With the virus epidemic being on the verge of becoming pandemic, there is a cloud of concern hovering over not just the affected nations but also the rest of the entire world. 

The grim picture of Coronavirus is not just of the virus making its way around the world, but also of the lack of crucial medical supplies. Red Cross China has also come under fire for failing to deliver urgent supplies to the front line hospitals. In its apology, Wuhan Red Cross mentioned that it has called for an overnight emergency meeting for discussing internal problems and have pledged to hold people who are in charge of relief distribution, accountable.

The fund shortage has led to a number of hospitals in Wuhan who are looking after coronavirus patients to seek charities on social media platforms. Many of them said that they are in dire need of basic protections against this contagious pathogen. While on the other side, people from all corners of the world who came together to donate money to the coronavirus patients and to aid treatment creation, expeditiously, are outraged at the unfair distribution of their funds. 

To solve the challenge of unfair donation distribution in real-time, Hyperchain, together with Xiongan Group, Fuxing Group, and other well-known establishments, is taking Blockchain’s help. 

Utilizing everything that Blockchain in Healthcare has to offer, Hyperchain is building a platform which would ensure that the entire Coronavirus donation process is traceable, immutable, and reliable. Announced in a press release on 4th February, the platform will act as a medical supply donations portal for supporting medical institutions operating in central China. 

It is going to be a transparent portal that will also act as an information exchange enabling donors to see where their donations or funds are going. Through the platform, the donors will get proof of receipt and proof of need which would ensure that their funds have reached the intended party in real-time. 

Hyperchain, Hangzhou Qulian Technology Co., Ltd , formed in 2016, is a tech company providing blockchain solutions. It excels in the development of underlying blockchain platforms, security platform and data sharing, supply chain finance SaaS platform, BaaS platform, and digital evidence services.

The lack of transparency and censorship are often two of most debated challenges that emerge during every epidemic outbreak. What happened with Red Cross China is simply a wake-up call for the dire need of the inclusion of a Blockchain development company in every world-affecting event and process. 

There is a need for credible and transparent mechanism based society and Blockchain is the answer.

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Now, Store also includes Google JetPack collection of libraries which poses as a solution for creating current-day Android apps.

Google JetPack makes it possible to create high-quality Android apps while accelerating the development process. 

There are two objectives that this library fulfills – It leverages advanced Kotlin features in order to reduce the boilerplate code and offers high-level abstractions besides those found in the Android SDK, i.e., Fragments and [Activities]. These allow the developers to present complex tasks in an easier and simpler way.

Like in case of the traditional mobile app architecture, there are numerous components in Jetpack that developers can use independently and cover four areas – Architecture, Foundation, User Interface, and Behavior.

In fact, Google uploaded its own recommended Android app architecture along with JetPack defining the set of modules that make up an Android app and how they interact. As shown in the image, a well-architecture Android app is fundamentally based on the tenets – model-driven UI, separation of concerns, and one-directional dependencies across several modules.

However, though Jetpack offers most of the components for the creation of an Android app based on the architecture suggested by Google, there is an exception – the Repository layer.

On this matter, Mike Nakhimovich, the creator of Store states- 

“Repository currently only has a few code samples and no reusable abstractions that work across different implementations. That’s one of the big reasons why Dropbox is investing in Store–to solve this gap in the architecture model above.”

Store, while relying on a reactive design, aims to support Android app development where data flows in and out of the UI in a seamless manner without forcing the users to navigate back and forth. Mike goes on to say on this matter –

“Reactive front ends led me to think of how we can have declarative data stores with simple APIs that abstract complex features like multi-request throttling and disk caching that are needed in modern mobile applications.”

To explain this in brief – Dropbox Store helps in connecting the app model with an external data source by using a declarative interface centralizing all data-related activities. 

Store aims at optimizing network usage in order to keep it at a minimum. This library was rewritten Kotlin backed by Coroutines and Flow, followed by another major change of discarding RxJava for structured concurrency paradigm which is implemented in Kotlin reactive streams. 

This switch poses a big impact on ensuring all resources employed in concurrent tasks are freed whenever the task completes, says Mike.

“The big problem with RxJava’s approach to scoping background operations is that it’s too easy for engineers to forget to call dispose. Failing to dispose of active subscriptions directly leads to memory leaks.”

