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Apple Card

The US Citizens Can Now Finally Use the Apple Card

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Apple finally launched its most anticipated Apple card on Tuesday. For now, it will only be available for the users in the U.S. The users can apply for the card directly from their Apple Wallet app on their iPhone. They do not have to wait for the physical card to arrive as they can use it virtually through the Apple Pay as soon they request for the card.

The new card is the digital-first card that the iPhone users will get, and it will even make the credits private for the users. According to Apple, no system will keep the record of from where and when a user has shopped and what amount did he pay, like, in the cash system, it will keep the credits anonymous. So the users don’t have to worry about their data being sold by the company. But the users can see their spendings and balance in the card through the Apple Card app. They can also keep the record of the cash backs they got and see where they spent their money in Apple Maps.

Apple has partnered with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard to design and process the card. There is no annual fee, cash advances fees, over the limit fees or late fees, that the user needs to pay to use the card. And moreover, according to the claims made by the company, it has got even lesser interest on the purchases. In fact, the company will be providing incentives and cash rewards to users for using the new card. The card is acceptable at every merchant accepting Mastercard.

Apple Card
Image Source: interestingengineering.com

The new card also renders some interesting features, like it changes colour for different types of spendings. For example, if a user is using the card for a restaurant bill, the card will turn orange. And if the spending is on entertainment, the card colour will be a mix of orange and pink. Apple has already started 3% cashback on purchase through the virtual card at selected merchants, including Uber and Uber Eats. With the physical card, the cashback will be 1%.

The new app to use the card is available for the users, who own an Apple 6 or a newer model running iOS 12.4. To use the app, you need to go to the Apple Wallet and tap on the (+) icon on the upper right corner on the screen. Then, a Continue button will appear along with a small description of the Apple Card. Upon tapping on the Continue button, a list of Card Type will appear, where you need to select Apple Card. Then you must verify and confirm your details by filling in the information and accept the Apple Card terms and conditions on the next screen.

After that, Apple will send you a description of the credit limit and interest rates based on your information, where you need to tap on Accept Apple Card. This way, the card will be ready for use.

MobiKwik

Bipin Preet Singh : The Journey from IIT Delhi to Founding MobiKwik

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Here’s a story of another successful IITian whose name got added to the already glorious record of entrepreneurs from IITs. Bipin Preet Singh has become quite a significant figure in the start-up society after he launched MobiKwik in 2009.

MobiKwik is a Gurgaon based Indian start-up which provides a mobile application to carry out online payments. Hence, it contributes largely to the initiative taken to digitalize the payment system in the country. The company also built its Lite app in 2016 so that anyone with poor internet connectivity can also access the application.

Before founding MobiKwik, Singh explored different kinds of job which included Training Facilitator and SoC Architect.

Early Life and Early Career

Bipin Preet Singh MobiKwik
Image Source: inc42.com

Bipin Preet Singh graduated with a B Tech degree in Electrical Engineering in 2002 from IIT Delhi. Soon after graduating from college, he started working for Intel as the Senior Design Engineer. He worked there for three years in the Whitefield Project in Bangalore which has Intel’s first-ever project, including the server microprocessor designing. He worked mainly on circuit designing and formal modelling of microprocessors.

After leaving Intel in 2005, Singh joined Janaagraha in 2006, as a training facilitator. During his time in this company, he worked to build up a social awareness program (India’s first such program), which was mainly targeted to motivate the students and IT professionals to think of democracy beyond voting. This was a bit unusual profession to be picked up by an IITian, but he conducted training series in companies like Dell, NVIDIA, which exposed his skills and helped him fetch better career opportunities.

Bipin Preet Singh joined NVIDIA as a Platform Architect in 2006, while he continued working at Janaagraha. He worked there with a high-level global architecture team and dealt with some of the most complicated projects around the world. He also developed architectural infrastructure for RAID and SATA/AHCI.

In May 2007, Singh joined Freescale Semiconductor as an SoC Architect and worked there for two years. His main work in this company was to generate and analyze performance models, work on memory technologies, propose new features for Motorola Chipsets etc.

By this time, Singh already gained a work experience of 7 years, and the learning phase was about to get over. Moreover, the companies he worked for gave him a pretty dominant position, so he wasn’t looking for a promotion at all. This is when he thought of building something of his own, something more challenging and daring than regular 9 to 5 job.

From Designing Engineer to an Accomplished Businessman

In his entrepreneurial journey, Singh approached and got rejected by many people. But, finally, an old friend of his was very impressed by his idea and agreed to join him in this venture. He kept meeting people and built up his own team from scratch.

