Beenz.com
beenz.com was a website that allowed consumers to earn beenz, a type of online currency, for performing activities such as visiting a web site, shopping online, or logging on through an Internet service provider. The beenz e-currency could then be spent with participating online merchants. The marketing and brand concept positioned Beenz as "universal, incentive-based currency for on-line merchants… a globally acceptable alternative to money that would influence and reward on-line consumer behavior". The Beenz management team raised almost $100 million from venture capitalists including Apax Patricof, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Michael Saylor of Microstrategy, François Pinault of PPR, Vivendi Universal, Italian financier Carlo de Benedetti and Hikari Tsushin of Japan. Since launching a new currency is illegal in many countries, beenz management and its legal teams had to meet with finance ministers across Europe to assure them that Beenz would be categorized as virtual p ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Neil Forrester
Neil A. Forrester (born 3 January 1971, in Keynsham, England) is a British research assistant in the field of developmental disorders and language acquisition at the University of London and former reality television personality. He is best known to the general public as one of the cast members of the fourth season of the MTV reality television series '' The Real World: London'', which aired in 1995. At that time he was the lead vocalist of an underground, alternative-orientated band called Unilever, which had punk and performance art leanings. Forrester was co-founder of an online currency company called Beenz.com. He is also co-author of a number of technology patents. In his current line of work he has written a variety of academic papers with such titles as "Learning the Arabic plural: the case for minority default mappings in connectionist networks." He has a website at neilforrester.com, but it now depicts a message simply stating "There is no neilforrester.com". It offe ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Nicolas De Santis
Nicolas De Santis (born 1966) is an Italian businessman. He launched the first digital currency of the web, beenz.com and co-founded travel portal opodo. He is the founder and chief disruption officer of Megavisionary Labs, an advisory firm and ventures incubator. In 2004 he became the president and secretary general of Gold Mercury International Award, a think tank and global governance award organisation founded in 1961 by his father. Early life and education Nicolas De Santis was born in Madrid, Spain in 1966. He is the son of Spanish actress Maria Cuadra and film producer Eduardo De Santis. As a child actor, he appeared in the Spanish movie Elisita. Career De Santis started his career at Landor Associates (now WPP Group) where his father was a partner. As a strategy advisor, Nicolas has created strategies and visions for governments, academic institutions, global brands, and technology start-ups, such as: British Airways, Opodo, Morgan Stanley, Iberdrola, Garanti Bank, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Flooz
Flooz.com was a dot-com venture, now defunct, based in New York City that went online in February 1999. It was promoted by comic actress Whoopi Goldberg in a series of television advertisements. Started by iVillage co-founder Robert Levitan, the company attempted to establish a currency unique to Internet merchants, somewhat similar in concept to airline frequent flyer programs or grocery store stamp books. The name "flooz" was based upon the Arabic word for money, فلوس, ''fuloos''. Users accumulated flooz credits either as a promotional bonus given away by some internet businesses or purchased directly from flooz.com which then could be redeemed for merchandise at a variety of participating online stores. Adoption of flooz by both merchants and customers proved limited, and it never established itself as a widely recognized medium of exchange, which hindered both its usefulness and appeal. Use by crime syndicate In 2001, Flooz.com was notified by the Federal Bureau of Inve ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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London
London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Western Europe, with a population of 14.9 million. London stands on the River Thames in southeast England, at the head of a tidal estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a major settlement for nearly 2,000 years. Its ancient core and financial centre, the City of London, was founded by the Roman Empire, Romans as Londinium and has retained its medieval boundaries. The City of Westminster, to the west of the City of London, has been the centuries-long host of Government of the United Kingdom, the national government and Parliament of the United Kingdom, parliament. London grew rapidly 19th-century London, in the 19th century, becoming the world's List of largest cities throughout history, largest city at the time. Since the 19th cen ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Digital Currency
Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital currencies include cryptocurrency, virtual currency and central bank digital currency. Digital currency may be recorded on a distributed database on the internet, a centralized electronic computer database owned by a company or bank, within digital files or even on a stored-value card. Digital currencies exhibit properties similar to traditional currencies, but generally do not have a classical physical form of fiat currency historically that can be held in the hand, like currencies with printed banknotes or minted coins. However, they do have a physical form in an unclassical sense coming from the computer to computer and computer to human interactions and the information and processing power of the servers that store and keep track o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bitcoin