In addition, the Store also supports disk caching, memory caching with TTL and size policies, explicitly skipping the cache to fetch new data from the data source, multi-casting of responses, among many others.

Now, that Dropbox is implementing many changes in the Store for improvement, it has been set on a path of becoming a great source of resources for all Android app development developers.

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AppSheet was founded back in 2014 by Praveen Seshadri and Brian Sabino to help businesspeople and others build their own mobile applications without having any coding experience. It received its seed funding from the New Enterprise Associates in 2015 and was recognized as one of the innovative tech startups by TiE in 2018, followed by getting fame of leading a leader for low-code app development for business developers by Forrester Research in 2019.

The platform became the first choice of various small and established brands, including Whirlpool, Pepsi, the Global Cancer Institute, Toyota, American Electric Power, and M&O Partners for making their presence in the IT-powered business world. Something that is a consequence of the set of features it offers, such as the ability to capture, collaborate, and display data, and create a declarative programming model.

“As we’ve matured, so has the IT industry, and there is now a tremendous pent-up demand for enterprise automation,” said Praveen Seshadri. He further added, “With the rise of low-and no-code platforms, citizen development has emerged as the strategic way for modern organizations to invest, innovate, and compete”.

AppSheet has also been integrating AI and NLP technology to further accelerate the mobile app development process and enable businesses to enter the mobile sphere at the earliest.

Till now, AppSheet’s development suite has been used by over 18,000 app creators to deploy around 200,000 apps. And now, when Google acquires AppSheet, the numbers, as well as the results, are expected to be much beyond the expectations of all.

The tech giant, which recently acquired a retail inventory management startup Pointy as well, is expecting to reimagine the app development space by bringing AppSheet services to Google Cloud.

“The acquisition will complement Google’s strategy to reimagine the application development space by helping businesses innovate with workflow automation, app support, and API Management,” shared Amit Zavery, vice president of Google Cloud. He further added, “Customers will now be able to build richer apps that use not only Google Sheets and Forms, but other top Google technologies like Google Analytics, Maps, and Android”.

[Note: As we mentioned above about API management, consider this blog to know in detail about the process and available tools: 15 Open-Source API Management Platforms to Add in Your Tech Stack]

The tech giant expects to employ AppSheet’s ability to power up workplace applications (include CRM, personalized reporting, field inspections, etc.) while keeping Google Cloud’s services focusing entirely on the financial, media, and retail domains.

The Google team also revealed that low-development app development platforms like AppSheet are not going to replace sophisticated development environments. Rather, they will be put into practice to empower mobile app developers to collect extensive, rich data like geographic data and indoor location data from any device and use the insights gained to build user-centric applications. Plus, they will also be able to update and maintain the data set in real-time, without compromising on the security front.

The AppSheet team will soon join Google Cloud. But, they will continue to serve their existing new and existing clients and support iOS apps and web-based mobility solutions.

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The Toronto-based AI tech startup was launched back in November 2018 by Edmundas Balčikonis (earlier CEO of TrackDuck, which was later acquired by Invision), Pranas Kiziela, and Adomas Baltagalvis.

The team realized that planning a trip demanded users to go through dozens of websites and mobile apps, compare the information, and look for suitable deals. All the while, these platforms offered them little to no personalization, making the entire experience unpleasant. 

So, to cut down their efforts and provide a seamless experience, Eddy Travels introduced an AI-powered personalized advisor bot. 

Available on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Rakuten, Slack, and Line, the bot delivers a personalized traveling experience in real-time. It enables users to type the company’s name in the search bar of the Messenger and wait for a yellow hat representing brands to start a conversation. It also encourages them to send a voice message to get personalized suggestions related to best flights, hotels, and other services.

The chatbot uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) system – one of the top technology trends for 2020 – to bring together all the booking needs of the users on a single platform, analyze the information and recommend personalized activities.

“This bot is more personal, and would provide a customized trip-planning experience,” said Edmundas Balčikonis, CEO of Eddy Travels.

Because of this functionality, the bot is used by more than 100,000 users worldwide. Also, it is being considered for making around 40,000 flight searches per month. A value that seems much smaller when compared to popular travel portals like Airbnb, but is quite significant for a bot.

And now, when the brand has closed a pre-seed funding with a motive to expand their services into accommodation, car rental, and other travel-related services, these numbers are expected to rise.

