• Skip to main content

Biz Builder Mike

You can't sail Today's boat on Yesterdays wind - Michael Noel

  • Cryptocurrency Exchange
  • Blockchain Consultants
  • About Us
  • Blog

pandemic

Jan 19 2021

AC Milan Will Launch ACM Crypto Tokens for Fans

Italian football club AC Milan recently partnered with fintech blockchain company Chiliz to launch a new fan token. The token will be available on socios.com.

An exciting new development for fans

The new fan token will bring new engagement options for fans. It will also give fans voting rights in club polls. The token will be called $ACM and will be available on the social platform socios.com. The official announcement suggests that $ACM will be available in the next few weeks and give VIP rewards to fans of the football club.

AC Milan Will Launch ACM Crypto Tokens for Fans

However, AC Milan is not the first club to launch a fan token. AS Roma, PSG, Juventus, and FC Barcelona have already launched their fan tokens on the same platform. The estimated fanbase of the Italian club is around 450 million around the globe. It is one of the most prominent clubs in European football with a number of Serie A titles and 18 FIFA and UEFA trophies.

A new partnership for the club

Chief revenue office of AC Milan, Casper Stylsvig commented on the new partnership and said,

“We are happy to join hands with Socios.com and welcome them to our family as a global partner. This partnership allows us to give our 450 million fans across the world another exciting way to interact with AC Milan, which is particularly important under the current circumstances created by the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Blockchain technology is becoming popular amongst football clubs in Europe. Barca launched a cryptocurrency for its fans back in February 2020. Socios.com has also registered exponential growth because of football clubs joining its platform. It has registered the sale of 14 million fan tokens on its platform last year alone. Clubs and partners have generated millions via the sale of these tokens. Some fan tokens were listed on global crypto exchanges in late December and early January because of which volumes also increased. In December, the trading volumes of $JUV and $PSG reached 24 hours high of $300 million.

AC Milan Will Launch ACM Crypto Tokens for Fans

Source

Written by bizbuildermike · Categorized: cryptocurrency · Tagged: $ACM, 2020, AC Milan, ACM Crypto Tokens, blockchain, company, covid-19, crypto, cryptocurrency, data, Europe, Exchanges, Family, FIFA, fintech, Football, Global, milan, pandemic, partnership, revenue, said, social, Technology, token, tokens, trading, us, voting, world

Jan 15 2021

UK based Property Finance Platform LendInvest Claims it’s Well-Prepared to Deal with New COVID-19 Lockdown Measures

UK-based LendInvest, a property finance platform, has reportedly told its investors that it’s well-prepared to deal with new lockdown measures. This, after making upgrades to its business processes, risk mitigation efforts and various financial metrics during the lockdown enforced in March of last year.

The digital lending platform confirmed that it had to face challenges during the first lockdown, which was when construction and property viewings had to temporarily stop. But during the current lockdown period, property viewings may continue and home moves are also going as planned.

Jono Gomez, Treasurer at LendInvest, has noted that companies are beginning to adapt to changes after the initial lockdown. Gomez revealed that the lender learned more about the COVID-19 pandemic, which has helped with opening up construction sites. Valuers have also been able to carry out socially-distanced visits, and third-party services figured out how to conduct operations remotely.

Gomez added that LendInvest has spent this time carefully going over its business processes, building in more resilience and buffers, and changing up its financial risk metrics to support greater limits and also make plans for the worst possible scenarios in the foreseeable future.

Gomez further noted that the lending platform has been able to adapt and held significantly more funds or assets just in case its investors experienced their own challenges and asked for approval for alternative types of valuation methods with its funders.

Gomez noted:

“None were required, and none have been utilized, but should something of the scale of the March lockdown happen again, we are better placed to pivot more nimbly to keep supporting our customers.”

Gomez also mentioned that the lending platform would be able to keep operating throughout the Coronavirus pandemic with a full set of valued loans to progress which will help the company face the current challenges.

