Ferhan Patel

Ferhan Patel's Note: Clinkle has always been a mystery to me.  It was in stealth mode for the longest time and when it launched, it left a lot to be desired.  The full story by Alyson Shontell The week after Thanksgiving, 40 Clinkle employees gathered in the kitchen of their San Francisco office. It was the second time in two days they’d been called together for an all-hands meeting. One day prior, Duplan had proudly announced a new hire, Chi-Chao Chang. A former Yahoo and xAd executive, Chang was Clinkle’s new vice president of engineering. It was a position recruiters had been trying to fill for months, and Chang had come highly recommended by former Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz. The soft-spoken engineer had stood up and shared a few words about his background. He said he was excited to be joining Clinkle. Now, just 24 hours later, Chang was nowhere to be seen. Duplan cleared his throat, nervously shifting his weight. “Chi-Chao has left Clinkle,” he annou...

Samsung Pay, a forthcoming mobile payments feature for Samsung mobile devices, has a unique advantage that BI Intelligence thinks will help drive US mobile payments volume to over $800 billion by the end of 2019. One of the biggest obstacles to mobile payments adoption in the US is that only a handful of retailers have the technology to accept mobile payments in stores. However, in early 2015 Samsung acquired a company called LoopPay which could potentially solve this problem. LoopPay developed a technology called Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) which will be integrated into new Samsung phones. The technology will allow mobile users to pass their phones over a typical credit card reader to make a payment. In addition, Samsung Pay users will also be able to pay by presenting a barcode to be scanned at checkout. That means that Samsung Pay will work at most existing payment terminals in the US — So someone who adopts Samsung Pay can begin to use it habitually righ...

Calling the Silk Road “an assault on the public health of our communities,” Federal Judge Katherine Forrest sentenced 31-year-old Ross Ulbricht to life in prison for his role in creating the Silk Road — the bitcoin-ran online drug marketplace that funneled through billions of dollars for selling heroin, cocaine and crystal meth. Just last week , Ulbricht wrote a letter to the judge as an appeal for sympathy, writing that “I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave my old age.” He asked for the judge to issue only the mandatory minimum of 20 years for his seven federal crime convictions, saying that he has learned how wrong he was about creating the Silk Road . He explained the backstory of the site, saying it was about encouraging freedom — and wasn’t designed with a criminal or malicious intent. Ulbricht was convicted in February as running the Silk Road marketplace under the pseudonym  Dread Pirate Roberts ...