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Razer Collabs with Visa to Move Forward with its Fintech Arm

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Razer and Visa Partenership
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Razer the fintech gaming company has joined its hands with the world’s leader in digital payments, Visa, to initiate an unusual type of partnership. The two companies will be working together to develop a new virtual prepaid solution for many of Southeast Asia’s, especially the unbanked and underserved, consumers.

The company announced that its fintech arm, Razer Fintech, will be joining the fast-track program from Visa, as a revolutionary idea, aiming to transform the way the gamers make payments. The fast-track program from Visa has been specially designed for fintech companies to help them easily access 54 million merchant locations around the world that accept Visa.

The partnership between the two companies will lead to developing a new virtual payment service, that will empower the Razer Pay e-wallet and give its users access to the global Visa payment network. With this new service, the unbanked users will be able to top up the wallet, make online payment through it, and also, will be able to withdraw cash through it. The scope of Visa is already huge, and with the collab, the two companies will be targeting to the 60 million Razer users. Noticeably, the company has not talked about rolling out a physical payment card along with the service.

“We are pleased to partner with such a forward-looking and innovative company that understands the value and importance of expanding access to digital payments. This announcement reaffirms Visa’s commitment to the fast-growing and digitally savvy Southeast Asia region. Together, Visa and Razer Fintech have the opportunity to transform the payments experience for not only the gaming community but many of Southeast Asia’s unbanked and underserved consumers as well”, Chris Clark, Regional President, Asia Pacific, Visa, stated during the announcement.

The two companies have said that they will be rolling out a mini app for the new payment service and will also include great offers for its users. The app will be integrated into Razer’s virtual wallet app.

Reliance Plans to Launch Jio GigaFiber Next Few Weeks

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Reliance Jio, the biggest telecom company in India, had released the beta of its Jio GigaFiber last year, and since then, there have been many talks about the same. The Jio GigaFiber claims it will replace the old fashioned cables with all fibre cables, enhancing the speed for the broadband and TV connections. Reportedly, the company is planning to end the beta and officially launch the GigaFibre in the coming weeks.

Jio GigaFiber
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Since the company had made the testing open for the public, too, many of the common people were able to enjoy the unlimited internet after paying a sum of Rs. 4500. This way, there have been numerous leaks on the details about the upcoming Jio GigaFiber.

The new Jio GigaFiber is faster and offers three different services altogether, i.e., landline, broadband, and a TV connection. With the new network connection, Reliance intends to provide its users with a connected ecosystem for their homes through a single package, and that too, at a cheaper price.

Though there are various network providers that use optical fibre for the connection, they mix these connections with the conventional cables. With Jio GigaFiber, the whole network will rely on fibre optics, leading to up to 100Mbps network speed with no or negligible loss in the connection. The people who were using the beta of the service have confirmed a similar speed on the network. The TV connection and the landline will also rely on the internet, such that JIO TV will stream the TV channels in HD, and people will be able to make free calls through the landline. Even if we believe the rumours, the Jio TV will stream 600 TV channels for Rs. 600.

Also, unlike the other network providers, GigaFiber includes the dual-band Wi-Fi routers. Currently, the company is offering the GigaFiber beta connection for a security deposit of Rs 4500. The other plan includes a single-band router rendering speed of 50Mbps, which will cost the users a sum of Rs 2500.

GigaFiber can be a big game changer for Reliance as it may empower other home devices as well, and this way, people will not have the need for different service providers for separate home internet services.

Renault-Nissan Partners with Waymo to Experiment with Self-driving Cars

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The French automobile company, Renault has partnered with Waymo, the automobile subsidiary of tech giant Alphabet Inc., to bring new autonomous cars to France and Japan. The venture also includes Renault’s Japanese partner Nissan, which will be responsible for the launch of those self-driving cars in Japan.

waymo Self-driving cars
Image Source: engadget.com

With this partnership, Renault and Nissan will be researching on how self-driving cars can help in easing-out the transportation of humans as well as goods and develop driverless mobility services for the same. Noticeably, Waymo has already brought such vehicles in Arizona called Waymo One and a limited robo-taxi pilot program in suburban Phoenix last year. Though the launched cars are fully-autonomous, there is always a human monitor sitting on the other front seat of the car for emergencies.

The companies will also work on the commercial, legal and regularity issues, that are related to the development of self-driving cars and making the transportation-as-a-service for both the countries.

According to the reports, the agreement between the companies has been done for a limited but unspecified time. There has been no comment on the same from either of the company. The agreement also has restricted all the three to work with other companies on a similar project.

“This is an ideal opportunity for Waymo to bring our autonomous technology to a global stage, with an innovative partner. With the Alliance’s international reach and scale, our Waymo Driver can deliver transformational mobility solutions to safely serve riders and commercial deliveries in France, Japan, and other countries,” said John Krafcik, CEO Waymo, in a statement.

Though Waymo is quite excited about this merger, the venture will be a 50-50 partnership between Renault and Nissan for both the countries, and there has been no hint on the role of Waymo for the same. The two companies will be setting up a joint committee to work together in France and Japan.

Earlier, the two companies were in talks with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) to bring next-generation technology and work in the field of self-driving cars. But the merger could not take place, and FCA withdrew the agreement.

Kano and Microsoft Bring New DIY Windows 10S PC Kit

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Reportedly, Microsoft has partnered with Kano, a London-based startup, that specializes in building build-your-own PC DIY kits for the kids. The two companies have joined their hands to bring a DIY touchscreen laptop for its little users, that will be running the Windows 10S.

