Daily Archives: August 19, 2015

Pay With Your Face In Mastercard’s New Pilot Project

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Payments are a white-hot market right now. Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Square and PayPal are all lusting after the transactional fees and data that continue to flow, and will continue to flow, over the technology rails built by Visa and Mastercard. Everyone in Silicon Valley talks about “disrupting” the payment networks, or killing Visa or some daft talk like that. But have you seen the stock charts for V and MA? It’s insane. Like, Netflixian insane. Mastercard is up 21-fold since its IPO in 2006. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is up a “mere” 133%. Visa is up 4x since its IPO in 2008.
They’re not sexy or groovy, but both Visa and Mastercard are on our list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies (at nos. 32 and 36, respectively).

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Beautiful Ideas

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Great ideas can arrive in a moment of inspiration, plucked out of the ether fully formed. More often, though, the muses don’t pick up the phone. Innovation is mess and toil, and often found outside your four walls. “No matter who you are,” said tech pioneer Bill Joy, “most of the smartest people work for someone else.” The world’s most innovative firms, whose ideas are featured here, will always admit brilliance is harder than it looks.

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Adobe Kickbox Gives Employees $1000 Credit Cards And Freedom to Pursue Ideas

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What if you could get a $1000 pre-paid credit card to fund any idea you want, free of expense reports or a supervisor’s approval? That’s what Adobe did with its Kickbox program, which launched in early 2013. Employees are given a bright red box, which contains tools to foster innovation. Besides a credit card, the box includes a Starbucks gift card, candy bars, and reference cards that outline the program.

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How We Rank The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2015

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Most innovation rankings are popularity contests based on past performance or editorial whims. We set out to create something very different with the World’s Most Innovative Companies list, using the wisdom of the crowd. Our method relies on investors’ ability to identify firms they expect to be innovative now and in the future. You can learn more about our research on innovation by visiting learn.theinnovatorsmethod.com.

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The Lenovo Vibe S1 could be the world’s first dual front camera smartphone

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The Lenovo Vibe S1 has already passed by our rumor mill a few times in the past. Back in February, we got our hands on an extensive leak, featuring specs and photos for a few upcoming Lenovo handsets with the Vibe S1 among them. More-recently, a visit to TENAA reaffirmed the hardware and exterior of the phone and we were pretty confident that it would be yet another generic mid-range offer.

But, as it turns out, we might have been a little hasty in our assessment, as according to @upleaks, the Vibe S1 has a trick up its sleeve that it had hidden in plain sight all along. Allegedly, the smartphone will come with two front-facing cameras, which, believe it or not, is a world first. The pair of selfies shooter would presumably be used to achieve bokeh effects.

If you examine the TENAA photos, you will clearly see two symmetrical openings on one side of the earpiece. We previously thought that one would simply house sensors, but it could just as easily hide a second camera sensor, as well.

Lenovo Vibe S1 at TENAA

According to the aforementioned TENAA listing, the Vibe S1 has a 5MP front-facing camera, which under these circumstances is obviously not the full story, but could also indicate that both modules will be 5MP.

As far as the rest of the specs on the Lenovo Vibe S1, it should sport a 5-inch FullHD display and run on an eight-core 1.7GHz processor (perhaps the Snapdragon 615). Memory is set at 2GB for Ram and 16GB of onboard storage, expandable by microSD. It measures 143 x 70.8 x 7.85 mm and weighs in at 130 g, that includes the 2420 mAh battery. Last, but not least, the Vibe S1 should come in a colorful pallet, featuring violet, blue and pink colors, as well as the traditional black and…

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