app and an app that lets merchants pick out insights about their sales such as what s selling best and worst.
Bedier says the company won t make money from sales of the device itself or a cut of payment fees.
Instead it plans to take a cut of revenue from sales of apps that will run on the device.
Besides a small rise in the price of natural gas and slightly cheaper coal, the weather played the biggest role in in pushing up emissions,
The price of natural gas rose from $3. 54 per million BTU in 2012 to $4. 49 in 2013
while the price of coal dropped from $2. 38 per million BTU to $2. 35.
All of this combined to make the carbon intensity of the whole U s. economy, or the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per million dollars of GDP, rise by 0. 2 percent,
Grabit, which was founded in 2011, counts Nike and Samsung among its strategic investors g
#How Magic Leap s Augmented Reality Works A Florida startup called Magic Leap announced Tuesday that it had received $542 million in funding from major Silicon valley investors led by Google
to develop hardware for a new kind of augmented reality hardware. The secretive startup has yet to publicly describe
The desire to understand why inequality seems to be reaching such troubling levels no doubt accounts for the remarkable success this year of The french academic economist Thomas Piketty Capital in the Twenty-first Century,
Economists have warned long that inflation-adjusted wages for low-and middle-income workers have been flat or declining since the late 1970s in the United states,
even as its economy has grown. Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of economics, greatly expands on this idea,
and Anthony Atkinson, an economist at the University of Oxford, Piketty collected and analyzed data, including tax records,
The top 10 percent now accounts for 48 percent of national income; the top 1 percent makes almost 20 percent
The disparity in the portion of income earned from workhat economists call labor incomes particularly striking.
Privately held wealth in some European countries is now about 500 to 600 percent of annual national income,
where r is the average return on capital and g is the economic growth rate. When the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate
then the money that rich people make from their wealth piles up while wages rise more slowly if at all.
Since the 1950s, economics has been dominated by the ideaotably formulated by Simon Kuznets, a Harvard economist and Nobel laureatehat inequality diminishes as countries become more technologically developed
and more people are able to take advantage of the resulting opportunities. Many of us suppose that our talents,
what economists like to call uman capital. But the belief that technological progress will lead to he triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders,
and skill over nepotismis, writes Piketty, argely illusory. Not all economists are so pessimistic; in fact, g has been higher than r for most of the 20th century
and continues to be so. Nonetheless, Piketty book is important because of the way he has clarified the magnitude of the problem and its dangers.
The coauthor, with fellow MIT academic Andrew Mcafee, of The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson, like Piketty, has gained recently unlikely prominence for an academic economist.
The biggest factor is that the technology-driven economy greatly favors a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck.
is that the technology-driven economy greatly favors a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck,
Brynjolfsson argues that these people are benefiting from a winner-take-all effect originally described by Sherwin Rosen in a 1981 paper called he Economics of Superstars.
Why hire a local tax consultant when you can use a cheap, state-of-the-art program that is constantly being updated and refined?
or large investments to create an apphe biggest economic winners will not be those owning conventional capital but,
and Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate and professor at New york University, argued that uperstar-based technical change is upending the global economy.
That economy they conclude, will increasingly be dominated by members of the small elite that nnovate
says David Autor, an MIT economist, the disparity in skills and education among the other 99 percent is big deal, a much bigger deal.
Research he conducted with a fellow MIT economist, Daron Acemoglu, suggests that productivity growth is not in fact accelerating,
According to Autor, the changes wrought by digital technologies are transforming the economy, but the pace of that change is not necessarily increasing.
But the underlying problem for much of the population remains. e have a very skill-driven economy without a very skilled workforce,
he begins abruptly. e used to be a classic middle-class economy. But that all gone.
The economy is bifurcated and there nothing in the middle. He blames globalization for wiping out the semiconductor industry
and other living expenses. At the same time, much of the employment growth in the area is happening in retail
According to Chris Benner, a regional economist at the University of California, Davis, there has been no net increase in jobs in Silicon valley since 1998;
If economists are right that income inequality is fueled by disparities in skills and education, then the last chance for many people to find a route into the middle class may be in places like Foothill College.
supply an average of 44 percent of the funding for elementary and secondary schools in the United states, helping to fuel the disparity in educational investments between poor and rich communities.)
Perhaps technology is changing so quickly that people are slow to grasp which skills they might need,
Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez believe that the tax cuts made by Margaret Thatcher
including a global wealth tax, could begin to close the economic gap. But at least in the United states, edistributionis a dirty word in almost any political setting. f we know one thing,
says Robert Solow, a professor emeritus of economics at MIT, t that redistributing income is not something wee very good at.
Solow, a Nobel laureate who is one of the most influential economists of the last half-century,
which is damaging to the economy. In other words, the lack of access to high-quality education is not just bad for the students in East Palo alto;
It will also strike many as unfairly taking money from those who have earned it. If the goal is based the erit inequalitythat results
and, ranging from a higher minimum wage to stronger job protections to modifications of our tax policy. And if Piketty is right about the supermanagers,
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