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bigyack-com · 5 years

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Full Roll-Out of myCWT China to Commence in Q2 2020

CWT has expanded myCWT to China, becoming one of the first global travel management providers to deploy an omni-channel, open API-based platform that has been tailored for the specific needs of the Chinese market. “Our focus globally is to deliver the leading employee-grade business travel experience, and we have made significant investments in our myCWT platform to create a best-in-class proposition,” said Kurt Ekert, CWT’s President and CEO. “Given China’s high-tech, mobile-oriented pace of life, we are excited to launch a digitally-driven customer experience here that helps clients and employees in this dynamic market achieve their true potential.” Working with several specialized Chinese travel, technology and e-commerce partners, CWT has specifically adapted myCWT for deployment in China. It addresses the unique needs and nuances of the market – from content, to payments and integration capabilities – while maintaining a consistent user experience with CWT’s global offer. Its open API architecture facilitates easy integration with third party applications and clients’ internal systems, allowing CWT to provide a broad selection of products, services and content.

“The myCWT platform in China has been purpose-built for this market, keeping in mind the priorities and expectations of our customers and their employees,” said Albert Zhong, General Manager, China, CWT. “We want to ensure that we’re offering a digital experience that is second to none. Combined with the deep expertise and servicing capabilities we have around the world, it makes us the perfect partner for fast-growing Chinese companies who are expanding their footprint overseas, and for global multinationals who need help managing their travel in China.” Highlights of myCWT in China include: Omni-Channel Experience: In China, travelers and travel arrangers will be able to connect with CWT through multiple channels, including an H5 website, a mobile app, messaging (i.e. live chat), email and phone calls. They can initiate a booking through one touchpoint, and then pick up where they left off on another. They can also manage all aspects of their trip – from re-booking or making changes to cancelations and refunds, online check-in, seat selection for trains and flights, hotel room preferences and visa consultation services – or reach out for support, through any channel. In particular, special focus has been placed on creating an industry-leading digital experience, as a significant and growing percentage of bookings by CWT’s customers in China are made using online and mobile channels. More Choices: The platform will offer extensive domestic and international travel content including flights, rail, hotels and ground transportation. In addition to using the global distribution systems (GDSs) like TravelSky, it will incorporate content from other sources such as aggregators by using API connections, giving travelers far more choices than was previously possible. For example, travelers will be able to book low-cost carriers (LCCs), ride-hailing services such as Didi, and even amenities like security fast-tracking and lounge access in airports and train stations. They will also have more than 800,000 business-appropriate accommodation options in 73,000 locations around the world, including 100,000 properties in China, via RoomIt, CWT’s hotel distribution division. Simplified Booking Process: The rapid expansion of China’s high-speed rail network is making it an attractive option for business travelers. myCWT will allow travelers to compare flight and rail options for domestic journeys in a single view, including the cost and travel time, to make more informed decisions. Travel approvals, a common requirement by companies in China, can be requested via email, SMS, the mobile app or through API integration with companies’ own internal approval systems. Multiple payment methods will be supported including WeChat Pay and AliPay, the two third-party payment providers which account for over 90% of mobile payments in the market, as well as credit cards and UATP lodge cards. Integration: Using API connections, myCWT can be integrated with organizations’ own internal management systems including expense and approvals, office automation (OA), business process management, HR and finance, and intranet, for greater efficiency and automatic synchronization. “In 1996, CAS and CWT worked together to introduce the concept of managed corporate travel in China,” said Qu Li, Board Chairman at China Air Service (CAS), CWT's joint venture partner in China. “Since then, we have continued to pioneer together, delivering several 'industry firsts'. The launch of the myCWT platform in China further reinforces our partnership and our commitment to elevating the business travel experience in this market.” CWT is currently piloting myCWT with a few clients in China. A full roll-out will commence in Q2 2020, progressively replacing CWT Online, the current online booking tool and mobile app used by CWT’s customers in China since 2012. See latest Travel News, Interviews, Podcasts and other news regarding: CWT, China. Headlines: Mövenpick Resort Opens in Cam Ranh, Vietnam Sky Bridge Delivered to Final Position at HKIA Airbus Performs First Fully Automatic Vision-Based Take-Off Manchester Signs Tourism Collaboration Agreement with New York City CWT Appoints Scott Hace as Vice President - Enterprise Strategy United to Launch CRJ550 Shuttle Service Between Washington and New York Perth Airport to Upgrade T1's Aerobridges Thomas Krooswijk Appointed GM of Four Seasons Marrakech American Appoints Brian Znotins as VP of Network and Schedule Planning Pools - World Rugby Sevens Challenger Series in Chile 15-16 February British Airways to Refresh First and Club Lounges at Chicago O'Hare Airport Malaysia Airlines and Qatar Airways Expand Codeshare Onyx Signs Second Amari Hotel in China Air Canada's First Airbus A220-300 Enters Commercial Service Hyatt Signs Regency Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Bangkok to Host 30th Global Summit of Women in April One Championship Appoints Jonathan Anastas as CMO IHG Signs Deal for 1,200+ Rooms in Thailand; First Hotel in Chiang Mai HK's Airport Authority Appoints Ricky Leung as Executive Director Trenchard Makes Donation to Aerobility - The British Flying Charity Chu Yuet Hung Joins Four Seasons Hangzhou as Director of F&B Hong Kong Visitor Arrivals Down 14.2% in 2019 Hotel Ritz Madrid to be Rebranded by Mandarin Oriental Sabre Appoints Karl Peterson as Chairman Muralilal Armugum Joins Aloft KL Sentral as Director of F&B Traxof to Automate Talent Acquisition of Airbus' IM Organisations Vie Hotel Bangkok Selects Organika Products for Renovated Spa Europ Assistance Opens Office in Bangkok, Thailand Gulf Air Partners Etihad Guest Team GB Selects British Airways as Official Airline for Tokyo 2020 Emirates Targets Chinese Travellers with Trip.com MOU Thailand: Did Strength of Thai Baht Affect Number of Arrivals from UK in 2019? AirAsia to Launch Flights Between Penang and Chengdu, China Marriott Appoints Bart Buiring as Chief Sales and Marketing Officer APAC Airbus' BelugaXL Enters Service Vietjet Launches Flights from Can Tho to Taipei and Seoul Air New Zealand's Chief People Officer Resigns Whitbread Installs Defibrillators in 800 Premier Inn Hotels Air France Invites Customers to Vote for Preferred Carbon Offsetting Project Calhoun Becomes President and CEO of Boeing Accor to Take Over 581-Room Hotel in Rayong, Thailand Travelport Appoints John Elieson as COO Full Roll-Out of myCWT China to Commence in Q2 2020 Terry Kavieris Returns to Bali as RM of InterContinental Bali Eaton Hotel in Hong Kong Earns EarthCheck Gold Status Mandarin Oriental Launches Tea Roasting Experience in Taipei Chubb Partners Grab to Launch In-App Travel Insurance in Singapore Steady Growth Forecast for Mainland China Hotel Markets in 2020 Artyzen Hospitality Signs Habitat Hotel in Yubei, China Pictures from Ascot United vs Colliers Wood United on 11 January What Does TAT Have Planned for Thailand Travel Mart (TTM+) 2020? Exclusive Interview Aviation: Stable Passenger Demand Growth in November CWT Appoints Dale Eastlund as VP Supply Chain Partners Dassault Falcon to Hold M&O Seminars in 8 Cities Around the World Expat in Phuket Donates Two SV14 Dinghies to Disabled Sailing Thailand Bangkok to Host Asia Destination Film Forum on 30 January Wizz Air Becomes First in Europe to Deploy SITAOnAir's ACARS Over IP Service Airbus to Increase Aircraft Production in USA Sanlorenzo Appoints Simpson Marine as Distributor for Bluegame Yachts in Asia Global Air Freight Demand Down 1.1% in November 2019; APAC Down 3.7% IHG Expands Thailand Portfolio with Holiday Inn and Suites Siracha Laemchabang Asia Pacific Airlines Flew 30.3 Million Int. Passengers in November 2019 SilkAir to Cease Flights to Kolkata, India Biman Bangladesh Airlines Launches Flights to Manchester, England EmbraerX and Elroy Air to Collaborate on Unmanned Air Cargo FCM Strengthens Innovation Programme with Shep Investment Artotel Appoints Yulia Maria as Group Director of Marketing Communications Japan, Singapore, S. Korea and Germany Have World's Most Powerful Passports Yangon Int. Airport Implements SITA's Airport Management Solution Air France to Launch Twice-Daily Flights Between Paris-Orly and Munich, Germany ANA to Enhance Service at Airports in Japan with Portable Translators Yvette Thomas-Henry Appointed GM of Four Seasons Resort Nevis Hahn Air Enters 2020 with 40 New Partner Airlines CWTSatoTravel Partners US Military's Spouse Employment Programme My Emirates Pass Gives Passengers Special Discounts in UAE Visitors to Singapore Must Now Register Unmanned Aircraft India's Vistara Airline Appoints APG as Online GSA in France BOC Aviation Orders 20 Airbus A320neos China Airlines to Launch Direct Flights to Chiang Mai, Thailand Green Light for Vietnam Airlines to Expand Codeshare Agreement with Delta All Hi Fly Flights Now Single-Use Plastic Free Air India Renews Distribution Agreement with Amadeus Mandy Goh Joins St. Regis Langkawi as Executive Chef Spirit Airlines Signs Purchase Agreement for 100 Airbus A320neo Aircraft Hamad Int. Airport Served Record 38,786,422 Pax in 2019 British Airways Starts Offsetting Carbon Emissions on All Flights Within UK Marriott Opens Second JW on Hainan Island, China Airbus Partners Aston Martin for Special Edition Helicopter Dassault Aviation Appoints Charles Wemaëre as VP Worldwide Spares Boeing Appoints Niel Golightly as SVP of Communications Jayson Goldstein Joins Four Seasons Boston as F&B Director Vietjet Takes Delivery of Two More Airbus Aircraft Two Executive Appointments at Bombardier Aviation Air India No Longer Available on Sabre GDS Thailand Targets Tourism Revenue of 3.18 Trillion Baht in 2020 Pictures from Ascot United vs Banstead Athletic on 4 Jan 2020 Gen Z - Airbnb's Fastest Growing Market for Experiences in Asia Pacific Air Canada Takes Delivery of First Airbus A220-300 AirAsia Launches Flights Between Kuala Lumpur and Dalat, Vietnam Cebu Pacific Orders 15 Airbus Aircraft, Including Up To 10 A321XLRs American Airlines and Royal Air Maroc to Codeshare New Immigration Requirements to Help Solomon Islands Fight Measles Vietjet Launches Danang - Singapore Flights American Express GBT Forecasts Stable Air Prices in 2020 Etihad and Kuwait Airways to Codeshare PAG and Inmark Purchase Grand Hyatt Seoul British Airways and Iberia Achieve IATA NDC @Scale Certification Air Caraïbes Takes Delivery of First A350-1000 Aman Signs Fourth Resort in Japan Hamilton to Host HSBC New Zealand Sevens 25-26 January 2020 Thales' New Touchscreen Cockpit Displays Now Available on Airbus A350s Mongolian Airlines to Expand Network with Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner British Airways to Trial AI-Powered Robots at London Heathrow Dusit Thani Resort Opens in Shuangyue Bay, China Six Senses Signs First Hotel in UK Mandarin Oriental to Take Over Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi Cebu Pacific Offering Passengers Roaming WiFi Kits Air France Orders 60 Airbus A220-300 Aircraft Sindhorn Midtown Hotel in Bangkok Appoints Jee Hoong Tan as GM British Airways to Launch LHR Flights to Portland, USA Braathens Takes Delivery of First of Five New ATR 72-600s Cebu Pacific Joins IATA Thailand: Airbnb Adds Saraburi to Beyond Big Cities Campaign New International Rugby Sevens Competition to be Launched in February Sindhorn Midtown Hotel in Bangkok Appoints Nicha Ruenthip as DOSM Qatar Airways to Launch Flights to Santorini and Dubrovnik British Airways Signs Joint Business Agreement with China Southern Air Canada Rouge Completes In-Flight Wi-Fi Installation Saab Wins Order for Digital Air Traffic Towers in Netherlands Whitbread Secures Fourth Premier Inn Hotel in Dublin, Ireland Amman to Host CAPA Middle East & Africa Aviation Summit 2020 Boeing to Suspend Production of 737 MAX Cathay Pacific's Inbound Hong Kong Traffic Down 46% in November Singapore Airlines to Launch Flights to Brussels, Belgium Wego Signs Retailing Agreement with ATPCO GTR Opens Air Cargo Hub at KLIA Air Cargo Terminal 1 Bombardier Uses SAF to Deliver Challenger 350 to Latitude 33 Aviation Swiss-Belhotel Signs First Hotel in Malaysia Czech Air Force Orders Two More Airbus C295 Aircraft New Boeing-Built Satellite to Orbit Over Asia Pacific Third Four Points by Sheraton Hotel Opens in Malaysia Hong Kong Airport Reports Further Drop in Pax, Cargo and Flights Air Canada Launches Flights Between Vancouver and Auckland, New Zealand Andaz Macau Appoints Chikako Shimizu as GM Cathay Pacific to Take Over Air New Zealand's Auckland-Hong Kong Service Four Seasons Opens Second Luxury Resort in Megeve, France Ireland's Department of Defence Orders Two Airbus C295 Aircraft Best Western Plus Opens in Nairobi, Kenya Qatar Airways Launches Flights to Gaborone, Botswana Korean Air to Revamp SkyPass Frequent Flyer Program Embraer E175-E2 Performs Maiden Flight Charlie Sullivan Joins CWT's Air Distribution Team Marriott Opens Third Sheraton Hotel in Beijing, China Radisson Blu Opens Resort in Cam Ranh, Vietnam Qantas Chooses Airbus A350-1000 for Ultra Long-Haul Flights Executive Appointments at Banyan Tree BA to Launch LHR Flights to Six New European Destinations in 2020 Korean Air to Revamp SkyPass Frequent Flyer Program Embraer E175-E2 Performs Maiden Flight Charlie Sullivan Joins CWT's Air Distribution Team Marriott Opens Third Sheraton Hotel in Beijing, China Radisson Blu Opens Resort in Cam Ranh, Vietnam Qantas Chooses Airbus A350-1000 for Ultra Long-Haul Flights Executive Appointments at Banyan Tree BA to Launch LHR Flights to Six New European Destinations in 2020 How Technology is Shaping Airports of the Future FCM and Flight Centre Achieve NDC Level 4 Certification Dusit Rebrands Luxury Resort in Philippines Emirates Launches Flights to Mexico via Barcelona Air Canada's First Airbus A220-300 Completes Maiden Flight FAA Certifies ExecuJet MRO Malaysia to Work on Dassault Jets AirAsia Launches Snap Air France-KLM Orders 10 A350-900 Aircraft Bundeswehr Takes Delivery of First Airbus H145 SAR Helicopter Drew Crawley to Join American Express Global Business Travel as CCO Cape Town 7s 2019 to Take Place 13-15 December Congo Airways to Replace Dash 8-400s with Embraer E175 Aircraft Ascent Solutions Installs Two E-Gates at NAIA 2 Departures Michel Poussau Appointed GM of Rugby World Cup 2023 Wetherspoon to Invest £200 Million Developing New Pubs and Hotels IATA Asks EU to Support Sustainable Aviation Fuel Transition Boeing Delivers First Modified MV-22 Osprey to United States Marine Corps Marriott Signs Six Hotels in India Accor to Rebrand Hotel in Queensland, Australia MHG Signs Two Hotels in Doha, Qatar Vietjet Launches Flights to New Delhi from Hanoi and Saigon SKY Signs Purchase Agreement for 10 Airbus A321XLRs British Airways Trials 3D Printing SAS' First A350 to Enter Long-Haul Service on 28 January Air Italy and Oman Air Sign Codeshare Agreement ACH and Aston Martin to Unveil 'New Creation' in January Qantas Signs FFP Agreement with Air France - KLM Group Malaysia Airlines Launches Shuttle Fares on Flights Between KL and Singapore Accor to Open 125-Room Mercure Hotel in Canberra in January Openings Push Australia's Hotel Inventory to Over 300,000 Rooms Alban Dutemple Appointed Cluster GM of Two Hotels in Bahrain Air New Zealand Trials Edible Coffee Cups Manchester Airport Unveils Details of £1 Billion Transformation South Africa Beat New Zealand to Win Dubai Sevens Aviation: RPKs Up 3.4% in October 2019 China Airlines to Launch Flights Between Taipei and Cebu, Philippines Seaplanes in Thailand? Interview with Dennis Keller, CBO of Siam Seaplane Seven HD Videos from IATA Airline Industry Retailing Symposium 2019 in Bangkok Vietnam Airlines Signs EngineWise Service Agreement with Pratt & Whitney Future of Airline Distribution and NDC - Interview with Yanik Hoyles, IATA Cambodia Airways Interview with Lucian Hsing, Commercial Director HD Videos and Interviews Podcasts from HD Video Interviews Travel Trade Shows in 2019, 2020 and 2021 High-Res Picture Galleries Travel News Asia - Latest Travel Industry News Read the full article

