Bengaluru: Flourish Ventures, a venture firm focused on financial services and fintech, may back companies in neo-banking, gig economy, embedded finance and insure-tech, in India this year, its managing partner, Tilman Ehrbeck, said. In March last year, Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, had said it had spun off its financial inclusion initiative to launch Flourish Ventures. Flourish makes investments in personal finance management tools, challenger banks, regulatory innovations, and technologies that foster an inclusive economy. Till 2018, Omidyar Network globally had invested $200 million across more than 45 startups in financial services including 13…
Author: Loknath Das
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According to a new report, the consumer millennials (18 – 34-year-old) are notably impacted by internet influencers and people they follow sites such as Instagram and Facebook. Their daily use of Facebook is 77%, compared to 68% usage by the 35 to 54-year-old and 52% of the 55+ age group. However, their daily influence on purchasing behavior of Instagram is substantially higher. The daily usage by the 18 – 34-year-old is 72%, 41% by the 35 – 54-year-old and only 9% by the 55+ age group. YouTube use compared to Instagram is more by older age groups. Less popular sites…
Follow these steps if you want to hide memories with certain people on Facebook | Picture for Representation Facebook is one of the most popular social platforms across the world where people can share their photos, videos or post a status with others creating memories. Memories on Facebook helps its users to remind their old Facebook posts, when they became friends on Facebook with others, posts on Facebook that they were tagged in and major life events including some other things. But, one can control what they see in Memories by hiding people or dates they don’t want to be…
Social networks, once a fun and novel way to connect with friends and interests online, have taken on a much more frustrating and dispiriting tone for many users in recent years. It’s an albatross that many of us can’t seem to shake. Twitter and Facebook have ballooned into monolithic giants that hold a lot of sway over the way we consume information and interact on the web. And they can’t seem to solve their myriad negative impacts on society… or worse, don’t see the value. Facebook allows lies in political advertising and plays fast and loose with user data; Twitter lets fake accounts run riot across…
The Royal College of Psychiatrists wants social media data in order to reduce rates of suicide and self-harm among young people. Photograph: Alamy Social media firms such as Facebook and Instagram should be forced to hand over data about who their users are and why they use the sites to reduce suicide among children and young people, psychiatrists have said. The call from the Royal College of Psychiatrists comes as ministers finalise plans to crack down on issues caused by people viewing unsavoury material and messages online. The college, which represents the UK’s 18,000 psychiatrists, wants the government to make social media platforms…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added new pricing options for container-based software to its marketplace service. As of 13 January, select software can be billed on demand based on new consumption units, like the number of worker nodes managed. This is in addition to existing payment options of fixed monthly charges, upfront based on contract length and time-based as you go. Contracts can also be purchases for one year or more. According to AWS, the added pricing option is available from vendors including Kasten, Solodev, Intuz and Quilt Data, with “many more [products] to be added in the coming months”.…
Look around: what is happening? Australia, AI, Ghosn, Google, Suleimani, Starlink, Trump, TikTok. The world is an eruptive flux of frequently toxic emergent behavior, and every unexpected event is laced with subtle interconnected nuances. Stephen Hawking predicted this would be “the century of complexity.” He was talking about theoretical physics, but he was dead right about technology, societies, and geopolitics too. Let’s try to define terms. How can we measure complexity? Seth Lloyd of MIT, in a paper which drily begins “The world has grown more complex recently, and the number of ways of measuring complexity has grown even faster,” proposed three…
Indie Developer Matt Stark has tweeted a video of his idea for a game on twitter. It’s what he’s callling the “Polaroid Effect,” after the once-ubiquitous instant cameras. The experimental game mechanic allows a player to take a picture of a slice of environment using a camera, then place the instant-camera picture into the world as a piece of interactive environment—physically altering the world around them into a surrealist photo collage. He first posted the concept in November 2019, but was then unsure if what he has done now was even possible. “The effect is purely visual and the player can’t physically…
With another US Presidential election on the way in 2020, we can expect the debate around fake news to once again ramp up, and become a key focus of discussion as we look at how political influence spreads online. But what if fake news isn’t actually the problem? Sure, it would be easier to be able to attribute the broader shifts in the political landscape to lies and deceit online – that would help explain the more polarizing movements which seem to be gaining momentum, often despite significant evidence against many of their key claims. But various investigations – including…
No one likes to be audited. On its own, the word “audit” implies wrongdoing or, at the least, carelessness. Opening the books particularly stings when the subject of an audit believes that every obligation has been met in good faith. An audit suggests the reviewing party sees only an act of bad faith. But for software vendors, an audit has often been the traditional path to confirm whether a customer is complying with its software license agreement. In such a scenario, a vendor likely has a legitimate suspicion of misuse — regardless of whether the misuse was intentional or not.…