DINUBE: Mobile-enabled cloud transactions

The DINUBE team has been named runner-up of the MIT 100K Competition in the Mobile track, thus finishing among the best 10 teams in the prestigious competition. In the 13 weeks we have been closely working with the idea, we have already received several accolades and continue to attract interest and foster enthusiasm within the development and investment communities, and in the industry.

With renewed energies, we look forward to a successful Nextlab event next Thursday and to growing our company throughout the summer and into next year.

Congratulations team!

“Interoperability is a Social Fact: Extraction and Reimportation in
Experiments with Mobile Money”

On Thursday 30th April,  Bill Mauer from UC Irvine offered  a special

lecture at the Center for Future Banking.

ABSTRACT: A new “payments space” has emerged in the past five to ten
years that promises to bring access to funds transfer, banking and
financial services to millions of “unbanked” people in developing
countries and in the diasporas that remit funds to them. This payments
space is characterized by the innovative use of new information and
communications technologies. Payment and communication technologies
from the developed world are merging with the informally developed
systems of migrants and the poor around the world. At the same time,
the economic crisis in the industrialized North is now leading
engineers, designers, financial service companies and nonprofits to
explore the possibilities of “reimporting” new payment systems from
the Third World to the First, as more and more citizens of developed
countries become unbanked themselves.

In listening to people involved in creating new mobile payment systems,

I am struck by how much their activity is about “finding ways of doing things”

(as Jan Chipchase of Nokia puts it) with devices that were not built into the

design of the object. I am also struck by how much this activity of “finding ways of
doing things” explicitly mirrors practices that designers are
observing out in the world, through their own forms of participant
observation. Finally, I am interested in how “finding ways of doing
things” is itself a way of doing things for those charged by their
employers with creating such new systems in situations where they are
bound by non-disclosure agreements not to talk to their colleagues
working for other companies. When you can’t talk, you find other ways
of doing things, often with material objects. After providing an
orientation to the payments space, this talk asks after the
affordances in objects that are not built into them by design. It also
begs the question of other modalities of instituting markets or market
devices besides the performative modality emphasized by social studies
of finance.

BIOGRAPHY: Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts
research on law, property, money and finance, particularly new and
experimental financial and currency forms and their legal
implications. He has written widely on the anthropology of money,
finance and property.

MIT MediaLab, Center for Future Banking.

Please join us this Thursday for a lecture with Arjan Schütte of The Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI).

This lecture is open to the public; please feel free to forward this link to friends and colleagues who might be interested.

Light lunch will be served.
___________________________
WHO: Arjan Schütte (The Center for Financial Services Innovation)

WHAT: CFB Lecture Series: “Outcast and Overcharged: Inside the Underbanked”

WHEN: Thursday, May 7th at 1pm

WHERE: Wiesner Room, MIT Media Lab (2nd Floor)

ABSTRACT: Over 100 million Americans are considered underbanked. No longer a niche market, it is becoming clear that the traditional financial services industry does not serve a significant percentage of the population. The current crisis is forcing more people out of banks and stretching the modern payment and credit infrastructure to serve emerging consumer needs. Current products, marketing and distribution channels and risk management tools are misaligned with consumer needs and behaviors, especially those at the bottom of the pyramid. However, an emerging class of new companies – including some present day pioneers – are using technology to rethink and reinvent how the underbanked relate to their money, and can do so at lower cost and with greater ability to move towards prosperity. From self-service kiosks, to alternative credit modeling, to mobile phone account opening, to internet lending, we will review market-based innovation serving this segment. We will debunk common myths about the underbanked consumer and their supposed irrational choices, as well as industry serving it, with products such as check cashing and payday loans.

BIOGRAPHY: Arjan Schütte is an Associate Director of The Center for Financial Services Innovation. He manages the Center’s investment and grant programs, identifying candidates as well as counseling and supporting investees, grantees, and other promising innovators.

Here is the collection of competitions where Dinube has submitted and is awaiting judge decisions:

Dinube in the MIT $100k Seminfinalists, Mobile Track
Dinube in the Dell Social Innovation Contest
Dinube in the NetSquared N2Y4 Competition
Dinube in the MIT IDEAS Competition

Vote for us, and check back to see Dinube’s updated status.

Check out our initial company promotion video:

(You can also follow the link: Dinube video)

Some news:
Nokia seeks gold in mobile payments startup Obopay
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D97511B82.htm
Branchless banking in the year 2020 (CGAP)
http://technology.cgap.org/2009/03/25/branchless-banking-in-the-year-2020/

We have entered the N2Y4 mobile challenge. Here is the link to the project
http://www.netsquared.org/projects/dinube-cloud-banking-mobile-payments
You can post your comments to the N2Y4 website

For additional information, a MOBILE PAYMENT NETWORK forum was created early this year.

http://www.mobilefuture.ning.com