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source software, open-source implementation. In 2021, Bitcoin in El Salvador, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. It is mostly seen as an investment and has been described by some scholars as an economic bubble. As bitcoin is pseudonymous, Cryptocurrency and crime, its use by criminals has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to Legality of cryptocurrency by country or territory, its ban by several countries . Bitcoin works through the collaboration of computers, each of which acts as a Node (networking), node in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Each node maintains an independent copy of a public distributed ledger of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlantic, North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and List of islands of France, many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean, giving it Exclusive economic zone of France, one of the largest discontiguous exclusive economic zones in the world. Metropolitan France shares borders with Belgium and Luxembourg to the north; Germany to the northeast; Switzerland to the east; Italy and Monaco to the southeast; Andorra and Spain to the south; and a maritime border with the United Kingdom to the northwest. Its metropolitan area extends from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea. Its Regions of France, eighteen integral regions—five of which are overseas—span a combined area of and hav ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Java Applet
Java applets were applet, small applications written in the Java (programming language), Java programming language, or another programming language that Compiled language, compiles to Java bytecode, and delivered to users in the form of Java bytecode. At the time of their introduction, the intended use was for the user to launch the applet from a web page, and for the applet to then execute within a Java virtual machine (JVM) in a Process (computing), process separate from the web browser itself. A Java applet could appear in a frame of the web page, a new application window, a program from Sun Microsystems, Sun called appletviewer, or a stand-alone tool for testing applets. Java applets were introduced in the first version of the Java language, which was released in 1995. Beginning in 2013, major web browsers began to phase out support for NPAPI#Support/deprecation, NPAPI, the underlying technology applets used to run. with applets becoming completely unable to be run by ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Arbitrage
Arbitrage (, ) is the practice of taking advantage of a difference in prices in two or more marketsstriking a combination of matching deals to capitalize on the difference, the profit being the difference between the market prices at which the unit is traded. Arbitrage has the effect of causing prices of the same or very similar assets in different markets to converge. When used by academics in economics, an arbitrage is a transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state; in simple terms, it is the possibility of a risk-free profit after transaction costs. For example, an arbitrage opportunity is present when there is the possibility to instantaneously buy something for a low price and sell it for a higher price. In principle and in academic use, an arbitrage is risk-free; in common use, as in statistical arbitrage, it may refer to ''expected'' profit, though losses may occur, and in practic ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Reality Television
Reality television is a genre of television programming that documents purportedly unscripted real-life situations, often starring ordinary people rather than professional actors. Reality television emerged as a distinct genre in the early 1990s with shows such as ''The Real World (TV series), The Real World'', then achieved prominence in the early 2000s with the success of the series ''Survivor (franchise), Survivor'', ''Idol (franchise), Idol'', and ''Big Brother (franchise), Big Brother'', all of which became global Franchising, franchises. Reality television shows tend to be interspersed with "confessionals", short interview segments in which cast members reflect on or provide context for the events being depicted on-screen; this is most commonly seen in American reality television. Competition-based reality shows typically feature the gradual elimination of participants, either by a panel of judges, by the viewership of the show, or by the contestants themselves. Documentary ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Holding Company
A holding company is a company whose primary business is holding a controlling interest in the Security (finance), securities of other companies. A holding company usually does not produce goods or services itself. Its purpose is to own Share capital, stock of other companies to create a corporate group. In some jurisdictions around the world, holding companies are called parent companies, which, besides holding Share capital, stock in other companies, can conduct trade and other business activities themselves. Holding companies reduce risk for the shareholders, and can permit the ownership and control of a number of different companies. ''The New York Times'' uses the term ''parent holding company''. Holding companies can be subsidiaries in a Subsidiary#Tiered subsidiaries, tiered structure. Holding companies are also created to hold assets such as intellectual property or trade secrets, that are protected from the operating company. That creates a smaller risk when it comes ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |