Weekend FinTech Reading, December 20–22, 2013

It’s the weekend, which means it's time to catch up on recent FinTech news and reading:

General

Doing work at work? Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters act to ease bank instant messaging concerns. (Forbes) 

Real-Time Wallets: ‘Quantified Self’ movement now lets you track your money too. (Wired)  

Faster than Envelopes: Credit Union Tech Provider Enables Charitable Giving at ATMs. (American Banker) 

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: The IT department is dead. Long live the IT department. (Wired)  

Big Data 

Reign of the Quants: Big Data becoming core of business strategy for financial firms. (American Banker) 

Data Alert: Big banks required to provide data analysis in fraction of the time requested. (Forbes) 

Adventures of an Upstart Currency

Cashing In: Coinbase raises largest pool of funding to date for bitcoin-centric startup. (TechCrunch) 

Cash for Code: Open source software projects find funding with Bitcoin. (Wired) 

Bitcoin Plummets:  Some commentators not surprised one Bit. (TechCrunch) 

FinTech Startups

SoCal Fintech: L.A.’s “Silicon Beach” community paving the sand-way in FinTech innovation. (VentureBeat) 

FreE-Trading? Mobile app Robinhood brings stock trading to the millennials. (TechCrunch) 

Is the tech bubble finally ready to burst? (Wired) 

Banks, Innovate: Software company works to break digital vaults with information management. (VentureBeat) 

Avian Awareness 

Predicting the future with Twitter? Some investors relying on Twitter trends to anticipate stock movements. (Wall Street Journal) 

Twitter Signal? Wither the value of gleaning investment insights from the twittersphere? (StockTwits)