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joshuajacksonlyblog · 7 years

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The Ultimate Guide to Cannabis Tokens

Everybody knows Bitcoin nowadays. But the cryptocurrency world is far and wide. It is rapidly changing more and more industries. And Cannabis has its place in the crypto universe as well!

In an ever more complicated haze of new projects and buzzing ideas, you need proper guidance and information. So, we’ve done the homework and present you this useful guide.

Here you will get an overview of the cannabis industry and tokens. Last year cannabis tokens came out big and according to many analyses, they will perform even better in 2018.

Cannabis Industry

Cannabis has always had a market in North America. An illegal one, though.

Recently, the history notwithstanding, this has changed. Since 2014, almost a dozen states from the US now allow for the legal production and use of recreational cannabis and even more so have made room for its medicinal consumption. In Canada, more than 60% of its population has used the plant.

It is estimated that the cannabis industry will increase in value by 16% each year until 2025. In total, the market cap is predicted to reach an outstanding $24 billion.

For the period 2014 to 2016 monthly average revenue of dispensaries skyrocketed from $10 million to above $70 million.

During the same period, the price per gram took a dive from $45 to $12.77 in Washington for example (1).

From an economic standpoint, falling prices and increasing revenues suggest one thing for sure– growing demand.

Tokens: Overview

The projects can be classified into three groups.

Production

Infrastructure

Payment Solutions

Production

AgroTechFarm

The company’s product is an aeroponic smart appliance. It lets people grow their own organic cannabis, tomatoes, peppers and other crops at home.

The appliance allows people to become self-sufficient and get even more yield than from an outdoor garden. All processes are automated, so there is little user involvement.

Since users will grow in their kitchens there will be no need for transportation or for farming land which are among the biggest contributors to global warming.

The fact that you can grow other crops than Cannabis means their product will be useful even if you decide not to grow Cannabis.

They are currently doing an ICO to introduce the Agro Tech Farm Token (ATF) and it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is the backbone of all industries. A market’s growth potential is worthless without proper infrastructure. Think about it this way: the fastest car in the world is good for nothing without roads.

Budbo

Budbo’s platform is a global cannabis blockchain that allows any ancillary service or cannabis related business to integrate into and harness the power of its immutable ledger.

Founded in 2015, they already have a working mobile application, dispensary analytics dashboard, and an enterprise suite of products. Their mobile application has 75,000 active users and an interface similar to “Tinder” in that it allows users to quickly swipe through 1000s of locally available strains and products. There are over 2,000 dispensaries on the mobile application.

With their token sale, they aim to tokenize their blockchain and become the single point data aggregate for the cannabis industry. Utilizing the tokens as the API keys to access the ledger.

Paragon

Paragon successfully launched its initial platform and functionality in late 2017 and is now progressing towards a fully-fledged release in mid-2018.

Importantly, Paragon aims to do a lot more than just solve part of the cash problem that the cannabis industry currently faces. Paragon is developing a seed-to-sale tracking solution for cannabis products. All users and governments will be able to verify the entire life cycle of a product for free and be certain that no data was manipulated or deleted. These solutions are all made possible by smart-contracts and fueled by PRG to incorporate all elements of the supply chain.

On top of the extensive blockchain-based solutions that Paragon is creating, the company is also launching Paragon Spaces – these are co-working spaces that serve the cannabis industry with flex desks and office space – all paid for in PRG.

HempCoin

This project, like Dope Coin, is a bit of a hybrid. It combines a payment platform with a mission to rebrand the industry.

Their eight-page whitepaper does shed little light on what exactly they mean by this term.

To the best of our knowledge, they want to develop a community that will actively push pro-cannabis materials like artwork, blog posts, articles and others to improve the image of the industry.

Payments Solutions

These token bitcoin for cannabis. The -coin in their names says it all.

Cannabis Coin and Canna Coin

These projects aim to facilitate payments to cannabis businesses in a secure way. Yet, their websites do not offer enough information.

Together with that could not find a dedicated whitepaper for either of them. Whitepapers are professional tools that explain all aspects of any token-venture, so missing one is not a good thing.

Both projects have Github, so if you are into coding make sure to check them out.

Pot Coin

PotCoin tokenizes seeds and strains through a reward program. People have the option to convert PotCoins into real cannabis seeds.

Together with that, growers who develop a new strain will have the opportunity to sell it on their platform and earn tokens.

Dope Coin/ Smoke Exchange

Dope Coin’s mission is to provide a payment solution for both the legal cannabis market and the illicit one like the darknet silk road.

Just recently, the team started a new project called Smoke Exchange that aims to be a marketing and advertising platform specifically for cannabis businesses. They will integrate dope coin and bitcoin as payments on this platform.

Smoke Exchange says they will release a working demo in Q1/2018.

Wrapping it all up…

Cannabis tokens are will most likely be a good buy in 2018. Yet, be cautious when it comes to projects without a working product or that have too much hype around them. Together with that bear in mind the basic rules of investing.