Gomez added:

“March was a month riddled with uncertainty, and the team’s quick reaction to the scenario and the work carried out to put both internal and external stakeholders at ease is easily the success story of 2020. Resiliency planning, scenario analysis, credit risk and liquidity management pivoting, were done with incredible rigor, diligence and speed, to give [the] executive committee and the board confidence that the business could weather the storm.”

Christian Faes, Founder of LendInvest and creator of the lobbying group Fintech Founders, recently noted that the Fintech sector is “losing out to big banks” in receiving attention from the government.”

Faes said:

“Now, more than ever, the Fintech sector is facing real challenges and the voice of founders needs to be heard loud and clear.”

Last month, LendInvest launched a new Cloud-based application for short-term lending products. The new application is designed to streamline and automate the loan origination process. The application utilizes Salesforce to enable a centralized hub for customer information, a log for all interactions with LendInvest while automating the workflow.

As reported in November 2020, LendInvest was recognized as the BTL [Buy to Let] Lender of the Year at the 2020 National Association of Commercial Finance Brokers (NACFB) awards for the second year in a row.

Source

Written by bizbuildermike · Categorized: Crowdfunding · Tagged: 2020, analysis, business, commercial, company, construction, coronavirus, covid-19, creator, digital, digital lending, diligence, Europe, finance, fintech, founder, founders, Future, Global, going, government, information, lending, lendinvest, lobbying, more, pandemic, Products, Real Estate, risk, said, Salesforce, story, uk, united-kingdom, Valuation, work

Jan 15 2021

High-tech Babel fish: How the Timekettle WT2 Edge Translator breaks language barriers

Normal conversations are energetic and messy. You and your friends might talk over each other, interrupting each other with new ideas and clarifying questions. Which means that if you and your friend don’t speak the same language, a traditional translator would slow down your conversation to the speed of a walkie-talkie. Helpful, but not exactly a replacement for a fluid chat.

The Timekettle WT2 Edge is the first in-ear translator that preserves the nuances and flow of a natural conversation. The WT2 Edge are bi-directional simultaneous translation earbuds that translate in real-time as you speak and listen, delivering what you said to your listener’s ear in as little as 0.5 seconds with up to 95% accuracy in 40 languages and 93 accents. 

We sat down with the Timekettle team to learn more about how they made a working Babel fish and how they hope to foster more connections worldwide by breaking down language barriers.

Who are the team members of your project? What’s their story?

Timekettle was founded in 2016 by Leal Tian, who was named to the Forbes China 2018 30 Under 30 list. Over the past four years, the Timekettle team has acquired a number of rising stars: Doctor Liang Tian, who works in neural machine translation; Wei Shiei, one of the leading experts in the vector voice algorithm field; Yuman Wang, a software and hardware architect with over a decade of experience; and Alex Qin, a serial entrepreneur who has generated millions of dollars with his business successes. Timekettle has become an open and international start-up, and our staff includes specialists from Japan, the United States, France, and more.

How did it all begin?

We knew we could make a handheld translator faster than an in-ear style, but we believe the cross-language conversation is more than the translation itself. A face-to-face conversation involves exploring and enhancing a relationship from start to finish, and we knew that our design would determine whether our translator would push the conversation forward or hold it back. The in-ear translator seemed to be the best way to achieve our goals, but we lacked a technical solution to make the concept a reality. We re-rooted codes and architected the software and hardware. We spent more than one million dollars and worked on it for a year and a half, but we still failed. We thought about abandoning the in-ear concept and reverting to a handheld translator instead, but we believed in designing a product that made the conversation so natural, it was like the translator wasn’t there at all.

We were lucky: We broke through our technical bottleneck and created a wearable, in-ear translator in 2018. Timekettle WT2 series Translator earbuds are still the best experience translator in the world. We appreciate the backers who supported Timekettle’s product idea, and media outlets like Techcrunch who introduced our idea to the world. They inspire us to feel what we’re doing is worthy. We’re excited to help people break the language barrier in a new way.

