Monthly Archives: October 2019

French fintech startup Keplerk announced Thursday that it has resumed service selling BTC at “Tabacs” in and around Paris, after halting the service earlier this year. A Tabac is a convenience store licensed to sell tobacco products. These stores also sell newspapers, lotto tickets, scratch games, telephone cards and postage stamps. Keplerk wrote:You can go to one of the 5,200 tobacco shops today and easily buy your €50 €100 or €250 vouchers.All 5,200 stores are equipped with a payment terminal from Keplerk’s partner, Bimedia, a payment solution provider for Tabacs. According to local media, Keplerk will focus on selling only BTC for the time being, and will not be offering ETH as previously planned.Keplerk first announced in November last year that it would sell bitcoin at Tabacs. The firm then started selling BTC vouchers at a handful of tobacco stores in January. At the time, cofounder Adil Zakhar said he wanted to enroll up to 6,500 Tabacs by February. However, instead, the firm halted the service on Feb. 27. Its official reason for suspending the service was that the system was too slow. The startup planned to relaunch the service in April, but it was delayed until this month.With dwindling tobacco sales, France’s 24,000 licensed tobacco shops have diversified into products such as prepaid credit cards, cellphone credits and money transfer services, Reuters explained. “Some people find it complicated to get bitcoins on-line,” Zakhar was quoted by the news outlet as saying. “They trust their local tobacco shop owner more than they would trust some remote anonymous website.”Following the firm’s original announcement, three French regulators — The Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), the Banque de France and the Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (ACPR) — issued statements warning the public of the risks associated with investing in speculative digital assets. Local media reported that the authorities also alerted consumers not to confuse Keplerk with other regulated entities in France such as Kepler Cheuvreux and Kepler Capital Markets which have no connection to the fintech company selling BTC.In its March public warning, the AMF explained: “Cryptocurrencies are booming and many platforms on the internet offer to invest in these very special assets. But this type of investment has many risks: volatility, scams, etc. All you need to know before you decide.”Keplerk is not the only firm in France offering such a service. Digycode has been selling BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC, and DASH vouchers at thousands of Tabacs and service stations in €20, €50, and €200 denominations.

Singapore-headquartered Viola.AI uses blockchain to build what it calls a global relationship registry that is transparent, open and accessible to all. The technology creates smart contracts and digital wallets for users that allow Viola.AI to verify their identity, including through visual recognition. Its artificial intelligence engine meanwhile tracks down common interests and backgrounds to find sharper matches than would be possible with standard dating app algorithms. The company had an initial coin offering (ICO) in June 2018. It also has trained relationship experts who offer online advice — for a fee, which you pay in “Violet Tokens” that you purchase from the company.Like Voila.AI, DateCoin, which had its ICO in May 2018, combines neural networks and AI algorithms with blockchain to promise a more secure and transparent dating experience. These apps are all available on Google Play, Apple’s App Store and a range of Chinese online platforms. And established dating apps are now beginning to acknowledge the potential of blockchain by also turning to the technology. Secretive Hong Kong-based dating app for the ultrarich, Luxy, in 2018 announced that they will accept bitcoin as a mode of payment. The app uses blockchain to verify that those looking to get on the platform are all millionaires. 

From the EU parliamentary elections in May to the coming Swiss national elections on Sunday, Green parties are emerging as unlikely political winners, gaining dramatically — often at the cost of far-right parties that have in recent years been on the rise. Ireland sent its first Green representatives to the European Parliament this year while other countries saw advances of up to 30 percent in vote shares for Green candidates.In September, Austria’s Greens gained more than a 10 percent increase in vote support, giving them 26 seats in Parliament where they had none earlier. They’re now the third strongest party and a contender for coalition talks with winner Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). The right wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) dropped 20 seats in the elections.IT’S A COUNTERMOVEMENT TO THE POPULISTS AND THE NATIONALISTS.JOACHIM BLATTER, POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR On Oct. 20, the two Green parties in Switzerland are set to see the biggest gains in a national election. The Green Party and the center-left Green Liberal Party are together up 5 percent in the latest polls. That doesn’t seem like much, but in the Alpine country where sentiment moves at a glacial pace, it’s a lot. The far-right Swiss People’s Party, which reached a historic high of 40 percent of the votes in the previous election, is now polling at 25 percent.And the historically conservative German state of Baden-Württemberg is now ruled by Green politician Winfred Kretschmann, who oversees a coalition with the center-conservative party of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Experts say that in giving Greens a push in Central Europe, voters are venting their frustration with centrist parties that have done little for the environment and simultaneously sending a counter-message to nationalists and populists who have dominated the last decade.