Never put it all in one coin

Invest only as much as can afford to lose

A working product is better to no product

Look at the market cap (price times number of tokens), not only price

Disclaimer: This article has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for investment advice.

Images courtesy of Cointed

The post The Ultimate Guide to Cannabis Tokens appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

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mbaljeetsingh · 4 years

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100 Jamstack Tools, APIs & Services to Power Your Sites

We’ve explained the Jamstack, a popular new way to build secure, scalable, high-performance sites. Now we’ll introduce you to the tools, services, and APIs that power Jamstack sites.

The A in Jamstack stands for API. APIs can do anything for you, from sending a form to authenticating a user, or from storing and retrieving data in real time to shopping for products.

In this article, we’ll do an extensive review of existing APIs and how they compare to one another. This review couldn’t possibly encompass the whole spectrum of third-party APIs that you can integrate into your website, but hopefully you’ll still find the coverage enlightening enough.

We’ll use the words “headless”, “detached”, and “serverless” a lot in this article. If you haven’t already, check out our introduction to the Jamstack, which covers all the basics.

Hosting (Mostly for Free)

Provided: Netlify

Hosting a Jamstack site usually involves automated deployment pipelines. For example, you might have a repository in GitHub which, on every push, automatically triggers an online deployment (via webhooks), running the necessary build tools (such as Jekyll) and regression tests (via Travis CI).

Sound difficult? It can be a surprisingly simple process!

Most of the services here include these goodies out of the box:

SSD drives

CDN deployments

free SSL (including for custom domains)

command line deployments and rollbacks

Note: look out for another article in this series, coming soon, covering how to use these services.

Services

Google Firebase and AWS Amplify

Firebase Hosting is Google’s take on a hosting service that’s easy to understand and implement, and it’s free to use (limits apply). Firebase’s backbone actually lies on top of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and you can in fact access and tweak some Firebase deployments through the GCP console. But by implementing something of an “gateway” (Firebase) that transparently handles GCP resources for us, Google gave developers a brand new and highly improved user experience (UX) … and the Firebase’s YouTube channel is just brilliant! 👏

AWS Amplify is also an effort to reduce the complexities of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for web and mobile deployment that doesn’t quite offer free hosting but 12 months of free use for new accounts for its Storage with Amplify as part of the AWS Free Tier.

Google really made a brilliant move with the Firebase family of products by “detaching” them from the GCP, but Amazon went half-way with AWS Amplify. It sure is a dramatic improvement from the regular AWS workflow, especially for novice users, and its documentation hub is superb and way more down-to-earth than the way Amazon usually documents services. But Amplify is still accessed from the same old (horrifically bloated) console. You still need a credit card to just open an account, deployments are still region-specific (no built-in CDN, seriously?), and the workflow isn’t as straightforward when compared to that of Firebase or Netlify.

GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages

Both hosting services for Git repositories also have a built-in service to host static pages right out of your codebases, 100% free: GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages.

In a future article we’ll cover how to use these services, but in the meantime make sure to check out these easy-to-follow guides:

Getting Started with GitHub Pages

Hosting on GitLab.com with GitLab Pages

Netlify and Heroku

In a very short period of time, Netlify not only coined the Jamstack term but also positioned itself as the place to go for all things static. While you could certainly accomplish more with an elaborated AWS pipeline, the simplicity and unparalleled ease of use that Netlify offers is unbeatable. Want to host a static site? Just drop it here and it’s online. Want automatic updates? Link a repo and just push a commit. And batteries are included — instant builds, worldwide CDN, free SSL, CLI tool, on-click rollbacks, and more.

Heroku is the only service in this list that allows you to host dynamic pages: Node.js, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, Go, Scala and Clojure (check their Language Support page). So if you aren’t yet quite ready to go static, this might be a good way to test your dynamic sites online for free.

Others Services

With 194 data centers as of 2020, Cloudflare is — by many metrics — the company that offers the lowest latency for their DNS and CDN services around the world. They serve big companies but also have a number of services oriented to developers, like Workers Sites. The service isn’t free ($5/mo minimum charge) but it’s as top performant as you can get, and fairly easy to use.

Other tools targeted at static pages include Aerobatic, which offers a free trial with no credit card required and support for internationalization (i18n) and full-text search built-in plugins; Surge.sh with npm run scripts and CI services; and Vercel (formerly ZEIT Now) with an Edge Network serving big names such as Twilio and The Washington Post.

Comparison

Service Free plan Easy-of-use Tooling Aerobatic 1 month easy good Firebase Hosting yes easy very good GitHub Pages completely free easy poor GitLab Pages completely free easy good Heroku yes somewhat easy very good Netlify yes extremely easy very good Storage with Amplify 1-year (new accounts) somewhat easy very good Surge.sh yes easy good Vercel yes easy good Workers Sites no somewhat easy good

Storing and Retrieving Data: Real-time NoSQL Databases

NoSQL solutions like MongoDB have been coexisting with relational databases like MySQL for some time (see the differences and how to choose), but real-time processing takes NoSQL to the next level by enabling cloud storage for state management, such as a user entering their name or clicking a radio button.

If you’re familiar with Redux and Vuex — React and Vue.js libraries for state management, respectively — think of integrating that concept with a cloud storage provider.

Services

Amazon DynamoDB is a “fully managed, multiregion, multimaster, durable database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications”. But as with many things AWS, it’s difficult to implement and very hard to debug (see Why Amazon DynamoDB isn’t for everyone, by Forrest Brazeal). In all fairness to Amazon, they also built DataStore into AWS Amplify (with GraphQL and REST API support) with a more straightforward approach, in line with the simplicity of the rest of Amplify’s products.

Google Firestore made real-time NoSQL databases — a fairly complex topic in and of itself — as simple as they can be, with pretty much all the capabilities DynamoDB has. It’s very well documented (with introductory clips that are fun to watch). And React and Vue.js have wrappers around Firestore with react-redux-firebase and Vuexfire, respectively.

Cloudflare sure knows how to take performance to the very extreme, and Workers KV, a serverless key-value storage for applications, is a fine example of what a well engineered product looks like. The premise of Workers KV is that you can access a key as if it were a local file within your app, and the content will be the value stored for that key. That’s it — no API to implement, no extra coding. And because of the unbeatable performance of the Cloudflare CDN, this approach can actually be faster than querying a NoSQL database. And as simple as it is, it scales seamlessly to millions of requests. 👏

And finally, there’s FaunaDB, a startup that crafted a solution with native GraphQL and a simple pricing (including a free plan) that can be implemented in minutes.

Managing Content: Headless CMS

In the “monolithic” way of doing things, whenever we used a given content management system — such as WordPress, Django, or Joomla! — it meant that we also needed to use the front-end engine that came attached to it, as back and front end were “coupled” components of a single piece of software (see our introduction to the Jamstack for more info about tightly vs loosely coupled sites).

Enter the headless CMS — a back end only without a front end. Since a headless CMS would normally expose an API or generate static content in the way of Markdown or HTML files, the front end can be anywhere really. In fact, multiple and simultaneous interfaces can be created for web sites, mobile apps, and Internet of Things (IoT) apps.

Products and Services

There are a number of headless CMSs, both as software you can download and configure where you do the deployments yourself, or offered in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model where everything is taken care of for you.

Some features you can expect to find:

localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n)

microservices architecture with a RESTful API

editor interface

customization

versioning*

* Since some headless CMS will integrate smoothly with your git repo, the versioning capability can actually be a remarkable improvement over a regular CMS.

Self-hosted Headless CMS

Ghost, “the #1 open source headless Node.js CMS”, is certainly the one with the most stars on GitHub. Not only can Ghost handle content, but it also offers a number of integrations to manage payments (Stripe), email lists (MailChimp), shopping (Shopify), and many more. And then there’s Ghost(Pro), which is the official managed hosting for Ghost with commercial support.

Fairly close to Ghost in popularity comes Strapi, with REST and GraphQL APIs, and 1-click deployments on Heroku, AWS, and DigitalOcean. It has “starters” (template projects) to work seamlessly with Gatsby, Vue.js with Nuxt.js, React with Next.js, and Angular. It also runs on Node.js and has support for a number of database engines.

Netlify CMS is also a popular option built as a single��page React app. There’s Directus, which wraps custom SQL databases with an API and provides an intuitive admin app to manage its content, and the commercial companion Directus Cloud. There’s also TinaCMS, which is also React-based, and Ponzu, Copckpit, and many more, which you can explore oin the comprehensive list provided by headlesscms.org.

SaaS Headless CMS

CloudCannon is the cloud CMS for Jekyll (we’ll review Jekyll later in the “static site generators” section), with smooth integration with GitHub, Bitbucket and Dropbox. They have a free plan as well but with no global CDN hosting.

Contentful is something different: a content hub where business owners, marketers, developers and project managers can all go to set and manage all of the data sources of an organization. And their headless CMS is just a part of that strategy. The Contentful platform is fully featured, very well documented, with plenty of open-source tools. And while the pricing is a bit confusing, there’s actually a free plan that only requires attribution.

There are other SaaS headless CMSs with free plans, such as DatoCMS and Sanity with a proposition similar to that of Contentful; Forestry, with support for a number of static generators; GraphCMS, with GraphQL support; and Prismic. These are just a few of the many options.

Sending Information: Forms without Code

Sending data through forms has forever been one of the main uses for server-side processing. There are essentially two approaches to addressing this problem on a static site, each with pros and cons.

From Builders, Embedded and Hosted Forms

Many times integrating a “powered by” external form is more than enough to collect email addresses or to receive feedback.

Google Forms have offered this possibility since 2008 entirely for free, with a simple interface that stores submissions on Google Sheets, and that can send alerts via email every time there’s a submission.

Formstack takes forms to another level by providing an integrated workflow supporting digital signatures, document generation, Salesforce integration, and more. They offer a free tryout but no free plans.

Then you have the extremely easy-to-use form builders JotForm and Wufoo, which integrate handling payments, among other things, or Typeform, which makes forms and surveys … pretty? All of them offer free plans.

External API: Form Processing as a Service (FPaaS)

Sometimes a builder won’t cut it, as you need more flexibility to present information and fields, or to fully integrate the look and feel of the form with the rest of your website. For this you will need to integrate an API.

The way these services work is surprisingly easy: you specify a URL for submission that will do the processing for you. At most you’ll have to set a few things up but most probably won’t need to do any extra coding.

There are a number of providers offering free plans, such as Form.IO, Formcarry, Formspark, and Netlify Forms. They all work in a similar way and are very easy to implement.

FormDen and FormKeep are also form builders that can otherwise be used just as back ends, though none of them offer free plans.

Programming Server-Side Logic: Function as a Service (FaaS)

Couldn’t find an API that does quite what you want? Create it! You don’t need to resort back to a hosted back-end system to process server-side logic, with all the hassle that comes with it (maintenance, bills, credentials, security patches). Instead, you can implement a micro-service in your language of choice (oftentimes JavaScript, Python, or Go), encapsulate that logic into functions, and offer them through a RESTful API.

As with pretty much everything else in this list, you won’t be paying anything for a function that’s not being actively used, so no worries for just leaving it sitting there (but beware that spikes in traffic might also trigger extra billing).

