Despite a few missteps that seemed to place Uber on the wrong side of ‘do no evil’, (Uber Godview) this financing round seems to unequivocally see them as a force that will continue to expand and battle against legal and taxi interests attempts to slow them down. Uber valued at $40bn in latest funding round Investors looked past Uber’s recent controversies over its handling of competitors, the press and users’ privacy to give it a huge $40bn valuation as it announced the completion of a $1.2bn funding round on Thursday. Continue reading Uber is not going anywhere after raising $1.2 Bn

I have been following Stripe for a while, and now I wish they were listed 🙂 Stripe banks $70m in fundraising, valuing company at $3.5bn ft.com Good for them. Stripe and Ripple are the two that I would bet on in payments. Continue reading Stripe land another $70 million

This is an interesting partnership. TD are portraying as a PFM play. Moven has been promoting till now as a full debit account with Spend, Save & goal tracking. It will be interesting to observe how TD implements and how this impacts Moven strategy going forward. Continue reading Moven agrees to partnership with TD Bank

Oil is down 30% in the last 3 months. There are strong hints this is a systemic shift and not an aberration. Market rout as oil slide rocks energy groups ft.com He compared the surge in North American shale to the dotcom and subprime mortgage booms, and said Opec’s objective now was “to get small producers with large debts and low efficiency to pack up and leave the market”. Is hard to tell who is really behind it. Middle east producers attempt to kill off smaller US shale producers who have produced a world oil surplus US influence on Saudi … Continue reading “Market rout as oil slide rocks energy groups” | Are we entering the next economic crisis

This is probably a screw up but its funny given the tenure of those involved. First Scoble has this post and mentions Openstack. That link was interesting so I clicked and got this link. I arrived at the Gigaom site and clicked the lead story. (This experience might change as they add stories, but this is too much fun to ignore.) There I clicked the lead story “Why eHarmony is rebuilding itself atop Hadoop and (probably) OpenStack”. That link took me back to Scobles story. Round and round we go! It is a classic circular reference. I love it that … Continue reading Echo chamber classic

The world of payments is going crazy. Payments is supposed to be about SWIFT and land in SIBOS annually. Darn. The usual suspects at SIBOS Boston in October past must be suffering from brain exploding thoughts about Singapore next year. But seriously payments ain’t what they used to be. Apple Pay certainly drove payments front and centre, but Stripe have been quietly making significant moves the in the background. Here are just three stories tonight from the interwebs. Payments have been a story for a while but finally they are showing as consequential change, and banks are not in the … Continue reading Payments – whats going on?

And pigs can indeed fly. Visa and MasterCard have finally caved in to pressure from Canadian competition authorities and agreed to set a 1.5% ceiling on interchange rates in the country for the next five years. But I have to wonder with the pressure on large institutions including telcos to reduce locked in periods, fees, and exits costs, that similar pressure was expected on interchange, and maybe this was a way to get head of the regulators. Continue reading Visa and MasterCard reduce and cap interchange fees in Canada