How did backer feedback help you make this latest version of your earbuds?

Over the past year, more than 100,000 backers and users from 89 countries and regions have used the WT2 Plus Translator. We received thousands of emails with feedback on the product that helped us design new features. We’ve created a more intelligent voice pick-up capacity, and we also released a feature that allows people to chime in while the other person is still speaking. With other translators, speakers have to wait their turn to talk, but that isn’t how a real conversation happens. Simultaneous Mode lets people speak more naturally. It also enables people to use the Translator in places where there might be a lot of background noise, like streets, restaurants, shopping malls, and more. We’re excited to showcase these features with our new model, WT2 Edge.

Can you briefly explain what your product is? 

Timekettle WT2 Edge Translator Earbuds are the world’s first two-way translation earbuds, meaning you can speak and hear other people’s translations at the same time. The vector noise reduction and bi-directional simultaneous translation make our earbuds different from other existing translators. The WT2 Edge effectively prevents interruption from the external environment and improves translation accuracy significantly to give you a natural and fluent conversation with your friends around the world.

What are you raising funds for? What is the purpose of your campaign? 

It takes years to transform our ideas into a final product. Indiegogo is a global platform for innovative products from all over the world where we can receive feedback from backers around the world. Crowdfunding for the product allows us to continuously update the hardware and improve the software to bring our customers a refined user experience.

What inspired you to make your product? 

Our team was inspired by the Babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Babel fish is small, yellow, and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. When the main character, Arthur Dent, puts it into his ear, it translates the universe’s languages for him and allows him to finish his exploration of the galaxy. 

We wanted to make a real-life Babel fish — something that made communication between people who speak different languages as easy as it was for Arthur Dent. We believe that communication is connection. Translation is about more than words: It’s expression, eye contact, and body language. The WT2 Edge expands on its predecessors to make connections even easier. 

Why did you choose to do crowdfunding? 

Language barriers have divided human beings for thousands of years. For most people, language translation is very expensive. Plus, it’s difficult to find a good interpreter. And learning a new language yourself is time-consuming and hard to do well.

In 2016, artificial intelligence technology was growing fast and neural machine translations were already being used in travel, social networks, business communications, and more. However, very few people were paying attention to the industry back then, and they didn’t realize that this new technology could be turned into a wearable device and bring consumers a cost-effective translation experience. We knew we wanted to launch our Translators through crowdfunding to find our early adopters.

Crowdfunding backers are engaged and supportive. They’re passionate about sharing their ideas for how to optimize products, and passionate about telling their friends and family about a product they backed. Through crowdfunding, we build the Timekttle brand together with our backers.

What have been your biggest challenges so far? 

2020 was an unstable year, and the pandemic has restricted most of our international travel. Timekettle is also a startup, and as a new company, our staff’s time is limited. While some companies were spending 2020 changing directions and putting their efforts into new businesses, our team was working hard to improve our translating system to create an accurate and stable technology that encompasses multi-lingual support. We believe in our mission because of the encouragement, love, and anticipation that we see in our backers all over the world. We made our Translators because we believe that language barriers should be overcome. 

Want to support Timekettle? Check out their campaign page to back their campaign today!

<!–

Comments are closed

–>

Source

Written by bizbuildermike · Categorized: Crowdfunding · Tagged: 2020, algorithm, artificial-intelligence, Behind The Scenes, business, Businesses, chat, Chime, china, company, conversations, Crowdfunding, Design, entrepreneur, Environment, Family, four years, Global, hardware, html, human, ideas, intelligence, international, japan, Media, Model, more, other, pandemic, product, Products, said, Shopping, social, Software, startup, story, style, Success Stories, supported, TechCrunch, Technology, The Conversation, travel, United States, us, world

Jan 02 2021

Fintech Professional Says Challenger Banks are Disrupting Banking Sector in a “Big Way” by Improving Customer Experience

Mr. Potter Banker Banking (1)

Mr. Potter Banker Banking (1)Last year, we saw many banking challengers offering services to customers who might not have been satisfied with their traditional bank. Many more people also began to use online banking services due to the COVID-19 pandemic which forced many physical business locations to shut down.