Providers

While the implementation details for AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions may differ, they all work in pretty much the same fashion and you’ll need a degree of familiarity with AWS, Azure or GCP. AWS Lambda has the richest language support of them all (and also Amazon API Gateway to help you wrap your functions into a maintainable API with monitoring tools), while Azure — not surprisingly — has the best support for .NET Framework and .NET Core (with different versions supporting different runtimes and even TypeScript transpiled to JavaScript). But be aware that Azure systematically ranks as the slowest service by a margin.

Cloud Functions for Firebase and Netlify Functions are wrappers around Google Cloud Functions and AWS Lambda, respectively. They greatly simplify the management of functions on the cloud, as you effectively can get away without even having an account on such services. Code deployment and versioning become trivial with Netlify — which also has very good community support — as it will smoothly integrate with your repo offering stage, previewing, and rolling back at a click (or a commit). Simplicity naturally comes at the expense of losing some flexibility (see Firebase Cloud Functions: the great, the meh, and the ugly by Pier Bover).

IBM Cloud Functions (based on Apache OpenWhisk) and Cloudflare Workers are other services you might want to look at. IBM has an impressive list of supported languages, including the option to deploy Docker containers with your own runtime. However, it ranked somewhat poorly performance wise. And just as Netlify systematically manages to make things the simplest, Cloudflare again makes things the fastest (and by a difference).

Comparison

service languages overhead* coldstart* difficulty support AWS Lambda C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, Python, Ruby 86 ms 🟢 589 ms high 👍 very good Azure Functions C#, F#, Java, JavaScript and TypeScript, PowerShell, Python 760 ms 🔴 5,907 ms 🔴 high 👎 very poor Cloud Functions for Firebase JavaScript and TypeScript 642 ms 🔴 168 ms low 👍 very good Cloudflare Workers JavaScript, COBOL 70 ms 🟢 76 ms 🟢 intermediate intermediate Google Cloud Functions Go, Java, Node.js, Python 642 ms 🔴 168 ms high 👍 very good IBM Cloud Functions .C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Swift, and Docker containers 136 ms 2,103 ms 🔴 high no info Netlify Functions Go, Node.js 86 ms 🟢 589 ms very low 👍 very good

* As measured by λ Serverless Benchmark, the overhead is the time from request to response without the time the function took (for a concurrency of 50), and the coldstart is how long the servers takes to respond when queried are spanned every 3 hours; the lower the values, the better.

Authenticating Users: Identity as a Service

Identity as a Service (IDaaS), also called sometimes Authentication as a Service (AaaS), involves managing a full user registration, confirmation, and authentication with just APIs. The Geist of “stateless authentication” is that a user will authenticate against a third-party and come back to you with a valid “token” that you can verify, or revoke if need be.

In some cases, a provider might even offer a “drop-in” user interface (UI) that will work seamlessly across desktop and mobile, all of which could potentially save you very long hours of work.

Services

Auth0 has been in business the longest and has quickstart guides for a number of scenarios. It’s an excellent provider if you want to implement a complex solution and already have some experience implementing authentication. But as they point out, “identity is complex, deal with it”. The large scope Auth0 services (universal login, single sign on (SSO), multifactor authentication, branch password detection, and so on) can be overwhelming if you’re just starting on the topic.

Firebase Authentication (with its ready-to-use UI) and Authentication with Amplify are also very comprehensive and flexible, and somewhat presented in a more straightforward manner than Auth0. Firebase also offers anonymous authentication! Curious? Check out this clip:

youtube

Once again, Netlify seems to come up with the easiest solution to implement with Netlify Identity and its open-source zero config netlify-identity-widget to create a secure login in 10 minutes! But of course, there are some limitations (check out Four Dealbreakers in Netlify Identity, by Jean Cochrane).

You can also check Okta, FusionAuth and LoginRadius, all of which have free plans. There are no freebies for Ping Identity, OneLogin, and Ubisecure, which are more oriented to the enterprise sector. Finally, consider Cloudflare Access, as everything Cloudflare does is rock solid.

Going F·A·S·T: Static Site Generators (SSG)

I can hear some of you saying “all of this might be okay for future projects, but my sites are already dynamic, so what to do?” Here’s when static site generators enter the picture.

You can have the best of both worlds — the convenience of a familiar CMS and static pages with code and data splitting, preloading, caching, image optimization, and all sorts of performance enhancements. An SSR will bridge that gap by querying your database and generating static output out of it (for example, Markdown pages), and with some settings to set your template, you’ll be all set.

The listing here is tiny compared to the ever increasing list of SSRs. Have a look at StaticGen for more info.

Main Products

GatsbyJS is powered by React.js and webpack, meaning that it can generate progressive web apps (aka PWAs, websites that look and feel like an apps). It also supports GraphQL (see Write Apps with Better Building Blocks) and it has +1,000 plugins to get data from anywhere (WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, GraphCMS, DatoCMS, and many more). See how GatsbyJS says it compares to its main competitors, Hugo and Jekyll.

All of this flexibility comes at a cost, as setting and customizing GatsbyJS can be a time-consuming process, and if you don’t have a decent understanding of React — and therefore JavaScript — you won’t be able to make much of it. That’s where Gatsby Cloud comes in, offering support to build and maintain Gatsby sites for free or for a fee, where you could automate your fast builds, access to previews, generate daily edits, and fire deployments with ease to Netlify, Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront or Akamai.

Hugo claims to be “the world’s fastest framework for building websites”, and it sure can generate massive sites in milliseconds. With built-in templates (literally hundreds of them available) and native support for internationalization (i18n), it’s also one of the most popular SSGs. Hugo is a Go app, and while Go isn’t hard to set and learn, you’ll definitely need to be checking the documentation often if you aren’t familiar with it.

Unlike GatsbyJS, configuring and deploying Jekyll is a rather straightforward process. Furthermore, Jekyll is the only SSR supported by GitHub Pages (Tom Preston-Werner, creator of Jekyll, is also a co-founder of GitHub), and can smoothly deploy static sites for free right out of your GitHub repos! Jekyll uses Shopify’s Liquid template language, which is also easy to learn. The downsides? As a Ruby app, Jekyll can be hard to set on a Windows environment, and optimizations such as minimizing JavaScript code and image preloading aren’t included by default. In fact, Jekyll doesn’t even aim at generating a PWA but just purely static sites — which might still be fine depending on what you need.

Comparison

Product Language Templating Setting GitHub stars GatsbyJS JavaScript React.js difficult

Hugo Go Go (library) intermediate

Jekyll Ruby Liquid easy

Others

WP2Static is an SSR designed specifically for WordPress (WP). It has a small but very interesting set of plugins, like Algolia search, and Cloudflare Workers and Netlify deployments. HardyPress is actually a SaaS solution to generate static WP sites, and for a fee you’ll have an admin panel from where you can enter some credentials to access your online WP installations to manage everything: shut down live WP installs that were already imported, transparent deployment to global a CDN, HTTPS, forms, search. Other WP-related SSGs with commercial support are Shifter, Strattic, and Sitesauce.

Since I am admittedly biased towards Vue.js, I had to include VuePress, which is intended to generate single page applications (SPAs) and has a minimal setup with markdown-centered files, and it’s also powered by webpack. Gridsome and Nuxt.js are more featured Vue.js powered frameworks with SSR capabilities.

Selling and Processing Payments: Headless Shopping Carts

The architecture and benefits of headless ecommerce is not that different from that of a headless CMS: massive cost reduction (hosting, licenses, maintenance), less time to market, seamless integration, and — a big one for commerce — “omnichannel” capabilities.

Continue reading 100 Jamstack Tools, APIs & Services to Power Your Sites on SitePoint.

via SitePoint https://ift.tt/3fUHoNL

#IFTTT #Feedly

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bitcoingape · 5 years

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What is a Milestone-based Token offering? Storecoin, with Early Backing from Ari Paul/BlockTower Wants to Tokenize your Data

New Post has been published on http://bitcoingape.com/what-is-a-milestone-based-token-offering-storecoin-with-early-backing-from-ari-paul-blocktower-wants-to-tokenize-your-data/

What is a Milestone-based Token offering? Storecoin, with Early Backing from Ari Paul/BlockTower Wants to Tokenize your Data

“If we’re right about our thesis, a new computing platform emerges — one powered by open and tokenized data.

Not only do developers get paid when the Google’s of the world want to query/crawl/search their data (and devs can even share this data revenue with users), developers can build with the open data streams and open APIs of other developers (who get paid when the developers access their data stream; 1MB data = 1 datacoin).

I think this can change the world. It’s a new computing platform powered by open data.

Storecoin is merely incentivizing it.” – Chris McCoy, CEO of Storecoin

June 15, 2019

Consumers are more than ever aware of and feeling the effects of predatory business practices from Big Tech, as data breaches, deplatforming, and policy shifts occur at alarming rates. Washington is scrambling to gain control over the situation.

Consumers favor alternative approaches to data handling instead of a mass break up of today’s tech companies. Consumers want alternative business models that allow people to leverage their data as an asset they can manage.

What is Storecoin?

Storecoin is a zero fee payments and peer-to-peer cloud computing blockchain that will enable such an alternative by helping transform data into money. Here’s how it works.

The Storecoin project starts with a zero-fee settlement layer. At the heart of this is Blockfin, our leaderless, Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm that solves for scalability and decentralization. Thanks to Blockfin and a credibly low inflation policy, $STORE functions as a sound money for the entire Storecoin ecosystem.

As security with scalability is proven, Storecoin will open up miner (or, as we call them “dWorker’s”) participation to anyone in the world. From there, the secure settlement layer can evolve into a p2p cloud platform for the decentralization of data and the creation of new, zero-fee tokenized apps (tApps).

Put simply, we see many applications that want to experiment with their own native tokens to incentivize work and other activities, to coordinate their groups, and to experiment with as yet undreamed of use cases.

The first generation of ICO tokens created the issue of manufactured payment tokens, limited in use cases, and unbacked by anything but speculation. A weak substitute for money, and lacking decentralized governance.

Incentivize Developers, and They Will Come

Application developers in the Storecoin ecosystem can only issue tokens that are backed by the data their application produces, giving them intrinsic value based on the demand that third parties have for that data. Because data is the oil of the new economy, this creates an opportunity for the dWorkers in the Storecoin ecosystem to get rewarded for servicing and securing the network of applications, while providing a more profitable hosting solution for app developers than today’s centralized alternatives like AWS.

What’s more, this tokenization of data creates new opportunities to address consumer concerns like never before. First, enterprising developers who want to offer something different might take advantage of data tokenization to help cut consumers in to their business models, finding new alignment and synergy with their users. Even if users aren’t being paid for their data, per se, tokenization makes data much more trackable and transparent, giving users new insight into how their data is being used and providing them more power to fight against what they don’t like.

Underpinning this all is a shared security network where the miners or dWorkers of the Storecoin system ensure that the entire network is protected from malicious attack.

