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With its new checking account, Credit Karma wants to get into your wallet

Posted onSeptember 30, 2020Authoradmin

Credit Karma, the company that turned the promise of a free credit score into a business worth over $7 billion, is joining the ranks of “neobank” startups offering a checking account. The product will be folded into Credit Karma Money, which launched last year as a savings account available to the company’s 100 million members. Digital banking has been gaining steam for the last several years, with the pandemic only accelerating consumers’ interest in the options that neobanks are providing. In the U.S. and Europe, there are now over two dozen neobanks, which have collectively raised over $6 billion in venture funding. “We think this is a product for people who have been left behind in financial services,” Credit Karma cofounder and CEO Kenneth Lin says of his company’s variation on the theme. Credit Karma Money Checking will not charge fees and will include automated features designed to help users better manage their money, such as bill payment date optimization. Over time, data from Checking will also help the company better present its members with targeted advertisements for loans, credit cards, and more. “Historically, Credit Karma has been focused on helping people optimize their credit, optimize their borrowing,” says Lin. “Now we’re moving to the other side of that spectrum. We want to help you save for your future, and this is the connector to making all of the pieces work.” [Image: courtesy of Credit Karma] Credit Karma is entering an increasingly crowded market for digital-first checking and savings accounts. Read More …

The hottest new video game is . . . chess?

Posted onSeptember 4, 2020Authoradmin

As a global pandemic continues to determine a new normal, tens of thousands of viewers have been tuning in to watch people play chess on a live-streaming website called Twitch.tv . An American chess grandmaster, Hikaru Nakamura, along with a number of celebrities of the video game world, is leading a renaissance in the ancient game. While viewers eagerly wait for Nakamura’s streams to begin, they are treated to a slideshow of memes involving Nakamura’s face superimposed into scenes from pop culture. First a reference to a well-known Japanese animation, next a famous upside-down kiss with Spiderman, and finally, Nakamura’s characteristic grin is edited onto the Mona Lisa herself. From August 21 to September 6, Twitch and Chess.com are hosting a tournament, called Pogchamps, where some of the most popular gaming streamers in the world compete in a chess tournament with $50,000 on the line . The current renaissance in chess is happening at the confluence of live-streaming technology, video game culture, and one grandmaster’s exceptional skills as both a chess player and entertainer. What is emerging is an unexpectedly good pairing between chess and a digital generation that is showing how influential gamers can be. The game of kings is more popular than ever , with over 605 million players worldwide, and now, memes are involved. Chess explodes on Twitch.tv Twitch.tv is a live-video streaming website that was started in 2011 as a platform for users to watch other people play video games. In recent years, Twitch has grown to become the cultural hub of the gaming community. It now hosts tens of thousands of creators who broadcast live to a global audience of around 17.5 million viewers a day . Since 2015, chess viewership has experienced exponential growth on Twitch. Read More …

Exclusive: Inside Uber’s billion-dollar bet to deliver food, people, and everything else

Posted onJuly 9, 2020Authoradmin

Earlier this week, Uber acquired Postmates, the number four player in the food delivery space, for $2.65 billion. It was a clear statement that Uber is no longer just a rides company, but a home delivery company. Now, Uber is rolling out a new design in its main app that gives its Uber Eats business equal real estate with rides on the app’s home screen. This shift in Uber’s business began last year, but was dramatically accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. As people began sheltering in place, the company’s rides business fell by 80% in April, and Uber Eats, the restaurant food delivery business, suddenly became its most popular product. Now, Uber Eats’s success has established it as a model from which Uber can design other services that rely on its advanced logistics platform. “We’ve really doubled down on our Eats business, extending not just in food, but from food into adjacent categories like delivery, like grocery, and essentials,” says Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in an exclusive interview. “There we’re seeing a pretty extraordinary acceleration, which is good for the business, but it’s also a really important lifeline for the restaurants and other local stores in every city, that frankly our customers are interested in keeping alive in an unbelievably difficult situation [with] COVID.” Uber’s new focus on Eats may help it survive the pandemic, in which the company has already shed a quarter of its 26,000-odd person global workforce in two rounds of layoffs. But it’s unclear whether Eats and other new Uber services can speed the company’s path toward profitability. Uber has lost a lot of money since its ill-fated IPO last year: It reported a $8.5 billion loss for full-year 2019. It reported a net loss of $2.9 billion in the first quarter of 2020, its biggest loss in three quarters. Before the pandemic hit, Uber said it expected to hit profitability in the last quarter of 2020, but was forced to withdraw that guidance in April, saying the coronavirus had made its 2020 financial performance “impossible to predict.” [Photos: courtesy of Uber] Even amid growing losses, Uber has placed a big bet on Postmates as central to the future of its business. With the addition of Postmates, Uber Eats will control 37% of the food delivery service market but will still trail the market leader, Doordash, which owns 45%, according to Edison Trends. But Uber didn’t buy Postmates just to beef up its food delivery market share, as some have suggested. Postmates’s technology and people will very likely be used to deliver home products such as groceries, pharmacy products, home goods, hardware, and packages (the Postmates brand will live on, at least for now). Khosrowshahi suggested as much in the Postmates deal announcement Monday: “Uber and Postmates have long shared a belief that platforms like ours can power much more than just food delivery,” he stated. Dara Khosrowshahi [Photo: courtesy of Uber] This flexibility is key to understanding how the coronavirus has expedited Uber’s transformation from a ridesharing company to a logistics platform that can deliver people, food, and things. Read More …

