Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Parking ticket chatbot expands to all 50 US states
 Updated, July 14, 2017: DoNotPay, an automated chatbot that produces formal-sounding letters for contesting parking tickets and other basic legal issues, has been updated to support the legal nuances of all 50 US states.

DoNotPay first emerged in 2016 as an automated parking ticket appeal chatbot for London and New York with a success rate of over 60 percent. Seattle was the next city to be added, and today the service spans the UK and US. Apparently more than 375,000 parking tickets, totalling £7.2 million, have now been successfully appealed.

In total, DoNotPay now has over 1,000 separate chatbots that generate formal-sounding documents for a range of basic legal issues, such as seeking remuneration for a delayed flight or train, reporting discrimination, or asking for maternity leave. If you divide that by 51 (US and UK) you get a rough idea of how many different topics are covered. Each bot had to be hand-crafted by the British creator Joshua Browder, with the assistance of part-time and volunteer lawyers to ensure that the the documents are actually fit for purpose.

There is one small wrinkle, though: DoNotPay is so popular that it can't keep up with demand, and thus it doesn't currently work. The bot's creator, Joshua Browder, tells Ars that everything should be back to normal in the next few hours: "It's overloaded at the moment, but I'm working around the clock to fix it. It's hard because it's free and sometimes servers crash from so many people trying it out." Update: DoNotPay is back up and running.

The video at the top of the story gives you a good idea of how DoNotPay works. Read on for an interview with Browder from August 2016.

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Original story (August 2016)

The young British coder whose simple "robot lawyer" chatbot has overturned more than 170,000 unlawful parking tickets in the UK and America has set his sights on solving homelessness by providing people with basic legal advice.

An update to his DoNotPay bot works by asking users a simple set of questions about their circumstances, before advising them on the best course of action—often helping them draft an effective form letter to apply to their local councils for emergency housing. Councils have to take every letter seriously, and using Freedom of Information requests, he's researched the best ways to prompt them into acting on his bot's clients' behalf.

The bot's creator, Joshua Browder, a 19-year-old Brit studying at Stanford University in California, told Ars that since the update launched last Wednesday "almost every local government in the UK has signed up for the website."

"I can see on the back end that they are actively trying out the service for themselves," he added. He's also working with Centrepoint, one of the UK's largest and most recognisable homelessness charities, with volunteer lawyers helping out to finesse the legal advice his bot provides.

DoNotPay was originally a chatbot which simply advised people on the best ways to legally get out of parking tickets issued by local authorities in London and New York. He says the service has a success rate of about 64 percent, appealing more than £3 million of fines.

Soon, however, a service which started as a simple way for him and his friends to avoid tickets they couldn't afford to pay evolved into something more significant. First he adapted it to help people claim back money for delayed flights and trains, and then PPI claims as well. But then he began to realise he might be able to make a tool for proper social change.

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"Since the success of the robot in appealing parking tickets, users began contacting me, assuming I could personally help with a whole range of issues," he told Ars. "I started to receive a large number of messages about evictions and repossessions, and noticed that they were at the highest levels ever recorded. I felt bad that I didn't have the knowledge to personally help people, especially since they were being made homeless.

The bot asks basic questions to ensure someone is eligible—e.g. "do you have a legal right to live here?"—and to uncover specifics which might make a difference—e.g. "are you or someone you live with pregnant?"

"What is most exciting for me is not only that it is completely free (currently the only alternative is to pay a lawyer hundreds of dollars), but also that it will write the letter to maximise the applicant's chances," Browder said. "For example, it will rearrange the letter to focus on how a mental illness means that an application should be a priority."

Browder, who is from London, has been volunteering at various human rights organisations for the past five years by creating iPhone apps for them; it was during this period that he realised that bots could "help make a huge difference in improving the world." He doesn't make any money from the service, which is currently only available in the UK.

His next project will focus on immigration, especially on Syrian refugees in the UK. He said: "There is so much prejudice in the world towards refugees, with disgraceful candidates like Donald Trump, but I think that everyone has the right to be safe."

Now read about the AI chatbot that (almost) lets you speak to the dead...

Tom Mendelsohn contributed to this report

Output: Automated appeal chatbot DoNotPay has been revamped to encompass all 50 states in the US, adapting to the legal specificities of each region. The bot was created in 2016 as a parking ticket appeal service, but now has more than 1,000 distinct chatbots that generate official-sounding documents for a range of issues, including compensation appeals following a transport delay, discrimination reports and maternity leave requests. Since starting in London and New York, it has grown exponentially to cover the UK and US, and has recovered £7.2m ($9.4m) in appeals against parking ticket fines.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Credit defaults rising in the UK: BoE
 Banks have reported the biggest surge in the number of customers missing loan repayments since the financial crisis.

In the most worrying sign yet that household debt is out of control, high street lenders informed the Bank of England that default rates have soared on credit cards, personal loans, overdrafts and car finance.

Default rates on credit cards are expected to get even worse over the summer. According to the Bank of England's latest Credit Conditions Survey, 24.4 per cent more lenders reported default rates on credit cards rising rather than falling over the last three months.

Worrying: High street lenders informed the Bank of England (pictured) that default rates have soared on credit cards, personal loans and car finance.

This is the highest figure since the start of 2009, shortly after the taxpayer bailouts of RBS and Lloyds.

The picture is even more worrying on other unsecured borrowing, including personal loans and car finance, with 30.3 per cent more lenders reporting an increase in customers missing repayments.

These are the worst figures since the height of the credit crisis at the end of 2008. Almost £200billion in consumer credit is owed in total – an average of around £7,700 per household – and this figure does not even include mortgages.

Lenders have told the Bank of England they intend to crack down on consumer credit over the next three months to rein in risky lending. To tackle the problem, they revealed plans to reduce interest-free introductory periods on so-called 'teaser rate' credit cards.

The Bank has already raised concerns these deals are helping to fuel Britain's borrowing binge, by allowing customers to pay no interest on existing debt for up to 43 months.

Some cards also allow people to make interest-free purchases for two years or more, encouraging them to rack up more debt. This is the first time lenders have signalled a crackdown on these deals since the Bank of England started asking about them at the start of 2015.

Unsustainable: Wes Streeting (left), a Labour member of the Treasury Select Committee, said: 'For some time there have been warnings that the rise in unsecured borrowing is becoming unsustainable and Britain is on the brink of a household debt crisis'

Banks fear many customers will be unable to pay off these debts – particularly when interest rates finally rise from record lows. Rising inflation has also led to a fall in real wages, which is putting household budgets under pressure.

Wes Streeting, a Labour member of the Treasury Select Committee, said: 'For some time there have been warnings that the rise in unsecured borrowing is becoming unsustainable and Britain is on the brink of a household debt crisis.

'These figures confirm that this debt crisis has arrived, with a rise in people defaulting on their debts even before a rise in interest rates.

'We have a perfect storm here of rising borrowing, rising inflation and a rise in interest rates coming down the track.'

Lenders insisted they have become stricter about who they offer credit since the start of the year. But the Bank's latest figures show short-term household debt growing at its fastest pace in 12 years.

It has ordered lenders to come clean about the high-risk loans on their books and warned they will face disciplinary action if they do not set out plans to address concerns by the end of September.

In a damning report published earlier this month, it revealed reckless banks are failing to carry out basic checks on new customers' debts before offering them more loans and credit cards.

The Bank said many of the biggest lenders have no idea how much debt existing borrowers have racked up, and whether they could cope if mortgage repayments rise.

Former pensions minister Baroness Altmann said: 'This rise in default rates on loans and credit cards is another siren warning of trouble ahead for over-indebted consumers. Action to curb irresponsible lending should have been taken long ago.'

Output: The Bank of England (BoE) has predicted that UK consumers will continue to default on their credit card debts in the coming months. Roughly 25% of lenders in the country have reported rising rates of default in the past three months, according to the BoE's most recent credit conditions survey. The figure is the highest since early 2009 and, as a result, lenders have told the central bank that they plan to rein in risky lending in the coming quarter.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Tophatter auction site looks for new users away from Facebook
 Back when real-time auction app Tophatter was founded in 2012, it spent as much as 95% of its user acquisition budget on Facebook.

But with a solid user base of around 12 million registered users, it’s been making a concerted effort to mix up its UA strategy.

“In the beginning, Facebook was a big gorilla, but it’s also a little risky to rely on one network for all of your traffic,” said Ragnar Gudmundsson, Tophatter’s VP of growth and marketing. “We have limited resources and we have a big initiative to diversify away from Facebook.”

Moving away from Facebook helps keep CPMs down by not “putting too much pressure on any one acquisition channel,” he said.

With Facebook “well under” half of Tophatter’s UA budget, the rest of its spend is distributed among a small number of larger mobile ad networks, including YouAppi, which Tophatter leverages to acquire profitable users based on internal KPIs, like cost for first purchase.

Tophatter doesn’t put a cap on the budget it sends to YouAppi, where it’s seen solid results on the cost for first purchase KPI.

For Gudmundsson and his team,to extract value from its paid UA efforts, they need to see newly acquired users to download and convert on day one. That’s also how it knows an acquisition source is working.

Tophatter, which also works with Google, Taboola and Outbrain on acquisition, monetizes in a similar manner to eBay – it gets a commission anytime something is sold on the platform – but the auctions go down at hyperspeed, taking 90 seconds from the first bid to the last.

