Abstract: A sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may reduce the amount of work and communication required by each participant, thus possibly avoiding scalability bottlenecks that may be inherent in previous distributed ledger implementations and possibly enabling the use of additional resources to translate to increased throughput. A sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may be made up of multiple shards, each of which may also be a distributed ledger and which may operate in parallel. Participation within a sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may be allowed only with permission of an authority. A sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may include a plurality of nodes, each including a dispatcher configured to receive transaction requests from clients and to forward received requests to verifiers configured to append transactions to individual ones of the shards.

Abstract: A wireless communication device used in a vehicle is provided, includes a communicator that performs wireless communication with a service provider terminal, a vehicle condition acquirer that acquires a condition of the vehicle, a correspondence storage that stores a correspondence of what type of service is available under what condition of the vehicle, and an availability determiner that determines whether the service provided by the service provider terminal is available under the condition of the vehicle acquired by the vehicle condition acquirer, based on service type information included received by the communicator, the condition of the vehicle acquired by the vehicle condition acquirer, and the correspondence stored in the correspondence storage. When the availability determiner determines that the service is unavailable, the communicator does not open a service channel designated by the service provider terminal.

Abstract: A payment management system and a method of operating the same to receive payment before initiating an operating cycle of a cycle-based appliance is provided. The payment management system includes a payment device for receiving a non-cash payment from a user of the appliance. A payment processor communicates the payment to a controller of the appliance in the form of cycle credits, which may be stored in an encrypted credit storage bank. When a user attempts to initiate an operating cycle, the controller compares the available cycle credits to the number of required cycle credits, and only initiates the operating cycle if the number of available credits is equal to or exceeds the number of required credits. The payment management system may be included in any residential appliance and activated by the owner to enable pay-per-use functionality.

Abstract: A data transaction processing system receives and processes equation-based electronic data transaction request messages. Transmitting equation-based electronic data transaction request messages that represent a large series of discrete values reduces the data transmission to the data transaction processing system. Processing equation-based electronic data transaction request messages instead of a series of discrete values reduces the amount of time need to perform transactions, greatly reducing processing latency. Equation-based electronic data transaction request messages can also be efficiently updated by modifying equation parameters, again reducing the amount of data transmitted to the data transaction processing system.

Abstract: A data transaction processing system receives and processes equation-based electronic data transaction request messages. Transmitting equation-based electronic data transaction request messages that represent a large series of discrete values reduces the data transmission to the data transaction processing system. Processing equation-based electronic data transaction request messages instead of a series of discrete values reduces the amount of time need to perform transactions, greatly reducing processing latency. Equation-based electronic data transaction request messages can also be efficiently updated by modifying equation parameters, again reducing the amount of data transmitted to the data transaction processing system.

Abstract: A technique of configuring insurance policy rate routines includes accessing information representing an insurance product or information representing an insurance policy transaction. It further includes receiving a user input from a user indicating that a rate routine operand is to map to a portion of the information representing the insurance product or a portion of the information representing the insurance policy transaction. It further includes processing the information representing the insurance product or the information representing the insurance policy transaction to obtain one or more appropriate configuration options for the rate routine operand, based at least in part on a context of the rate routine operand. It further includes presenting the one or more appropriate configuration options to the user.