For Storecoin, it is imperative that this new data paradigm doesn’t simply replace one intermediary with another, however. That’s why the entire project will be governed through a system that enshrines checks and balances and the separation of powers. Our governance system makes it impossible for any one group – developers, miners, or the nonprofit foundation – to warp the system to benefit them above the others.

Announcing the next Storecoin Milestone Token Offering

Storecoin is launching its long-awaited Milestone Token Offering on Thursday, June 20th at 12pm PT. This Regulation D and Regulation S securities offering aims to bring in over 500 new wallets and up to $4.97 Million of Treasury into the project.

Since inception, Storecoin has taken a strong anti-ICO stance and instead has committed to growing Treasury on the basis of achieving key project milestones. These global MTOs focus Storecoin on transparent project execution while building long-term trust with its growing community.

The sale will be offered as a sequence of three phased pricing rounds. Each sale phase will be offered on a first-registered and first-funded basis. Once a phase is fully registered and funded, the next phase will open up and be offered to the next registered buyer.

The proceeds from this sale will be used for a number of vital project building activities, including:

Releasing the alpha network for BlockFin, our parallel and pipelined consensus engine

Multiple security audits for our BlockFin BFT consensus algorithm

Begin hosting STORE meet-ups around the world

Releasing our Governance, Economics, and Security Papers for public peer review

Hosting the first-ever Storecoin Conference, a research and governance global gathering

Existing Storecoin investors include Ari Paul of BlockTower, Anthony Pompliano, Matt Ocko, AlphaBit Fund, Ari Nazir of Neural Capital, and more.

Links

E-mail: [email protected]

Website: http://storecoin.com

Telegram Group: http://t.me/storecoin

Twitter: http://twitter.com/storecoin

The post What is a Milestone-based Token offering? Storecoin, with Early Backing from Ari Paul/BlockTower Wants to Tokenize your Data appeared first on Ethereum World News.

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kennethherrerablog · 5 years

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We’ve Tested 100s of Banks, Credit Cards and Apps. These Are the Best

It seems like there are a million financial companies competing for your attention.

Put your money here. Invest with us. This is the best credit card. You’ll get cash back. Hey, we’ll give you a loan! We’ll give you the sweetest deal, we promise. We are totally not a scam. Here at (fill in the blank) company, your financial future is our top priority.

Sound familiar?

We’re here to cut through the noise. We’ve road-tested countless financial apps, products, services, tools, accounts, cards and companies. If it has to do with money, we’ve tried it.

Let’s cut to the chase: Here are the only four you really need. We’re recommending these four because we’ve found them to be legit, easy to use, and effective. Each of them does something different, but they all offer smart ways to grow and manage your money.

Put Your Money in This Fee-Free Online Account

We’ve reached a point where online accounts are simply easier to use than traditional accounts. They’re cheaper and more accessible.

One of our favorite companies, Aspiration, works on a pay-what-is-fair model. You choose to set a monthly tip up to $20 or as low as $0, and you can change it anytime.

That gives you fee-free access to a Spend and Save account — and its perks. Check these out:

Earn 2.00% APY on your savings as long as you squirrel away at least $1 a month.

Earn 0.5% cash back on purchases with your debit card.

Get reimbursed for any ATM fees (i.e. get money anytime, anywhere you need it without worrying about the exorbitant cost of those pesky machines).

Plus, in an age when we all look on the big banks with a touch of suspicion because of years of scandal and mismanagement, Aspiration has popped up with the simple motto to “Do Well. Do Good.” It commits to donating 10% of earnings to charity and makes it easy for account holders to do the same.

Invest Your Money in Real Estate — Even If You’re Not Rich

Want to try real-estate investing without playing landlord? We found a company that helps you do just that.

Oh, and you don’t have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars, either. You can get started with a minimum investment of just $500. A company called Fundrise does all the heavy lifting for you.

Through the Fundrise Starter Portfolio, your money gets invested in private real estate around the United States.

This isn’t an obscure investment, though. You can see exactly which properties are included in your portfolios — like a set of townhomes in Snoqualmie, Washington, or an apartment building in Charlotte, North Carolina.

You can earn money through quarterly dividend payments and potential appreciation in the value of your shares, just like a stock. Cash flow typically comes from interest payments and property income (e.g. rent).

You’ll pay a 0.85% annual asset management fee and a 0.15% annual investment advisory fee.

Get Cash Back From Your Credit Card

There are so many credit cards to choose from! So many.

Here’s the one we like: It’s the Chase Freedom Unlimited card*. Its claim to fame? You’ll earn an unlimited 1.5% cash back on all your purchases. Plus, if you spend $500 in your first three months of opening the card (hi, groceries), you’ll pocket a $150 bonus.

There’s no annual fee, and the cash-back rewards don’t expire.

As a Penny Hoarder, you just have to be sure you don’t get too carried away with those purchases — and that the card is paid off at the end of each billing period.

Get signed up — and 0% intro APR for 15 months — here.

Cut Down Your Credit Card Debt with a Personal Loan

When you think about how much debt you have, it can make you anxious. A lot of us are being crushed by credit card interest rates north of 20%. If you’re in that boat, consolidation and refinancing might be worth a look.

That’s where a company like Fiona can help. It can help you find personalized lending options to refinance or consolidate your debt to potentially save thousands of dollars in interest.

Fiona will show you all the lenders willing to help you pay off your credit card debt and eliminate the headache of paying bills by allowing you to make one payment each month.

If your credit score is at least 620, you can borrow up to $100,000 (no collateral needed) and compare interest rates, which start at 3.84%. The idea is to secure a loan at a lower interest rate than your credit cards, potentially helping you save thousands. Repayment plans range from 24 to 84 months.

Take, for example, Katherine, who faced $12,000 in credit card debt. Holding her back? The 15.24% interest rate. By refinancing with a 5%-interest, seven-year personal loan, she saved $12,000 in interest.

If she’d kept on the same road, she would have paid something like $14,000 in interest alone over 25 years. Yikes!

If you’re just curious about what’s out there, checking rates on Fiona won’t hurt your credit score — and can probably save you in interest.

Cut Through the Clutter and Focus on Solutions

Countless financial services are vying for your business. Too many to keep track of.

Sometimes it’s best to keep it simple, and focus on a few good, solid ones that can really help you out.

Based on our experience, all of the ones we mentioned here are legit. They’re a good place to start.

*The information for the Chase Freedom Unlimited card has been collected independently by The Penny Hoarder. Opinions expressed here are the author’s alone, not those of the credit card issuer, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the credit card issuer. The Penny Hoarder is a partner of Credible.

Mike Brassfield ([email protected]) is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder. He keeps it simple.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.

We’ve Tested 100s of Banks, Credit Cards and Apps. These Are the Best published first on https://justinbetreviews.tumblr.com/

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investmart007 · 6 years

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Robocall Volumes Shatter the National Record for Fourth Straight Month

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/bcGTLZ

Robocall Volumes Shatter the National Record for Fourth Straight Month

IRVINE, Calif./ July 12, 2018 (STL.News) — The American public was inundated by 4.12 billion robocalls in June, setting a new national record for the fourth consecutive month and spiking 63% over the monthly total from June of last year. That record pace equaled roughly 1,591 robocalls placed every second during June, or 137.5 million calls for every day of the month. The June total represents the highest per-second/per-day volume of robocalls ever recorded since YouMail launched the Robocall Index in 2015. Fully 40 of the 50 Most Robocalled Cities in America (80%) recorded month-on-month calling increases during June, bringing the national total to 20.3 billion robocalls in the first six months of 2018, a 39% increase from the first half of 2017. These latest monthly figures come from YouMail, a free robocall blocking solution for mobile phones helps consumers stop robocalls from ever reaching their phones. YouMail blocks unwanted robocallers by making sure the user’s phone doesn’t ring, and then plays an out-of-service message that leads them to think that the number they dialed is invalid. The YouMail Robocall Index™ is a compilation of the scope and location of the worst robocalling hotspots across the country by area code, and these statistics are regularly cited by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a definitive source for national data trends. The growth trend indicates that robocallers, especially those from business interests, are making even more calls to try to get through to consumers. “We continue to witness an accelerating pace of robocalls even as consumers are wisely picking up fewer of these calls from unknown numbers, while downloading more robocall blocking apps onto their phones,” said Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail. “The irony here is that this defensive behavior has only motivated the robocallers to step up their pace of dialing, rather than decreasing it.” How Robocalls Break Down June was very similar to May in terms of how robocalls broke down into different categories. As in May, there were well over 1 billion scam calls in June, which works out to over 37 million scam calls per day. Category

Who Gets the Most Robocalls Atlanta topped the YouMail 50 Most Robocalled Cities in America list for the 31st month in a row. Atlanta residents were bombed by 189.2 million robocalls in June, a 7% increase over the prior month. The Top 50 Cities that notched the biggest monthly increases for June included Miami (up 14% to 64.7 million); Phoenix (up 10% to 78.3 million); and Seattle (up 10% to 40.8 million). Atlanta’s 404 area code was by far the most robocalled area code in June, with 84.2 million calls received, followed by Atlanta’s 678 area code with 58.9 million calls received. Texas area codes claimed the third and fourth rankings for June, with Houston’s 832 area code getting 58.9 million calls and Dallas’ 214 area code getting 58.6 million calls. Fort Lauderdale’s 954 area code rounded out the top five area code list with 53.9 million calls received. California, the nation’s most populous state, retained its top ranking on the list of most-robocalled states for June, with 468.9 million robocalls received. Texas was close behind at 437.4 million calls received, followed by Florida (331.0 million), Georgia (273.9 million), and New York (260.2 million). South Dakota registered the biggest monthly percentage increase of any state, rising 19.3%, followed by Massachusetts (+17.5%), Kansas (+12.6%), Arizona (+9.9%), and Washington (+8.4%). Who Makes the Most Robocalls The top 20 phone numbers in June produced 197.9 million calls during the month. Robocalls involving debt collectors or payment reminders made up 17 of the 20 top robocalling numbers in June. One national credit card company retained the country’s most active robocalling phone number with 37.3 million calls placed in June alone. Over the past 33 months of the Robocall Index, this single robocalling number has placed 980.5 million calls. New York City placed 126.6 million robocalls in June, rising two spots in the rankings to unseat Chicago as the #1 robocalling city for the month. Anchorage, AK, notched a 198.1% increase in outbound calls in June, driven by 1.3 million calls placed by 907-275-8202, a car warranty robocalling line. In addition to receiving the most robocalls of any state, California also produced more robocalls than any other state for June, with 324.9 million outbound calls in the month. Alaska recorded the largest percentage increase of outbound calls, rising 198.1% in June, followed by Wyoming (+97.4%), Hawaii (61.4%), Maryland (+59.4%), and Delaware (28.3%). For more information about the YouMail Robocall Index or to view the latest report, please visit http://robocallindex.com. To join the YouMail Robocall Index mailing list, please write to [email protected]. About YouMail, Inc.