Marwan Forzley, Co-Founder and CEO at Align Commerce, a payment service provider for global commerce, notes in a blog post published by Payments Source that challenger banks are still quite small when compared to traditional financial institutions. But they’re “disrupting” the banking sector in a “big way” by changing “the fundamental and antiquated experience we’ve come to expect.”

Forzley points out that Deloitte’s “DNA of Digital Challenger Banks” report states that “challengers have developed a product offering and channel experience that targets the points of the value chain where incumbents’ weaknesses are most exposed and often not easy to fix.” In 2020, we saw Fintech challengers (like Current) offer certain services that cater to the financially underserved — such as SMEs, Millennials and underbanked consumers, Forzley confirmed.

He added that digital-only banks (like Revolut) have launched services that specifically aim to serve corporate or business clients. They may offer advanced tools and features (for example, access to working capital, accounting integrations, online wallets, and payment scheduling). These tools may be accessed from a laptop or mobile device — “without the processes, complexities or red tape that incumbents are known for,” Forzley claims.

He also mentioned that there’s a “wide open market with plenty of opportunity not just for challenger banks but for financial technology as an industry to set themselves apart from incumbents to gain market share.”

In 2020, we saw an “unprecedented” level of investment into Fintech firms, Forzley noted. He pointed out that the opportunity for growth within the payment and banking sector is driven by the need to solve or address clear problems and develop “tech-forward solutions” that are “readily available” to serve individuals and companies. He claims that VCs and incumbents are interested in funding “innovative, agile products and services that improve on the speed, accessibility and transparency issues that are widespread throughout traditional financial institutions.”

He concluded:

“[The] winners will be determined by how novel their offering is. In order for the leaders in the space to survive against incumbents and against each other, challengers will need to focus on ensuring their services are more innovative and different compared to what exists today. If the service is going to yield minor incremental changes, it won’t be enough for the challenger to truly take off. The services that will do well are the ones providing a fundamentally different and forward-thinking customer experience.”

As reported recently, digital banks and Fintech challengers must show they can generate profits, because investors are expecting returns.

Investors have been pushing banking challengers to show them how they can generate sizable profits by effectively monetizing their products and services. Industry analysts expect that the neo-banking sector will have to consider consolidation opportunities and seriously begin to focus on achieving profitability in a post COVID environment.

As covered, Fintech adoption is on the rise globally with over 250 digital banks operating in major financial markets, according to a new report from Exton.

The report noted:

“On their quest for monetizing customer relationships neobanks have learned a first lesson: payment transaction fees, premium account subscription fees, or open banking commissions from brokering 3rd party services will in most cases not be sufficient to generate profits or breach beyond operational break-even. Our expectation much rather is that Neobanks will need to offer additional products to jump the gap to sizable profitability.”

The report added:

“Irrespective of which path neobanks will take, we remain convinced that they will need to shift into profitability mode quickly as investor patience will not be unlimited. But for those that select the paths right for them, stay focused on it and grow up as an organization, the future remains bright and full of opportunities.”

Exton suggests that some Fintechs or neobanks may want to consider offering digital or lending services which should help them diversify their business. Financial technology firms can also look into developing their own super app or offer investment services to the mass affluent market, Exton noted.

Source

Written by bizbuildermike · Categorized: Crowdfunding · Tagged: 2020, Adoption, AIM, align commerce, Analysts, Banking, banking challenger, Banks, blog, breach, business, ceo, challenger, Challenger Banks, Co-founder, consumer behavior, covid-19, digital, digital bank, digital banking, digital banks, digital technology, digital transformation, diversify, Environment, financial technology, fintech, fintech adoption, funding, Future, Global, going, investment, investor, lending, market, markets, marwan forzley, Millennials, Mobile, mobile device, more, neobanking, online banking, online wallets, opinion, other, pandemic, payment, payments, product, Products, red, report, returns, SMEs, Space, Technology, transaction, Wallets, working capital

Dec 31 2020

HOM for the holidays: How Capra Leather made the perfect shoes to wear at home

When the pandemic started, Capra Leather, a design studio from Bogotá, realized they needed to create a new product to help people adapt to the new normal. As our homes became more important to our daily lives, they decided to design a product to help people get more comfortable.