Finally, in April 2009, Singh along with his wife, Upasana Taku, founded MobiKwik with a motto to improve the payment system and money transfer scenario. Initially, MobiKwik only had a closed wallet facility, but later the company launched a mobile application for the same. When Singh and his wife founded the company, he invested eight lakhs from his own money and rented an office in Dwarka, Delhi.

Success of MobiKwik

MobiKwik was started as an initiative to eradicate all the payment problems and set up a hassle-free environment for the transaction. They set up a wallet system, where after saving the money, one can use it for different purposes like phone number recharge, payments to online merchants, and different service providers.

In 2012, the company launched the e-wallet system of MobiKwik, and in November 2016, it brought the MobiKwik Lite mobile app to the market. In 2014, the company won the mBillionth Award South Asia in the category of mobile business.

By April 2015, MobiKwik had around 15 million users, and according to Forbes magazine, one million new users were added every month. MobiKwik also started giving loans of a small amount (500-2,500 Indian rupees) in partnership with CashCare. By 2016, the number of users hiked to 55 million from 15 million. In February 2017, MobiKwik announced that the company is going to invest more in expanding the user base to targeted 150 million. By 2017, maximum e-wallet transactions in our country were done through Paytm, ITZCash and Mobikwik.

Today, MobiKwik connects 105 million of its users to over 3 million merchants providing a huge spectrum of services including insurance, investments and loans. MobiKwik’s next target is to reach a billion Indian users and hit $20 billion by 2022.

reddit live stream

Reddit is Testing a New Live Stream Feature

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The popular American social news aggregation and discussion website, Reddit, has just announced that it is going to start a new live streaming service. Last Friday, the Reddit feed was filled with posts that were talking about a new r/pan subreddit, which made everyone curious about the new feature. Finally, Redditers started getting notifications about this new subreddit on their accounts, including the announcement about a new live broadcasting service from Reddit, and also, the rules that one need to follow in order to live stream.

The company revealed through the notification that the new broadcasting service will be called the “Reddit Public Access Network”, and only the eligible people will be able to live stream over it. The r/pan subreddit will be dedicated to the very service.

Reddit will be displaying the best live streams on its first page. There will be a voting system, like the upvote Reddit already have on it. The other users can vote for their favourite creators, and those votes will be the parameters for the lives streams to feature on the Reddit front page.

reddit live stream
Image Source: marketingland.com

But, there are some rules that the users need to follow in order to live stream on the platform. One of the rules states that the creators need to be careful about posting any adult content, anything that can offend the common users of Reddit, graphic violence, hoax promotion, as well as illegal or dangerous behaviour.

Since it will be a public network, there is no choice for the users to post anonymously or keep the live stream private. Currently, the new feature is out for testing. But even during the test, it will display the top voted posts on its first page. There has been put a limitation on the timings for the stream as well. It will be a five days test, that will end on 23rd August, and the users will be able to post between 9 am to 5 pm.

The main purpose for setting the time limit for the post is to carry out an accurate moderation for the content that will be posted through live broadcast.

“We are 100 per cent committed to making sure that content on RPAN stays safe and Safe for Work. We will be watching RPAN broadcasts very closely.” said the company in the blog post.

Though Reddit is already one of the most loved contents posting platforms, if all worked fine, the new feature can lead it to join YouTube and Twitch as one of the leading streaming platforms as well.

UPI

Mandar Agashe : The Man Who Brought a Revolution in the Indian Digital Payment System

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Receiving rewards for paying your bills is like the smartest scheme ever to digitalize the payment system of our nation. Most of us make payments through UPI apps like Tez to earn digital scratch cards and cash backs. The growth of UPI has been unbelievable from only 92,000 transactions in August 2016 to 105 million transactions in November 2017. Today, almost everyone with a smartphone uses these UPI apps for the transaction. And, the biggest advantage of UPI is you don’t have to walk to your bank to deposit money into someone’s bank account. From transferring money to bank accounts to paying for movie tickets, UPI has become the most convenient and the most successful initiative in terms of online banking.

But, who is the person behind this massive success that turned the entire scenario of digital payment in no time?

Mandar Agashe, the founder of Sarvatra Technologies, a company that provides financial and payment solutions to the Indian banking sector, came up with the idea of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and launched it in 2016.