YouMail, Inc. is the leading provider of intelligent, cloud-based telecommunication services. The company’s flagship service provides an automated virtual receptionist that replaces the subscriber’s voicemail on iPhone, Android, and Windows phones. This service stops robocalls, and delights other callers by instantly greeting, routing, and responding to them, personally and memorably, and even provides free conference calls YouMail also provides data on problematic phone number behavior, through a reverse phone lookup service that allows anyone to identify and comment on suspicious numbers, an application program interface (API) that any telecom service provider or third-party developer can use to determine whether a number is problematic, and the YouMail Robocall Index™, which since its launch in in September 2015 has emerged as the nation’s definitive source on robocalling data for telecom carriers, smartphone and app companies, and public policymakers. Headquartered in Irvine, Calif., YouMail, Inc. was founded in 2007 and is privately funded.

_____ SOURCE: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/robocall-volumes-shatter-the-national-record-for-fourth-straight-month-300679966.html

#Alex Quilici #blocking solution #FCC #Federal Communications Commission #National Record #RoboCall #Robocall Index #TodayNews #YouMail

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strangestudentexpertus-blog · 6 years

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Nexty Coin “The Solution the world await”: Business Transaction Made Easier

It is no more of news the strain and stress coupled with emotional trauma that individual, company, business holders suffered in making business transaction especially online payment. The world today is tired of this traditional ways of payment and with Next Coin agenda, the Solution comes.

Nexty Coin belongs to a group of individual who developed new ideas of future payment which include instant transfer, Zero trans fees and price stabilization system in order to overcome barrier of trading. Nexty is one of those things that keep you happy in your trading transaction. With Nexty, business transactions made easier and stronger.

The World awaits a convenience payment method and in Nexty Coin, individuals have found their solace. Not only this, Barrier people faced in international payment were overruled, with Nexty Coin, Individual has easiest way of payment and transact business across the globe. This mode of future payment developed by Nexty are fast, low fees, involve commitment to privacy and confidentiality. It is also relatively simple to use.

Reason why you have choose nexty than any other platform is because Nexty Coin find there solace in contributing to the community, this contributions encompasses programmes which are beneficial to the community, this contribution brought about different technology set up which improve individual participatory standard of living and life in general. Their programmes include Smart taking Programme, Affiliate Program, Double crypto currency and lots more. Moreover, the technology set up in Nexty include the rise of FinTech (Financial Technology) which require a currency platform with low transaction time and low transaction cost were met with Duo Crypto currency confirmation system invented by Nexty. This system include two types of crypto currency operating in parallel, the former called NTY I.e. the main crytpocurrency used for daily transaction while the latter called NTF is for transaction confirmation system. Individual can buy NTY in Nexty at a much lower price that you can find it in other places. Individual can also earn income from Nexty Coin lending programme an initiatives developed by Nexty to encourage individual participating in it. Moreover, other programme like smart staking programme regulates demand and supply which provide flexible interest rates. This programme can help investors increase their asset periodically if they keep reasonable amount in their status wallet (This is like purse where transactions are kept). After the end of the ICO i.e a preeminent stage that attracts capital invested to grow, Nexty will build a secure payment gateway for Nexty ecosystems. Online or retail stores will have extensions available if they use popular store systems such as Magento, Woocommerce, Prestra, Opencart, or Shopify, while other systems require only 4 to 8 hours to integrate. Their systems then are available with Nexty's API.

In addition, after the ICO, Nexty will demo an online wallet into operation on the phone, for Android, iOS, or web-based applications to be able to pay or transfer quickly between individuals to individuals. This will allow easy transaction and fastest mode of payment with Zero worries.

Conclusively, the future of the Nexty ecosystem is approaching and it is very clear, with the application of Block chin technology which is formed from a currency formed with peculiar features. It is sure and very certain that investing in Nexty will secure and deliver your financial future in the coming years. Bank with Nexty today and enjoy financial establishment, freedom and security. With Nexty financial transaction made easy. Note, the difference in winning and loosing is definitely not quitting.

For more information on their road map, comparison table, and their ICO can be viewed from this archives :https://nexty.io/images/nexty-whitepaper.pdf

You can also viewed below to check their payment transaction: see the video below showing how fast is their transaction :

youtube

Team member of the platform

Ken Z. CEO Blockchain | Deep Learning SingaporeInformation Technology and ServicesCurren Nexty Pte Ltd, Blockchainology Pte Ltd Education The George Washington University Websites

Loc Dinh A team member at nexty Founder at EcoICO and CryptoBang

Thanh DaoCo-Founder at Nexty.io

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON NEXTY CHECK BELOW:

Portfolio: https://nextycoin.com I/O

Ecosystem development: https://nexty.io

Telegram: https://t.me/nextyio

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cryptochurp · 7 years

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The Ultimate Guide to Cannabis Tokens

Everybody knows Bitcoin nowadays. But the cryptocurrency world is far and wide. It is rapidly changing more and more industries. And Cannabis has its place in the crypto universe as well!

In an ever more complicated haze of new projects and buzzing ideas, you need proper guidance and information. So, we’ve done the homework and present you this useful guide.

Here you will get an overview of the cannabis industry and tokens. Last year cannabis tokens came out big and according to many analyses, they will perform even better in 2018.

Cannabis Industry

Cannabis has always had a market in North America. An illegal one, though.

It is estimated that the cannabis industry will increase in value by 16% each year until 2025. In total, the market cap is predicted to reach an outstanding $24 billion.

For the period 2014 to 2016 monthly average revenue of dispensaries skyrocketed from $10 million to above $70 million.

During the same period, the price per gram took a dive from $45 to $12.77 in Washington for example (1).

From an economic standpoint, falling prices and increasing revenues suggest one thing for sure– growing demand.

Tokens: Overview

The projects can be classified into three groups.

Production

Infrastructure

Payment Solutions

Production

AgroTechFarm

The company’s product is an aeroponic smart appliance. It lets people grow their own organic cannabis, tomatoes, peppers and other crops at home.

The appliance allows people to become self-sufficient and get even more yield than from an outdoor garden. All processes are automated, so there is little user involvement.

Since users will grow in their kitchens there will be no need for transportation or for farming land which are among the biggest contributors to global warming.

The fact that you can grow other crops than Cannabis means their product will be useful even if you decide not to grow Cannabis.

They are currently doing an ICO to introduce the Agro Tech Farm Token (ATF) and it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Infrastructure

Budbo

Budbo’s platform is a global cannabis blockchain that allows any ancillary service or cannabis related business to integrate into and harness the power of its immutable ledger.

With their token sale, they aim to tokenize their blockchain and become the single point data aggregate for the cannabis industry. Utilizing the tokens as the API keys to access the ledger.

Paragon

Paragon successfully launched its initial platform and functionality in late 2017 and is now progressing towards a fully-fledged release in mid-2018.

HempCoin

This project, like Dope Coin, is a bit of a hybrid. It combines a payment platform with a mission to rebrand the industry.

Their eight-page whitepaper does shed little light on what exactly they mean by this term.

To the best of our knowledge, they want to develop a community that will actively push pro-cannabis materials like artwork, blog posts, articles and others to improve the image of the industry.

Payments Solutions

These token bitcoin for cannabis. The -coin in their names says it all.

Cannabis Coin and Canna Coin

These projects aim to facilitate payments to cannabis businesses in a secure way. Yet, their websites do not offer enough information.

Together with that could not find a dedicated whitepaper for either of them. Whitepapers are professional tools that explain all aspects of any token-venture, so missing one is not a good thing.

Both projects have Github, so if you are into coding make sure to check them out.

Pot Coin

PotCoin tokenizes seeds and strains through a reward program. People have the option to convert PotCoins into real cannabis seeds.

Together with that, growers who develop a new strain will have the opportunity to sell it on their platform and earn tokens.

Dope Coin/ Smoke Exchange

Dope Coin’s mission is to provide a payment solution for both the legal cannabis market and the illicit one like the darknet silk road.

Smoke Exchange says they will release a working demo in Q1/2018.

Wrapping it all up…

Never put it all in one coin

Invest only as much as can afford to lose

A working product is better to no product

Look at the market cap (price times number of tokens), not only price

Disclaimer: This article has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for investment advice.

Images courtesy of Cointed

The post The Ultimate Guide to Cannabis Tokens appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

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voguepay · 7 years

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Headline News from PaymentsNews.com - May 19, 2017 http://ift.tt/2q0Eywv

Headline News is brought to you by Glenbrook Partners. Glenbrook provides payments strategy consulting and education services to payments professionals worldwide!

ON THE WEB

Telegram now lets users buy things from chatbots in its messaging app - TechCrunch - "Telegram, which puts a focus on security, introduced chatbots nearly two years ago, and now it is bringing support for payments for chatbots. That’s likely to open up a whole series of commercial opportunities for companies that want to use the chatbot platform to connect with consumers. The most obvious is e-commerce, but real-life commerce through bots — for example, buy a coke in a shop by interacting with its bot — is a possibility that other companies beyond Telegram are considering. Kik CEO Ted Livingston recently told TechCrunch that the introduction of payments is key to making chatbots live up to the hype."

Google announces Payment API, Assistant payments, targeted Android Pay loyalty offers & more - 9to5Google - "The new Google Payment API, which will work with both verified credit or debit cards linked to a Google account, is launching to enable faster payments in apps and online by requiring only a security code or authentication with an Android device to complete a purchase. Google is accepting sign ups for developers that are interested in getting early access to the new API."

Cryptocurrency Market Cap Tops $60 Billion to Hit All-Time High - Coindesk - "The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies reached an all-time high today, passing $60bn as the innovative assets continued to draw robust inflows. This figure reached $63.6bn at one point during the day's trading, according to online data service CoinMarketCap, which represented a weekly, monthly and quarterly increase of roughly 18%, 115% and 220%, respectively."

Fraudsters Exploited Lax Security at Equifax’s TALX Payroll Division - Krebs on Security - "Identity thieves who specialize in tax refund fraud had big help this past tax year from Equifax, one of the nation’s largest consumer data brokers and credit bureaus. The trouble stems from TALX, an Equifax subsidiary that provides online payroll, HR and tax services. Equifax says crooks were able to reset the 4-digit PIN given to customer employees as a password and then steal W-2 tax data after successfully answering personal questions about those employees."

The Modern Mobile Web: State of the Union - Chromium.org - "What a difference a year makes. Last year at Google I/O, we shared that the mobile web was open for business. New technologies such as AMP and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were bringing new capabilities, better performance, and a streamlined workflow to the mobile web. Fast forward one year later: more than two billion AMP pages have been created and "PWA" has proved to be far more than a buzzword—it’s now the way that many businesses around the world are building for mobile devices. "

ON THE WIRES

First Data Launches Global eCommerce Solution for Payment Facilitators - "With First Data’s Global PFAC solution, payment facilitators have access to a single integration interface, enabling their merchants to easily authorize transactions in more than 150 currencies worldwide, and settle in 17 currencies."

Wells Fargo Helps Automates Accounts Receivables - "Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) announced today significant enhancements to the Receivables Manager service offered to Treasury Management customers. The industry-leading tool saves time and improves efficiency for accounts receivable departments. Receivables Manager now offers three distinct capabilities – remittance advice matching, ACH and wire repair, and an integrated receivables file– that together streamline and automate the receivables application and posting processes."