Amazon is selling its no-checkout tech to other stores, and we have questions

Posted onMarch 10, 2020Authoradmin

After two years of running its own cashierless “ Amazon Go ” stores, Amazon now wants other retailers to start using the tech. The “ Just Walk Out ” service, which launched this week, lets retailers equip their stores with cameras, weight sensors, and other technology to detect what people grab from the shelves. Shoppers scan a credit card when they enter the store, and the system automatically bills them for each item when they exit, with an optional kiosk allowing them to enter an email address for receipts. It’s unclear what size of stores Amazon is targeting, but the company says it’s ideal for places where customers are in a rush and have long lines. The company told Reuters that it has “several” unnamed retail customers on board already. If Just Walk Out takes off, it could upend the entire brick-and-mortar retail system even without shifting ever-greater amounts of shopping online . Yet in announcing the new program, Amazon has chosen not to discuss many fundamental issues, such as how it’ll affect jobs and what it will do with all the data it collects. The company declined to answer most questions for this story, instead referring to a brief question-and-answer section on its website . Will Just Walk Out stores accept cash? Although Amazon says it can retrofit existing stores with its tech, the company isn’t saying whether those stores could (or should) continue to accept cash Read More …

Ford is betting its future on an electric Mustang SUV

Posted onNovember 17, 2019Authoradmin

People want to drive gas-guzzling SUVs. The demand for them, along with trucks, is continuing to grow so much that it could even outweigh the carbon-emission benefit gains made by all electric vehicles . That is, unless the car industry builds electric SUVs. That’s what the Ford Motor Company is doing. Today, the company is unveiling an electric SUV called the Mustang Mach-E (though details were leaked earlier this week). Unlike many electric cars, which tend to be smaller sedans that car companies often release to keep regulators happy, this car was designed from the ground up to fit right in with the rest of Ford’s famed Mustang sports cars. Except, of course, that you can’t rev the engine since you don’t need any gas (though the car’s performance version can still go from zero to 60 in about three and a half seconds). [Photo: courtesy of Ford Motor Company] The electric SUV, which will be delivered to customers in late 2020, is the first vehicle that was shepherded from start to finish by Ford CEO Jim Hackett, who took the company’s top job in 2017 and previously helmed the furniture manufacturer Steelcase. While Hackett has announced a renewed emphasis on electric cars and hybrids, with an announcement in 2018 that Ford would release 40 nongas cars by 2022, this is the first tangible evidence of his strategy—and the first evidence of how his emphasis on the Ideo brand of design thinking might pay off for the 116-year-old automaker. The rationale for an electric SUV Hackett says that there were plans for a new Ford electric car already underway when he joined the company, but that he and his team decided to scrap it and start afresh. “I was imbuing this notion that design is going to rule here,” Hackett says. “[My team] said, this doesn’t meet the measure of any of that. So we said, we have to tear it up.” Instead of building yet another “science project,” as Hackett called previous electric cars in our conversation, Ford decided to focus instead on macro trends to find a form factor that might actually be profitable for the company ( like most manufacturers , Ford has never built a profitable electric car). The most important trend? If you take fuel efficiency off the table, people want larger cars. Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Hackett [Photo: courtesy of Ford Motor Company] “People have voiced that when fuel prices are low, they want larger silhouettes,” Hackett says. “That’s what customers are telling us Read More …