“Over time, we’ve learned what to look for,” Gudmundsson said. “We know that most of our customers convert on the first day they register. We also know that their activity over the first three days following registration is a proxy for how long they’ll stay overall.”

Tophatter is aggressive with its paid efforts. The majority of its profits are immediately reinvested back into marketing. The quicker the payback, the faster Tophatter can put the money “back into the acquisition machine,” Gudmundsson said.

As Tophatter’s user acquisition strategy matures and Facebook has continued to recede as a traffic source, Tophatter is becoming increasingly selective in how it chooses its ad network partners.

In the early days, Tophatter was willing to test almost anyone that came along, which it why it ended up working with heaps of small ad networks, most of which had limited scale.

Now, Tophatter has a more rigorous process to put potential partners through their paces. Networks need to exhibit a proven track record of working at scale with other ecommerce clients, show how quickly they’re able to ramp up spend, explain how they optimize the traffic they send and demonstrate that they’ll be able to easily ingest Tophatter’s data.

“Of course, it’s not a perfect vetting process,” Gudmundsson said. “The reality is that we generally don’t end up using nine out of 10 partners we try out on a long-term basis. But we do need to keep actively testing. We’re looking for at least one or two successes each quarter with good scale.”

Output: Real-time consumer auction site Tophatter has reduced the proportion of its user acquisition budget that it spends on Facebook from 95% to less than half, as it actively moves away from the social media giant. Instead, Tophatter has sought out a small number of larger mobile ad networks, working with Google, Taboola and Outbrain on acquiring profitable users based on key performance indicators including cost for first purchase. Networks need to demonstrate they can work at scale, optimise the traffic they send and make use of Tophatter's data.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Norwegian broadcaster's real-time use of Instagram draws in teens
 As TV ratings continue to take a beating, broadcasters are searching for ways to keep audiences — particularly hard-to-reach teenagers — engaged in their shows. For Norway’s public service broadcaster, NRK, this meant putting Instagram at the heart of its popular teen drama, “Skam.”

“Skam,” which means “shame,” followed a fictional group of teens at school in a suburb of Norway’s capital, Oslo. Scenes from their lives, plus social media posts, were published in real time throughout the week, so if a scene from the show occurred at midnight on New Year’s Eve, that’s when it went live online. Each week, a compilation episode about 20 minutes long aired on TV and online. The final episode of the fourth — and last — series, aired on June 24.

By the end of the fourth series, “Skam” clips online were fetching 1.2 million unique users on NRK’s site, according to the broadcaster, roughly a fifth of the country’s population.

Part of this success came from the social media activity of the show’s characters. All 15 characters have their own Instagram accounts, with some amassing 800,000 followers, and group chats and text messages were regularly posted online.

“The goal was to make a show that could mirror the target group,” said NRK producer Mari Magnus, who manages all the accounts. “NRK didn’t have the 16-year-old anywhere on the platform; [teenagers] didn’t trust NRK to make anything for them. As a public broadcaster, that’s a problem because you have to be there for everyone.”

During the show’s research phase, NRK frequently heard phrases like “Instagram is a big part of my identity” or “I am 100 percent myself on Instagram.” It was an obvious choice to use social media in the story or distribution, Magnus added.

For “Skam,” the Instagram posts and the group chats between characters offered storylines that aren’t crucial to the main narrative but added to the characters’ development. The number of posts Magnus published was fluid and depended on the nature of the lead character, which changed each season. The lead in the third season, Isak, struggles to deal with his sexuality and starts to retreat and shut out his friends. His lack of Instagram posts reflected this, said Magnus.

“’Skam’ is handmade to be watched day by day, also weekly,” she said. “We want to get audience engaging with the [show’s] universe.”

According to Magnus, the number of unique users watching “Skam” online kept climbing, even though viewing figures for the weekly episodes started to decline. More people moved from watching weekly episodes to daily clips.

The characters also posted on Instagram about things happening in the real world, like tributes to Manchester after the terrorist attack or videos of Melania and Donald Trump. This gave a snapshot of the show’s universe in a way that blurred the lines between fiction and reality.

“The target group immediately and intuitively understood the concept; they knew it was just fiction but continued to engage with the posts like [the characters] were their real friends,” said Magnus. “People grow up with so much competence and intuitively understand digital storytelling.”

Shows have often used social media as a way of adding additional information. The BBC, which broadcast “Sherlock,” published blog posts sidekick John Watson wrote, but often the efforts felt like what they were — thinly veiled marketing tools.

Magnus doesn’t think it’s important to define whether Instagram was used for promoting “Skam” or enhancing the story. “They work so well together: Instagram is creating a buzz and also telling a story.”

Fans’ interaction and comments factored into the show’s digital activity, too. Toward the end of the fourth season, single Instagram posts were getting 1,500 comments. When Noora, one of the main characters, is waiting for a love interest to text her back, a fan commented on Noora’s Instagram account that she couldn’t study for her exams until Noora received an answer from him. “I took that line and wrote that in a chat between Noora and her friends,” said Magnus. “The fans recognize [their influence on the show] immediately — it gives them the illusion of power; they feel like they have been seen and understood.”

Image courtesy of NRK

Output: Social media site Instagram has provided Norway’s public service broadcaster NRK with a way to engage and maintain teenage audiences that it couldn't have done with traditional broadcasting. NRK made the site part of popular soap opera Skam (which translates as "Shame"), with character pages and daily clips featuring on Instagram eventually attracting 1.2 million unique users – a fifth of Norway's population. All 15 of the show's characters have their own Instagram accounts.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Circular economy may exacerbate environment problems
 The circular economy’s June jamboree in Finland, attended by around 1,500 experts and policymakers, showed just how much momentum the concept has gained in recent years.

Little wonder. The circular economy model – which aims to use closed-loop production to keep resources in play for as long as possible – is presented as a pragmatic, win-win solution; an almost magical fix for our environmental woes.

As well as easing climate change, resource depletion and waste, its backers promise economic growth and job creation too. Big business can continue to flourish, buoyed by “new opportunities” and “expanding markets”.

But this vision ignores the fact that on a finite planet endless economic growth is not an option. And it fails to see that solving our ecological crises means diluting the power of global corporations – not propping them up.

One of the tenets of the circular economy is the idea that closing material and product loops will prevent primary production. But recent research published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology concludes that circular economy activities can actually increase overall production, “partially or fully offset[ting] their benefits”.

This suggests that the circular economy suffers from a similar rebound effect to energy-efficiency strategies. Just as more efficient coal plants can lead to lower coal prices and therefore higher demand for coal, more efficient use of materials can make products cheaper and therefore more appealing. While technical changes succeed in lowering the per-unit impact, overall the environmental benefit is largely offset by economic growth.

The architect and thinker Walter Stahel has proposed a shift from taxing labour to taxing non-renewable resources, which could mitigate the rebound effect while offering a solution to structural unemployment. But since big business is suspicious of new taxes and higher material costs, this approach is not encouraged by the circular economy’s key advocates.

Corporate interests are served by the circular economy in other ways too. Take one of its most widely hailed features, the business trend towards offering services rather than selling ownership. Sharing underused items, like children’s shoes or DIY tools, may save money and materials. But a “sharing economy” put in place and dominated by large corporations also increases corporate power and can exacerbate inequalities and dependencies. Just consider the precarious working conditions of Uber and delivery drivers.

Intertwined crises

The shaping of the circular economy should not be left to global corporations. It has to be owned by citizens and an enlightened civil society, and it has to acknowledge the fact that complex problems do not have easy solutions.

Our environmental crises are intertwined with the crises of inequality, migration and democracy, and none of these can be solved in isolation. Maximising recycling and re-use of materials is necessary, but cannot be a cure-all.

To truly flourish, the circular economy needs to be part of a bigger effort to tackle economic growth, wasteful consumerism and undemocratic power structures in the global economy. It needs to be geared to the real needs of all people rather than the excessive consumption of a few, and to be underpinned by more cooperative mechanisms rather than controlled by a small number of powerful companies.

Imagine an Airbnb owned by its users rather than a profit-seeking company with quasi-monopoly status, providing value for participants rather than venture capitalists and private equity funds. Without pressure to maximise growth and profits, such an organisation could be a champion for equality and resource efficiency.

Or think of a world with widespread networks of community gardens, repair cafes and time banks – where individuals can provide services, track and bank their hours and then spend those hours to get their own needs met – and where the introduction of a universal basic income has made participation in such activities realistic for ordinary people.

In such a vision, global corporations might still exist, but would play a much less dominant role than today. Peer-to-peer economic co-operation or local and regional community-led production and consumption models would thrive, helping to support a less growth-dependent and more sustainable economic system.

Only once the circular economy is embedded in such a holistic framework will it be worthy of the buzz it is generating.

Output: The circular economy, which proposes closed-loop production as a means of combating climate change, resource depletion and waste whilst also supporting economic growth, may see its benefits offset by increased production, according to an op-ed in The Guardian. A “rebound effect” could see increasingly efficient use of materials reducing costs and making products more appealing. Likewise, increased economic growth may counter environmental benefits. Walter Stahel’s proposal to tax non-renewable resources could mitigate rebound, but business is suspicious of such a suggestion. To succeed, the circular economy must be part of wider efforts to tackle growth, consumerism and undemocratic power structures.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Redrow [4]: Housing and extra care facility plans lodged by Redrow for Telford site
 Redrow Homes has acquired the major scheme to construct 92 houses and a 50-suite extra care facility on land between Arleston Lane and Dawley Road that was given the green light last year.

