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I have a question similar to this one, only that my question is focused on "non-Western" users (with this I refer to users outside of Western Europe and the US).
I have to pay users of my website (for services rendered for instance), and they are located at places where banking systems are poor to say the least. They do have ATMs, and credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, etc) work in most of these countries.
After many hours of browsing the web looking into this, I figure my best bet is to go with Prepaid Debit Cards. They allow me to deposit onto the cards, and my users to simply withdraw or pay for things using that card. In fact, several of those services were mentioned in the post I linked before. These were mentioned:
Payoneer: on paper their service looks good, but I have not yet received any reply to several inquiries made, their registration form is buggy, and their 'news' section mostly has news from 2008. All red flags to me.
iKobo: another provider named in the other topic and at Wikipedia (for what it's worth...). However, their SSL certificate is expired. Big red flag.
I've gone over most of the cards mentioned at this review site, but they all appear to be tailored to the US.
So my question is: does anybody know a good payment solution (could be Prepaid Debit Cards, could be something else) that is suitable for paying a wide audience of international users?
NOTE: these are mostly larger payments in the range of $100-500.
In the UK there are two providers: Caxton (Visa) and Fairfx (Mastercard). Their cards are called currency cards rather than prepaid debit cards, but I believe they are exactly what you are describing. Both are fully registered under UK financial law, so are reputable and reliable. Both are usable in a very wide range of countries. They are both usable in many, though not all ATMs (for instance in Thailand, they are usable in ATMs in local supermarkets, but not in local money changing kiosks). In addition to the problems #hol mentions about ATMs, in Asia in particular, local banks can, and do, choose to stop receiving payments from one of the two major networks - usually Mastercard - if there has been a high level of fraud on that network in that particular country.
I believe Caxton also offer a variety of money transfer options at low cost, but I have not used these services.
I have used both providers in travelling round 11 countries this year, mostly in the developing world, including Laos which has the least developed financial system of all the countries visited. They have provided a reliable and useful service. I have no other connection with either provider.
Whatever method you choose, you should be very careful not to fall over laws against money laundring. I am not sure sending around prepaid debit cards is legal.
My own instant idea was bankwire or paypal (or Skrill - moneybookers). Western union I remember as expensive but I might be wrong.
Working in international payments for banks in my professional career I know how money moves around the world and I must say the pre-paid debit card idea is a not too bad an idea and actually quite innovative. I looked at the payoneer thing and I think it looks OK.
I wonder if there are hidden costs but does not look like it. The only costs not visible is for sure the extra charge from the ATM provider in the foreign country charges in addition to the pre-paid debit card provider.
One thing came to my mind: Make sure the receiver can use the card at ATM's in his country. Nowadays almost all cards can receive money at any ATM in the whole world but I would not take it for granted. In worst case the payee has to go to a big airport where ATM machines are more internationalized. Ask the payee what symbols/names his nearest ATM shows. Then ask the hotline if the card can receive money at that ATM. E.g. is EFTPOS supported etc.
On bankwire it depends on the receiving country and some countries tend to do a rip off in charges. I guess you are in the US. I do not know if banks provide the service but UBS Switzerland has a "guaranteed OUR charge" that allows you to make bankwires anywhere in the world where the receiver pays nothing and you are charged a max of 20 CHF plus the regular bankwire charge (I think around 15 CHF to foreign countries). Foreign bankwires from the US also seem to be ridiculously expensive. I just looked up what Bank of America charges. OMG.
Bankwire I would discourage for some countries. I had some bad experience with a certain country once and maybe times changed. Check with the payee first and rather make a test with a smaller amount if it is a rather to corruption tending country. They may think this is money against something exported and want papers and all that before releasing the money...
Of course you still can go back to cash or cheques which have the problem to be very slow and get lost in the mail (but your cards also need to be mailed) and cheques in international traffic tend to have big charges and cash has poor exchange rates.
At last, you should really ask the payees for suggestions, too.
Couldn't you ask some of your users, or people in the countries that are in similar circumstances?
And Western Union Money Transfer is widely known for being able to pay people in a lot of countries.
I would use paypal or, if they accept it, bitcoin.
Skrill (formerly MoneyBookers) may also be an option as they provide an accompanying MasterCard pre-paid card. https://www.moneybookers.com/
Related
I want to create a tokenomics database.
I want to build a bot to automate data collection that answers for each token on the blockchain some of the questions asked and answered in this article.
I am a total newbie when it comes to blockchain. So, I have some basic questions.
Where is this information located? How did the author discover the numbers he quotes? Is there an API one could use to collect this information? (See update.)
Update: In writing this question, I discovered this Etherscan API. How might one leverage that API to obtain the tokenomics data I want?
