Science & Technology News – Page 286

Banking, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

The next FinTech: Global “Open Finance” Infrastructure

May 1, 2019

“Open Finance “ — open-source financial services infrastructure built on public blockchains — may be the next major digitization narrative after Fintech. Driven by the transformation of analog liquidity (deposits in a bank account) to digital liquidity (tokens in digital wallets), the playing field can be leveled for offering financial services. As a result, new profit motives are introduced encouraging innovations not previously feasible.

Technology disrupting finance is a narrative that’s existed for a long time. The dream has always been for tech to digitize financial services, increase competition/access, reduce concentration risks, and improve customer experience. Many sales-pitches have tried to achieve this: from FinTechs, TechFins, API / Open Banking, to Permissioned Blockchains.

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Bitcoin, Blockchain, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

Blockchain: Separating fact from fiction

May 1, 2019

Blockchain is not a single technology. After having been conceived by Bitcoin creator — Satoshi Nakamoto, the world discovered the first known representation of this abstract concept through Bitcoin. Since then, hundreds of implementations have been explored. These are also called Distributed Ledger Technologies.

With hindsight, the blockchain concept is quite simple: it proposes an innovative information system architecture to process value exchange within open ecosystems. On the traditional web, information can be corrupted. Blockchain aims at securing high-sensitive data exchanges to preserve them from wrongdoing.

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Bitcoin, Blockchain, Latest Trend, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

Crypto lending on the rise: Credit volume of Genesis Capitol at over $1 Billion

May 1, 2019

Genesis Capital, one of the largest providers of crypto loans, cracked $1 billion in crypto loans in 2018. Despite falling bitcoin prices, the demand for credit in the crypto money market seems higher than ever.

In the fourth quarter of 2018 alone, Genesis, a type of crypto bank, will provide $500 million in loans. As a result, the US company accounts for almost half of its total lending volume in the fourth quarter of 2018; In total $1.1 billion in loans. The market is booming — and after the already south-facing market lost further value in November and December. This emerges from the quarterly report of the company.

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Business, Finance, Science & Technology News, Startup

How Incubators are Shaping the Indian landscape

April 30, 2019

According to the NASSCOM India Startup Ecosystem report, India has retained its position as the third largest Startup Ecosystem in the world. More than 1,200 startups came up in 2018, including eight unicorns, taking the total number to 7,200 startups, NASSCOM reported. Considering the scale of the Indian market, even average startups can find a viable market even with average ideas and poor quality. However, on the flip side, India with its diversity and wide-ranging issues also offers a fantastic test base to develop a robust and innovative product.

In this dynamic and complex landscape, while an increasing number of entrepreneurs are emerging, a report by IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics found that 90 per cent Indian startups fail within the first five years. The emerging incubator ecosystem in the Indian landscape is a welcome shot in the arm for the starry-eyed startups.

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Analysis, Big Problems, Housing, Science & Technology News

Over 13% of the homes in Japan are abandoned

April 30, 2019

Japan’s population is shrinking. Last year it fell by nearly 450,000 people. Not since records began in 1899 had so few babies been born (921,000). Before that, 2017 had also set a record. Meanwhile the number of people passing away last year set a post-war record. The figures are part of a larger pattern in which births have declined and deaths increased steadily for decades.

Less noticed is another alarming figure that’s been growing. According to the latest government statistics, the number of abandoned homes in Japan reached a record high of 8.5 million as of Oct. 1, 2018, up by 260,000 from five years earlier. As a proportion of total housing stock, abandoned homes reached 13.6%.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Forget about artificial intelligence, extended intelligence is the future

April 30, 2019

Last year, I participated in a discussion of The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Weiner’s groundbreaking book on cybernetics theory. Out of that grew what I now consider a manifesto against the growing singularity movement, which posits that artificial intelligence, or AI, will supersede and eventually displace us humans.

The notion of singularity – which includes the idea that AI will supercede humans with its exponential growth, making everything we humans have done and will do insignificant – is a religion created mostly by people who have designed and successfully deployed computation to solve problems previously considered impossibly complex for machines.

