Timecross. ru, �Ilya Khrennikov Innovation Nueyes

Next Steps Nueyes went on sale in April. “The patients that have tried it have been very happy,” says Michael Samuel, a surgeon and researcher at the Retina Institute in Los Angeles, adding that cost is a limiting factor. Veterans Affairs hospitals have b

A host of others split the rest. Avito, controlled by South African internet company Naspers, is expanding beyond its focus on consumer classified ads with more goods from businesses. Aliexpress, the consumer arm of China’s Alibaba Group, offers mostly imported products. And locals Ozon.ru and Ulmart run web stores but don’t work much with smaller merchants. Amazon, which operates in 13 countries beyond the U. S., isn’t in Russia and declined to comment on its plans for the country.

To lure consumers, Yandex is adding categories such as toys, cosmetics, and home improvement goods, which haven’t been widely sold online in Russia. It lets buyers order directly from phones and tablets, since many Russian web stores aren’t configured to work well with the smaller screens on mobile devices. And it’s stepping up advertising in far-flung regions of the country and offering a service that lets consumers compare costs— and various shipping methods— nationwide, meaning people in smaller cities can get the lower prices usually available in Moscow.

While most retailers can still choose to pay click fees rather than commissions, Yandex is requiring watch sellers to adopt the new fee model if they want to list on the site. That’s “mutually beneficial, as shops now pay for concrete transactions instead of web clicks that won’t necessarily result in a purchase,” Aleshin says. Vyacheslav Zhigarev, deputy head of which sells Casio watches, isn’t so sure. He says the system has created more work for his staffers, who must separately track sales made via Yandex because the companies’ software wasn’t properly integrated. And it costs more, he says— though he acknowledges it’s tough to avoid Yandex. “We need Yandex. Market to attract customers and can’t do without it,” Zhigarev says. “But their commission model has created some complications and increased what we pay.”

The bottom line Yandex, looking to boost sales and attract more customers, is changing how it works with its web vendors. Edited by Dimitra Kessenides, Matthew Philips, and David Rocks Bloomberg.com Form and function

Nueyes, a combination of custom software and smart glasses, is designed to restore sight to people with serious vision loss. A camera on the front of the blacked-out glasses acts as eyes. Captured images are projected on the lenses. 1.

Specs The glasses, made by government contractor Osterhout Design Group, are equipped with an autofocus camera with 720-pixel resolution, comparable to a low-end HDTV.

People with significant loss of vision from macular degeneration, glaucoma, and retinitis pigmentosa— the leading causes of vision loss worldwide—can benefit from the glasses. Funding Greget financed the software development with about $100,000 of his own money and $350,000 from family and friends. Innovator Mark Greget Age Title Co-founder and chief executive officer of Nueyes in Newport Beach, Calif. Origin Greget, a U.S. Navy veteran, began developing Nueyes after spending five years distributing devices for the blind. The price is about $6,000.

A speech-recognition feature lets wearers use voice commands to improve the image projected through the lenses to best remedy their particular condition. Earbuds let users listen to a text reader or other media via a Bluetooth-connected device.

The central bank of Bangladesh was the victim of one of the biggest bank heists of all time in February, when thieves made off with $81 million. The perps are still at large—and may have the combinations to many more vaults.

Since the Bangladesh job came to light, other banks have come forward. In Ecuador, a commercial bank said it was held up for $12 million last year. A bank in Vietnam said criminals tried, and failed, to steal $1.1 million in what experts say may have been a practice run for Bangladesh. By late May as many as a dozen more banks, mostly in Southeast Asia, reported breakins. All of the attacks were committed by cybercriminals, and at least some made use of a messaging system run by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, better known as Swift.

The crimes point to big trouble in the cross-border transfer of money, the basic plumbing of global finance. Swift connects 11,000 members, including central and commercial banks, brokers, money managers, and multinational corporations in more than 200 countries and territories.

Banks in the developed world weren’t targets of the crime wave, but the breaches have served as a wake-up call that any system is vulnerable. Security experts say the digital trail appears to lead to North Korea, which the U.S. government blamed for the Sony Pictures hack in December 2014.

The breaches undermine trust and may hurt business in developing countries, if foreign banks worry whether it’s a real bank or a crook on the other end of the line. “If banks lose confidence in Swift, they will either have to live with the discomfort or reduce their participation in cross-border payments,” says Erin Mccune, a payments strategist at consulting group Glenbrook Partners.

Swift, a nonprofit cooperative based near Brussels, was founded more than 40 years ago to make it easier for banks in various countries to communicate with one another. It replaced messages sent by telex machines. The private network was designed to be more secure, and its messages followed a protocol so they could be quickly understood by banks anywhere in the world.

Swift doesn’t move money itself— transfers take place between banks. But its messages tell banks which accounts to debit and credit, and for how much, so a parent in New York City can send money to a child studying in London, or a clothing company in France can pay a shirt factory in Vietnam. As many as 27.5 million Swift messages are sent daily.

Swift has said the system itself hasn’t been breached. That means the hackers haven’t been able to read or change a message traveling over its network. If Bank A gets instructions from Bank B, the message originated from Bank B’s computer.

Hackers have made clear, however, that Swift can’t ensure the person sending the message from a bank’s computer works for that bank. In the case of Bangladesh, malicious software code, known as malware, was introduced into the central bank’s systems in January. That probably allowed hackers to record keystrokes and ultimately steal codes enabling them to send fraudulent messages over the Swift network.

The hackers struck on Feb. 4, asking for dozens of transfers equaling almost $1 billion. The messages requested that money be sent from the Bangladeshi account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Most of the transactions were blocked after they were flagged for review to ensure they complied