Councillors pushed for the original proposals to be amended over concerns about the design of the new 18-acre estate on land near Arleston Manor, including the number of parking spaces for staff at the care unit that will be operated by Fair Home Group, and reducing the number of houses from 103 to 92.

A new report to Telford & Wrekin Council show changes made include the creation of a footpath linking nearby residential street Kingsland and the removal of a grass strip behind plots 10 and 14 due to concerns over future maintenance, and the installation of chicanes near the cleaning products factory Serchem Ltd, in Heathersett.

In addition the proposed houses to be built near near existing properties, in Arleston Manor Mews, will have detached garages instead of integral garage space.

Redrow’s technical director Mark Marsh today confirmed that the latest application relates to a previously approved scheme which it has now taken on.

“It’s a great opportunity in an area where Redrow has a reputation for providing quality new homes," he said.

“We’re seeking consent to build 92 of our arts & crafts inspired Heritage Collection homes on land at Arleston Lane. This is a slight reduction from what has previously been approved and would offer a choice of two to four-bedroom homes, with an anticipated finished value of around £30 million.

“The proposed extra care facility, to be developed by a specialist supplier, will include a shop and gym, which home owners and other local residents would be able to use.”

Fair Home Group will run the extra care centre which is being proposed in lieu of affordable homes at the 18-acre development which is situated to the rear of Wrekin Retail Park. The facility will feature 24 one-bedroom flats and 26-two bedroom flats. The communal area will comprise a shop, restaurant, a meeting room, a salon, laundry and scooter charging area.

In April 2016 councillors deferred a decision on the plans to allow case officers to work with the applicants to improve the design. Plans for the development was given outline permission, and members of the committee were expected to approve the layout. But members of the planning committee said they were concerned that there was not enough parking for staff working at the care centre complex, that the design of the extra care facility would struggle to attract potential operators, and that it would dominate the landscape of the Arleston area.

Output: Redrow is seeking consent for changes to a previously approved scheme, looking to build 92 Heritage Collection homes and a 50-suite extra care facility - which is being proposed instead of affordable homes - on land at Arleston Lane, Telford. The anticipated finished value is around £30m. Specialist supplier, Fair Home Group, will run the extra care centre which will comprise of 24 one- and 26 two-bedroom flats, a shop, restaurant, meeting room, salon, laundry and scooter charging area. The shop and gym will be available for use by home owners and other local residents. The 18-acre development is situated to the rear of Wrekin Retail Park.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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MXene electrode promises super-capacitor speed battery charging
 Imagine fully charging a cell phone in just a few seconds. Now, Researchers from Drexel University’s College of Engineering have moved a big step forward in making this reality with their latest work unveiling of a new battery electrode design in the Nature Energy journal.

Drexel researchers developed electrode designs using MXene that allow for much faster charging because they open up paths for ions to quickly travel within the material. Credit: Drexel University

The group, headed by Yury Gogotsi, PhD, Distinguished University and Bach Professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, developed the new electrode designs from a two-dimensional, highly conductive material called MXene. Their design could help make energy storage devices, such as batteries, viewed as the plodding tanker truck of energy storage technology, just as quick as the speedy supercapacitors that are used to deliver energy in a pinch, often as a battery back-up or to deliver quick bursts of energy for things like camera flashes.

This paper refutes the widely accepted dogma that chemical charge storage, used in batteries and pseudocapacitors, is always much slower than physical storage used in electrical double-layer capacitors, also known as supercapacitors. We demonstrate charging of thin MXene electrodes in tens of milliseconds. This is enabled by very high electronic conductivity of MXene. This paves the way to development of ultrafast energy storage devices than can be charged and discharged within seconds, but store much more energy than conventional supercapacitors. Yury Gogotsi, PhD, Distinguished University and Bach Professor, Drexel’s College of Engineering

The key to fast-charging energy storage devices is in the electrode design. Electrodes are vital components of batteries, through which energy is stored at the time of charging and from which it is distributed to power electronic devices. Therefore, the perfect design for these components would be one that enables them to be rapidly charged and store more energy.

In order to store more energy, the materials must have places to put it. Electrode materials present in batteries provide ports for charge to be stored. These ports are called “redox active sites” in electrochemistry, and they hold an electrical charge when each ion is delivered. Therefore, if the electrode material has more ports, it can store more energy — which connects to a battery with more “juice.”

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Partners Zifeng Lin and Patrice Simon, PhD, from Université Paul Sabatier in France, created a hydrogel electrode design with more redox active sites, which enables it to store as much charge for its volume as a battery. This capacity measure, called “volumetric performance,” is a vital metric for judging the utility of various energy storage devices.

In order to make hydrogel electrode ports more attractive to ion traffic, the Drexel-led group, including investigators Maria Lukatskaya, PhD, Sankalp Kota, a Graduate Student in Drexel’s MAX/MXene Research Group headed by Michel Barsoum, PhD, Distinguished Professor in the College of Engineering; and Mengquiang Zhao, PhD, designed electrode architectures with open macroporosity, many small openings, in order to make each redox active sites in the MXene material easily accessible to ions.

In traditional batteries and supercapacitors, ions have a tortuous path toward charge storage ports, which not only slows down everything, but it also creates a situation where very few ions actually reach their destination at fast charging rates. The ideal electrode architecture would be something like ions moving to the ports via multi-lane, high-speed ‘highways,’ instead of taking single-lane roads. Our macroporous electrode design achieves this goal, which allows for rapid charging — on the order of a few seconds or less. Maria Lukatskaya, the First Author on the paper, who conducted the research as part of the A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute

The overarching advantage of using MXene as the material for the electrode design is its conductivity. Materials that enable rapid flow of an electrical current, like copper and aluminum, are often used in electric cables. Just like metals, MXenes are conductive, therefore, not only do ions have a wide-open path to a range of storage ports, but they can also move very rapidly to meet electrons there. Netanel Shpigel and Mikhael Levi, PhD, Research Partners from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, assisted the Drexel team to increase the number of the ports available to ions in MXene electrodes.

The use of the MXene material in battery electrodes is just the latest in a series of developments. This was discovered in 2011 by Scientists in Drexel’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Since then, Scientists have been testing them in a number of applications from energy storage to water filtering, and electromagnetic radiation shielding. This latest development is particularly important because it tackles one of the key problems the hinder the expansion of the electric vehicle industry and that has been lurking on the horizon for mobile devices.

If we start using low-dimensional and electronically conducting materials as battery electrodes, we can make batteries working much, much faster than today. Eventually, appreciation of this fact will lead us to car, laptop and cell-phone batteries capable of charging at much higher rates — seconds or minutes rather than hours. Yury Gogotsi, PhD, Distinguished University and Bach Professor, Drexel’s College of Engineering

This research was supported by Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport (FIRST) Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Office of Basic Energy Sciences; as well as the National Science Foundation and Binational Science Foundation, which supported collaborations with France and Israel, respectively.

Output: Researchers from the Drexel University College of Engineering have created a battery electrode prototype that could offer super-capacity speed charging for energy storage devices. The design utilises a two-dimensional conductive material named MXene in a hydrogel form, allowing for high-energy charging of a few seconds or less. The technology could be used in a range of applications, including water filtration and electromagnetic radiation shielding.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Australian company to print batteries on printed solar
 Originally published on RenewEconomy.

A new technology bought by battery storage firm Printed Energy promises to do what the company’s name suggests – print out ultra-thin, flexible screen-printed batteries, on top of ultra-thin flexible screen printed solar panels – and engineer another major reduction in renewable energy costs.

The company this week struck a deal with UNSW and the University of Queensland – and financial backing from the federal government – to pursue the technology and bring it to market. The $12 million R&D project received a $2 million grant from the Cooperative Research Centres Projects scheme.

The Brisbane- based Printed Energy says the “solid state” batteries that is is pursuing – and has some working prototypes – are thin and flexible and can be printed in a “roll-to-roll” process – just like a newspaper – and adapted to almost any shape.

It is unlikely to be able to be paired with existing solar technology, but it figures that if it can match this technology with printed solar panels, then it may just be able to unlock the next big thing in renewable energy.

The venture is being backed by Sunset Energy, a company better known for buying the Vales point coal fired power station in NSW for next to nothing, and for wanting to buy out the Northern and Hazelwood brown coal generators and keep them running.

Its principal, Trevor St Baker, is considered something of a maverick and contrarian in the industry. The co-founder of energy company ERM, he has argued strongly against renewable energy targets, and said last week, in response to AGL, that the “baseloading of intermittent renewables to replace coal in the foreseeable future … will just drive business out of the country.”

As recently as earlier this year, he said the 33,000GWh target would be impossible to meet, and he preferred a 20,000GWh target -which the country has already well and truly sailed past.

Still, while saying all this, St Baker has bought a Tesla, put solar on his roof, (and according to this article a gas generator in his garage), and has created an “energy innovation fund” and invested in the likes of Brisbane EV charging firm Tritium, smart energy device company Kortek; and Nth Degree.

