Can Wearable Tech and Bitcoin Revamp Mobile Payments?
The smartphone revolution kicked off a decade ago, but it really heated up over the past three to five years. Smartphones are perhaps the most 'personal' computer used by the average person and, in terms of usefulness, they are the gadget equivalent of the Swiss Army knife. It's little wonder, then, that more than a billion people bought a new smartphone in 2013. Engineers, developers and designers from Cupertino to Seoul and Taipei have clearly done an excellent job. Sadly, the same cannot be said of marketers, merchants and economists. Few of them imagined that a phone could have the....
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Wearable technology startup MEVU has announced the first wearable bitcoin wallet that tracks movement in order to make payments. Users of MEVU's proof-of-concept bracelet - which is powered by Coinbase's wallet API - will easily be able to send bitcoin with just a flick of the wrist. Apurv Mishra, CEO and co-founder of MEVU, said that the use case for the company's wearable wallet is for small transactions such as tipping, whether in BTC, altcoins or perhaps even something else: "If we use bitcoin or any other currency, if it has the facility for tipping, I think that's what people would....
Despite a selection of headlines to the contrary, bricks-and-mortar is still relevant to the digital payments consumer, although not in the traditional sense, says Visa’s 2016 Digital Payments Study. The study, for which Visa surveyed more than 36,000 online consumers in 19 European countries, says this is in addition to the number of Europeans regularly using a mobile device – a smartphone, tablet or wearable – for payments having tripled since 2015. It notes that “showrooming” – the act of seeing an item in-store before purchasing online – is an overwhelmingly popular shopping method for....
Walking platform app Bitwalking and Misfit wearable devices have unveiled that they have teamed up, enabling users to generate Walking Dollars (W$) through the Misfit devices. Designed by Nissan Bahar and Franky Imbesi, the U.K.-based Bitwalking app was created to give users an incentive to become more active while earning W$ at the same time through the simple act of walking. By converting steps into digital currency, a step is worth the same value for everyone regardless of who they are or where they are. Now as the two team up, users will have the opportunity to mine their own W$....
Technological advancements in this day and age are seen as both a blessing and a curse. Innovation is always heralded with anticipation and hesitation at the same time, leaving the door wide open for mass consumption of technology that isn’t properly protected. Recent innovations, such as wearable tech, might prove to be a security risk in the near....
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is working in tandem with Ripple Labs in its 3.5 billion GBP technological revamp. In particular, the London bank is looking into the proof-of-concept technology offered by Ripple in order to prevent IT failures from losing transaction records. This was announced by the bank's administrative officer Simon McNamara during a webinar, following a technological glitch that caused 600,000 payments to disappear. RBS said the affected payments to and from customers' accounts would be made by Saturday at the latest, as account holders bombarded the bank with....