Kano PC
Image Source: venturebeat.com

Windows 10S is the lighter version of the Windows 10, and it will be the first time that any of the Kano computers will be operating a Windows OS. Though using the Windows 10S will restrict Kano laptop to run apps only from Microsoft. Previously, Kano laptops ran the Raspberry Pi 3s OS and the OS from Kano itself.

The new Windows-based Kano PC is a laptop/tablet, which is a similar version of most of the Microsoft’s Surface PCs, but having a transparent back on its 11.6” screen. The screen of the laptop is a touch screen, and the transparent back shows the components of the upper flap of the laptop.

The laptop comes into detachable pieces, such that the kids will need to assemble the entire system themselves. The laptop is empowered with the 1.44 GHz Intel Atom x5-Z8350 quad-core processor, supporting a 4GB RAM, and 64GB of eMMC storage. The laptop also supports expending the storage with the help of microSD card. It also has got an HDMI port, microphone, detachable speakers, headphone jack, and 2 ports for USB extensions. The laptop also renders support for WiFi and Bluetooth for connectivity.

Since the kids will need to assemble the laptop by themselves, the company has provided a storybook kind of instruction manual for the kids, on how to attach the parts of the PC together and make the experience even more interesting.

The company has included some educational apps to the laptop, including ‘How Computers Work’, in order to teach the kids more about coding and computing. Other applications that are included in the PC are some educational apps from Minecraft, Microsoft’s 3D Paint and Pong-based game development apps. The kids will also be able to create 3d models and learn binary codes, with the help of Kano PCs.

Kano is known for bringing computing DIY kits for the kids, and it has already launched various famous DIY kits, including Harry Potter-themed coding kit with the wand and a computer running a Kano OS operating system. The new Windows-based Kano PCs have been made available for preorders on Kano’s official website and also at the Microsoft Store for a price $299.99 and £299.99. These PC kits will go live on sale in the US and UK starting from Oct 21.

Facebook Opens Up About Libra its New Cryptocurrency Project

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Only over ten days ago, an article from ‘The Information’ talked about Facebook’s rumoured cryptocurrency project, ‘Libra’, and today, the company has come out in open to announce that it will be launching its own cryptocurrency by the first half of 2020.

The biggest social network company, Facebook Inc., revealed on Tuesday, that it is ready to launch its cryptocurrency in 2020, in order to move its focus from social media to eCommerce and online payments.

libra cryptocurrency
Image Source: fortune.com

The company reported that the new cryptocurrency won’t be a speculative asset, like Bitcoin or the other major cryptocurrencies, but will be a type of digital currency, as stable as the dollar, that people will be able to use for normal expenditures or to transfer money globally.

According to one of the spokespersons from Facebook, the company aims to establish Libra as the first mainstream cryptocurrency, by offering people to pay for online as well as offline services through it. In the beginning, Libra will support online money transfer for the countries that lack traditional banking facilities. And, after some time, it will be used for day-to-day transactions.

Along with the cryptocurrency, the company is also working on its subsidiary, Calibra, a digital wallet, that will be used for the online transactions through the cryptocurrency. According to the company, Libra will be backed by the reserve of assets. Also, the new cryptocurrency will have its own new blockchain platform.

Facebook is excited about Libra but has also got the regulatory concerns. It has been facing backlashes from its users and the regulatory authorities due to the data breaches alligations it holds. A cryptocurrency from a company which has been responsible for these hacks and breaches is quite questionable for the lawmakers and the regulators.

The company has already in talks with the regulators in the United States, Europe and from the other countries, about the launch of its own cryptocurrency. And, these regulators are also going in depth of the announced project from Facebook to get to know more about it. Since it is not purely a cryptocurrency, many of these regularities doubt its privacy.

Facebook revealed that it has partnered with the Geneva-based association Libra for the development of its cryptocurrency. The organisation have been founded by some major companies from around the world, including Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe, eBay, Uber, Lyft, Spotify, Coinbase, Xapo, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Mercy Corps, and Women’s World Banking, along with Facebook. So these companies will also be playing a crucial role in decisions to be taken for Libra.

Nvidia and Arm Collabs to Build Energy-efficient Supercomputers

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Continuing with the collaborations with Arm, a British semiconductor design company, now Nvidia is again working together with the company to support the processors built by the former. Nvidia announced the news at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) going on in Frankfurt, Germany, saying that the partnership will be able to build supercomputers which will “exascale” on performance.

nvidia
Image Source: memeburn.com

According to Nvidia, the two companies are working towards developing the energy-efficient supercomputers that will be carrying out at least a quintillion (a billion) floating point, i.e. Flops, computations per second. Noticeably, one flop is equal to the multiplication of two 15-digit numbers.

Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang, while announcing the news at the event, said, “As traditional compute scaling has ended, the world’s supercomputers have become power constrained. Our support for Arm, which designs the world’s most energy-efficient CPU architecture, is a giant step forward that builds on initiatives Nvidia is driving to provide the HPC industry with a more power-efficient future”.

The company will be extending its support for Arm with its high-performance computing and AI-focused software by 2020. The other services that the company will be offering Arm, includes software development kits, profilers, CUDA-X libraries, PGI compilers with OpenACC support, and graphics-accelerated frameworks, etc.

The partnership between the two companies will help Arm to expand its business and build trust among the investors, as no computer architecture from the company will be without the support of Nvidia. Though it is not the first time that the two are working together, previously, the two had joined hands for Nvidia’s AGX platform that incorporated Arm-based chips and also Nvidia’s Deep Learning Accelerator (NVIDIA).

On the other hand, with this partnership, Nvidia will be getting access to the most energy-efficient chip designs, specially built for mobile devices. According to Nvidia, the energy saving products are the next big thing that is going to be the most important in the coming future.