Source [emphasis mine]
There will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoin, and they’re released at a rate that gets cut in half every four years or so. Roughly 19,000,000 already exist, so there are only 2,000,000 more to be released over the next 120 years.
What about Ethereum? The circulating supply is around 118,000,000, and there’s no cap on how many Ether can exist. But Ethereum’s net emissions were recently adjusted via a burn mechanism so that it would reach a stable supply, or potentially even be deflationary, resulting in somewhere between 100-120m tokens total. Given that, we shouldn’t expect much inflationary pressure on Ether either. It could even be deflationary.
Dogecoin has no supply cap either, and it is currently inflating at around 5% per year. So of the three, we should expect inflationary tokenomics to erode the value of Doge more than Bitcoin or Ethereum.
The last thing you want to consider with supply is allocation. Do a few investors hold a ton of the tokens which are going to be unlocked soon? Did the protocol give most of its tokens to the community? How fair does the distribution seem? If a bunch of investors have 25% of the supply and those tokens will unlock in a month, you might hesitate before buying in.
The question is about using a chat-bot framework in a research study, where one would like to measure the improvement of a rule-based decision process over time.
For example, we would like to understand how to improve the process of medical condition identification (and treatment) using the minimal set of guided questions and patient interaction.
Medical condition can be formulated into a work-flow rules by doctors; possible technical approach for such study would be developing an app or web site that can be accessed by patients, where they can ask free text questions that a predefined rule-based chat-bot will address. During the study there will be a doctor monitoring the collected data and improving the rules and the possible responses (and also provide new responses when the workflow has reached a dead-end), we do plan to collect the conversations and apply machine learning to generate improved work-flow tree (and questions) over time, however the plan is to do any data analysis and processing offline, there is no intention of building a full product.
This is a low budget academy study, and the PHD student has good development skills and data science knowledge (python) and will be accompanied by a fellow student that will work on the engineering side. One of the conversational-AI options recommended for data scientists was RASA.
I invested the last few days reading and playing with several chat-bots solutions: RASA, Botpress, also looked at Dialogflow and read tons of comparison material which makes it more challenging.
From the sources on the internet it seems that RASA might be a better fit for data science projects, however it would be great to get a sense of the real learning curve and how fast one can expect to have a working bot, and the especially one that has to continuously update the rules.
Few things to clarify, We do have data to generate the questions and in touch with doctors to improve the quality, it seems that we need a way to introduce participants with multiple choices and provide answers (not just free text), being in the research side there is also no need to align with any specific big provider (i.e. Google, Amazon or Microsoft) unless it has a benefit, the important consideration are time, money and felxability, we would like to have a working approach in few weeks (and continuously improve it) the whole experiment will run for no more than 3-4 months. We do need to be able to extract all the data. We are not sure about which channel is best for such study WhatsApp? Website? Other? and what are the involved complexities?
Any thoughts about the challenges and considerations about dealing with chat-bots would be valuable.
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The critical word in my question title is a.
I am not asking "what is bitcoin?". There are numerous articles that show up when a Google search is performed with that question, and they all involve in summarizing what decentralized currency means, what the blockchain is, how mining generally works etc.
However I find that none actually answer the question of "what is a bitcoin"?
If my child were to ask me "what is a dollar"?, I can pull out a one dollar bill or coin for him to hold and examine.
What can I give him to examine when he asks me what a bitcoin is? (Not counting the physical bitcoin makers) Is there a string of digits I can print out and say "this! this is a bitcoin!" , or do I point to some entry on a public ledger and say "there! That's a record of Dad's bitcoin!"
Essentially, I would like to know, what is the actual tangible representation of a bitcoin, or any cryptocurrency unit?
Basically, a bitcoin can be seen as a measure of work - of "mining" - done by other users. As you probably already know, the entire bitcoin system is pretty much depends on it's users constantly doing difficult computations, sealing and ensuring transactions between users. To ensure that users keep doing those computations (which are quite expensive, by the way, mostly due to electricity and hardware costs), for every block made it's creators are awarded a certain amount of bitcoins, simply for the mere presence of their block in the blockchain. To own a bitcoin is to being able to say "I've been given this bitcoin by that guy, who got it from that guy, who got it from that guy, who got it from lets-skip-these-hundreds-of-transactions from the guy who made that block (very deeply buried inside the blockchain by now) which means he was either very lucky or had a lot of computing power to make that lucky hash and release the block before others could do it". And since every user has a full copy of blockchain on their computer (hopefully correct and agreed by majority), every single transaction ever made can be traced to the source - to the bitcoins awarded for mining a block - and your claim can be easily verified.
Although that's a little bit simplified - since, as in practice, transactions are done in tiniest fractions of bitcoins, the bitcoins you have will most likely originate from different block makers, but in general the concept is the same.
Bitcoin is generated as a compensation for mining (running cryptographic calculations to maintain the integrity of transactions within the bitcoin network).