It is Nth Degree that has developed the IP for the battery storage. But because it wants to focus on printed LEDs, it has agreed to sell the IP to another of St Baker’s portfolio companies, Printed Energy.

Rodger Whitby, CEO of Printed Energy and of the St Baker Energy Innovation Fund, says the technology is ideal for powering sensors, devices for the “Internet or Things”, disposable healthcare devices and eventually, for renewable energy.

He says that the company will focus first on “disposable” devices, like sensors and healthcare devices, which he hopes will come on to the market in the next few years. The battery storage with solar will follow later.

“We are really thinking of this type of battery in a different paradigm,” he says. “We have also got IP for printed PV – so the idea is to have a sub-strata plastic sheet, and print solar on one side and battery on the other.”

The goal is to reduce the cost of manufacturing to next to nothing – it would come out in kilometres of rolled sheets, just like a newspaper. The challenge is to ensure it has enough efficiency to produce enough power, and to store it, to make it worthwhile, and competitive with what is there now.

Given that solar costs are already down to 2.5c/kWh in the Middle East, and still falling, the challenge is there.

“It might only have a 5-year life …. so what we are thinking about is a toally different price structure,” Whitby says.

Can it be done? “We don’t know,” Whitby says. “We have got a lot of research to undertake before we answer that question.” And this research includes understanding the electro-chemical properties of the product, how it performs in various temperatures, and its lifetime.

Printed Energy says is developing a unique set of new battery chemistries using commonly available metals such as zinc and manganese oxides, along with inorganic matrix structures mixed with polymers and electrolytes. They are non-toxic and have very low flammability, but their performance is still uncertain.

Mark Hoffman, UNSW’s Dean of Engineering, said in a statement: “What’s exciting is that this technology also has immediate applications in wearables and small-scale devices.”

The first applications of the technology will be in small-scale devices, with development work in large-scale uses to be explored by the partners over the next three years, relying on Printed Energy’s proprietary designs.

UQ’s the Dow Centre will coordinate the research effort, with UQ’s Lianzhou Wang and UNSW’s Da-Wei Wang driving the development.

Reprinted with permission.

Sign up for Have a tip for CleanTechnica, want to advertise, or want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Former Tesla Battery Expert Leading Lyten Into New Lithium-Sulfur Battery Era — Podcast: I don't like paywalls. You don't like paywalls. Who likes paywalls? Here at CleanTechnica, we implemented a limited paywall for a while, but it always felt wrong — and it was always tough to decide what we should put behind there. In theory, your most exclusive and best content goes behind a paywall. But then fewer people read it! We just don't like paywalls, and so we've decided to ditch ours. Unfortunately, the media business is still a tough, cut-throat business with tiny margins. It's a never-ending Olympic challenge to stay above water or even perhaps — gasp — grow. So ... Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News Have a tip for CleanTechnica, want to advertise, or want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here I don't like paywalls. You don't like paywalls. Who likes paywalls? Here at CleanTechnica, we implemented a limited paywall for a while, but it always felt wrong — and it was always tough to decide what we should put behind there. In theory, your most exclusive and best content goes behind a paywall. But then fewer people read it! We just don't like paywalls, and so we've decided to ditch ours. Unfortunately, the media business is still a tough, cut-throat business with tiny margins. It's a never-ending Olympic challenge to stay above water or even perhaps —— grow. So ...

Output: Australian battery storage manufacturer Printed Energy aims to launch an ultra-thin flexible battery that is screen printed for use on solar panels, promising a significant reduction in renewable energy costs. The company will work alongside the University of New South Wales and the University of Queensland to bring the technology to market. The project, which has federal financial backing, will cost $12m, with $2m of that amount provided by the Cooperative Research Centres Projects schemes.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Aviva to close Essex office as it moves claims handling online
 Brokers agree technology can help claims service but Unite Union slams the job losses.

Brokers have agreed that technology can help the claims process following the announcement that Aviva is to put 120 commercial property roles at risk and close its Southend office.

It is proposing to move work carried out in its commercial property business in Southend to Perth where its property claims operations are based. The insurer has stated that more claims will be processed online.

An Aviva spokesman said: “Our strategy in property claims has always been underpinned by investing in

Output: Aviva has put 120 jobs in Essex on the line as it proposes handling more claims online. The company said it wants to close its Southend offices by May and move any leftover positions to its property claims operations centre in Perth, Scotland. Brokers said they understood the rationale behind the move. “Technology will make the service better for customers," said Brokerbility chairman Ashwin Mistry, adding that most claims were too small to require in-field investigation.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Findel [2]: Game Digital to join Findel in Mike Ashley's 'sports retailing' stakes
 The billionaire tycoon Mike Ashley has added a 25% stake in the video games retailer Game Digital to a high street shopping list that also includes Debenhams and French Connection.

Sky News has learnt that Sports Direct International, the chain controlled by Mr Ashley, is understood to have bought the stake in recent days.

A source close to Game Digital, which announced a profit warning last month because of a shortage in supplies of Nintendo's new Switch gaming console, said Sports Direct's purchase of the stake would be disclosed to the stock market this week.

It will be the latest move by the controversial Mr Ashley, who owns Newcastle United FC and has expressed an ambition to build a business empire upmarket enough to be dubbed 'the Selfridges of sports retailing'.

The tycoon, who has spent part of the last fortnight embroiled in a court case over allegations that he failed to honour a £15m payment to a former colleague, is thought to see opportunities in Game's presence in the fast-growing e-sports market.

Mr Ashley has orchestrated the acquisition of substantial stakes in Debenhams, French Connection and Findel, the home shopping retailer, through Sports Direct or personal investment vehicles.

The size of the shareholding being bought by Sports Direct will stoke speculation that Mr Ashley is planning a formal offer for Game - although he could choose to distance his company from such speculation through a formal statement that would rule out such a move for six months.

The billionaire made headlines last week when he gave evidence in a High Court case in which he described his unconventional business methods, many of which include copious amounts of alcohol.

Sports Direct has already been under close scrutiny in the City following revelations about working practices at its warehouse in Shirebrook, Derbyshire.

Advertisement

Mr Ashley has angered investors for refusing to bow to pressure to replace the company's chairman or appoint more independent board members.

His stake-building in other listed retailers, sometimes through complex financial derivatives, has also caused consternation in their boardrooms.

Game's shares closed nearly 23% higher on Wednesday at 24.25p amid speculation about higher-than-average trading activity.

The company has a market value of just £33.74m following a slump in the shares amid continued trading difficulties, including the recent profit warning.

Game trades from about 580 shops in the UK and Spain, and has sought to diversify into events, e-sports and other digital businesses as consumer trends shift shopping activity away from physical stores.

It has also been hit by the structural impact of game developers selling their products directly to consumers in order to disintermediate the profit-diluting involvement of third-party retailers.

Game's response has produced a degree of positive results, according to a statement last month.

"The board is pleased... by the initial performance of our new in-store gaming arenas, now trading out of 12 locations under the Belong banner," the company said on June 30.

Game added that it was also focused on cost reduction programmes and "significant efforts to reduce fixed and variable costs across the group's UK retail footprint, where we have over 220 lease events to manage by the end of 2018".

Sports Direct is thought to have acquired its 25% stake in Game from City institutions including Invesco.

About 40% of Game's shares are owned by Elliott Advisors, which engineered the public listing of the company's shares in 2014.

A Game spokesman declined to comment, while Keith Bishop, a spokesman for Sports Direct, did not respond to a request for comment.

Output: Sports Direct International, the chain controlled by billionaire Mike Ashley, is said to have added a 25% stake in video game retailer Game Digital. Mr Ashley has previously expressed an interest in creating 'the Selfridges of sports retailing' and has acquired substantial stakes in Debenhams, French Connection and Findel through Sports Direct or personal investment vehicles.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Regus [3]: Lack of high-quality flexible workplace space in Brighton and Hove
 Supply issues clouding otherwise sunny outlook.

High-end offices such as CityView (pictured) and Mocatta House have proved to be a big hit in Brighton.

Brighton & Hove’s office market reveals a vibrant commercial city restricted by a lack of new space.

Stiles Harold Williams Partnership LLP Brighton agency team report:

There is a total of circa 4.8million sq ft of offices in Brighton & Hove

Currently only 150,000 sq ft of this lies vacant. Much of this is low quality so the real vacancy rate is nearer 3

Space on the periphery of the city is vulnerable to residential conversion

60,000 sq ft of new Grade A office space has been given planning permission to be built by McAleer & Rushe, who were behind CityView, the highly successful new-build development adjacent to Brighton Station opened last year

CityView was the first speculative office-only new build development in the city for 20 years

Since then a further 40,000 sq ft was refurbished by Aberdeen Asset Management at Mocatta House, Trafalgar Place

Headline rents of £28 psf have been achieved, but lack of supply could stifle further mid-term growth

There has been significant growth in flexible membership workplace initiatives with offerings from Regus, Platf9rm and The Werks Group

Agency director Emma Hards said: “The office market in Brighton is strong with a real variety of occupiers looking for new space and/or expanding. There is a real lack of supply, especially of good quality space and if more were available there are the occupiers to take it! As a city it is important we look at ways to provide good quality space for occupiers in order to both keep existing business in the area and attract new business to Brighton.”

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments.