Early Life of Mandar Agashe

Mandar Agashe
Image Source: Facebook

In 24th May 1969, Agashe was born into an influential family of Mumbai to an Indian businessman, cricketer and philanthropist, Dnyaneshwar Agashe, and Rekha Gogte. Agashe had two other siblings, Ashutosh Agashe and Sheetal Agashe.

When Agashe was pursuing his B.E. degree in Computers, he created Musicurry.com, an online radio website. After completing his college, Agashe joined his family business in 1994 and started working in the firms. By 2000, he established EBZ Online in association with Oracle, followed by establishing Brihans Natural Products Ltd., and finally, Sarvatra Technologies in 2000.

Sarvatra Technologies

Agashe established his startup in Pune. The startup was basically to provide payment solutions and promote online banking through UPI and IMPS (Immediate Payment Service). The main goal of the company was to get the rural and semi-urban population connected to banking as well as the system of digital payment and get every citizen of India accustomed to EFT (Electronic funds transfer).

Since Mandar Agashe belonged to a family full of successful business tycoons, he had a clear idea of how the corporate sectors function. He wanted to come up with a solution that can be affordable to every single person out there and can easily carry out online transactions with minimal knowledge.

Oracle was the first company to invest in the strategies of Agashe, and eventually, investors like Vallabh Bhanshali and ICICI Bank participated in the following funding rounds. By 2018, the company brought 450 co-operative banks on National Financial Switch.

Agashe realized that both, the banks and the customers, faced a lot of issues during online transactions because of the poor connectivity. So, he provided the banks with SaaS-based technologies to enhance better performance, and also, reducing the operating cost at the same time.

The success of UPI and other payment solutions

After UPI was launched in 11th April 2016, the transaction volume increased unexpectedly. Transactions through the leading UPI apps like Google Tez, PhonePe and BHIM increased exponentially. By 5th December 2017, two months since the launch of Tez, the transaction volume hit 140 million, and the amount processed through PhonePe summed up to 100 crores per day.

Another advantage of Tez which accounts for 70% of the total UPI transaction is that the money one pays through it directly gets credited in one’s bank account instead of getting dropped into the wallets. By 2017, the apps that use UPI reached 20 million downloads from Play Store.

In the financial year 2017-2018, Mandar Agashe announced that they had a gross transaction value of 27,000, and by the next financial year, they will be going to make it 40,000 crores.

Agashe’s Musical Career

Apart from being an entrepreneur, a philanthropist and a successful businessman, Agashe is also a renowned singer. Releasing Musicurry.com was his first step towards the musical world, which led to launching his very own music album. His first role in the world of music was as a co-director with Pandit Hridayanath. He sang his first playback song with Asha Bhosle, and in 1998, his album ‘Nazar Nazar’ was recorded and released in Hindi and English. In 2005, another album, Jaan Le was released followed by 82 in 2016.

Huawei mapping kit

Huawei to Launch its own Mapping Kit as the Result of the China-U.S. Trade War

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The ban that the U.S. government had put on Huawei has made its experiment with its own products, and after it announced HarmonyOS (HongmengOS), the company has revealed that it is going to launch its own home-grown mapping kit similar to the Google Maps. Though the company has still not admitted that the HarmonyOS will be empowering its smartphones, it definitely is going to feature its mapping app into them.

The company has been facing some serious issues, and it got almost banned in the U.S. Though the company got a relaxation for the trade in the U.S., and it is expected to get 90 more days to operate in the country, it still is banned from embedding Google Maps into its smartphones.

This has led the company to take another step towards independence, such that it is already up to developing on its own mapping app, named Map Kit. The company will be incorporating over 150 countries into the very mapping kit, and for that, it will be operating with the local mapping apps.

Huawei mapping kit

The mapping app is not for the public use, instead, the developers would be able to create their map apps based on the kit. The kit will combine features, like street views and navigation, that will also show real-time traffic condition. The kit can also be used to add a location tracking feature in other apps, and for that, the kit will render support for the augmented reality.

“Huawei Map Kit will be available in 40 languages. It will offer real-time traffic conditions and a highly sophisticated navigation system which can recognize a car changing lanes. It will also support augmented-reality mapping,” Zhang Pingan, the president of cloud services of the consumer business group at Huawei, said in a statement.

But the company still has got into ties with an American company named Booking Holdings to work on the new mapping service. The U.S. government has though given the company the permit to work in the U.S. market, still the company is now aware that it is not permanent, and the company has to bring its own products if it wants to continue to rule the smartphone market.