Every block in the blockchain has a specific value (in amounts of bitcoin) and this value is attributed to the bitcoin address(es) who submitted this block successfully.
From the bitcoin wiki:
The number of Bitcoins generated per block starts at 50 and is halved every 210,000 blocks (about four years).
Their value to the outside world depends on what people agree it’s worth (free market if you will).
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I run a website where users can upload art images and photographs. Now, I am looking for a photo printing API to sell printed products to visitors. I want to do this entirely from my own app, under my own domain. Basically, I need something similar to Google Cloud Print, but I really need high quality print products, like large canvases and aluminium prints. This print service would preferably be globally available and at least take care of the actual printing, international shipping and - if I would be really lucky - also customer service.
So far, I have not been very successful, because most print facilities do not have a very user-friendly API and/or require a minimum number of orders that is completely ridiculous. Suggestions are welcome!
Take a look at https://www.kite.ly for mobile print SDK's and RESTful print API offerings.
Full disclosure: I'm cofounder of the company so a little biased, but our products and offerings also happen to be really really good (especially from a developer integration point of view) so I'll take any chance to shout about it ;)
We're all about high quality, beautiful personalised products and we're adding new ones all the time: Photo Prints, Magnets, Postcards, Posters, Stickers, Phone cases, etc, etc...
REST Print API: https://www.kite.ly/docs/1.1/
iOS Print SDK: https://github.com/OceanLabs/iOS-Print-SDK
Android Print SDK: https://github.com/OceanLabs/Android-Print-SDK
Several of our partners also have millions of users hitting our services so you'll be in good company!
Here's a peek at our iOS Print SDK (Android is similar, and REST API is naturally without UI and for more advanced use cases):
Try Peecho. The Peecho Simple Print API allows developers to build professional printing functionality entirely in their own apps, with a very simple REST API to place print orders through Peecho's cloud print network. It is prepaid, so you can build all screens yourself, including checkout and payment (so you can decide on your own pricing and profit). There is no minimum order volume - you can start with 1 piece.
If your website has photos in a gallery, it may be faster to just implement the javascript-based Simple Print Button. The Simple Print Button allows digital publishers to sell their content in print, by adding a single line of code to their website. It includes checkout and payment, so there will be less effort for you.
For both services, Peecho offers a dashboard for order management and tracking, worldwide production in print facilities like CEWE COLOR and RPI Print, international shipping and delivery and even customer service. Products range from hardcover books to premium quality wall decoration like aluminium prints, as offered by for example Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
Take a look at the Printchomp Print API http://printchomp.com/api . The now have over 10,000 printers across North America including photo printing on demand. The Printchomp Print API is truly restful and has adopted Hypertext Application Language (HAL) to make consumable and explorable. All API calls and responses are very consistent making it easy to program with.
There is also http://print.milkbooks.com/ They are a single image print API that is plugs easily into any platform. Margins are high as is price point but that is offset by the super high quality of the product. You have control of the RRP so you can reduce price at any time. Once the user has ordered a book you no longer have any involvement in the process as they handle everything, from payment to a full refund even if damaged during transit.
With an extensive product range from single art prints to notecards, canvases to gallery frames and photo books including a range of Moleskine options the variety is surprisingly varied considering they are reputed to be a specialist artistic book publisher.
The API is simple to integrate, requires no investment on your part, is multi platform, handles all aspects of the order process. The API is scalable as it is handled by Amazon Web Services so grows with your company. It's customizable as you can develop your own range of products however this does require some investment on your part and because they have adopted a https always on policy, security is pretty tight too.
There is also http://www.theprintersinc.co.uk/ They have a RESTful API as well, no sign-up fees, worldwide delivery and no minimum orders. In fact your app can still make orders even if your account balance has got to zero. Your orders would be placed on hold until you top up your account. They print on 12 Giclee fine art printers and can print from A5 prints to a whopping 60" x 40" canvas... They also have free UK delivery as well.
It's commonly agreed that successful software development is as much about teamwork and communication as it is about individual programming expertise. Given this, one might assume that by operating a geographically distributed team you are at an immediate disadvantage to a tight-knit team all working locally.
When my startup company was founded, we couldn't afford shared office space and I was actually located in a different city to the rest of the team, so we all had to work remotely and use tools such as Basecamp, Skype and Trac to communicate. One the whole, this was really successful - we got a huge amount of quality work done in a short space of time and launched a successful product. Working remotely gave our developers the time and space they needed to focus on the job and be productive without having interruptions or enduring office politics. To me, this is a huge advantage.
Given my experience, as well as the success of software companies with distributed teams such as 37signals and StackOverflow (and I'm sure many more), I'm increasingly of the opinion that the advantages of running a distributed team outweighs those of running a centralised team, especially for start-up companies.