Output: Brighton and Hove has seen significant growth in flexible membership workplace initiatives with offerings from Regus, Platf9rm, and The Werks Group, according to a Stiles Harold Williams Partnership LLP Brighton agency team report. However, while headline rents of £28/sq ft have been achieved, lack of supply could hamper mid-term growth; there is roughly 4.8 million sq ft of offices in the area but limited vacant space, especially higher-quality space. Planning has been given McAleer & Rushe to build 60,000 sq ft of new Grade A office space; the group developed the new build office-only CityView, which opened last year.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Swiss bank Falcon Group to offer bitcoin services to clients
 English Russian German Spanish French Italian

Zurich, July 12, 2017 - Falcon Group is the first Swiss private bank to provide blockchain asset management solutions for its clients through the new cooperation with Bitcoin Suisse AG. Following the approval by FINMA for Bitcoin asset management, this novel product underlines Falcon's strategic repositioning, which focuses on shaping a unique experience, empowered by individual excellence and world-class digital intelligence.

Falcon Group is the first Swiss private bank to provide blockchain asset management solutions for its clients through the new cooperation with Bitcoin Suisse AG. Clients can exchange and hold Bitcoins via Falcon using their cash holdings. Our solution facilitates easy access to blockchain assets and a convenient storage process. Additionally, a Bitcoin ATM has been installed in the lobby of Falcon Private Bank's headquarters in Zurich and is accessible for the public during business hours. After an in-depth enquiry, FINMA has given its approval for the launch of this unique new product.

Arthur Vayloyan, Global Head Products & Services, Falcon Private Bank Ltd.: "Following our strategic partnership with Move Digital, a best-in-class provider of digital asset management and investment advisory systems, this is a further tangible element of our new strategy. We are proud to be the first-mover in the Swiss private banking area to provide blockchain asset management for our clients. Falcon is convinced that the time is right to enter this nascent market and it is our firm belief that this new product will fulfil our clients' future needs."

"It has been a pleasure assisting Falcon in realising this new product, which is nothing less than a historic milestone for the entire crypto space," says Niklas Nikolajsen, CEO, Bitcoin Suisse AG.

MME acted as the legal advisor and PricewaterhouseCoopers as auditor in the approval process.

# # #

Falcon Private Bank is a Swiss private banking boutique with 50 years of expertise in wealth management. We provide first-class financial services to private clients and wealthy families from our headquarters in Zurich and our locations in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, London and Luxembourg. Our clients benefit from an excellent investment competence as well as from our financial strength and stability, which results from our Swiss heritage and our government-owned shareholder.

Media contacts

Falcon Private Bank Ltd.

Gianmarco Timpanaro

Head Marketing & Communications

Phone: +41 44 227 57 47

Mobile: +41 79 404 37 73

gianmarco.timpanaro@falconpb.com

www.falconprivatebank.com

Falcon Private Bank Ltd.

Urs Fehr

Deputy Head Marketing & Communication

Phone: +41 44 227 57 45

Mobile: +41 79 694 47 65

urs.fehr@falconpb.com

www.falconprivatebank.com

Output: Switzerland's Falcon Group has become the country's first private bank to offer clients blockchain asset management solutions, in cooperation with Bitcoin Suisse, following approval by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority. As part of its strategic repositioning, Falcon has installed a bitcoin dispenser in the lobby of its Zurich headquarters.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
LexisNexis-Modus tie-up seeks to increase UBI data feeds
 HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. and ATLANTA, July 12, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a leading provider of data and analytics in insurance telematics, and Modus, a leading provider of advanced vehicle tracking systems for insurers, fleet managers and businesses, announced today a new alliance which provides insurers more options in after-market solutions to gather data and apply advanced analytics in developing and managing their UBI programs. Through this alliance, Modus is joining the LexisNexis Telematics Exchange, which will allow insurance carriers who opt in to take advantage of data from the industry and OEMs, make better decisions faster, and gain unique insights for competitive advantage.

"Vehicle telematics have become an integral part of the new wave of usage-based insurance, and it starts with having integrated flexible solutions. We have seen an increased adoption of programs using multiple data collection models simultaneously, including hardware and mobile app. These options provide more tools for driver scoring, consumer-focused value added services, and location data for personal and commercial insurers, allowing for even greater risk insights than ever before. In working with LexisNexis Risk Solutions, together we're able to provide a deeper level of data granularity and scoring to insurers and better consumer experiences no matter the data collection method," said Brandon Johnson, CEO, Modus.

"This alliance allows LexisNexis Risk Solutions to leverage core competencies, pairing the experience of Modus with telematics devices, mobile apps, and data, and our industry-leading telematics platform and some of the most the advanced data and analytics that are changing and shaping the industry," said Ash Hassib, SVP and GM, Auto and Home Insurance, LexisNexis Risk Solutions. "Our insurance customers need to be able to move quickly, properly adapt to evolving technology and optimize their programs and we're helping them do that with a high-level of service, expertise, and technological innovation."

Modus offers an innovative, scalable and flexible connected car platform to deliver driver performance data that enables insurers to identify and characterize more accurate risk profiles. The LexisNexis Telematics Exchange ingests and normalizes telematics data gathered from many data sources, including auto manufacturers (OEMs) or after-market devices such as 12-Volt, OBDII dongles and smartphone apps from companies like Modus. Once this data is compiled and normalized, LexisNexis then scores it using advanced analytics and predictive modeling specific to telematics to provide driving behavior insights for insurers. This approach allows insurers to access key data and analytics on the driver, which can help improve pricing and profitability across an insurer's entire portfolio.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions

At LexisNexis Risk Solutions, we believe in the power of data and advanced analytics for better risk management. With over 40 years of expertise, we are the trusted data analytics provider for organizations seeking actionable insights to manage risks and improve results while upholding the highest standards for security and privacy. Headquartered in metro Atlanta USA, LexisNexis Risk Solutions serves customers in more than 100 countries and is part of RELX Group, a global provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. For more information, please visit www.lexisnexisrisk.com.

About Modus

Modus is a pioneer in the wireless and vehicle telematics space with a DNA of mobile innovation, great customer experience, affordability and industry leading level of service, support and technological expertise. As one of the first vehicle telematics providers focused on the auto insurance market, Modus saw early success in this space providing telematics solutions to several top insurance carriers. Modus has broadened its offering to all aspects of telematics and leads the industry in providing the most technologically advanced, intuitive, and reliable vehicle telematics solution available. Many of the world's largest insurers, technology companies and fleet operators rely on Modus to improve their business performance. For more information, please visit www.mod.us.

SOURCE LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Related Links

http://www.lexisnexisrisk.com

Output: LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Modus have partnered to offer insurers tools to develop and manage data culled from usage-based insurance programmes. The move will see Modus integrate with LexisNexis Telematics Exchange, and will enable insurance companies greater risk insights.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Tokenisation offers added layer of security for mobile payments
 New Delhi: With increase in the number of cashless payments, customers’ financial information is increasingly at risk.

In this scenario, tokenization is emerging as an important technology to secure mobile payments, according to industry experts.

What is tokenization?

Tokenization is the process of replacing sensitive data with unique identification symbols that retain all the essential information without compromising on security.

In the payments space, tokenization is the process of replacing the 16-digit payment card account number with a unique digital token in mobile and online transactions.

Where is it used?

In the payment card industry, it can be used for mobile payments. For example, payments using mobile wallets.

Tokenization could also be enabled to work with different technologies, and has been extensively used in contactless payment applications such as magnetic technology in the case of Samsung Pay, NFC (near-field communication) in the case of Apple Pay and Android Pay, and sound-based technology of ToneTag.

Samsung Pay and Apple Pay are mobile payment services offered by Samsung and Apple, respectively. While Samsung Pay was launched in March, Apple Pay is still not available in India.

How does it work?

“If a cardholder decides to add their personal account number to a mobile device or digital wallet, Visa will issue a token behind the scenes. Then when the Visa account holder initiates transactions with mobile devices using their digital account number, the token, and not the primary account number, will be used to process the transaction, just like a traditional card payment. This process is invisible to accountholders and merchants," said Visa, in response to an emailed query from Mint.

Visa, MasterCard and American Express offer this technology in India.

Why is it important?

Tokenization is a new layer of security for digital payments without adding friction to the shopping experience. It does not require merchants to make major changes to their current payment acceptance systems. The biggest benefit to all involved is that payment card numbers are no longer used or saved where unauthorized access can occur.

For customers, this means added security and convenience. It eliminates the need to enter and re-enter the account number when shopping on a smartphone, tablet or computer.

It is safer than magnetic strips because tokens don’t carry the consumer’s primary account number, there is less risk in storing tokens on mobile devices online by e-commerce merchants, and in cloud-based mobile platforms and applications. Even if it is hacked, there wouldn’t be anything of use as it devalues the entire data.

“While speed and ease of use are the major advantages of mobile payments over cash, payment security plays an equally crucial role in ensuing that the consumers feel confident when they reach for their mobile phones to pay. This is where our Visa Token Service adds tremendous value to the mobile payments experience by protecting consumers’ payment data during transactions," said T.R. Ramachandran, group country manager, India and South Asia, Visa, in an emailed statement.