In fact, the future of travel sales is anticipated to grow upto $817B by 2020. And with the news of funding rounds like these, it only gets validated how technology, in the face of travel app development, will play a major role in meeting these numbers.

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The startup which is focused on offering a blockchain infrastructure, in addition to developer tools, has bagged $15 million in contributions from Stanford. And some of the most influential mainstream business leaders, like Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang and LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman. 

Chris Kelly, the ex Facebook legal chief, who is also one of the Alchemy investors and is involved in the Libra project, said that he expects Alchemy to be a massive player in the Blockchain sector. 

How does Alchemy work? 

The startup replaces the nodes which businesses use to write and read blockchain, with a scalable, faster decentralized architecture. It also offers tools for monitoring, analytics, alerting, debugging, and logging for cryptocurrency-linked software. The mere two-year-old startup powers the infrastructure of several hundred businesses that serve more than one million customers in over 200 countries every week. This includes names like 0x, Augur, Cryptokitties, Opera browser, and Kyber.

“Right now people are trying to build skyscrapers with picks and shovels. We need to give them construction equipment,” Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan said. “None of this exists for blockchain.”

Typically, businesses spend massive dollar amounts in setting up and operating nodes that could interpret and then write to Blockchain. The process is not just costly but also slow, in addition to relying on heavy resource consuming. All this, more often than not, leads to Blockchain apps running slow or being buggy. 

Alchemy, solves the issue by using an entirely different decentralized architecture. They separate the different data types into special data stores to enable reliable and faster access. The end result of it is that it becomes a lot more easy for a blockchain app development company to work around Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other such coins with lesser engineering resources’ utilization. 

Alchemy also takes up heavy inspiration from Microsoft by providing tools for the management of decentralized applications. The tools include ones for:

• Analytics of usage tracking
• Availability and performance monitoring
• Informing teams when things break
• Debugging to get the apps running again. 

In the case of traditional web, performing the entire gamut of services would need inclusion of different startups, but since blockchain standardizes the database and how they are accessed, Alchemy does it all by building more tools for blockchain based mobile apps development. 

“Since using Alchemy, our team has been able to refocus its time on building new product features for Augur that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise,” Augur’s director of operations Tom Kysar says, “We used to spend a notable amount of time dealing with infrastructure issues, and now we don’t worry at all.” His prediction market startup writes that Alchemy resolved 98% of reliability issues and made its users’ applications load 3X faster.

The post Stanford Backs Alchemy, a Startup Endorsed as Blockchain’s Microsoft appeared first on Appinventiv.

The funding has brought the pre-money valuation of the company at $1.65 billion. 

The extension funding was led by OMERS Venture, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and Merian Chrysalis. The round follows the March’s Series B round, where the brand raised $125 million, led by the Abu Dhabi government owned Mubadala Ventures and Creditease. 

Talking about the OMERS Ventures association, Wefox’s CEO and Co-founder, Julian Teickie said, “We’re delighted to have OMERS Ventures as the lead investor for this financing round, and with the addition of Merian Chrysalis and Samsung Catalyst Fund on board, we have reinforced wefox Group’s investor base substantially.”

The revenue chart of the insurtech firm, ever since its inception in 2014, has grown to more than $100 million and they are now offering services to more than 500,000 customers in Europe. The brand is also planning to launch their app to UK consumers next year, which would provide details on the customer claims, policies, and would help in finding new rates.

“This year we quadrupled our growth and now we have a great opportunity to strengthen our business in partnership with our new investors, which is part of our strategic plan for further global expansion in 2020,” added Teicke.

The company’s direct to consumer insurance brand, One Insurance, has a similar story to share. The insurance wing has also witnessed a nearly tenfold rise in their annual revenue, bringing the number up to $30 million, while it is on the verge of becoming Germany’s fastest growing private and household liability insurance provider. 

While the firm is presently active in Austria, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland, commenting on the funding round, Julian mentioned that the funding amount will be invested in ramping up their international expansion plans in 2020.

Backing his expansion plans, Henry Gladwyn, the principal at OMERS Ventures said, “We are thrilled to continue our support of Julian and the incredibly ambitious Wefox Group team as they continue to disrupt and re-invent the insurance industry. We believe wefox Group’s  approach to revolutionizing insurance – empowering the consumer and prioritizing solutions for secured data-driven experiences – will deliver significant value for the entire trade”.