Would you agree?
Given my experience, as well as the
success of software companies with
distributed teams such as 37signals
and StackOverflow (and I'm sure many
more), I'm increasingly of the opinion
that the advantages of running a
distributed team outweighs those of
running a centralised team, especially
for start-up companies.
Would you agree?
I half agree.
Running a distributed team definitely has its disadvantages. As you pointed out in your own post, communication is a big problem. There are times, as a developer, I enjoy just bouncing ideas off other developers and swapping ideas that I may not have thought up on my own. In addition, it can be tough to get feedback or to perform code reviews (practices that I have found useful in my development experience).
With that said, I also think there is an advantage to a distributed team. The biggest of these being that developers tend to do better when they can focus and just develop and not have to worry about being interrupted or having to attend frequent meetings, etc. This was a huge advantage at one job I had at a smaller company.
In your specific situation, have you considered that one reason you were so successful was not because you were geographically dispersed, but you were successful because you're a small company? Small companies have an advantage in that you have a limited number of products, there tends to be more focus, and, as a result, you can maintain a better control over your products/schedules/etc.
That's my 2 cents.
I agree that offices are quite distracting due to noise and interruptions. But the distractions that hinder you are the other side of the coin to the ability to ask people around you questions. Although I've not tried remote working for more than a few days at a time, the inability to get an answer to a quick question in 30s is the main disadvantage that I see.
Like-for-like comparisons that might give us empirical data are very hard to do, arguably practically impossible. So that gives us the licence to speculate, right?
My pet theory is that any sufficiently talented and motivated team can make most any system, method, geographical dispersion work.
I totally agree. An office environment provides mainly distractions and opportunities to waste time and look busy. A distributed team doesn't have to pay rent, they can deduct part of their own rent or mortgage from their taxes, and they can recruit talent from virtually anywhere in the world (instead of trying to find capable RoR developers in East Bumwipe, Oklahoma).
Are you a regular reader of Joel Spolsky's blog?
Joel described the centralized offices they have set up in order to increase productivity.
More than enough room for each developer, so they can walk up and down for a while whenever a bug haunts one of them. :)
Separated offices. During work hours, only the developer and the given task exist. Nothing else.
Sound-proof walls. (As far as I can remember.) Generally useful to provide full control over work space. Devs can listen to music without headphones, for example.
As you can see, FogCreek has managed to combine most advantages of remote work, while still keeping live communication as an option.
However, due to lack of teleportation, this customized and professional office is yet to solve the problem of different world-wide locations.
From personal experience I am much more productive when working remotely. I lose the sense that someone is staring over my shoulder, criticizing me for being lazy when I'm really just taking a moment to collect my thoughts.
I also appreciate not having a commute, even if I'm only saving 20 minutes each way it's a huge load off of my back, plus I don't have to dress to be in the office so I save time getting ready in the morning.
I've found that it's fairly easy to mitigate the communication issues by implementing a certain time during the day to be online, we had people on the east and west coast so we had people stay online between 1-4p EST. Also, just making sure that everyone has each other's phone numbers was a good thing, there were many problems that could be resolved with a quick phone call.
I wish that more businesses would support remote developers, I'm in an office right now and I feel that being here is so wasteful. I could get more done in less time without the distractions involved, and would have a better ability to manage my time.
Pros: You can hire the person you like instead of sticking with those available in the neighborhood.
Cons: It can be difficult to communicate if your team members live in various time zones.
I think a start up works best if the core team are physically close in space. As the team grows and the product and processes matures remote work gains traction in my experience. During that critical first year there can't be too much communication between developers and founders.
Once the startup has real direction and good processes in place remote working becomes very effective.
Certainly having some developers working remotely saves real money in overhead costs and makes everyone happy if its possible.
In my startup a lot of our work requires direct physical interaction with expensive equipment, so we can't all be virtual. Some of us can, and our remote developers are good contributors.
I've been working for US based companies from my country for about 4 years (as of Feb 2014). The experience has been very rewarding, and I feel now absolutely comfortable doing my job remotely, but there is a learning curve that needs to be endured, which cannot be overlooked. There are so many subtleties to communication that suddenly get lost when chatting over skype or sending emails. A whole level of information brought by body language and the sheer empathy that comes from knowing personally the person you're dealing with. Over time, you learn strategies around that, but there's no denial that it is a learning process.
Also, even though sometimes having the team working on the same office is perceived as distraction-prone, in my view, it also fosters a more dynamic environment, where ideas flow more freely and faster. It also encourages a "team-attitude" towards problem solving, which is great for consistency.
I think the best approach, whenever possible, is having a bit of both - work a few days from home, so people can focus and self organize their time, and then work a few days on the same office so that they are still part of a team, instead of islands in isolation.