Output: Payments made via mobile wallets benefit from the extra layer of security offered by tokenisation – the use of unique identification symbols instead of the 16-digit payment card number, as tokenisation eliminates the need to save payment card numbers. The digital account number also carries no intrinsic value as tokens do not carry primary account number details and so are useless to hackers, but they ensure a secure, yet frictionless, shopping experience.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Cashlez receives $2m for point-of-sale card reader expansion
 JAKARTA -- The venture capital unit of Indonesia's largest lender by assets, Bank Mandiri, on Wednesday said it is leading a $2 million funding round for local financial technology startup Cashlez, which claims to offer a portable, more user-friendly alternative to electronic data capture machines.

This is the seventh startup investment by Mandiri Capital Indonesia, and the third offering a payment solution. Since its establishment in January 2016, MCI has invested around 300 billion rupiah ($22.4 million) in fintech startups focusing on three areas: payment options, peer-to-peer lending and the so-called small enterprise solution.

Output: Jakarta fintech start-up Cashlez has secured $2m in a funding round led by Bank Mandiri's venture capital unit. Cashlez operates a mobile point of sales system, comprising a card reader and a smartphone app, aimed at Jakarta's 56 million micro, small and medium-sized businesses whose internet connections are not always reliable. The new funds will help Cashlez target an additional 4,000 merchants and IDR50bn ($3.76m) of monthly transactions by the end of the year.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Findel Stuart Caldwell appointed Group CFO of Findel
 RNS Number : 9215K

Findel PLC

13 July 2017

13 July 2017

Findel plc ("Findel" or "the Group")

Findel appoints Stuart Caldwell as Chief Financial Officer

Findel, the online value retail and education business, is pleased to announce the appointment of Stuart Caldwell as Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO) with immediate effect.

Stuart has held the position of Acting CFO since April 2017, prior to which he was Group Financial Controller. He is a qualified Chartered Accountant and a fellow of the Association of Corporate Treasurers. After qualifying within the profession he held a number of roles with Provident Financial plc before moving to Findel in 2010.

As part of this announcement, Stuart will be appointed to the Findel plc Board.

Commenting on the appointment, Ian Burke, Chairman, said:

"I am delighted that Stuart will be taking on the role of CFO on a permanent basis. His knowledge and experience marked him out during the search process, and since joining Findel as Chairman I have been impressed with the positive actions he has undertaken to reinforce the Group finance function.

Stuart's appointment further strengthens the new management team as we focus on the delivery of our medium-term growth plans."

The Company confirms that there is no further information about Stuart Caldwell requiring disclosure under paragraph 9.6.13 (1) to (6) of the Listing Rules of the UK Listing Authority.

Enquiries

Findel plc

Ian Burke

Phil Maudsley

0161 303 3465

Tulchan Communications LLP

Susanna Voyle / Will Smith

020 7353 4200

Output: Findel has announced the appointment of Stuart Caldwell as Group CFO with immediate effect. Caldwell joined the online value retail and education business from Provident Financial in 2010, and was previously Group Financial Controller at Findel before being made Acting CFO in April 2017. He will be appointed to the board as part of the appointment.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Stony Point plant to use gasification to turn waste into fuel
 Michael D'Onofrio

The Journal News

STONY POINT - Garbage in, fuel out.

That is the aim of a recycling plant proposed for a 39-acre property on Holt Drive that would convert the region’s garbage into fuel using a gasification process.

But while some are celebrating the potential return of large-scale manufacturing to the town that supporters claim will bring jobs and tax revenue, some are casting criticism on the project that would deploy a fleet of 400 trucks a day onto the area's roads.

New Planet Energy continues to move ahead with its $700 million proposal to build a biofuel plant near the border of the Town of Haverstraw.

INVESTIGATION:Florida plant failed despite $129 million in taxpayer subsidies

RELATED:INEOS Bio selling Florida biofuel plant

The plan includes a 250,000-square-foot processing facility that will use “cutting-edge technology for sorting and separating” materials, said John Cruikshank, president of the Los Angeles-based company.

“By bringing one business like ours in, we’ll attract other businesses, which is more jobs, more taxes,” he said.

The company is wrapping up a nine-month traffic study. The original design also has been expanded, and now includes more office space and another underpass below CSX-owned railroad tracks that split the property in half.

Supervisor Jim Monaghan said he and the Stony Point Town Board support the plan “as long as it’s safe and clean for our environment.”

But Haverstraw Supervisor Howard Phillips remains unconvinced of the merits of the project.

“It doesn’t make any sense to do this in a highly populated area,” he said.

The plan

The two-phase proposal could make Stony Point a recycling mecca.

The facility would process upwards of 4,500 tons of garbage a day from municipalities in New York City and Westchester, among others, but none from Rockland.

The garbage will include the typical swill and detritus found in any municipal dump.

Every day, upwards of 200 round-trips by trucks are projected on Route 9W and the surrounding streets to haul the garbage to the facility.

Half the materials will be recycled into “solid recovered fuel,” an EPA-certified alternative fuel; the remaining material will be converted into sulfur-free diesel fuel.

The plant's gasification process will use a steam reformation system, rather than incineration.

The facility could produce as much as 20 million gallons of diesel fuel a year.

Overall, the facility will recycle upwards of 86.5 percent of the materials that enter the facility, which otherwise would be destined for a landfill.

The entire recycling process will be done in the enclosed facility and use state-of-the-art technology, Cruikshank said.

“There will be a small degree of manual labor, but nothing like a lot of the recycling facilities in years past. This will be much more automated,” he said.

The plant will create 150 jobs.

The plan is currently in the permitting process and undergoing an environmental impact study with the state Department of Conservation, the lead agency for the proposal. The study will be followed by public meetings later in the year.

If approved, the facility will be built in two phases. Cruikshank estimated the first phase of the plan could be operational by the second quarter of 2019, after which the second phase could be completed within 18 months.

The Holt Drive property is the location of the former plastic company Kay Fries.

The property is an active Superfund site, which is land identified by the Environmental Protection Agency that has been contaminated by hazardous waste.

The site is still undergoing remediation, but the bulk of the cleanup has been completed, Cruikshank said.

Too close for comfort

The recycling facility is too close for comfort for Haverstraw’s supervisor.

Phillips contends New Planet Energy was using the region as a “guinea pig” to test “unproven technology.”

The supervisor rattled off a long list of problems he foresees with the plan: Increased truck traffic that will roll through Haverstraw along Route 9W; the proximity of the processing plant to residential neighborhoods; safety issues regarding CSX train tracks on the property; and potentially harmful emissions released into the air from the plant.

“This is an inappropriate use in a residential area,” Phillips said. “The traffic will be horrendous. ... We don’t want somebody experimenting in north Rockland with a product that can be very detrimental.”

Monaghan declined to address Phillips’ concerns, but said he supported the project as long as it was sustainable, and minimally affected traffic and the environment.

The loss of large manufacturers in north Rockland has hit the area's municipal and school tax revenues hard, Monaghan said. He added it was too early to estimate tax rates for the biofuel plant.

“It would be a real significant tax benefit. This would create jobs, not only during the construction phase of the project, but also employment," Monaghan said.

George Potanovic, president of the Stony Point Action Committee on the Environment, said he remained circumspect about the project.

Potanovic tempered his support for New Planet Energy’s mission to recycle with concerns over unanswered questions about traffic, odor and noise issues, as well as projected tax revenues.

“We’re keeping an open mind about it. We think it has a lot of potential," Potanovic said.

Traffic study

So what will the recycling plant’s impact be on the area’s traffic?

“Very minimal,” Cruikshank said.

Cruikshank based his answer on a traffic study commissioned by the company, which analyzed the impact of trucks and employee vehicles on Routes 9W, 303.

The full study has yet to be submitted to the town.

The peak hours of the facility’s generators, and thereby truck traffic, are expected to be between 4 and 5 a.m. and 2 and 3 p.m.

The study found traffic volume was heaviest on 9W between 7 and 9 a.m., and 4 and 6 p.m.

At more than a dozen intersections, traffic was projected to increase by 5 seconds or less, with some ticking up slightly higher, according to a limited overview of the study given by the company at a Stony Point public meeting in June.

Phillips doubted those traffic projections.

“I don’t care what they say,” Phillips said. “(Route) 9W can be a parking lot now. It’s an old, antiquated road that isn’t suited for the users there today.”

Problem plagued Florida facility

A previous biofuel plant associated with New Planet Energy fell well short of expectations.

The company had partnered with global chemical giant INEOS to build and operate a $130 million biofuel plant in Vero Beach, Florida, which converted waste to ethanol.

But technical problems plagued the Florida facility after it opened in 2013; the plant closed in January, according to an investigation by TCPalm.com, which is part of the USA Today network.

The Florida plant was bankrolled with $129 million in grants, tax breaks and guaranteed loans, according to the report. It was unclear that the plant ever produced ethanol in significant quantities.

Cruikshank said New Planet Energy “walked away” from that Florida plant, but maintains a stake in the business as INEOS seeks to sell it.

Tom Yonge, a spokesman for New Planet Energy's Stony Point project, said it was a “business decision” by INEOS to close the plant.

New Planet Energy had “no say in the management" of the Florida plant, Cruikshank said, adding: “It just wasn’t a good fit for (INEOS)."

Cruikshank said he aims to be a “conscientious neighbor” and provide long-term solutions to the disposal of solid waste in the region.