XRP Liquidity to Increase With Listings on 6 New Exchanges - "Ripple, the only blockchain payments provider with proven commercial deployments, has announced today the expansion of its partnership with BitGo to list XRP on several leading digital asset exchanges: Bitso, Coinone, bitbank, and SCI’s BuyBitcoin. Additionally, AlphaPoint will be adding XRP to their platform so that their exchange customers can easily list XRP, and separately, Quoine’s QRYPTO exchange will list XRP in Q2 2017. SBI Virtual Currencies also plans to list XRP later this year."

Portland Launches Mobile Parking Payment App, Parking Kitty, Powered by Passport - "Portland, Oregon is changing the city’s parking experience. Doing away with a few of the hassles traditionally associated with city parking, Portland has launched Parking Kitty, a mobile payment app powered by Passport, the global leader in mobile payments for parking and transit. The mobile application will also be available throughout the region at Washington Park and Portland State University."

GLENBROOK PAYMENTS EDUCATION EVENTS

Understanding the accelerating pace of change in the payments industry has never been more important. Get the knowledge you need fast at one of our two day Payments Boot Camps. Our one day Insight Workshops follow each Boot Camp and are deep dives into key topics such as digital payments and the global phenomenon of real-time push payments. Take a discount for attending all three days. Our workshop schedule is all set for the fall. Check it out here. We hope to see you soon!

Bring your colleagues along! Group discounts are available. For more information or to learn about our private workshops conducted at your location, contact Glenbrook's Russ Jones.

UPDATES FROM GLENBROOK

We're hiring! Passionate about payments? Love solving tough client problems? If that describes you, come join us! Click here to learn more!

Join our mailing list for updates about Glenbrook events. Follow us on Twitter: @paymentsnews and @paymentsviews

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Note: Headline News is compiled by Glenbrook Partners. Throughout the day, as we spot interesting developments, this post is updated. Do you have news to share? Tell us here: [email protected]!

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payment-providers · 7 years

Text

New Post has been published on Payment-Providers.com

New Post has been published on https://payment-providers.com/headline-news-from-paymentsnews-com-may-19-2017/

Headline News from PaymentsNews.com - May 19, 2017

Headline News is brought to you by Glenbrook Partners. Glenbrook provides payments strategy consulting and education services to payments professionals worldwide!

ON THE WEB

Telegram now lets users buy things from chatbots in its messaging app – TechCrunch – „Telegram, which puts a focus on security, introduced chatbots nearly two years ago, and now it is bringing support for payments for chatbots. That’s likely to open up a whole series of commercial opportunities for companies that want to use the chatbot platform to connect with consumers. The most obvious is e-commerce, but real-life commerce through bots — for example, buy a coke in a shop by interacting with its bot — is a possibility that other companies beyond Telegram are considering. Kik CEO Ted Livingston recently told TechCrunch that the introduction of payments is key to making chatbots live up to the hype.“

Google announces Payment API, Assistant payments, targeted Android Pay loyalty offers & more – 9to5Google – „The new Google Payment API, which will work with both verified credit or debit cards linked to a Google account, is launching to enable faster payments in apps and online by requiring only a security code or authentication with an Android device to complete a purchase. Google is accepting sign ups for developers that are interested in getting early access to the new API.“

Cryptocurrency Market Cap Tops $60 Billion to Hit All-Time High – Coindesk – „The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies reached an all-time high today, passing $60bn as the innovative assets continued to draw robust inflows. This figure reached $63.6bn at one point during the day’s trading, according to online data service CoinMarketCap, which represented a weekly, monthly and quarterly increase of roughly 18%, 115% and 220%, respectively.“

Fraudsters Exploited Lax Security at Equifax’s TALX Payroll Division – Krebs on Security – „Identity thieves who specialize in tax refund fraud had big help this past tax year from Equifax, one of the nation’s largest consumer data brokers and credit bureaus. The trouble stems from TALX, an Equifax subsidiary that provides online payroll, HR and tax services. Equifax says crooks were able to reset the 4-digit PIN given to customer employees as a password and then steal W-2 tax data after successfully answering personal questions about those employees.“

Cayan preps new mPOS device, the Genius Mini – Mobile Payments Today – „Cayan said in a press release that the Genius Mini supports the growing trend of retailers and restaurants embracing mobile tablet POS systems and can accept all payment types including chip cards, NFC mobile payment and magstripe cards.“

The Modern Mobile Web: State of the Union – Chromium.org – „What a difference a year makes. Last year at Google I/O, we shared that the mobile web was open for business. New technologies such as AMP and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were bringing new capabilities, better performance, and a streamlined workflow to the mobile web. Fast forward one year later: more than two billion AMP pages have been created and „PWA“ has proved to be far more than a buzzword—it’s now the way that many businesses around the world are building for mobile devices. „

ON THE WIRES

First Data Launches Global eCommerce Solution for Payment Facilitators – „With First Data’s Global PFAC solution, payment facilitators have access to a single integration interface, enabling their merchants to easily authorize transactions in more than 150 currencies worldwide, and settle in 17 currencies.“

Wells Fargo Helps Automates Accounts Receivables – „Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) announced today significant enhancements to the Receivables Manager service offered to Treasury Management customers. The industry-leading tool saves time and improves efficiency for accounts receivable departments. Receivables Manager now offers three distinct capabilities – remittance advice matching, ACH and wire repair, and an integrated receivables file– that together streamline and automate the receivables application and posting processes.“

XRP Liquidity to Increase With Listings on 6 New Exchanges – „Ripple, the only blockchain payments provider with proven commercial deployments, has announced today the expansion of its partnership with BitGo to list XRP on several leading digital asset exchanges: Bitso, Coinone, bitbank, and SCI’s BuyBitcoin. Additionally, AlphaPoint will be adding XRP to their platform so that their exchange customers can easily list XRP, and separately, Quoine’s QRYPTO exchange will list XRP in Q2 2017. SBI Virtual Currencies also plans to list XRP later this year.“

Portland Launches Mobile Parking Payment App, Parking Kitty, Powered by Passport – „Portland, Oregon is changing the city’s parking experience. Doing away with a few of the hassles traditionally associated with city parking, Portland has launched Parking Kitty, a mobile payment app powered by Passport, the global leader in mobile payments for parking and transit. The mobile application will also be available throughout the region at Washington Park and Portland State University.“

GLENBROOK PAYMENTS EDUCATION EVENTS

Bring your colleagues along! Group discounts are available. For more information or to learn about our private workshops conducted at your location, contact Glenbrook’s Russ Jones.

UPDATES FROM GLENBROOK

Note: Headline News is compiled by Glenbrook Partners. Throughout the day, as we spot interesting developments, this post is updated. Do you have news to share? Tell us here: [email protected]!

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cryptochurp · 7 years

Text

The Ultimate Guide To Cannabis Tokens

Disclaimer: The author does not provide investment advice. This article has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for investment advice.

By now, Bitcoin is as famous as can be.

But deep down, Bitcoin is just blockchain technology disrupting our concept of money.

Blockchain is rapidly revolutionizing more and more industries. And it’s all thanks to tokens, tools that aim to do more than just to replace money.

Nowadays, the legal cannabis industry is just another stage for the blockchain to rock in.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a cannabis enthusiast yourself, an investor or just an up-to-date citizen of the world, the speed at which social and political perception of cannabis are shifting is a sight to behold (see USA and Canada).

Last year, several tokens and coins tied to cannabis emerged, meeting this fast-growing market. Analysts point to an even better development for 2018. Both tokens and the industry are truly flying high.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a user, connoisseur, business-owner or investor, you absolutely must understand how this game will play out.

So, buckle up, because here we are about to break down the cannabis industry, then discuss the most important tokens that will stick to its unstoppable growth. We’ll also get to highlight some talking points along the way.

Because the hard part of this popularity peak of cannabis tokens has led to so many projects and start-ups that choosing the right one has become a huge hassle; so we’ve taken the liberty to do the homework.

Here’s what’s going down.

Cannabis industry

Recreative cannabis was first legalized in 2014 in the state of Colorado. In the following years another 9 states joined the legalization initiative in the US (1). Since then the market has experimented an ongoing boom, creating thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue.

Some years down the line, historians may well call it the green rush.

An enormous user base and no previous legal competition make this a market ripe for investment. The industry of legal cannabis is expected to grow at least by 16% each year until 2025.

By then, it’ll have reached a market cap of $24 billion.

And the growth is fast. Dispensaries’ monthly revenue has increased from $10 million in 2014 to above $70 million in 2016.

This has impacted cannabis price. In that same timeframe, average price per gram has plummeted from $45 to $12.77 in Washington for example (2). This has been ideal to keep a steadily growing demand.

Credits to Frontier Financial Group

But this infant market could grow faster. Indeed, the tricky legal status of the plant hinders the growth of this industry.

Not only do they have to fight against social prejudices and federal laws in conflict with state regulation. Cannabis businesses still have no access no banking. Their multi-million dollar industry runs mostly on cash.

Besides, there are no standards for product quality, use of pesticides and origin.

It is wild.

But where governments and regulation have failed to make room for a strong, growing industry, blockchain has come to the rescue. Many tokens and solutions have sprung last year, ready to give the cannabis market a turbo boost.

First, let’s check why tokens can be catalyzers for change.

The Tokens: An Overview

You’re probably asking yourself how on earth can a big business flourish without access to banking.

Picture gas stations, fast food chains or pharmacies working on cash only.

Sadly the federal ban on cannabis prevents banks from servicing cannabis dispensaries and related businesses.

That’s why many cannabis tokens are basically payment solutions like bitcoin is.

This means they’re straightforward ways to facilitate payments between industry players like dispensaries, clients and growers. In a way, then, most cannabis tokens are basically cannabis-related money.

Thanks to a reliable, secure, digital tradable value coin, the logistics nightmare of cash-only dealing may be over.

We can call these tokens cannabis-money.

But there are others which aim even higher.

Projects like Paragon, Hemp Coin, Smoke Exchange and Budbo are trying to not just solve major hurdles in logistics and management. They want to tangibly improve the infrastructure of the whole cannabis industry.

How? By

Making supply chains more efficient and manageable,

Allowing payments between different parties

Increasing transparency when it comes to the origin of seeds and produces

And of course, there’s the odd one out. There’s one blockchain project from AgroTechFarm, that is about cannabis production.

That’s how we will divide the guide: production, cannabis-money, and infrastructure

Production

You’re probably wondering how can a token affect cannabis production. Although it’s not so straightforward, you’ll see that blockchain can be used in many ways.

The cool part: changing how cannabis is produced will transform the industry. Especially if it can disrupt the distinction between industrial producers and individual users.

AgroTechFarm

AgroTechFarm occupies a blue ocean in the cannabis industry. The aim of the project is to provide a zero-chemical, zero-environmental impact way to grow cannabis and other crops.

Their product uses aeroponics in their smart appliance for organically growing cannabis, tomatoes, peppers and other large crops at home. The appliance allows people to become self-sufficient and produce their own fruits and vegetables. Everything is automated, the yield is optimized and less resources are used.

Since everything grows in the user’s kitchen there is no need for transportation neither for farming land. Considering that these two are among the biggest contributors to global warming.