Facebook says that currently, a year after its global launch, more than 720 million people watch Watch videos monthly and around 140 million people watch them daily. Facebook has packaged its video metrics in, um, clever ways before, so I asked for more specifics. Basically, those monthly and daily numbers account for people who have visited the Watch tab or app and have spent at least one minute there. They might not actually be watching Watch but searching for something to Watch on watch. I mean, watch on Watch.But this isn’t a story about Facebook Watch’s engagement numbers (murky), its long-term strategy for original video (unclear), or its minimum requirements for ads (creators need to have more than 10,000 Facebook followers and have generated more than 30,000 one-minute views on their videos). It’s not even really about content moderation, a huge and thorny issue for Facebook. (Facebook says its original programming pages are moderated by human beings who are intimate with the video content or show.)This is about the act of watching Watch. It’s about diverting your eyes from Netflix or Hulu or YouTube or Twitter or Amazon, and instead giving your full attention, that hot but finite commodity, back to Facebook. Not only your attention but your emotions too.

Masire’s family and friends thought she was mad to sell, but she was having none of it. “People don’t like change,” she says. “But I do. Monotony is not good for the mind.” Besides, she had a new business plan up her sleeve: Greenhouse Technologies. Acknowledging that she knew little about vegetable farming, Masire’s first move was to hire a horticulturist and an irrigation specialist. She could afford to pay the university graduates only a basic salary, but she urged them to “make their money by going the extra mile.”They did just that. By helping aspiring farmers with cropping plans, soil tests and calculating borehole yields, she was able to unlock millions of pula in grant money that had been going unclaimed, while also greatly contributing to the prosperity and self-sufficiency of Botswana and its people.Amanda Aminah Masire says monotony is no good for the mind. A few happy customers later and she’d caught the attention of the Ministry of Agriculture, which she is now partnering with on a training farm on the company premises on the outskirts of Gaborone, Botswana’s capital city. The farm is already fully functional (the crops provide a nifty additional revenue stream), and builders are putting the finishing touches on the classrooms. Masire and her team are set to run the first of many government-sponsored, five-day introductory horticulture courses as soon as next month.It comes amid a nationwide push for food independence. Other initiatives in the land-rich but water-poor nation include the rollout of gray-water treatment plants and a clampdown on importing crops that Botswana is able to produce. The proportion of Botswana’s food produced locally jumped from 20 percent in 2013-14 to 60 percent in 2017–18, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.But there’s still a long way to go. Galeitsewe Ramokapane, the ministry’s director of crop production, told a horticultural meeting recently, “We cannot produce enough because we have alternatives, as we are depending on our brothers and sisters in South Africa.” (In an interview, Ramokapane wouldn’t single out Greenhouse Technologies, only saying several firms have been working on this.)By Masire’s own admission, her quest to educate Botswanans about modern farming practices has not been easy. “As my [company] name suggests, I started out wanting to sell greenhouses,” she explains, but eight years down the line her biggest sellers remain drip irrigation and shade cloth. “Greenhouse technology is the Rolls-Royce of horticulture,” she explains, but Botswana is still driving Toyotas. Not that she’s going to let their choice of ride get her down. “I started with the end in mind.”

One promising trend is the nature-on-demand market, where several startups have emerged. Subscriptions have worked neatly for products like wine or jewelry, and they're also suited for plants, because you can help customers develop their green thumbs. Horti's first shipment is always a rugged, hard-to-kill plant—mine was a peperomia, with thick, almost rubbery leaves. Maybe soon I'll be tending a hoya tricolor. And the surprise—what am I getting next month?—is part of the joy.Millennials are fans: Cool-looking plants are Instagram gold and give a generation living in precarity something to nourish. “Someone said if pets are the new kids, plants are the new pets,” jokes Justin Mast, founder of Bloomscape, a startup that has mastered tricks to keep delicate life-forms thriving while being shipped across the country. (#Planthack: In winter, the company puts hand-warmers near the base of the greenery.) But he's learned not to overtechnologize the experience. Bloomscape's customers don't want internet-of-things remote plant monitoring to tell them when to water. “They want to stick their finger in the soil,” he says.