The constant attention that the mobile centric finance industry is getting from investors, reinstates that the Fintech app development economy is ripe for innovation and standing miles apart from hitting the bubble. 

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Founded back in 1995 by Craig Newmark, Craigslist offers the facility to post an ad in different sections like jobs, items wanted, gigs, housing, items wanted, for sale, resumes, and discussion forums. It serves users in 700+ cities in around 70 countries, and that too in different languages including Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and German. 

But, what’s more interesting is that this company has been operating for the past 24 years via a website. Though it was linked with various third party applications – giving an impression that it understands the importance of mobile apps for business – it is now that it has taken a step towards making its official presence on mobile.

It’s now that this bastion of classified ads has launched its own official iOS mobile app and a beta version of its Android app.

Their official iOS application, just like their website, is simple, straightforward, and effective. It is easy to load and work with, has only text and clean interfaces, and various other characteristics that comes under the title of mobile app UI design tips and trends to follow.

The Craigslist iOS app offers the option to post and edit your classified ads. It also gives an opportunity to browse all the listings even without having an official account. Something that comes under the category of tips to redefine your mobile app retention strategy.

What’s more, the application has gone live on App Store yesterday only. And by today, it has climbed to the 14th position in the shopping category of App Store. It has also received 4.6 out of 5 ratings and 63 reviews, which shows that target user base are appreciating the company’s initiative.

The Craigslist official apps is expected to become a second preference by users, with website still leading the show. However, it might be possible to turn the table, if the Cragislist team, in the coming days, update their application while focusing on the upcoming mobile app development trends.

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This San Francisco-based fintech raised funding of $120M in equity funding back in February this year. The one in which various reputed investors, including Ribbit Capital, RPM Ventures, Nimble Ventures, DCM, Morgan Creek, and DCG. In May, they unveiled that they have crossed up to $1B of uncommitted asset-powered financing facility on its own custom Blockchain from WSFS Institutional Services and Jefferies.     

And now, according to the paperwork filed with the SEC earlier this month, Figure Technologies is about to touch $103M in Series C funding. A probable reason behind which is their investor’s partly interest in the startup’s growing series of products. 

While Figure started as a perfect collaboration of Blockchain and Fintech that provides home loans to the older customers who are not working/earning income in the present days, but have much of their wealth tied to their homes, they have now expanded their demographic. They have begun focusing both on their previous user demographic and that of SoFi: young people looking to refinance their student loans.

They have also recently talked to American Banker about their interest in competing directly with SoFi, quoting the $1.4 trillion in exceptional loan debit as the core reason behind its growing popularity. And, with the same ‘mousetrap’ strategy that Figure has designed to quickly and effectively process home loans,  which it further securitizes and sells.

To be more specific, most of the financial services business of Figure, if not all, is conducted entirely on its own blockchain, Provenance. This blockchain has also come up with a token called Hash which is employed for both accessing the blockchain and memorialize all the off-chain exchange of fiat currency. Something that has also directed other fintech Entrepreneurs to connect with Blockchain app development companies and amp up their business by introducing the power of decentralization into their processes.

Now while this is all about the present, the Figure team is planning to grab more such opportunities and enjoy higher fundings in the time to come. The brand has shared that they are planning to bring a money market product soon into existence, alongside various other lines of business like wealth management, checking accounts, and unsecured consumer loans.

And when talking about SoFi, the fintech startup is also working on a similar business model. They, earlier this year, introduced the opportunity of fractional share buying and exchange-traded funds and launched a mobile-powered cash management system. And now, are planning to go beyond refinancing student loan.

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• Vinted, a second-hand fashion platform just raised $141 million in a fundraising round.
• The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners 
• The company plans to improve its selling and buying process along with expanding their business with the funds raised.

Vinted, a company offering second-hand fashion, has raised $140.9 million (around €128 million) in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and supported by investors like Sprints Capital, Insight Venture Partners, and Accel and Burda Investments.

The Lithuania-based company, operating via both website and mobile app, has surpassed the total valuation of approx. $1 billion. This investment makes the company one of the biggest startups to come from the country to the limelight of the world.

The company has planned to use the funds raised for expanding the features of its platforms along with taking business across Europe. The company also claimed to work on their selling and buying process while focusing on the goal of offering a platform for users to list and buy used clothes.

