pound for pound, than other materials used in engineering for moving objects, he reported in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology,
A partnership involving Council Lead Partner Mastercard, however, hopes to change that. Mastercard is partnering with Masabi to completely eliminate the need for cash
or even advance planning when using transit. Masabi is known for its comprehensive mobile ticketing platform already in use by 22 transit agencies worldwide.
The partnership with Mastercard will make it even easier for transit customers to pay. Not only are the days of fumbling around for cash over
riders may not even have to pull out their credit cards. A transit overhaul in Athens The first city to benefit from the partnership is Athens, Greece,
The Mastercard/Masabi partnership allows riders to buy their tickets with a quick tap on their smartphone.
The solution incorporates Mastercard Masterpass, which allows people to store digital wallets securely on their mobile devices.
Credit card and other payment information can be stored in the digital wallet allowing people to pay without needing to swipe
or manually enter their credit card information. Reducing lines through convenience There is no doubt that contactless cards are fast.
With the Mastercard/Masabi partnership, the smartphone is the common platform. The rechargeable contactless cards used by many transit systems also create two lines:
And its approach didn break the bank. The state estimates the savings in the millions of dollars.
The savings are so great, it doesn bother to calculate a total. Over the past 10 years, the program has cut the number of chronic homeless in the state by 91%--drawing the attention of the Washington post
"A considerable amount of public dollars is spent essentially maintaining people in a state of homelessness,"Dennis Culhane,
and the Pandemic and All-Hazard Preparedness Act (signed into law 2 years later) allotted billions of dollars in funding for research into medical countermeasures to be used in the case of nuclear, chemical,
#White house unveils smart grid strategy, $250 million in loans WASHINGTON, D c.--If Thomas Edison could drop into 2011
--and $250 million in loans--for building a 21st century'smart grid'as a catalyst to make power less expensive,
so you can be underwater on your mortgage, have a two-car garage and enslave yourself to lawn care?
Image credit: Apple Insider Related:''Cliff'bill winners: wind, rum, electric scooters and more Can this polystyrene pedal-powered plane break world records?
Solar group to World bank: Give us gas and oil's $12b, and we'll cool planet Siemens:
880m euros'worth of wind power orders since July Google invests $75 million in U s. wind far r
which provide every conceivable function from credit card transactions to finance to procurement to human resource management--whatever it is there's an API for that.
when the payments world was dominated by Mastercard and Visa. API technology has opened up this restrictive market,
Plus millions of dollars for the software. Enter Medsphere a commercial supporter of Vista software.
the world's largest crude oil exporter, is launching an ambitious multi-billion-dollar plan aimed at creating an industry around its other abundant resource,
With protective packaging, anything that weighs more 10 pounds. Anyone that uses plastic foam, we d like to replace it.
Chief scientist and cofounder Gavin Mcintyre just won a half a million dollar proposal to adopt this same platform for automobile interior trim parts and cushions.
image credit: Google maps, David Worthington) Related on Smartplanet: What the NRC really knew about Fukushima Fukushima ocean radiation could pose sleeper threat Nuclear meltdowns nearly made northern Japan uninhabitable do need we to worry about radiation in our milk?
It uses a CO2 powered piston that launches the 11-pound machine into the air.
"The present solution is to have a switchable filter bank along with switchable and/or multi-band antenna, ays Jacob Adams,
and Samsungpent millions of euros on human listening tests. Full-HD Voice quality was possible even at data rates as low as 9. 6 kb/s. The processing power of modern smartphone chips is a key enabler for the new codecs.
"That translates into millions of dollars per power plant per year, "said Daniel Preston, one of the MIT authors of the paper, in a press release.
Silicon valley Postsecondary education And A Half-Trillion Dollars It easy to forget that these are early days for the Internet.
I get a giant bear hug and the credit for getting them there, and other educational tools are sidelined.
and 2012 kicked off three back-to-back State of the Union addresses pushing universities to reduce student debt
and has its eye on the postsecondary education market worth a half-trillion dollars every year. Read on for a sneak preview of the next few years,
The source of college funding changed from family wealth to federal loans. Most importantly, the goal of attending college moved from holistic education and a future in academia and research to career development and jobs.
#Apple Pay Now Supports Cards That Make up 90%Of U s. Credit Purchases Apple Pay is gaining steam just months after launch with the company revealing to the NYT that it now supports cards from providers that make up 90 percent of the credit card
. In addition to ten new banks that are coming on board today It s now accepted in more places than ever before with Staples Winn-dixie Albertson and the Amway Center turning on support in the latest wave.
and is working on an integration with a banking partner that will make its savings happen even more seamlessly.
give Digit access to your online banking account credentials, and over time the company gradually transfers funds from your checking account and into a non-interest bearing but FDIC-insured Digit savings account.
The service does so seamlessly, without asking you how much you want it to transfer beforehand.
Most days it provides users with the balance of their checking account, but occasionally also updates them on how much theye saved with Digit over the course of a week or a month.
For example, type ecentand Digit will text back the last three transactions to be recorded by your checking account.
the way a normal savings account would. That will no doubt cause some skeptics to complain that any Digit user would be better off just putting aside the money themselves into their own savings account.
Or better yet those users should be putting their money into stocks or bonds or basically anything with a better financial return than a sub-1%APY savings account.
But those people are missing the point: Digit exists because the majority of people in the world aren good at saving money
and you don really notice any money has gone missing from your checking account, well then, the team at Digit believes it doing its job well.
as the company works to integrate with a major banking partner. Doing so will lower the cost of processing its ACH transfers to more favorable rates,
Rather than relying on a combination of different banks and other payments processors for individual markets,
It has partnerships with all the major credit card companies, as well as local payment processors around the world.
Its platform works in nearly 200 countries, allowing partners to get paid in virtually any currency and through a wide variety of payment methods.
Over the past several years, hackers have stolen consumerspersonal information and credit card numbers from some of the largest retailers.
Large companies like Adobe and ebay have seen emails and other personal account information stolen. And whistleblowers like Snowden have revealed the most private and devastating aspects of government spying agendas.
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.
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.
#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
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,
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,
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.
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.
alil invested in Lending Club as a Series A in 2008. We were in the middle of the financial crisis
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?
says Harris. ublic markets are going to show us that financial services companies led by lending are going to be hugely valuable.*
with buyers using bank transfers to overcome payments issues, the postal service/meeting in person tapped for delivery,
create hundreds of thousands of jobs and save citizens billions of dollars a year by 2030.
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,
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
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.
#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
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.
According to Debt. org, the average 15-minute doctor-office visit cost patients an average of $69 in 2011.
since 2010 and boasts over 240 deployments including the three biggest credit card companies and two of the top three biggest banks,
The aim is to make smartphone theft ultimately as futile as stealing a credit card, whereby a user ancellingtheir hardware renders it ultimately useless.
#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:
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
#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
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
and the Sony Playstation Network last month have claimed credit for an attack on Malaysia Airlineswebsite.
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.
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
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.
Investment bank (SIB) and Old College Capital, the venture investment arm of the University of Edinburgh.
The company at one point last month closed its online store as the value of the Ruble plunged.
#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,
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
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,
000 loans is just terrifying none of their systems are set up to deal with loans that small,
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,
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
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,
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
#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
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