3MTB Newsletter - Samsung's Debit Card; Game Changing new NFC specs; Jio's 3rd Equity sale.

“X Ash A 12.” The X is just “X” and the A-12 is just “A 12.”

— Elon Musk on how to pronounce his baby’s name XÆA-12

Parents love to give unique name to their kids, but ‘XÆA-12’ is just a weird name. It is highly likely that the name will cause lots of troubles in the future, as most computer systems accept only Alphabets, hyphen and apostrophe in names.

XÆA-12 will change his name one day. Any wagers? :)

Some bits,

• Reliance is in advanced talks to acquire a majority stakes in Online Pharmacy company, Netmeds.

• In order to give more credibility to its Libra Association, Facebook has appointed Stuart Levey as CEO of the association, ahead of regulatory push. He was HSBC's Chief Legal Officer and former first Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence within the United States Department of the Treasury.

• Zoom acquires a startup called Keybase to provide end to end encryption on video calls. The company has clearly not anticipated the huge surge in users and has been hammered with multiple allegations such as  Zoombombing, sending data to Facebook, etc

---

Bytes

Jio’s 3rd stake sale.

US Tech Fund Vista Equity Partners takes a 2.3% stake in Reliance Jio for Rs 11,367 Cr, ($1.5 billion) making it the 3rd company to invest in Jio. Seems like Reliance is more viewed as a technology platform rather than a telecom company.

Fyi.. Brian Sheth, a co-founder of the company, has Indian roots born to an Indian father. Robert Smith, the other co-founder was included in the 2017 “100 Greatest living business minds”

New NFC Specifications for ‘very’ low power devices

The NFC (Near Field Communications) Forum has set new NFC standards and specifications that allows wirelessly charge devices at a power transfer rate as low as 1 Watt.

What does it mean? There are 36 billion IoT devices and even more number of small battery operates devices such as toys, remotes, etc. A widespread adoption of NFC charging of these devices will eliminate the need several thousand kilometres of wires and tons of single use batteries.

Samsung’s Debit card

Samsung has announced that it would launch a debit card by end of this summer, with the help of a FinTech startup called SoFi. The card would be based on a mobile-first money management platform. More details are yet to be released.

It is apparent that tech giants want to create new platforms for Financial transactions. Last year, Apple came up with a debit card and Google is also planning to launch a card in partnership with Visa.

Till the next edition, Stay Home, Stay Safe.

Best,

-SK