Capra Leather decided to create the perfect home shoe. That’s how the HOM was born.

Black home shoes. Slippers and slip on
Capra leather goods are made to last a lifetime.

HOM: The natural, easy-to-wear home shoe

HOM is made entirely from full grain leather, the highest quality layer of the hide. Capra’s leather comes from the finest cattle raised in the open grass of the Andean mountains, complying with the highest environmental standards during the tanning process.

The interior is all breathable suede, a natural material with a signature napped texture that is pleasant to touch.

Black home shoes. Full grain leather
HOM is made out of premium, locally sourced, natural materials.

The footbed has four complementary layers.

  • Memory foam that slowly molds to the shape of your feet. 
  • Natural rubber latex to insulate against heat and cold. 
  • Cork heel reinforcement for a natural firm support. 
  • EVA, as the foundation of the footbed; it’s light and shock-absorbent, and tenderly supports every step.

Capra Leather developed and tested HOM for more than 8 months. The end result was a made-to-last shoe that is the perfect balance between comfort and style. HOM is made out of premium, locally sourced, natural materials, and crafted by artisans to last the duration of a person’s life.

Brown home shoes. The footbed an sole
HOM shoes are made by hand from the highest quality leather.

The brand history

Capra was born in 2015 from founder Juan Quiñones’ love of leather and his belief that there was space to innovate in the men’s leather goods realm. He began his business by crafting and selling handmade laptop sleeves on Etsy.

Since then, Capra’s has cemented itself as a brand of handcrafted, sustainable and stylish leather goods. Today, they are trusted by customers in over 100 countries on 5 continents.

“We are a design studio passionate about pushing the limits of leather goods design to create products with soul. We believe in products that captivate the senses and evoke emotions,” says Juan. “Every detail is designed to achieve the perfect balance between functionality and style.“

Located in the art district of Bogotá, Capra’s shop is a place where creativity and dedication meet. Here, a group of talented artisans with decades of experience craft every order that is placed through their website. “This workshop is the heart of the Capra brand. Every product is crafted here, and every design is developed and tested here,” says Juan.

Craftsmanship by Capra Leather. The team
The Capra Leather workshop in Bogotá, Colombia.

“We believe that when a product is crafted by hand, the attention to detail is acute. The artisan’s character and advanced skill level gives soul to the product. Each artisan relies on traditional crafting techniques while also dedicating time to innovate on processes and materials to achieve unique designs,” says Juan.

Craftsmanship by Capra Leather. Inside the shop
Every piece Capra produces is made to order.

The Capra philosophy

Capra’s ethos is to never compromise quality and offer outstanding products at a fair price all year long.

“We only use the highest quality natural materials that we can get our hands on, and we are on a mission to locally source as much as possible and keep our ecological footprint low. And every piece is made to order to avoid waste inventory,” says Juan.

“We believe the combination of quality materials and attention to detail results in a leather piece that lasts a lifetime,” Juan continues. Capra offers a lifetime guarantee on every piece they craft.

They don’t spend any money on advertising; they rely on backers like you to spread the word.

Want to support HOM? Check out the crowdfunding campaign today or explore their website to learn more.

HOM shoes are the perfect shoes to wear at home. Support the crowdfunding campaign today!

<!–

Comments are closed

–>

Source

Written by bizbuildermike · Categorized: Crowdfunding · Tagged: advertising, art, Behind The Scenes, business, Design, founder, html, money, more, pandemic, product, Products, shopify, Space, step, style, sustainable, word

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 8
  • Go to Next Page »

Copyright © 2021 · Altitude Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in