(BOSTON) — A Bitcoin ATM has landed at a Boston rail hub, allowing commuters to learn about the digital currency.
On Wednesday, the ATM was placed by Liberty Teller at Boston’s bustling South Station, which sees thousands of commuters a day. It and an ATM in Albuquerque, N.M., are believed to be the first in the country.
Liberty Teller founder Kyle Powers tells WCVB-TV that the ATM gives people the chance to learn about the volatile currency, because after buying some, they can watch a company tutorial on its use.
Colleague Chris Yim says the money can be stored in a virtual wallet and used at an increasing number of online retailers in place of cash or credit cards.
Bitcoin is an open-source currency affiliated with no country or bank, which can be bought and sold anonymously.
This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources, and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally published at Inc.com.
I don’t typically make generalizations, but I believe there is one word every entrepreneur should immediately strike from his vocabulary. That word is “hope.” As an entrepreneur, if you find yourself on a regular basis starting sentences with “I hope,” such as …
“I hope that the market responds to our new product line.”
“I hope that this new VP we hired works out.”
“I hope that our biggest customer doesn’t leave.”
… then you may have already lost the battle.
Hope is an expectation based on desire. Every business has expectations at many levels, but these expectations cannot be achieved without planning and execution.
Hope implies a lack of control.
It is simply anti-entrepreneurial to give up control. Control is why entrepreneurs have chosen this path … to control what we create, who we work for and how we get the job done.
On the other hand, a lack of control can be a sign of storms on the horizon. Lack of control is a primary reason behind many unexpected situations. Lack of control is why many entrepreneurs look like they just took a shot of Jack Daniels when they talk about raising venture capital. Lack of control over what you create, whom you work for or how you do it is often at the core of why many entrepreneurs fail.
Hope implies a lack of planning.
The minute you begin to hope is the exact moment when the situation is officially no longer going as planned. This is a dangerous position to hold as an entrepreneur. Sure, there are risks and situations that are simply outside of your control. However, the successful entrepreneur will have a plan for assessing, addressing and executing through unexpected situations.
Cultivate plans, not hopes.
Just because an entrepreneur uses the word hope doesn’t necessarily mean she lacks a plan altogether. However, it does somehow, if only subconsciously, set a tone of relinquished control.
So the next time you hear yourself begin a sentence with those two words, “I hope,” take a moment to think about how you would finish that sentence if you started it with “I plan.” Doing so will switch your mindset back to a state of control, allowing you to approach situations with the proper plan to achieve your goals.
So just delete the word hope entirely from your entrepreneurial vocabulary, and start planning for success.
(NEW YORK) — Visa and MasterCard are introducing Internet-based technologies to make it easier for shoppers to buy things at retail stores without pulling out a credit card.
The two technologies, announced separately on Wednesday, will give merchants and banks more options for incorporating so-called contact-less payment systems into their mobile apps. The customer uses the app to make purchases by tapping the phone to a store’s card reader.
The technologies tap a new feature in Google’s Android operating system. Before, card information had to be stored on a secured part of the phone. Now, it can be stored remotely instead. A retail or banking app on the phone then retrieves what’s needed to complete the transaction.
Visa said it will provide app developers with a complete service, with card information stored on Visa’s servers.
MasterCard said it will publish technical details by the end of June to help companies use the new Android feature, known as Host Card Emulation. MasterCard said it has been testing the technology with two major banks, Capital One in the U.S. and Banco Sabadell in Europe.
“The use of HCE provides a very attractive way forward to launch an increased number of NFC-based offerings,” said James Anderson, MasterCard’s group head for emerging payments, said in a statement.
Visa and MasterCard are both targeting phones that have a wireless technology called near-field communication. Many Android phones have that, and the remote storage capabilities come with the Kit Kat version of Android, which was released last fall. Apple’s iPhones lack NFC, but cases are available to enable that technology.
Visa said it will make tools available for app developers to incorporate payment capabilities. The customer can then use a smartphone instead of a plastic credit card at stores, transit systems and other places that accept contact-less payments.
The hope is to encourage greater use of contact-less payments, which experts say offer more security protections than plastic. The card number is stored in encrypted form and can be easily disabled remotely if a phone is lost or stolen. Mobile systems also permit easier use of one-time card numbers, which won’t work for additional transactions and are useless should a merchant’s computers get hacked.
Sam Shrauger, Visa’s senior vice president for digital services in developed markets, said having payment information on remote servers is cheaper and easier to operate than using the phone’s hardware.
With hardware-based systems, he said, wireless carriers and device makers sometimes restrict what can be done. Many U.S. carriers had blocked or made it difficult to get Google’s NFC-based Wallet app, for instance, as they were developing a competing system, Isis.
Visa and MasterCard made the announcements ahead of the Mobile World Congress wireless trade show, which takes place in Barcelona, Spain, next week.
Facebook announced last year that it’s leading a squad of technology companies in a campaign to get the world’s estimated 4 billion disconnected people onto the Internet — and new data from Pew released Thursday show exactly why that’s so important to the company. In a new study on emerging nations’ adoption of the Internet and mobile technology, Pew found that among 24 nations studied, there’s a large gap between the percentage of people who regularly have access to the Internet:
Pew Research Center
However, it also found that once people in a particular country have regular Internet access, they quickly become avid social networking users:
Pew Research Center
Facebook already has a staggering 1.15 billion users — but many of the people with an Internet connection and a desire to sign up for Facebook have probably already done so at this point, save the young who aren’t old enough for an account yet. Thus, the Facebook-led connectivity project, Internet.org, is a play by the company to avoid sluggish user growth by going out into the world and creating Facebook’s next few billion users in emerging markets.
Indeed, Pew’s own analysis of its data makes it clear that Facebook has a golden opportunity in those countries:
The most popular way in which people [in the countries studied] use social networking is staying in touch with family and friends. A near-universal median of 96% among social networking users across the 22 countries analyzed say they use [social networking services] for this purpose (Pakistan and Uganda are excluded due to insufficient sample size). Sharing views about pop culture is also common, with a median of 73% saying they use social networks to post opinions on music and movies.
That sounds a lot like how we all use Facebook, no?
Facebook’s biggest hurdle, however, will continue to be bridging the smartphone gap: The vast majority of cellphone owners in emerging markets own a feature phone, not a smartphone — which is why Facebook has long been targeting those users with a pared-down text-based version of its platform.
Pew Research Center
If Facebook and the other Internet.org companies take anything away from Pew’s latest research, it should be this: Save a few outliers, Internet usage is “strongly correlated” with income. “Generally, the higher a country’s [Gross Domestic Product] per capita, the higher its percentage of internet users,” found Pew.
Pew Research Center
That leads to a chicken-and-the-egg problem that’s hotly debated in the social sciences: Does improving connectivity lead to greater GDP growth, or does greater GDP growth lead to better connectivity? Facebook is betting on the former, having already spent more than $1 billion on infrastructure improvements throughout emerging markets. If Facebook can get more people connected to the Internet, it hopes, it can get more people connected to Facebook, too.
I am a retired accountant & tax consultant now devoting much of my time to upgrading my own website, writing up my blog. I play sports on a weekly basis and is engaged in some voluntary work. I am also an amateur astronomer doing online research and quite proud of my research project. Details of my research in astronomy can be viewed on my website. Just click on any blog title ( in green colour ) or hit the link in my complete profile to access my website.