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AI, Automation, Science & Technology News, Shopping

Walmart unveils an AI-powered store of the future, now open to the public

April 28, 2019

Walmart this morning unveiled a new “store of the future” and test grounds for emerging technologies, including AI-enabled cameras and interactive displays. The store, a working concept called the Intelligent Retail Lab — or “IRL” for short — operates out of a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown, N.Y.

The store is open to customers and is one of Walmart’s busiest Neighborhood Market stores, containing more than 30,000 items, the retailer says, which allows it to test out technology in a real-world environment.

Similar to Amazon Go’s convenience stores, the store has a suite of cameras mounted in the ceiling. But unlike Amazon Go, which is a grab-and-go store with smaller square footage, Walmart’s IRL spans 50,000 square feet of retail space and is staffed by more than 100 employees.

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Human Behavior, Robots, Science & Technology News, Virtual Reality

Expert warns against forming emotional attachments with robots

April 28, 2019

Faking It

No matter how cute present-day robots are designed to look, no matter how smiley their virtual faces and chipper their beeps and boops, they will never love you back.

The stories of people mourning robots like Jibo, a smart home assistant that announced its own “death” when its servers were scheduled to get shut down last month, are heartwarming. But they also reveal a way, according to the Associated Press, that marketers could exploit the emotions of people — especially kids — by programming robots to seem more emotionally savvy than they really are.

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Famous Inventor, Historical Perspectives, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

A 23-year excavation into the life of Leonardo da Vinci

April 26, 2019

Met curator Carmen Bambach reveals what she has learned about the world’s most famous Renaissance man.

Carmen Bambach, curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, spent 23 years studying the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. The culmination of her research, a 2,200-page, four-volume book, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, will be published by Yale University Press this summer.

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Amazon.com, Employment, Hot Issues, Science & Technology News

Amazon’s system for tracking its warehouse workers can automatically fire them

April 26, 2019

A world where people are monitored and supervised by machines isn’t confined to the realms of sci-fi. It’s here now.

Tough conditions: There have been many reports over recent years about unpleasant conditions workers face at Amazon warehouses. Employees are under pressure to pack hundreds of boxes per hour, and face being fired if they aren’t fast enough.

What’s new: Documents obtained by The Verge show that it’s far more common for people to be fired due to lack of productivity than outsiders realize. Roughly 300 people were fired at a single facility between August 2017 and September 2018 for that reason. And crucially, the documents show that much of the firing process is automated.

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Analysis, China, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Chinese brands rule Indian smartphone market with 66% share: Report

April 26, 2019

Xiaomi’s India shipments fell by 2% over last year, but the Beijing-based company was still the biggest smartphone brand in the country, followed by Samsung Electronics

Chinese brands rule Indian smartphone market with 66% share: Report Chinese brands controlled a record 66% of Indian smartphone market in the first quarter, led by Xiaomi, a report showed, with volumes rising 20% on the back of popularity for brands like Vivo, RealMe and Oppo.

Xiaomi’s India shipments fell by 2% over last year, but the Beijing-based company was still the biggest smartphone brand in the country, followed by Samsung Electronics, according to Hong-Kong based Counterpoint Research.

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Great New Product, Green Friendly, Inventions, Science & Technology News

Just 10% of U.S. plastic gets recycled. A new kind of plastic could change that

April 28, 2019

Most plastics have a chemical history that makes starting a new life a challenge. The dyes and flame retardants that make them perfect for say, a couch cushion or a bottle of detergent, make them tough to transform into a desirable end product—one of the reasons just 10% of plastic in the United States gets recycled. Now, researchers have created a plastic with a special chemical bond that helps it separate out from those additives, turning it back into a pure, valuable product that can be reused again and again.

To make the new material, researchers tweaked a type of vitrimer, a glasslike plastic developed in 2011, by adding molecules that change the chemical bonds holding it together. These new bonds, called dynamic covalent diketoenamine bonds, require less energy to break than those in traditional plastics.

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