“We have not rushed to get this done,” Cruikshank said. “We recognize the downfall of a lot of companies in this industry, and we’re not going to make that mistake. We’re doing things properly the first time and that means it takes time and more money.”

Twitter: @mikedonofrio_

Output: New Planet Energy is progressing a $700m facility that plans to turn upwards of 4,500 tonnes of rubbish a day from municipalities in New York City and Westchester, among others, into “solid recovered fuel” and sulphur-free diesel fuel. The plant uses gasification via a steam reformation system and could produce as much as 20 million gallons of diesel fuel a year. New Planet Energy is aiming to recycle at least 86.5% of the materials that enter the facility, which otherwise would be destined for landfill.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Rutgers researchers cut enzyme cost for biofuel production
 The DOE Science News Source is a Newswise initiative to promote research news from the Office of Science of the DOE to the public and news media.

Output: Researchers at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Michigan State University have developed a method for reducing the amount of enzymes needed to turn biomass into biofuels. The team has demonstrated how to design and genetically engineer enzyme surfaces so they bind less to corn stalks and other cellulosic biomass, reducing enzyme costs.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Microsoft to use unused TV channels to take the net to rural US
 WASHINGTON — Silicon Valley has dreamed up hot air balloons, drones and constellations of mini-satellites to connect the world to the internet. Now Microsoft is adding its own moonshot to solve the digital divide into that mix.

The software giant plans to announce on Tuesday that it is harnessing the unused channels between television broadcasts, known as white spaces, to help get more of rural America online. In an event at the Willard Hotel in Washington, where Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated a coast-to-coast telephone call a century ago, Microsoft plans to say that it will soon start a white-spaces broadband service in 12 states including Arizona, Kansas, New York and Virginia to connect two million rural Americans in the next five years who have limited or no access to high-speed internet.

In an interview, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, said white spaces were “the best solution for reaching over 80 percent of people in rural America who lack broadband today.”

The United States has long grappled with uneven internet access. Many remote and less-populated areas have had particular trouble obtaining fast internet service because providers often cannot justify the cost of building out infrastructure to isolated locales with few people to serve.

Output: Microsoft has announced plans to utilise the unused channels between television broadcasts, called "white spaces", to reach the 80% of rural America which currently has no broadband access – some 24 million people. The company has been developing the technology, sometimes called "Super Wi-Fi", since 2008, and is asking federal and state regulators to support the project. One issue is that the equipment required to decode the signals is expensive – around $1000 a device – but the company believes that the price point will drop to below $200 by 2018.


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AI is making cheating far easier for maths students
 Denise Garcia knows that her students sometimes cheat, but the situation she unearthed in February seemed different. A math teacher in West Hartford, Connecticut, Garcia had accidentally included an advanced equation in a problem set for her AP Calculus class. Yet somehow a handful of students in the 15-person class solved it correctly. Those students had also shown their work, defeating the traditional litmus test for sussing out cheating in STEM classrooms.

Garcia was perplexed, until she remembered a conversation from a few years earlier. Some former students had told her about an online tool called Wolfram|Alpha that could complete complicated calculations in seconds. It provided both the answers and the steps for reaching them, making it virtually undetectable when copied as homework.

Pippa Biddle is a writer interested in culture, complex systems, and making sense of the world. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

For years, students have turned to CliffsNotes for speedy reads of books, SparkNotes to whip up talking points for class discussions, and Wikipedia to pad their papers with historical tidbits. But today’s students have smarter tools at their disposal—namely, Wolfram|Alpha, a program that uses artificial intelligence to perfectly and untraceably solve equations. Wolfram|Alpha uses natural language processing technology, part of the AI family, to provide students with an academic shortcut that is faster than a tutor, more reliable than copying off of friends, and much easier than figuring out a solution yourself.

Since its release, Wolfram|Alpha has trickled through the education system, finding its way into the homework of college and high school students. Use of Wolfram|Alpha is difficult to trace, and in the hands of ambitious students, its perfect solutions are having unexpected consequences. It works by breaking down the pieces of a question, whether a mathematical problem or something like "What is the center of the United States?", and then cross-referencing those pieces against an enormous library of datasets that is constantly being expanded. These datasets include information on geodesic schemes, chemical compounds, human genes, historical weather measurements, and thousands of other topics that, when brought together, can be used to provide answers.

The system is constrained by the limits of its data library: It can’t interpret every question. It also can’t respond in natural language, or what a human would recognize as conversational speech. This is a stumbling block in AI in general. Even Siri, which relies heavily on Mathematica—another Wolfram Research product and the engine behind Wolfram|Alpha—can only answer questions in programmed response scripts, which are like a series of Mad Libs into which it plugs answers before spitting them out of your speaker or onto your screen.

Using Wolfram|Alpha is similar to executing a Google search, but Wolfram|Alpha delivers specific answers rather than endless pages of potentially relevant results. Anyone can go to the Wolfram|Alpha website, type a question or equation into a dialogue box, hit enter, and receive an answer. If you’re trying to solve x2 + 5x + 6 = 0, Wolfram|Alpha will give you the root plot, alternate forms, and solutions. If you are looking for a step-by-step explanation, there is a pro version available for $6.99/month with discounted options for students and educators.

I first heard about Wolfram|Alpha in my parents' kitchen. My father had come home from his job at a private school in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He dropped his bag on the floor, and asked me what I thought about Wolfram|Alpha. Earlier that day he had been confronted by STEM teachers who were frustrated with their students' use of the tool. It was, they said, blatant cheating. My father had left the office unsure of how to proceed. Should the school crack down on Wolfram|Alpha? Or did the school need to catch up to this new beat in education?

Output: An online tool that uses natural language processing to perform complex calculations is being used by students to cheat on assignments. The artificial intelligence (AI) programme, Wolfram Alpha, provides a methodology along with an answer to the equation, which makes it difficult for a tutor to determine whether a student has cheated. After cross-referencing a problem against a library of datasets, the system offers a specific answer as a programmed response script. However, the system is limited by incomplete data libraries and its inability to respond in natural language.


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IBM Watson shows promise in genetic analysis of brain tumours
 IBM is busy applying its Watson AI to as many health arenas as possible and it looks like cancer genomic sequencing could be its next big market.

In a new proof-of-concept study testing a beta version of its genomic sequencing-specific version of Watson, Watson for Genomics, IBM's AI has once again shown potential.

Watson for Genomics operates on the same basis as other Watson iterations, processing masses of medical literature to gather potential disease insights and potential treatment options.

The study was carried out by researchers from the New York Genome Center, The Rockefeller University, other NYGC member institutions and IBM.

It compared Watson for Genomics to a traditional genome sequencing technique in its ability to derive treatment options from the genomic data of glioblastoma patient cells.

Watson for Genomics was able to provide whole genome sequencing (WGS) data – complete with clinically actionable insights – from the tumour cells within 10 minutes.

The traditional technique took around 160 hours of manual human analysis to arrive at similar conclusions.

“This study documents the strong potential of Watson for Genomics to help clinicians scale precision oncology more broadly,” said Vanessa Michelini, Watson for Genomics Innovation Leader at IBM Watson Health. “Clinical and research leaders in cancer genomics are making tremendous progress towards bringing precision medicine to cancer patients, but genomic data interpretation is a significant obstacle, and that’s where Watson can help.”

The results from the study could be far-reaching for IBM which has been busy striking deals to deploy its Watson for Genomics technology.

In January, it revealed a partnership with Illumina to use the firm's gene sequencing data to improve cancer treatment decisions. A month later, the Jupiter Medical Center in Florida became the first US hospital to deploy Watson for Genomics.

The technology is also playing a key role in Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot 2020 initiative, specifically targeting cancer cases in US veterans.

The platform's major selling point is its ability to dramatically speed up WGS analysis. As this technique produces a complete genetic picture of a cell, WGS can potentially produce a more detailed understanding of disease-causing genetic alterations and therefore treatment options.

However, it also requires more manual analysis than traditional methods, making it a less desirable option for diseases that require quick genetic data analysis. To get this data quickly, traditional methods only analyse a limited set of genes.

But as this study suggests, adding AI could dramatically cut the time needed to gather this data and therefore produce more potential treatment options for patients, faster.

Reducing the time from genetic analysis to treatment planning is particularly critical for glioblastoma which has a median survival of less than 15 months.

Output: IBM has taken a significant step toward using genomic sequencing in the treatment of cancer patients, following a proof-of-concept study that tested a beta version of Watson for Genomics, a genomic sequencing-specific iteration of its Watson artificial intelligence system. Watson for Genomics was able to produce whole genome sequencing data and clinically actionable insights from glioblastoma brain cancer cells within 10 minutes, according to researchers from the New York Genome Center, The Rockefeller University and IBM. Traditional sequencing techniques took some 160 hours to complete. Patients diagnosed with glioblastoma survive an average of 15 months.


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POET Systems uses anaerobic digestion to turn plastic into energy
 Machine turns waste plastic into energy Environment THE first systems to use anaerobic digestion technology to turn waste plastics into energy and fertiliser are being developed in South Australia. Republish Notify me

POET Systems expects to have its first two machines – each capable of processing 20 tonnes of plastic a week – operating commercially in about 12 months.