In January 2012, the Amazon-owned online retailer Zappos suffered a major data breach that exposed personal information of about 24 million of the site’s customers, including names, addresses, passwords, and the last four digits of their credit card numbers. The fallout from large-scale data breaches is never resolved quickly, but even by those standards, the settlement that Zappos proposed this fall was a little bit shocking both in how long it took to reach and how little it offered to victims of the breach.The settlement, which was submitted for approval to the United States District Court for the District of Nevada in September, provides a 10-percent-off code for one Zappos order per affected customer, but the discount has to be used by 11:59 Pacific time on Dec. 31, 2019, or within 60 days of being distributed to affected customers, whichever is later. The deal has already received preliminary approval and is likely to be finalized in the coming weeks. It’s an astonishing step backward in data breach settlements and a disheartening reminder of how easy it is for major companies to still walk away from data breaches with minimal consequences.

Uber veut devenir une super application du MaaS (Mobility as a Service). Son but ? Permettre à un utilisateur de se rendre d’un point A à un point B en utilisant plusieurs moyens de transports. Alors que la société connaît des moments difficiles (elle vient de licencier 350 emplois supplémentaires, dont certains dans sa branche voiture autonome), sa stratégie est clairement de se diversifier. Dans cette optique, Uber vient d’annoncer au salon Autonomy qu’elle ajoutait les scooters électriques Cityscoot à son application. 4 000 scooters sont disponibles à la réservation. Le paiement sera intégré et les données ne seront pas partagées entre les deux services. Les prix sont les mêmes que dans l’application Cityscoot (29 cts/minute).

La région Île-de-France vient d’annoncer la mise en place d’un futur «  service de mobilité autonome » — c’est-à-dire des véhicules qui sont capables de se diriger sans intervention humaine — entre le premier aéroport français et le quartier de La Défense.La région espère lancer ce nouveau service avant les Jeux Olympiques en 2024. Le nombre de passagers sur ce tronçon est estimé aujourd’hui entre 1 500 et 2 000 par jour avec un temps de parcours moyen évalué à quarante minutes.Les véhicules électriques, partagés et sans chauffeur pourront offrir une liaison non-stop, 24 heures sur 24 entre les deux pôles. Ils pourront rouler sur la bande d’arrêt d’urgence des autoroutes A1 et A86 qui deviendrait une voie dédiée. Les voies utilisées seront aménagées grâce à des crédits provenant d’un fonds de 100 millions d’euros créé par la région Île-de-France en 2018, et destiné à l’aménagement des grand axes routiers franciliens (A1, A4, A6, A86, A12). 

Et si l’avion n’avait pas sa place dans le futur du voyage ? Si l’idée fait son bout de chemin dans certains esprits, personne n’aurait imaginé qu’une telle initiative vienne d’un acteur de l’aérien dont transport de passagers et de fret représente 85,5% de son CA. Et pourtant, le groupe ANA Holdings Inc, propriétaire de la compagnie nippone All Nipon Airways, voit dans l’utilisation d’avatars le renouveau du voyage qui permettra de construire ce qu’il définit comme la « société 5.0 ». Un projet porté par la filiale ANA HD. En combinant ses capacités de transport aérien et la connectivité d’AvatarsOpens, ANA HD s’efforce de réduire les obstacles aux voyages et de permettre à tous de participer de façon égale à la société, indique un communiqué.« L’ANA HD a été conçu pour connecter les gens et les Avatars ont ce potentiel de connexion à l’échelle mondiale que les voyages traditionnels ne peuvent offrir et sont une continuation de nos croyances fondamentales », a déclaré Shinya Katanozaka, Présidente et PDG d’ANA HD. « Notre vision d’une planète mieux connectée s’appuiera sur les dernières innovations en robotique haptique, VR/AR et IA pour transformer la façon dont les humains interagissent. En mettant le monde à portée de main, les avatars ouvriront de nouvelles possibilités et aideront à tout remodeler, des affaires à l’éducation en passant par la santé et les divertissements. »