We could not find any other cannabis token that was dealing with production. And it’s a nice combination of the cannabis industry with organic farming. In one sense, it implies diversification (the art of not putting all your eggs in one basket).

This means that in case the cannabis industry goes down, their other clients will be intact.

More about it in their whitepaper or on their website.

Industry Boosters: Infrastructure

[HempCoin][Paragon][Budbo]

Infrastructure is the backbone of all industries.

A market’s growth potential is worthless without proper infrastructure. Without it, nothing can happen. Think about it this way: even if you have the fastest car in the world, it would be good for nothing if there were no roads.

That’s why some visionary projects want to create a stronger base for all cannabis-related businesses to flourish.

The boost can come in many ways, as we’ve seen. And some projects focus one some over others, but each has something to contribute. This showcases blockchain’s amazing capability to change our markets!

Let’s jump in and see what these projects can offer.

Budbo

Budbo has created a global cannabis blockchain, on which any ancillary service or cannabis related business can utilize and harness its immutable ledger.

Budbo has been an operating company since 2015, offering an enterprise level suite of business products. Budbo has a consumer mobile application that focuses primarily on product discovery, a dispensary and product manufacturer dashboard that breaks down predictive AI consumer analytics, and a GPS enabled program it calls Budbo Trax that monitors commercial cannabis shipments through geofencing technologies and electronic documentation.

Their app already has 75,000 individual active users and 2,000 dispensaries within their network. Their application has an interface similar to “Tinder”, in the way it allows users to quickly swipe through 100s of locally available strains and products. Allowing for online ordering, or getting directions to the dispensary that has the desired product.

Budbo wants to integrate all players in the industry, with a stated mission of bringing together a solid global community.

Their platform currently involves seed suppliers, growers, dispensaries, users, and patients.

The platform will provide not just information, but tracking as well to help with complex local, state, and federal compliance regulations, which will benefit all recreational and medical cannabis users and patients.

Budbo is currently closing out their token sale, having sold more than 130,000,000 utility tokens. The tokens act as the API key for access to the transactions stored on the ledger.

Learn more about them from their whitepaper or on their website

HempCoin

The Hemp Coin project is a bit of a hybrid. It combines a payment solution with a mission to rebrand the industries they serve. In contrast with Dope Coin and Smoke Exchange, this project is one whole thing.

Their eight-page whitepaper does not shed much light on what they mean by this rebranding. The only explanation we get in their roadmap is that implies: “Connecting with agriculture industry to accept HempCoin’’.

A user on Reddit defended the team saying that the information was not made public due to pressure from competitors.

So, what we can make out of this is that they seek to develop a community of people who will be actively pushing pro-cannabis materials like artwork, blog posts and articles. This would, in turn, improve the image of cannabis and its industry.

Paragon

Paragon intends to put the cannabis industry on blockchain through its extensive suite of solutions

Paragon successfully launched its initial platform and functionality in late 2017 and is now progressing towards a fully-fledged release in mid 2018.

Learn more about them from their whitepaper or on their website

Payments Solution

[PotCoin][Cannabis Coin][Canna Coin][Dope Coin]

All of these tokens are peer-to-peer cash systems devoted to payment within the cannabis industry. The -coin in their names says it all.

But do we really need a cannabis-bitcoin?

As we explained earlier, the industry is handicapped without access to banks. Security becomes a headache, logistics are nightmarish and your consumer base is hindered. This is all because of bad policy.

Crypto has always been praised as a way to go around governments and banking institutions. It’s even how most illegal trading is paid for, sadly.

So it’s inevitable that this new tech can now serve as the safe, easy to use money this industry so desperately needs.

As a bonus, a specialized payments solution allows for reward programs and community building and integration. So, if they become widely used, they do offer some benefits over money.

Let’s take a look at this new cannabis money!

Cannabis Coin and Canna Coin

We bundled these two together since we found them to be quite similar in terms of what they do, when were they launched and how they perform.

Both projects market themselves as the peer-2-peer cash systems for cannabis and aim to facilitate payments to cannabis businesses in a secure way. Similar to a cannabis bitcoin.

Yet, their websites do not offer enough information about the projects or the teams. Information is good, always.

We could not find a dedicated whitepaper for either of them. Whitepapers have become the bread and butter of tokens market for a reason: they’re professional tools that explain all aspects of any token-venture.

The main issue is that dispensaries may not benefit from a dedicated token only for them. They have to pay for for most of their supplies and logistics in cash. It is possible that they will need something more widely used or more liquid.

If you are interested in the code, you can take a look over at Github, where you’ll find both.

Pot Coin

Pot Coin stands out among other tokens in this section. Their website looks professionally made and contains all the information you’ll need.

Also, its whitepaper is well laid out and there is a thorough explanation of how the company aims to reach every milestone on their roadmap.

PotCoin offers some key bonuses: it aims to tokenize seeds and strains through a reward program. People will be able to convert their PotCoins into real cannabis seeds. Also, those who develop a new strain will have the opportunity to sell it on their platform and earn tokens.

These two reward options sound like good incentives to prefer Potcoins over bitcoin or fiat money.

The resources we found were conflicting, one quoting them as the best among the cannabis bitcoins and another that was not so flattering.

So, what can we make out of them? It seems Pot Coin’s success or failure will largely depend on their skill and effort at creating and maintaining an engaged community.

Dope Coin/ Smoke Exchange

Just as the name suggests, Dope Coin is made to serve the underground world.

Their mission is to provide a payment solution for both the legal cannabis market and the illicit one like the darknet silk road.

Since last year, when governments around the world announced they could now track bitcoin, privacy coins have been big. For example, the price of Monero (a secrecy-oriented cryptocurrency) skyrocketed from around $50 to around $300. This came about because the darknet was switching from bitcoin to Monero, to avoid wary eyes.

Just recently the Dope Coin team announced that they are starting a new project called Smoke Exchange that aims to be a marketing and advertising platform specifically for cannabis businesses. They will integrate dope coin and bitcoin as payments on this platform.

Smoke Exchange is to release a working demo in Q1/2018.

Get more information about Smoke Exchange from their whitepaper. Sadly, Dope Coin does not have one.

The future is even wilder

The cannabis industry is a wild place.

Cannabis tokens have come as a much-needed relief for its main issues, a powerful boost to its infrastructure, and as a new paradigm in its production.

These tokens are definitely a good buy in 2018.

But be cautious when it comes to projects without a working product or that have too much hype around them. We all know that sometimes huge profits can come from investing in tokens with a lot of FOMO surrounding them. Other times, it’s just a loss.

There are many ways to improve your decisions, but the key to all is basically the same: acquire as much reliable information as you can.

Pro tip: look at the whitepaper!

Think about the product, the solution they offer. Whatever your plans for the future, make sure to keep an eye out for the legal cannabis industry. It’s size, its potential and individual characteristics make it one of the most interesting of our times.

And if you’re looking to invest, think about real-world problems and real-life solutions.

Often the not so flashy looking projects turn out to be, you know, the big hits.

The post The Ultimate Guide To Cannabis Tokens appeared first on NewsBTC.

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payment-providers · 7 years

Text

New Post has been published on Payment-Providers.com

New Post has been published on https://payment-providers.com/headline-news-from-paymentsnews-com-may-18-2017/

Headline News from PaymentsNews.com - May 18, 2017

Headline News is brought to you by Glenbrook Partners. Glenbrook provides payments strategy consulting and education services to payments professionals worldwide!

ON THE WEB

Square Will Replace Meters in Washington Taxis – Bloomberg – “Washington, D.C., is enlisting Square Inc.’s help as its taxi commission tries to help the city’s cabbies compete with Uber drivers. By the end of August, all of the taxis in Washington have to tear out their traditional meters and start using smartphones or tablets, in what the city government has been describing as a complete reimagining of how the cab system works. On Wednesday, the Department of For-Hire Vehicles is announcing that Square will process the payments going through those mobile devices.”

Square Lays out Its Strategy for Growth at an Upbeat Investor Day Presentation – Digital Transactions News – “In its presentation, Square said it wants to improve the efficiency of acquiring merchants, which it calls sellers; move its services up market to larger merchants; grow and retain its existing customer portfolio; and make more international expansions. In March, Square launched in the United Kingdom, having already debuted in Canada, Japan, and Australia.”

Paytm Raises $1.4 Billion From SoftBank to Expand User Base – Bloomberg – “Paytm, India’s largest digital payments startup, raised $1.4 billion from SoftBank Group Corp. in the largest funding round from a single investor for the country’s technology sector.”

Google I/O: New Ways to Put Customers at the Center of Your Apps and Payments – Inside AdWords – “The Google Payment API enables merchants and developers to turbocharge checkout conversion by offering your users an easy way to pay with credit and debit cards saved to their Google Account. Users will have multiple Google payment options at their fingertips, like a credit or a debit card previously saved via Android Pay, a payment card used to transact on the Play Store or a form of payment stored via Chrome. And they’ll be able to use these saved payment options in third-party apps and mobile sites, as well as on Google Assistant when they are on-the-go.”

Big data, Chinese surveillance, and Donald Trump could keep China’s biggest payments company from entering the US – Quartz – “The Trump administration has two options as it faces this deal. It can oppose it on grounds that a reverse acquisition would likely never receive approval in China, citing the “reciprocity” slogan. As senator Roberts said, Ant Financial’s acquisition of MoneyGram “should trigger no less concern than if a Chinese company were seeking to take control of a large, well-known bank,” and added “there is virtually no chance that a US financial services company would be permitted to acquire a Chinese [rival].””

ON THE WIRES

First Data’s Clover Platform to Enable Android Pay’s Smart Tap – “Android Pay’s smart tap NFC messaging and mobile wallet marketing capabilities allow businesses to bring loyalty programs, stored value cards, coupons, and other offers to mobile-connected consumers. Android Pay users can simply tap their phones at the point of sale to receive rewards based on their loyalty or coupons towards future purchases.”

North American Bancard Holdings and Total Merchant Services Announce Agreement for the Acquisition of Total Merchant Services – ” North American Bancard Holdings, LLC (NAB), a multi-faceted and award-winning payment solutions provider, and Total Merchant Services, Inc. (TMS) announced today their agreement pursuant to which NAB will acquire TMS. The combined entity will be the 7th largest processor in terms of merchant locations in North America, processing nearly $50B annually.”

Youtap Introduces X8 Solution for Mobile Money Merchant Payments – “Youtap has introduced an inexpensive retail enablement solution to help mobile network operators, banks and payment providers boost transaction revenue. Youtap’s solution enables Tier 2 and Tier 3 merchants to accept NFC and QR code-based mobile money payments at the curb side. The solution relies on Youtap’s NFC X8, a small, discreet point-of-sale device that can fit easily in a merchant’s pocket or be worn around the neck. The X8 can process all mobile money transactions, including cash-in and cash-out transactions, airtime top-ups, bill payments and in-store payments.”

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Note: Headline News is compiled by Glenbrook Partners. Throughout the day, as we spot interesting developments, this post is updated. Do you have news to share? Tell us here: [email protected]!

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