In the past, many big companies have tried to build their own products, and not all have succeeded in that. The independence from the use of the third-party product will help Huawei to focus on the smartphone markets other than the U.S., and the company can also gain the customer base for its products, that the other companies would use into their products, such as is new HarmonyOS and the mapping kit. Huawei will be bringing the mapping kit in coming October.

venmo

Venmo : The Experience of Money Transfer Made Easy

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You do not get success in the first few attempts, but you sure get the experience. Trying and trying again always gets you with some good exposure and enhanced skill, such that the end product you create is always ‘the product’ that changes your life. One such similar story is of the founders of Venmo, a mobile payment service, who from being clueless about their future were able to build a multimillion startup.

The Founders

Venmo, an online payment app, was founded by two friends, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail. The two had joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, where they got to share their room as freshmen. Iqram and Kortina both opted for Computer Science as their major, but later, Kortina switched to philosophy and creative writing. The reason being that he was already able to study computers and programming through homework exercises, so to utilize the university fee, he changed his subjects.

With time, the two became good friends and together, started working on different projects. The first project, on which they worked together, was a college advertisement website. They named the website My Campus Post. Along with the website, they spent most of their time on various other projects, but all they were doing as a hobby.

Venmo founders
Image Source: fastcompany.com

But Kortina realised that the graduation time is near, and they had no plans for their career only when his mother asked him about his career plans. This hit his mind, as he and Iqram, both of them need to make a career plan for them.

Beginning the Career

The two decided to move to West Philly, as the rents were way cheaper there. Here they started advertising about website development services from door to door and started getting some work. They also started their own online music selling project named Philafunk, at the same time. The platform provided the musicians with the facility to sell their music, and the website would charge them a minimal fee on every sale.

The two had skills, but they did not have real-world experience. So they decided to take a job. For the next two-three years, they worked for different technology firms, including iminlikewithyou.com.

They kept their part-time work of developing websites running alongside and continued to look for the life-changing idea. They even developed software for shops that could be used as a ledger or register on a laptop.

They came up with the idea of Philafunk while enjoying a Jazz show in the city. Philafunk enabled the musicians to accept money for the subscription, music or the merchandise people bought from them.

Founding Venmo

While the two were working on Philafunk in NYC, Iqram forgot to bring his wallet and borrowed some money from Kortina and wrote a cheque to him. This hit his mind, as he was using the traditional method of paying the money when he was using their mobile for every other thing. The two knew PayPal was already there for online money-related transactions, but even though people were not using it.

This led them to think of a new idea of developing a method to send and receive money through their mobile. They started working on the project and made use of the text message, i.e. SMS, for sending and receiving the status of money transferred. The working of the new payment method was quite derived from the Philafunk model, where now everyone (not only musicians) could receive the money for anything (not just for selling music).

The two also included the option to add a small description about for what the payment was made, such that people could keep the record of when and who they paid money for. They put the name of the service as Venmo. ‘Ven’ in Venmo has been derived from the Latin word vendere, which means ‘to sell’ and ‘mo’ is short for mobile.

The two were ready with the prototype of Venmo and started meeting people for its seed investment. But unfortunately, they could not convince any major investors. But they had to launch the service, and they took the help of Magon-Ismail’s old boss at Ticketleap and his father with the investments. They launched Venmo in August 2009. But in the next few months, the popularity of the app led the two co-founders to raise a $100,000 in debt financing.

The Rise of the Company

By the end of the year, the company shifted the model from website and SMS to mobile application and launched an iOS app in December. In January 2010, they got the opportunity to represent their product at the Mobile Monday Mid Atlantic Demo Night. Here they asked the audience to send some donation money to the relief fund for people suffering from an earthquake in Haiti. The relief fund raised a $600 in just a few minutes of announcement and in a week, there was a total donation of worth $15,000 through Venmo. This was one of the best marketing moves for the company.

The company raised another $1.2 million in May 2010, in a funding round led by RRE Ventures, followed by another $400,000 in debt financing in June 2010. The next month, Venmo launched its Android app. The coming year, the company partnered with most of the banks running in the U.S, for the payments.

By 2012, the growth rate for the company reached 30 per cent per month, and it was carrying out $10 million in payments every month.

On August 16, 2012, Braintree, another technology and mobile payment company, acquired Venmo for $26.2 million. But in September 2013, eBay acquired Braintree and all its subsidiaries, such that Venmo became the part of PayPal.

Venmo still is one of the famous payment apps in the U.S. and only serve in the U.S. As of 2017, a million users were using Venmo for mobile payments, and it carried out nearly $50 billion worth of transactions in 2018.