More than one million tonnes of contaminated plastic deemed unfit for recycling is sent to landfill in Australia each year. In the United States the figure is almost 10 million tonnes.

Inventor David Thompson said his plastic to energy technology had so far successfully been applied to polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene and expanded polystyrene.

He said the anaerobic digestion process varied upon disposal feedstock and depended also upon temperature and system set up.

“The POET system prepares waste plastic in a way that microbial digestion can take place quickly and I think that’s really the key to making it a commercial opportunity,” Thompson said.

“I have already got inquiries from overseas including a large consortium in South America that is really quite interested to get involved and take the technology over there.”

POET Systems is a 2017 semi-finalist in the Australian Technologies Competition, which assesses, mentors and promotes companies providing a uniquely Australian take on the future and is open to technologies that have global potential in a range of industries.

Winners will be announced at Technology Showcases in Melbourne and Sydney in October and November.

POET is an acronym for Polymer – Organic – Energy – Treatment.

The first two POET machines will be built at wastewater treatment plants in regional areas of the Australian state of Victoria.

The same microbes will treat the plastic and the water simultaneously. The microbes then die and leave behind liquid and solid biomass, which can be used as fertiliser, and biogas, which can be separated into methane and carbon dioxide.

Thompson, who is based in the South Australian capital Adelaide, said the methane could be used to create heat and energy, possibly to power the wastewater plant, while there was also potential for the carbon dioxide to be captured and reused.

“So basically the plastics go into an anaerobic situation in wastewater where the microbes digest the plastic and create energy,” he said.

“This client in Victoria is big on wastewater treatment plants and after thinking about his methodology – there’s over 550 wastewater treatment plants in Australia and at least half of those would have anaerobic digestion facilities attached so it’s a good opportunity to go down that path.”

Thompson plans to lodge provisional patent documents for the technology in the coming weeks.

He said the system did not impact on existing recycling practices as it targeted plastics destined for landfill and would add a new revenue stream for companies in the waste industry.

“People in the waste industry have already invested heavily in infrastructure so they know how to do the business,” he said.

“If this gives them an additional opportunity to make money and take on a segment which hasn’t been handled before then I’m happy with that.

“We’ve had a look at a number of scenarios and where it actually works as a business model is at a starting point of 20 tonnes a week.

“So everything I’ve designed ready for manufacture here in Australia is based on 20 tonnes a week and I can scale it up larger from there.”

Output: POET Systems is developing technology that uses anaerobic digestion to turn waste plastics into energy and fertiliser. The South Australia-based company expects to have its first two machines – each capable of processing 20 tonnes of plastic a week – in commercial operation within a year. The system has so far been successfully applied to polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene and expanded polystyrene.


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Google prepares to enter India's mobile payments market
 Google About to Enter Indian Mobile Payments Market

July 13, 2017 By: Steven Anderson

It was once remarked in no less than Money magazine that the best way to get improved internet service was to get Google to announce it was turning your area into a Google Fiber city, and then watch the fun as every ISP in town suddenly ramped up the service. Now, with Google poised to enter the Indian mobile payment market, incumbents like Paytm may be wondering what they can do to keep the current user base in the fold.

The current reports note that Google has nearly completed testing its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system in the region. Once complete, it will allow ready transfer of cash between bank accounts via a mobile device. Interestingly enough, Google will be walking into a fairly competitive market. Whatsapp, Amazon, and even Uber are all stepping into this market as well. However, none of these will boast Google’s UPI-based system, at last report, and that could be enough to give it an edge.

A Google representative noted “We are always looking for ways to make it easy for people to pay with their mobile devices, for instance Android Pay in some countries, and continually evaluating ways to expand those capabilities to the next billion users.”

Naturally, it’s going to be difficult to break into that market. The event which gave mobile payments a whole new muscle in the region—the nigh-total demonetization of the country’s currency—won’t happen again. Already cash is down to the smallest denominations, and the country’s established mobile wallet providers like Paytm have already taken advantage accordingly.

Still, Google has the necessary cash and market recognition—not to mention the widespread Android device use—to potentially shake up this market. It’s going to have to offer something in particular, though, to break the entrenched market share out of its current position. Discounts might go a long way here, or perhaps merchant-specific services to get more of the merchant share on its side.

Whatever Google ultimately does, it’s likely not going to be able to count on its name recognition unaided to break this pot open. It’s going to need to offer something particularly worthwhile to break users out of entrenched patterns, just like it did with Google Fiber’s greater speeds and bandwidth caps. It will be interesting to see what it comes up with.

Output: Google has almost finished testing its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system in India, which will allow consumers to transfer cash between bank accounts via a mobile device. As well as facing competition from Paytm, rival firms Amazon, WhatsApp and Uber are also set to try their luck in India's mobile payments market. However, Google's is the only UPI-based offering in the segment.


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State Bank of India cuts electronic transfer costs by 75%
 The country's largest lender, State Bank of India SBI ), on Thursday reduced the National Electronic Funds Transfer ( NEFT ) and Real Time Gross Settlement ( RTGS ) charges up to 75%, effective from 15 July.In a move to promote digital transactions. The revised charges will be applicable on NEFT and RTGS transactions done through internet banking or mobile banking offered by the bank, SBI said in a statement. NEFT and RTGS are electronic payment systems, which allow fund transfer between two accounts of different banks in the country.Earlier, SBI used to charge Rs. 2 for fund transfers up to Rs. 10,000 through NEFT using internet or mobile banking modes. Now that has been reduced to Rs 1 (excluding 18 per cent GST). For NEFT transactions from Rs 10,000 to Rs 1 lakh, the charge has been reduced to Rs. 2 from Rs. 4 earlier. Similarly, SBI has revised its fees for fund transfers between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 5 lakh through RTGS on its net and mobile banking platform, to Rs 5. This charge was Rs 20 earlier."Digitalization and excellence in operations is one of our core strategies in providing convenience to customers. It has resulted in reducing turnaround time along with extended benefits to the customers.," said Rajnish Kumar, managing director (NBG) at SBI."In sync with our strategy and complementing the focus of Government of India to create a digital economy, we have taken one more step to promote use of internet banking and mobile banking for doing NEFT and RTGS transactions by reduction of the charges," he added.Additionally, the bank had also waived charges for fund transfer of upto Rs 1,000 done through Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) effective July 1, 2017, the statement said. IMPS is a money transfer service that can be carried out though mobile phones or internet banking. The IMPS service helps to transfer money to the beneficiary's account immediately when a fund transfer request is made through mobile phone or internet banking.(With inputs from agencies)

Output: The State Bank of India (SBI) has reduced charges for the National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) and Real Time Gross Settlement by 75% to persuade more customers to switch to digital banking, according to a statement from the lender. The change means a transaction through NEFT of up to INR10,000 ($1,555) will now cost INR1. The SBI has also dropped the charges for fund transfers of up to INR1,000 via its Immediate Payment Service.


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Encrypgen ICO raises funds for genetic data storage on blockchain
 Encrypgen, a leading innovator in the Blockchain genomic storage and security industry, announced today that they have raised over 1 Million USD through their ongoing Token Sale. The company, led by the renowned scientist and author Dr. David Koepsell, has already reached more than half of their intended sale goal at 55%.

This low-key token sale (or ‘ICO’) for a high-profile product has seen significant growth due to word-of-mouth marketing by it’s core enthusiasts. Encrypgen makes genomic data storage private and robust through Blockchain and encryption technology. With the help of a strong Blockchain insider network, they capped off the last three days with a 100 bitcoin leap.

The Encrypgen team highlighted in their last weekly update that they are on the verge of closing a number of sales for their beta application to research institutes. The beta has successfully assimilated a vast library of public genetic data.

Encrypgen allows individual donors to control and even sell access to their private genetic information with private encryption keys. Encrypgen is not ready to confirm (or deny) the rumor that a “whale” ICO investment fund plans to buy out all remaining tokens before the end of the token sale. The Gene-Chain coin token bonuses of 300K and 500K are still available to buyers of over 75BTC and 100BTC respectively. Meanwhile the largest buyer so far with 52BTC stands to earn a 1M Gene-Chain coin bonus.

After an eventful week, which included a new web portal and the release of a further developed white paper, Encrypgen remains confident that the last week of the token sale will be just as momentous as the company’s development to date.

Encrypgen is very busy with continued marketing and development to build application sales and revenue, and less focused on promoting their token sale. With a prescient focus on disrupting genomic data management, Dr David Koepsell says: “We continue to seek a brave and forward-thinking client who is interested and willing to help make their genomic data storage and sharing more secure, and facilitate what we are trying to create as a new marketplace for that data.”

Encrypgen LLC was founded by Dr. David Koepsell, in collaboration with genetics scientists and developers in 2016. Encrypgen enables an open and secure channel for genetic data storage and compilation, enabling next generation genetic database management. This aims to ‘solve’ genomic data storage whilst preserving the personal data autonomy of donors who participate for the first time. It’s fuelled by the team’s passion to give genetic data donors ownership over their data, and propel genetic research into the future.

Output: Blockchain genomic storage company Encrypgen has raised more than $1m through its ongoing initial coin offering (ICO).The total comprises 55% of its intended sale goal. Encrypgen will use the funds to develop its system for securely storing donors' genetic data. Meanwhile, the company has almost closed a number of sales of its beta application to various research institutes, it said.