The Silicon Valley alumni, Max Levchin, the hand behind Paypal's pioneering online security and fraud prevention mechanism, just went trotting his own way to launch his own mobile payments startup- Affirm.

Odd as the move is, Paypal just earned itself a new business rival alongside Square and Slide. However, the catch is that despite working in the same niche, Affirm is aimed to serve a specific "layer of the payment value chain", that is to enhance the conversion of mobile payments.

It is an open fact that Levchin is a prominent investor in Slide. Way back in his San Francisco based tech firm Hard, Valuable, Fun (HVF) tried to sell Slide to Google like Paypal was to eBay.

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Social media sites, especially Twitter has been the center of talk at least this year. It mentored the launch of a small video-sharing app Vine as well as ventured into e-commerce by bagging a deal with AmEx just this week.

Hashtags are somewhat "the thing" used by celebs, businesses and the common users to articulate their opinions in a minimalist "140" manner. In fact it has been popularized by businesspersons that "hashtag" was voted as the Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.  Social media has become such a rage that parents now name their babies Facebook and Hashtag!