In the words of the CEO Thomas Plantenga – “We want to make sure we don’t have new products…All our sellers are regular people.” He continued by stating that almost 75% of the company’s customers had never transacted second-hand clothes ever, until the advent of the platform and that “The stigma is no longer there.”

The company holds approx. 180 million products live on its platform, have 25 million registered customers in 11 markets (with a small user base in the US as well), and is managed by 300 employees. 

Vinted’s exponential growth is evident from the fact that Europe is a thriving market for second-hand clothes business. This growth has led the company to come to the front and gain the attention of some major US investors – even after its holding back in operating in the country for the concern of strong competition like eBay, Offerup, Poshmark, Letgo, etc.

The company is expecting to sell €1.3 billion in clothes by the end of the year 2019. These expectations are not baseless rather based on the 4x increased sales growth in the last 17 months.

Witnessing the success of this startup’s platform, many organizations will be inspired to invest in mCommerce app development and follow this business niche for their targeted locations. Without a doubt, there is a lot of scope in the second-hand fashion industry; it only takes a keen eye to see it.

The post Vinted Raises $141 Million In A Fundraising Round appeared first on Appinventiv.

Such videos are hitting the Internet every now and then. They are entertaining users in a way never expected before, with everyone believing that those popular faces themselves have posed for those videos. 

However, this technique to creating a nearly-real video using the power of AI of human-image synthesis, i.e, Deepfake is expected to take a more sinister turn in the future.

Image Source

It is predicted to take a shift from amusing public and giving special effects in Hollywood movies to being used for cybercrime and political scandals. 

In fact, it has been sensed by cybersecurity experts that such videos will be employed during the 2020 Election at some point or the other. This will bring an adverse impact on the public’s opinion and might result in some ethnic violence.

This has created an urgency in the tech world to find a way to combat these deepfake videos. Various tech experts have already begun exploring every possible way to fight back these videos; the one that are created using the latest technologies like AI to give a realistic look.

And guess what, one technology that has come up as the relevant solution is Blockchain.

The technology, as per the tech experts, has all the ingredients like transparency, immutability, and decentralization, that can help in distinguishing a real and a fake video. And eventually, lower down its impact.

“When it comes to the area of deepfake, emerging technologies like Blockchain can come to the fore to provide some level of security, approval, and validation”, said Kevin Gannon, PwC blockchain tech lead and solutions architect. He further added, “Blockchain has typically been touted as a visibility and transparency play, where once something is one, the ‘who’ and ‘when’ becomes apparent. But, it can go further! When a user with a digital identity wants to do something, they could be prompted for proof of their identity before access to something can be granted”.

Let’s simplify it with an example. 

Suppose a video enters into the market. Since every data is stored on Blockchain governed by consensus algorithms, you will be able to access the hashcode of the file and compare with the recently published one. If the result of comparison is not true, it will make it clear that the video is fake. 

Also, since proper smart contracts are written for every transaction, it would become more difficult for intruders to steal someone’s information secretly and make a deepfake video. 

This way, the technology will aid in differentiating between real and ‘nearly real’ videos and overcome the probable negative outcomes.

And a clear evidence of this implementation of Blockchain technology is Eristica.

This platform enables people to create challenges and encourage others to complete it in return for real money. Others record and share their videos on the platform, which is then liked and shared by others. The one that gets highest traction earns the money. 

“I put up a $100 and say, “Hey, I bet you can’t do a kick-flip on a snowboard,” shared Nikita Akimov, CEO and founder of Eristica, “If that person submits a video and the community votes that person up….then that person wins the money.”

Here, the platform’s algorithms crawls every profile and check for any drastic change. This could be anything like a person who has been doing $3 challenges is now betting for $10,000, or some irregular user usage pattern. 

Eristica also employs the algorithm used by YouTube and Instagram to find the copyright content from both the audio and video files. Besides, they use a third-party search algorithm to cut the video files into multiple frames and searching for their source file using the ‘image search’ mechanism. 

In addition to this, the legitimacy of the user and content is verified via a manual moderation process every time he engages with the Eristica community.

This way, the platform relies upon the combined potential of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence to detect and combat deepfake videos.

However, this is not the limit. The dual technologies are expected to enter various other business verticals like Finance and Marketing to ensure that deepfake technique is not used to steal money or perform other illegal activities. And of course, to assure that the 2020 elections won’t be affected by any fake video or publicity stunt.

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